Leningrad Page 16
For the rest of the year, Leningrad’s role was to produce as much weaponry as possible, while continuing to evacuate defence plant and workers by barge across Lake Ladoga. (The despatch of the six thousand staff of the Izhorsk Works tank shop, together with their families, was ordered on 2 October, and that of the Kirov Works, with 11,614 workers, a fortnight later.27) The ubiquitous slogan of the time – ‘Everything for the Front!’ – should more correctly have been ‘Everything for Moscow!’, for the bulk of Leningrad’s depleted production went not to its own beleaguered defenders, but out of the siege ring to the Central Front. Stocks of coal and peat, which could later have saved homes from freezing, were used to power production of shells and mines, and transport capacity that could have been used to import food was given over to powder and explosives, which went into munitions that were immediately re-exported to the capital.
At the same time Stalin ordered Zhdanov to try to lift the siege. ‘You must quickly break through via Mga to the east’, he telegraphed the Smolniy on 13 October. ‘You know yourselves that there are no other routes. Soon your food supplies and other resources will run out. Hurry, or we are afraid that it will be too late.’28 Two days later Voronov flew into Leningrad to oversee the offensive and to set new, impossibly high production targets. At their first meeting Zhdanov pleaded for more munitions. In response Voronov demanded that Leningrad increase its own production of shells to a fantastical million a month. ‘A million a month – that’s madness!’ Zhdanov exploded. ‘It’s a bluff! It’s ignorant! You simply don’t understand how munitions production works!’29 Three days later Stalin demanded to know if his new offensive had been launched yet:
We sent you a directive ordering an immediate advance, so as to unite the Lenfront and the 54th Army. We’ve had no reply. What’s going on? Why don’t you answer? Is the directive understood, and when do you think the advance will begin? We demand a quick answer in two words. ‘Yes’ will signify an affirmative, and rapid fulfilment of the directive; ‘No’, the negative.30
On 23 October, the planned attack having been pre-empted by a German one threatening Tikhvin, a vital railhead for evacuation across Lake Ladoga, Stalin tore into the Leningraders yet again, in a message read out on the telephone by Marshal Vasilyevsky, deputy chief of general staff. This time Stalin explicitly admitted that Leningrad might have to be surrendered, emphasising the importance of extracting the encircled armies and Moscow’s inability to come to Leningrad’s aid:
Judging by your indolence one can only conclude that you still haven’t realised the critical situation in which the Lenfront troops find themselves. If in the course of the next few days you don’t break through the [German] front and reconnect yourselves with the rear by restoring solid contact with the 54th Army, all your troops will fall into captivity. Reconnection is necessary not only for supplying the Lenfront troops, but especially so as to create an exit for the Lenfront troops to the east, in case necessity compels the surrender of Leningrad. Bear in mind that Moscow finds herself in a critical situation, and that she is in no condition to help you with new forces . . . We demand quick, decisive action from you. Concentrate eight or ten divisions and break through to the east. It’s necessary either way, whether Leningrad holds on or is given up. For us the army is more important.31
Vasilyevsky reinforced the message personally in a call to Fedyuninsky’s 54th Army on the same day. Unarmed reinforcements were being sent from Vologda, but beyond that the army had to rely on itself: ‘Please bear in mind that in the present situation discussion is not so much about saving Leningrad, as about rescuing the Lenfront army.’32
The prioritisation of Moscow continued into November, as Leningrad’s own civilian population started to die on the streets. Typical is a letter from Zhukov to Zhdanov of the 2nd. It opens confidingly – ‘My thoughts often return to the difficult and interesting days and nights when we worked and fought together. I greatly regret not having completed the business, I was convinced that I would’ – but carries a sting in its tail. The Central Front’s generals had ‘squandered all their troops; nothing but the memory is left of them. From Budenniy all I got was a headquarters and ninety men; from Konev, a headquarters and two regiments.’ Could Zhdanov send forty 82mm and sixty 50mm mortars on the next air convoy, since ‘you have them in excess, while we have none at all?’33 Zhdanov’s counter-requests for more transport planes and for deliveries of concentrated foods were fulfilled late or not at all.34 ‘You assigned us twenty-four Douglases’, Zhdanov replied to yet another of Stalin’s demands for immediate breakout, transmitted by Malenkov. ‘So where are they? Get them sent as soon as possible.’35
Altogether, between 1 October and their virtual shutdown in December, Leningrad’s factories sent the Central Army Group 452 76mm field guns with over 29,000 armoured shells and 1,854 mortars of different sizes. With hindsight, they could arguably have been better put to use outside Leningrad itself, since they were not numerous enough to tip the balance in Moscow, but might have done so south of Ladoga, where the Germans’ foothold on the lake shore was only ten miles wide. Had the Red Army then established a secure land route out of the city – a year before it actually did so – not only would hundreds of thousands of civilians have been saved from starvation, but the city’s defence factories could have resumed normal production, to the benefit of the Soviet war effort as a whole. As it was, the autumn’s massive production effort crippled Leningrad, draining it of the resources either to break the siege or – save at the cost of mass civilian death – to survive it.
*The British mission took a week to get there, thanks to frequent stops to let pass troop trains going the other way. Having omitted to supply themselves with food, its members had to bargain at farmhouses for provisions, and on arrival were put up, ‘most uncomfortably’, in a school.
8
125 Grams
Marina Yerukhmanova, nineteen-year-old descendant of Peter the Great’s favourite Alexander Menshikov, was, like Olga Grechina, a studious, sheltered girl to whom war was to give a harsh emotional and social education. Her first war work was in a ‘concert brigade’ seeing off soldiers on their way to the front. ‘The station platforms were covered with soldiers, sitting or lying, some with sobbing relatives. And then we appeared – four little girls with music stands and sheet music – and played quartets.’ Though she had been given the opportunity to evacuate to Tashkent with the Conservatoire, she had turned it down, preferring to remain with her family. When the air raids began they moved to an aunt’s safer ground-floor apartment – four adults, four children, four dachshunds and a baby squashing into a single room. The household saw its first death in early October, when Marina’s stepfather, a naval officer de-listed during the 1937 purges, suffered a heart attack two days before papers arrived reinstating him to the service. The family were able to give him a religious funeral at the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, and marked his grave with a large wooden cross (later stolen for fuel).
The death freed Marina and her younger sister Varvara to take jobs. They signed up as druzhinnitsy – unpaid auxiliaries, mostly teenage girls, who took on a wide variety of often dangerous wartime tasks under the direction of the police – at their mother’s workplace, the Hôtel de l’Europe, now requisitioned for use as a military hospital. Standing halfway down Nevsky Prospekt, the hotel – affectionately known as the ‘Yevropa’, or ‘Europe’ – was Leningrad’s oldest and grandest, founded in the 1830s and rebuilt, complete with lifts, air bells and central heating, in the 1870s. To the Yerukhmanov girls it seemed an ‘Elysium . . . Everything was expensive and of good quality – furniture, carpets, curtains, crockery . . . The showers still had hot water, and the laundry still functioned, where a languid, superior sort of woman handed us out our tunics. Everywhere order and cleanliness reigned.’ To start with they worked downstairs in the kitchens, under a giant, red-haired ‘tsar’ of a head chef, who was ceremoniously robed in full whites each morning and whose stomach wobbled as he
walked. Upstairs, slender Tartar waiters with pomaded hair and ‘theatrical’ manners served the lightly wounded in the ground-floor ‘Big Restaurant’. ‘They taught us how to lay the tables, greet our “guests” . . . God preserve you if you served food on cold plates.’ The head waiter gave the girls ‘scoldings, which he loved to pepper with the most shocking swear words. The first few times we didn’t know where to look. Mama said firmly, “Children, pretend you haven’t heard.”’ Though officially forbidden to sleep on the premises they quietly moved in, camping on a balcony above the riotously eclectic ‘Eastern’ dining room, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling, vaguely Egyptian plasterwork and great stained-glass window showing Viking longboats sailing down a river under the walls of an ancient Rus kremlin. Though she worked fifteen-hour days without pay, Marina remembered the hotel with gratitude: ‘Our Yevropa hid us and protected us, gave us time to catch our breath.’1
Marina’s mother’s first reaction, on hearing Molotov’s announcement of war, had been to send her daughters out to buy soap, and to light the stove, so that she could start making sukhari, the dried rusks that are a traditional Russian standby in times of food shortage. Others did the same: by the time the siege ring closed, Marina remembered, the only goods available for purchase were dried fruits and blanched almonds at the market, prohibitively expensive caviar in the shops and useless toys and sports equipment in the Passazh department store.
In 1941 a fifty-year-old Russian had lived through three major famines – the first of 1891–2, when drought hit the Volga steppe; the second of 1921–2, caused by grain requisitioning and the post-revolutionary Civil War, and the third of 1932–3, when the Bolsheviks violently collectivised peasant farms, condemning to death perhaps seven million people. Though privileged in normal times, Leningrad was particularly vulnerable, having always been dependent on food imports from the more fertile south. The bog-bound village of Myasnoi Bor, or ‘Meat Wood’ (just north of Novgorod and the site of a disastrous wartime encirclement in the spring of 1942), was named for the quantities of cattle which foundered there on their trek north to market in the capital. Though the collectivisation famine largely passed the city by, during the Civil War grass grew in the streets, so many were the Leningraders who fled to the villages in search of something to eat.
Despite all this, the Leningrad authorities went into the siege woefully underprepared. When the last road out of the city was cut on 8 September an estimated 2.8 million civilians were caught within the siege ring, 2.46 million of them in the city, and another 343,000 in its surrounding towns and villages.2 Troops and sailors within the ring numbered about another 500,000, making approximately 3.3 million mouths to feed in all. (The Germans seriously overestimated Leningrad’s population at more than four million, probably because they mistook the movement of families out of the vulnerable southern suburbs for the arrival of new refugees. They thus also overestimated how soon the city would begin to starve.3) On the same day that the city was cut off a junior trade commissar, Dmitri Pavlov, flew in from Moscow and started to make a detailed inventory of all food stocks held in warehouses, factories, army depots and other public institutions. At current consumption levels, he discovered, they would last not much more than a month. On hand were thirty-five days’ worth of grain and flour, thirty days’ worth of buckwheat, rice, semolina and macaroni, thirty-three days’ worth of meat and live cattle, forty-five days’ worth of oil and fats, and sixty days’ worth of sugar and confectionery.4 Planes were not available for a large-scale airlift (none ever seems to have been considered), and though the Leningrad Party had already requested that five trainloads of food be delivered to Lake Ladoga for transfer to the city by barge, there were no port facilities to receive them on the lake’s shallow, sandbank-riddled western shore. (The decision to start building docks and warehouses, at the dacha village of Osinovets, was not taken until 9 September.5) Unless the blockade was broken quickly, Leningrad would have to survive on its own resources.
Failure to lay in adequate stores of food and fuel before the siege ring closed was due to the same lethal mixture of denial, disorganisation and carelessness of human life as the failure to evacuate the surplus civilian population. The most efficient and concerned administration could not have prevented serious shortage – emergency stocks did not exist, the trains were overloaded, the country’s most fertile regions in the process of being overrun – but error, muddle and above all the leadership’s refusal to face reality made the situation even worse than it need have been. Telling is a story that Anastas Mikoyan, the State Defence Committee member in charge of trade and supply, recounts in his memoirs. In the early days of the war a convoy of military supply trains travelling westward in accordance with out-of-date mobilisation plans found themselves unable to reach their destination. Knowing that Leningrad was reliant on grain from the south, Mikoyan ordered that they be diverted to the city:
Assuming that the Leningraders would be only too happy with this decision, I did not consult them in advance. Even Stalin only learned of it when he got a telephone call from Zhdanov. [But] Zhdanov told him that the Leningrad warehouses were packed as full as they could hold, and insisted that no foodstuffs over and above those already designated be despatched to them . . . At the time none of us envisaged that Leningrad would be besieged. Consequently, Stalin instructed me not to despatch provisions in excess of agreed quantities without the prior consent of the city authorities.6
Zhdanov had earned points for zeal and successfully asserted himself against a rival; the trains went elsewhere.
Confusion and complacency continued to reign even after the siege had begun. ‘Jurisdiction over food supplies’, Pavlov remembered,
resided with ten different economic agencies. In the absence of instructions from their central offices in Moscow, each continued to issue food according to the usual procedures . . . In mid-September the central administration of the sugar industry, located in Moscow, wired its Leningrad office to despatch a number of freight-car loads of sugar from Leningrad to Vologda. Leningrad had been blockaded since the 8th. There were many similar cases.
Though by the time Pavlov arrived in Leningrad the expensive ‘commission shops’ – opened in July so as to provide the reassuring sight of full shelves – had already been closed, off-ration sales through canteens and restaurants continued, constituting a substantial 8 to 12 per cent of all outgoings of oils, butter, meat and sugar. Production of beer and ice cream carried on, as did off-ration sales of luxury goods such as caviar, champagne and coffee.7
Most visibly, the authorities failed to redistribute food stores so as to minimise the risk of loss in air raids. The result was the spectacular Badayev warehouse fire of 8 September, which Leningraders at the time believed to have destroyed almost the whole of the city’s food stocks – the air is described as filled with the smell of burning ham and sugar – and still remember as the trigger for their accelerating slide into starvation. (‘It was when life ended’, as Marina Yerukhmanova put it, ‘and existence began.’) Pavlov hotly disputes, in what is otherwise a rather impersonal account, the fire’s importance, claiming that the warehouses held boxes of old paperwork and spare parts, and that the only foods destroyed were 3,000 tonnes of flour and 2,500 tonnes of lump sugar, most of which was reprocessed into sweets. In terms of public morale, however, the Badayev fire was unquestionably a catastrophe. ‘Soon after’, Yerukhmanova remembered,
we were handed out eight kilograms of lentils, some canned crabmeat and a few other things. Everyone was unhappy that these handouts hadn’t been ordered in advance of the fire, rather than once it had already happened. To give such instructions in those days would probably have needed a lot of courage. But how was it that they didn’t have more foresight?8
Among the more successful of the Leningrad leadership’s initiatives in the autumn of 1941 were its efforts to gather food from inside the siege ring and to devise food substitutes. First came a drive, hampered by lack of transport, to bring in th
e harvest from the unoccupied countryside to the city’s east and north. For collective farmworkers (who did not qualify for rations) this meant a squeeze almost as severe as that which had caused the collectivisation famine of a decade earlier. A norm of what fell by November to fifteen kilograms of potatoes per person per month could be retained by the peasants themselves; the remainder had to be surrendered to requisitioning parties put together by local soviet executive committees. Peasants who hid their potatoes were ‘held responsible under wartime law’ – in other words, subjected to unspecified criminal punishment.9 Extra hands were also conscripted from the city – and carried home as much produce as they could. ‘On the main roads and on suburban trams’, a memorandum of 16 September complained, ‘hundreds of people can be observed with sacks and baskets . . . Failure to take urgent measures to stop this anarchy will mean that the whole harvest is squandered into private hands.’10 The squeeze on the countryside continued, via a mixture of compulsory purchase, requisitioning and ‘donations’, throughout the first siege winter, producing a total 4,208 tonnes of potatoes and other vegetables, livestock representing 4,653 tonnes of meat, over 2,000 tonnes of hay, 547 tonnes of flour and grain and 179,000 eggs. Three-fifths of the flour and grain came from peasants’ private stores, as did over a quarter of the livestock and over half the potatoes.11
Within the city, institutions involved in food processing and distribution were ordered to search their premises for forgotten or defective stocks that could substitute for conventional flours in the production of bread. At the mills, flour dust was scraped from walls and from under floorboards; breweries came up with 8,000 tons of malt, and the army with oats previously destined for its horses. (The horses were instead fed with birch twigs soaked in hot water and sprinkled with salt. Another feed, involving compressed peat shavings and bonemeal, they rejected.) Grain barges sunk by bombing off Osinovets were salvaged by naval divers, and the rescued grain, which had begun to sprout, dried and milled. (The resulting bread, Pavlov admitted, reeked of mould.) At the docks, large quantities of cotton-seed cake, usually burned in ships’ furnaces, were discovered. Though poisonous in its raw state, its toxins were found to break down at high temperatures, and it too went into bread. Altogether these substitutions, together with successive ration reductions, reduced Leningrad’s consumption of flour from over 2,000 tonnes a day at the beginning of September to 880 tonnes a day by 1 November.