Lake Ladoga, including the railway junction of Volkhov; General Fedyuninsky's troops just managed to stop the Germans outside Volkhov; but, further east, the Germans
succeeded in cutting the main Leningrad-Vologda railway line, and, on November 9, they captured Tikhvin. The loss of Tikhvin was critical. Small quantities of food could still, with great difficulty, be delivered by air. The problem of delivering larger quantities of food across Lake Ladoga, even when it was well frozen, became almost insoluble. The
Volkhov and Novaya-Ladoga food bases had gone out of action when the Germans had
cut the railway to the east of them. The new rail-head was now a small station called Zaborie, in wild forest country some 100 miles east of Volkhov and some sixty miles east of Tikhvin. Only a state of mind bordering on despair could have persuaded the
Leningrad War Council to order the building of a "motor road" of nearly 200 miles, along old forest paths and through virgin forest, in a wide circle from Zaborie to Novaya
Ladoga. Soldiers and peasants were mobilised to build this "road" at the height of winter; and it was actually completed on December 6. The whole area was almost uninhabited
and:
Along a large stretch, the road was so narrow that lorries meeting each other could not pass; moreover, the deep snow, the steep hills in a country wholly unfamiliar to the drivers led to constant breakdowns and stoppages. Fortunately, it so happened that three days after the road had been completed, the military situation sharply changed for the better, with the Red Army's recapture of Tikhvin. It is obvious that the new road could not save Leningrad for any length of time. A convoy of trucks
which left Zaborie for Novaya Ladoga took fourteen days to return to its base, and in three days, between Novaya-Ladoga and Yeremina Gora over 350 trucks had got
stuck in the snow. These convoys had travelled at the rate of twenty miles a day.. .
[Pavlov, op. cit., p. 155.]
By driving the Germans out of Tikhvin and beyond the Volkhov river between December
9 and 15 General Meretskov's troops literally saved Leningrad.
[Another great advantage of the recapture of Tikhvin was that it put an end to the threat of a German-Finnish "junction".]
The Germans, whose radio had screamed its head off about the imminent surrender of
Leningrad the day Tikhvin fell, said very little about the loss of the Leningrad "padlock".
Had Tikhvin remained in German hands, it is impossible to see how Leningrad could
have been supplied, since the improvised 200-mile road was as good as useless. And, at that time, with the Russian counter-offensive at Moscow at its height, there could be no question of providing Leningrad with a sufficient number of transport and fighter planes for a super-airlift. Not only did General Meretskov's troops drive the Germans out of Tikhvin, but by the end of December the troops of the Volkhov Army Group had also
driven the Germans a considerable distance away from Voibokalo, half-way between
Volkhov and Mga (the latter still in German hands). By January 1, 1942, trains could travel all the way from Moscow and Vologda to Voibokalo, where the supplies were
taken by lorry across the now frozen Lake Ladoga to Leningrad. But the organisation of the "Road of Life" across the ice of Lake Ladoga is a long and complicated story, and it would be wrong to suppose that, with the liberation of Tikhvin on December 9,
Leningrad's supply troubles were over.
Chapter V THE GREAT FAMINE
Already in November, people in Leningrad (in the first place, elderly men) began to die of hunger, euphemistically described as "alimentary distrophy". In November alone over 11,000 people died; the cut in rations on November 20—the fifth since the beginning of the Blockade—enormously increased the death-rate.
On paper, but only on paper, these all-time-low daily rations were as follows:
Workers and Engineering and technical
Office Workers
Dependants
Children
staff
Bread
9 oz.
4.5 oz.
4.5 oz.
Fats
0.66 oz.
0.33 oz.
0.25 oz.
Meat
l.75 oz.
1 oz.
0.5 oz.
Cereals
1.75 oz.
1.16 oz.
0.75 oz.
Sugar and
1.75 oz.
1.16 oz.
1 oz.
conf.
8.16 oz. or 581
7 oz. or 466
8.33 oz. or 684
Total
15 oz. or 1,087 calories
calories
calories
Even these incredible figures for calories, representing, especially for the last three categories, only a tiny fraction of the human body's requirements, are an "optimistic"
exaggeration. Since the meat and fats rations were not honoured, or else were replaced by wholly inadequate substitutes (sheep-guts jelly, etc.), the calory content of the rations was even lower, except (it is claimed) in the case of children. In December 52,000 people died, as many as normally died in a year; while in January 1942, between 3,500 and
4,000 people died every day; in December and January 200,000 people died. Although,
by January, the rations had been somewhat increased, the after-effects of the famine were to be felt for many months after; altogether, according to the official Russian figures quoted at the Nuremberg Trial, 632,000 people died in Leningrad as a direct result of the Blockade—a figure which is undoubtedly an under-estimate. In 1959 I was told by
Shostakovich, who had been in Leningrad during the early stages of the blockade, that 900,000 people died, and even higher figures have been quoted.
Apart from hunger, people also suffered acutely from cold in their unheated houses.
People would burn their furniture and books— but these did not last long.
To fill their empty stomachs, to reduce the intense sufferings caused by hunger,
people would look for incredible substitutes: they would try to catch crows or rooks, or any cat or dog that had still somehow survived; they would go through medicine chests in search of castor oil, hair oil, vaseline or glycerine; they would make soup or jelly out of carpenter's glue (scraped off wallpaper or broken-up furniture). But not all people in the enormous city had such supplementary sources of "food".
Death would overtake people in all kinds of circumstances; while they were in the streets, they would fall down and never rise again; or in their houses where they would fall asleep and never awake; in factories, where they would collapse while
doing a job of work. There was no transport, and the dead body would usually be
put on a hand-sleigh drawn by two or three members of the dead man's family;
often, wholly exhausted during the long trek to the cemetery, they would abandon
the body half-way, leaving it to the authorities to deal with it.
[Pavlov, op. cit., pp. 136-7.]
According to another witness:
It was almost impossible to get a coffin. Hundreds of corpses would be abandoned in cemeteries or in their neighbourhood, usually merely wrapped in a sheet... The
authorities would bury all these abandoned corpses in common graves; these were
made by the civil defence teams with the use of explosives. People did not have the strength to dig ordinary graves in the frozen earth... On January 7, 1942 the
Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet noted that corpses were scattered all over the place, and were filling up morgues and cemetery areas; some were being buried any old way, without any regard for the elementary rules of hygiene.
[Karasev, op. cit., p. 189.]
Later, in April, during the general clean-up of the city—which was absolutely essential to prevent epidemics, once spring had come—thousands of corpses were discovered in
shelters, trenches and under the melting snow, where they had been lying for months. As the Secretary of the Leningrad Komsomol wrote at the time: "The job of disposing of these corpses was truly terrifying; we were afraid of the effect it might have on the minds of children and very young people. A dry matter-of-fact communiqué would have read
something like this: 'The Komsomol organisations put in order all trenches and shelters.'
In reality this work was beyond description."
[Ibid., p. 227.]
Hospitals were of very little help to the starving. Not only were the doctors and nurses half-dead with hunger themselves, but what the patients needed was not medicine, but food, and there was none.
In December and January the frost froze water mains and sewers, and the burst pipes all over the city added to the danger of epidemics. Water had to be brought in pails from the Neva or the numerous Leningrad canals. This water was, moreover, dirty and unsafe to drink, and in February, about one and a half million people were given anti-typhoid
injections.
Between the middle of November and the end of December, 35,000 people were
evacuated from Leningrad, mostly by air; on December 6 many people were allowed to
leave the city across the ice of Lake Ladoga, but, up to January 22, this evacuation went on in an unorganised way: thousands simply proceeded across Lake Ladoga on foot, and many died before they even reached the south bank of the lake.
It was not till January 22 that, with the help of a fleet of buses travelling along the new Ice Road, the evacuation across Lake Ladoga started in real earnest.
There is some conflicting evidence about the effect of the famine on people: on the
whole, people just died with a feeling of resignation, while the survivors went on living in hopes: the recapture of Tikhvin and the slight increase in rations on December 25 had a heartening effect. Nevertheless, Karasev talks of numerous cases of "psychological trauma" produced by hunger and cold, German bombing and shelling, and the death of so many relatives and friends. There are no exact figures of the number of children who died of hunger; but the death-rate among these is believed to have been relatively low, if only because their parents would often sacrifice their own meagre rations.
Both local patriotism and an iron discipline, partly enforced by the authorities, account for the virtual absence of any disorders or hunger riots. That the measures taken against
"anti-social" behaviour were extremely drastic may be judged from the statement by Kuznetsov, head of the Leningrad City Party Organisation, who said in April: "We used to shoot people for half-a-pound of bread stolen from the population." There were, inevitably, a few racketeers here and there; but, on the whole, the discipline was good.
Pavlov tells the following significant incident:
The driver of a truck was delivering loaves of bread to a bakery, when a shell hit the front of the truck and killed the driver... The loaves of bread were scattered over the pavement. Conditions were favourable for looting. Yet the people who gathered
round the wrecked vehicle, raised the alarm, and guarded the bread till the arrival of another truck. All these people were hungry, and the temptation to grab a fresh loaf of bread well-nigh irresistible. And yet not a single loaf was stolen.
[Op cit., p. 109.]
Whether, on the other hand, as Pavlov implies, a man who started screaming at people in a bread-queue urging them to loot the shop was an enemy agent or simply a man driven half-insane by hunger is difficult to say; many people were driven half-insane, as is suggested by Karasev and other writers.
Morale, even in the appalling conditions of the famine at its height, was kept up in all kinds of ways: there are many accounts of the theatrical shows that continued throughout the winter, given by actors almost fainting with hunger, and wearing (like the audience) whatever they could to keep themselves warm.
Much is also made of the role played by the Leningrad Komsomol organisations to help people in dire distress. The Komsomol organised bytovyie otriady ("everyday life teams") of several thousand young people:
These teams consisted of a total of 1,000 young people; moreover, in each district, some 500 or 700 temporary helpers were frequently mobilised. Tired and worn out,
these young people, mostly girls, would help the population to overcome their
terrible difficulties. Visiting dirty and freezing houses, they would use their swollen hands, cracked with cold and hard work, to chop wood, or light the little burzhuika
stoves, or bring pails of water from the Neva, or bring dinner from a canteen, or wash the floor or clothes, and the pathetic smile of a completely exhausted
Leningrader would then express his gratitude for this hard and honourable work.
In the Primorski district alone, the members of these Komsomol teams examined in
February-March 1,810 flats, looked after 780 sick people and, altogether, helped
7,678 persons... The Komsomol teams were authorised to resettle people into more
suitable houses, place homeless children in children's homes, and arrange about
evacuations... Largely through the help of the Komsomol teams, over 30,000
orphans were settled in the eighty-five new children's homes set up between January and May 1942.
[Karasev, op. cit., p. 190.]
Most of these children were the orphans of parents who had died in the famine.
If the civilian population of Leningrad had to suffer all the pangs of hunger, and many had to die, since there was no alternative so long as large scale evacuation was
impossible, there could be no question of letting the soldiers starve; for everything ultimately depended on them. Even so, the soldiers' rations had to be cut, too. The Red Army rations established on September 20, 1941, amounted to 3,450 calories in the case of front-line troops and 2,659 calories in the case of "rear personnel", with two intermediary categories between them.
In the conditions of Leningrad such rations could not be maintained for long. Between the middle of November 1941 and February 1942, the ration of front-line troops was
reduced to 2,593 calories, and that of "rear" troops to 1,605 calories; from November 20
—that is, at the height of the hunger blockade—front-line soldiers were getting 1 lb. of bread and about 4 oz. of meat, besides small quantities of other food. This, at the height of winter, was far from satisfactory, though the knowledge of what was happening in
Leningrad at the same time made the soldiers feel that they were highly privileged in comparison with the civilians. Whenever civilians visited the front, soldiers gladly shared their meagre rations with them. Moreover, most of the reserves of potatoes in Leningrad were handed over to the Army's field kitchens, and this created an illusion of "bulk"; also, the army bread was of slightly better quality than that given to civilians.
The soldiers, however, suffered severely from the Leningrad tobacco shortage, and all kinds of admixtures were devised—such as hops and dried maple leaves. Desperate
remedies were resorted to in order to keep the troops well supplied with tobacco, which was found to be essential for morale. Very few soldiers, it was found, would agree to exchange their tobacco even for chocolate, which was among the "concentrated" foods brought to Leningrad by air.
Chapter VI THE ICE ROAD
There were only two drastic remedies for the appalling famine from which Leningrad had suffered, especially since the end of October: one was the evacuation of as many people as possible; the other was the organisation of a reliable supply-line for food, fuel and raw materials. The organisation of an ice road across Lake Ladoga had been in the Leningrad authorities' minds ever since the blockade on land had closed round Leningrad on
September 8; the lake was expected to freeze in November or early December. But
everything depended on the intensity of the frost; to build a proper motor road across the ice, it was essential that the ice should be uniformly tw
o metres thick. This thickness could be reached rapidly in only extremely cold weather of at least minus 15°C.
By November 17 the ice was only one metre thick, but by November 20—that day of the
all-time-low ration cut in Leningrad —it reached a thickness of 1.8 metres; horse-drawn vehicles were sent across the ice, but the horses were so underfed that many of them collapsed and died. The drivers were instructed to cut up such horses, and deliver them to Leningrad as meat. At last, on November 22, the first motor transport ventured on to the lake; but the ice was still so thin that only small loads could be carried by the two-ton lorries, and even so, several of them fell through the ice. On the following day a system was adopted of attaching sleighs to the lorries, and putting most of the load on the sleighs, so as to spread out the pressure on the ice more evenly. Between November 23
and December 1 only 800 tons of flour were transported across the ice in these various ways, and, in the process, some forty lorries were lost, some of them falling through the ice, often together with their drivers. The results of this first attempt to use the Road of Life were negligible. It should be remembered that, at this time, Tikhvin was in German hands, and that most of the food transported during that week came from the meagre
stores that had been accumulated on the south side of the lake before the fall of Tikhvin on November 9. New supplies—if any—were now expected to reach Lake Ladoga along
the incredibly long improvised road from Zaborie, far to the east of Tikhvin. To maintain the starvation rations that had come into force in Leningrad on November 20, it was
essential to bring to the city at least 1,000 tons of food a day, besides ammunition and petrol which were absolutely essential to the troops of the Leningrad Front. Even in the best possible conditions, not more than 600 tons a day could be expected from the
Zaborie road. Thus, the liberation of Tikhvin on December 9 truly meant that Leningrad had been saved.
[Pavlov, op. cit., p. 156.]
Not that the recapture of Tikhvin solved all problems—far from it. Although Tikhvin, on the main Vologda-Leningrad line, had now become the main food base for Leningrad and became, as soon as it was recaptured, "like a gigantic ant-heap" (Pavlov), the task of transporting food and other supplies from Tikhvin to Leningrad was still an extremely arduous one. Since the Germans, in their retreat, had blown up all the railway bridges between Tikhvin and Volkhov, there was no alternative, for the time being, to
Russia at war Page 38