The 900 Days (67 page)

It was under the influence of this heady prospect that Zhdanov took the risk of ordering the Christmas boost in the Leningrad ration.

Zhdanov’s decision was communicated to Party workers on duty at Smolny at about 1
A.M.
Christmas morning. It was the 116th day of the siege. The workers were asleep at their desks or catching a cat nap in the common dormitory in the cellar. They were routed out to spread the word to the various quarters of the city. The temperature was below zero, and wind swept snow through streets already piled high with drifts. The Party workers were in no better shape than their fellow citizens. “On my way to Vasilevsky Island,” recalled N. M. Ribkovsky, a political instructor, “I had to stop and rest five times.” Party representatives reached the bread stores before they opened at 6
A.M.
and passed on news of the increase in ration. One party worker in the Vyborg region claimed that citizens queued up at the local bakery shouted “Hurrah!” An old railroad repairman named Petrov awakened his children. He reported that they cried when they heard they would be getting another morsel of bread.

The radio was not working on Christmas Day—because of the virtual absence of electric power. Only one power plant, the Red Oktyabr, was running. Perhaps for this reason, news of the increase in ration seems to have spread slowly through Leningrad. Many diaries of the period, even of such an energetic political optimist as Vsevolod Vishnevsky, fail to mention the event, or report it only a day or several days later.

On December 25 the musicologist Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky noted the ration increase in his diary. But he also mentioned more pressing matters. It was the end of the financial year and the funds of the Composers Union and Music Fund had been exhausted. “We are cut off from the Union of Composers and from the Central Music Fund,” he wrote, “and don’t even know to which city they have been evacuated (from Moscow). And they evidently don’t know that there are composers and musicologists remaining in Leningrad or how many we are. I learned recently that the Committee for Artistic Affairs is in Tomsk and sent a telegram to its head, M. Khrapchenko, with a request that he establish connections with the Union and the Music Fund.”

That day Bogdanov-Berezovsky visited a composer named Malkov on Plekhanov Street who lay ill in a little matchbox (but warm) room. He recorded the death of another composer, A. Budyakovsky, and added:

Vera Inber learned of the ration increase from her friend and hospital worker, Yevfrosinya Ivanovna, who went to the bakery to pick up her ration. On Tolstoy Square Yevfrosinya met a man who she decided was either drunk or crazy. He was crying, laughing and hitting himself on the head. Only when she arrived at the bakery and learned of the increase in ration did Yevfrosinya realize that the man was in ecstasy over the news.

X meeting was held in the dining room of the Writers’ House on the evening of December 26. The writers slowly made their way through the drifts, past the corpses which had now begun to appear almost everywhere.

Vera Ketlinskaya made a speech. Soviet troops had broken two of the three circles around the city—the Tikhvin circle and the Voibokalo circle. Only Mga remained. That would be broken by New Year’s Day. The boost in the ration was just the first swallow of spring. Enormous quantities of supplies were being concentrated within sixty miles of Leningrad—50,000 tons of cereals and macaroni, 42,000 tons of flour, 300 tons of meat. And much, much more. All of this would flood into the city once Mga was taken.

The writers, sitting like gray ghosts around the empty table, applauded weakly. Hope there was for life.

Hope there was. Zhdanov possessed it. A mass of supplies actually was being hurried to the perimeter. Anastas A. Mikoyan had arranged to move under the most urgent priorities 50,000 tons of flour and 12,000 tons of other food to Vologda, Tikhvin and the key distribution points for the Ladoga ice road. The Railroad Commissariat had been enlisted. Mikoyan and Zhdanov knew that Leningrad had less than five days’ supply of flour on hand. The trains pounded north through the night from Zainsk, Rybinsk, Saratov. On the cars were scrawled in great letters “
Prodovolstviye dlya Leningrad
” (“Food for Leningrad”). The supplies poured into the ruined station and sidings of Tikhvin. They were loaded without cease upon trucks, which lumbered over the rutted roads north to Ladoga, out on the ice and on to the Leningrad shore.

The offensive of General I. I. Fedyuninsky, the drive of the Leningrad troops toward Tosno, was going so well that Zhdanov was confident that Mga would be liberated for the New Year’s holiday.

To give the starving, freezing people hope, to help them to survive to the New Year and the recapture of Mga, hundreds of meetings were held throughout the city—in the ice-festooned factories (hardly a plant was operating now—on December 19, 184 plants had been put on a one-, two-or three-day week); in the windowless government offices; in the apartment houses where burned small
burzhuiki
—makeshift stoves. The word was passed on to all: by January 1 Leningrad will be liberated; the circle will be broken; Mga will be retaken.

But Mga was not retaken. Even before New Year’s Day it was suddenly plain to Zhdanov that his Christmas optimism had been ill-founded. The terrible truth was that the Soviet troops had neither the physical strength nor the munitions to dislodge the Nazis.

The Red Army men were weak and sick. A report as of January 10 showed 45 percent of the units of the Leningrad front and 63 percent of Fifty-fifth Army units understrength. There were 32 divisions on the front. Of these, 14 were only up to 30 percent of strength. Some infantry regiments were only at 17 to 21 percent of authorized manpower.

Nor was there any way to bolster their ranks. During the whole winter of 1941–42 the Leningrad front grew by only 25,000. From October 1 to May 1, 1942, about 17,000 or 18,000 men were sent to the front from rear and office assignments, 6,000 were obtained from construction units and 30,277 sailors were provided from the Baltic Fleet. Women were mobilized, largely for rear and ARP duties, but by June, 1942, there were 9,000 in the front lines. In the last three months of 1941 about 70,000 men were sent to the front by Leningrad—29,567 in October, 28,249
^m
November and 12,804 in December. In the ensuing six months Leningrad was able to mobilize 30,000 men for active Red Army duty, but only 8,000 of these were provided from December to March.

These replacements hardly matched the Red Army losses. From October, 1941, to April, 1942, 353,424 troops reported sick or wounded, an average of 50,000 a month or 1,700 a day. Half of these were ill, largely of dystrophy and other starvation ailments. More than 62,000 troops came down with dystrophy from November, 1941, to the end of spring. The number ill with scurvy reached 20,000 in April, 1942.
³
Deaths due to starvation diseases were 12,416, nearly 20 percent of troops on sick call, in the winter of 1942.

Men were too weak to fight or work. Yuri Loman, commissar for a truck unit, recalled that he had seen four men trying to load a mutton carcass, weighing possibly forty pounds. They did not have the strength to lift it. A. P. Lebedeva, head of the factory committee at the Krasnaya Treugolnik rubber plant, was at her desk when a middle-aged, gaunt man tottered in. She recognized him as a cutter in the shop. “Give me a bowl of soup,” he said. “If you’ll do that, I’ll be back at work tomorrow.” Lebedeva had no food, but she poured him a mug of hot water. The worker drank it at a gulp, not realizing it was water. “Thanks for the soup, Lebedeva,” he said. “Now, I’ll go into the shop and start working.”

Zhdanov’s gamble was not paying off. Leningrad, incredibly, had slipped closer to utter disaster. The Military Council met in emergency session December 29. The previous day the ice road had delivered only 622 tons of freight, of which 462.2 tons were food. This was about half the essential minimum. To the horror of Zhdanov, General Khozin, Kuznetsov and Pavlov, deliveries dropped to 602 tons on December 29, of which only 431.9 tons were food.

The road of life might, it seemed, become the road of death.

On January 1, the 123rd day of the siege, the critical tabulation, known only to Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, Khozin, Pavlov and three others, showed that Leningrad’s cupboard was bare. There was in the reserves: 980 tons of flour, 3 tons of grain, 82 tons of soy flour, 334 tons of cereals and macaroni, 624 tons of meat and sausage, 24 tons of fish, 16 tons of butter, 187 tons of vegetable oil, 102 tons of fat and 337 tons of sugar.

That was flour for less than two days. Never had Leningrad been so close to starvation.

The days were beginning of which Kuznetsov later was to say: “There was a time when we gave bread to no one. Not because we did not want to give it out but because we had none.”

It was in these days that Filipp Sapozhnikov, a hard-working, bad-luck truck driver on the Ladoga ice road returned to his barracks, late once more as he had been almost every day with his truckload of flour. He found a notice posted on the bulletin board:

“Driver Sapozhnikov: Yesterday, thanks to you, 5,000 Leningrad women and children got no bread ration.”
⁴

It was true. The margin was that thin. One late truck, and thousands of Leningraders waited in vain before the bread shop and scores died.

The ice road was not working. In fact, it was critically close to failure. So was the sleazy one-track Irinovsky railroad which connected Ladoga with Leningrad. Under the impact of heavy traffic, lack of fuel, failing equipment, bad management, the weakness, illness and death of workers— from cold and starvation—shipments slowed and slowed again. By January 1 the branch was paralyzed. Not one train a day was getting through.

Director Kolpakov had started December with 57 of his 252 locomotives in service, of which 27 were switch engines. By the end of the month there were days when he had no more than 28 locomotives operating. He was getting only 92 hours’ daily work from the engines—many of them were operating less than three hours a day. His staff was dissolving. From December, 1941, to February, 1942, he had 10,938 men and women on sick leave. Of these, 2,346 died, including 1,200 in January. The City Council ordered 5,000 persons to help keep the railroad going by clearing away the snowdrifts. Not more than 400 or 500 were strong enough to report for duty, and many were too weak to lift a shovel. The railroad had been attacked 356 times by Nazi bombers, and much of the signal equipment, switches, sidings and terminals was badly damaged or out of use.

There was no more coal, and the city water supply which serviced the boilers had frozen. Machinists with picks and crowbars pried coal dust out of the frozen soil. There was plenty of dirt mixed with the dust, but this “fuel” was used to fire up the boilers. The average haul per locomotive in December was nineteen miles.

Once more the fate of Leningrad was in balance. Once more Zhdanov took strong measures. The railroad director was removed on chargés of confusion and failure to organize his work. Probably he was shot.
⁵
Extra rations—125 grams of bread—were ordered for the railroad workers. The last few tons of coal in the city reserves were turned over. Woodcutting teams were sent to nearby forests to cut cordwood for the engines. Three top regional Party secretaries kept the pressure on. Even so, only 219 cars were loaded in January—a fraction of what was needed.

The great New Year’s celebration which Zhdanov had promised Leningrad was not to be. True, some chauffeurs brought special gift parcels to Leningrad. Chauffeur Maksim Tverdokhleb was making his third trip over Ladoga on the day before New Year’s. His normal load was thirty barrels of flour.

There was a sign in the loading shed: “Comrade Drivers! If you carry 200 pounds of flour above plan, you will fulfill the bread ration for thousands of Leningraders.”

Tverdokhleb asked for his extra load. He was given a dozen wooden crates. He was surprised at their lightness. He thought they must be military supplies. Then he smelled a familiar but remarkable smell—tangerines! The cases were a gift from Georgia for the Leningrad children.

Zhdanov took desperate action. He put the Ladoga route under the iron command of Major General A. M. Shilov with I. V. Shikin, an experienced army political worker who had been prewar head of the big Gorky auto factory Party organization, as his chief aide. They were ordered to bring deliveries up to 1,200 tons a day and by any means necessary. Seven hundred Young Communists were sent to the ice road. Traffic control posts were established every 200 or 300 yards. Antiaircraft batteries guarded each kilometer of the route. The 7th Air Corps and the remaining fighters of the Baltic Fleet were assigned to ward off Nazi strafing planes. The short new Tikhvin-Volkhov-Voibokalo connection was put into use (at 5
A.M.
, January 1, 1942).

The temperature on the ice road ranged between 20 below zero and 40 below zero. The wind pressed endlessly from the north. The ice was so solid that KV-60 tanks now could be—and were—moved to Fedyunin-sky’s embattled army. But men froze to death in the cold, and trucks ground to a halt.