The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  In the dark early-morning hours the convoy reached the Leningrad side. The first few tons of food via ice road had arrived in Leningrad. Military Automobile Highway No. 101, the Road of Life, was open. It was the eighty-third day of the siege.

  For several days most of the transport over the road was by horse sledge. In some places the ice was only seven or eight inches thick. General Lagunov assembled about 1,100 horses and sleighs. But he limited loads to 200 to 250 pounds during the initial phase. This was hardly a drop in the bucket compared with Leningrad’s needs.

  On the night of November 22 the first column of trucks, sixty in all, commanded by Major V. A. Porchunov, arrived on the western shore and on the twenty-third delivered thirty-three tons of flour to Leningrad. The next day only nineteen tons crossed the lake. Porchunov lost one i^-ton truck and driver in the first crossing. Many trucks in the first days carried gasoline or kerosene to relieve Leningrad’s desperate fuel shortage.

  Though the ice road had been brought into being, it did not immediately promise to save Leningrad from starvation. On November 25 Leningrad received 70 tons of food; on November 26, 154 tons; on November 27, 126 tons; on November 28, 196 tons; and on November 29, 128 tons. On November 30 there was a thaw and only 62 tons crossed the lake. From November 23 to 30 the road delivered only 800 tons of flour—two days’ supply at the barest starvation ration (Leningrad was now using only about 510 tons of flour a day). At this rate Leningrad would starve—only a bit more slowly. And in seven days forty trucks had gone to the bottom of the lake.

  These shipments came from stores on hand at Novaya Ladoga. The forest haul over the rutted track from Zaborye did not get started until December 6, despite every effort of the peasants and Red Army men. When finished the road was so narrow in many places that trucks could not pass. The haul from railhead to the Leningrad side of the lake required ten to twenty days. Trucks took two weeks to make the round trip from Zaborye to Novaya Ladoga and back, averaging not more than twenty to twenty-five miles a day.

  Party Secretary Zhdanov decided to send his fellow secretary, T. F. Shtykov, to Vologda, the control point for supplies to Ladoga. His task was to try to get food moving more rapidly. Shtykov arrived in Vologda November 25. The Vologda Party organization was providing substantial relief shipments of food to Leningrad. But the problem lay with forwarding food to the railhead at Zaborye and a secondary base at nearby Podborovye.

  After Shtykov revealed how critical the situation was, the Vologda officials attempted to speed up shipments. The operation of the railroad had been hampered by lack of fuel. City and village residents were sent to the forests to cut wood. They brought it in by the sledgeload for the locomotives. Normal railroad operations through Vologda were suspended to route supply trains straight through to the railheads. Leningrad supply trains got special numbers. They were all in the “97” series. The moment a “97” train halted at a station for fueling or watering, rail workers dropped all tasks to speed it on its way.

  There were enormous losses of trucks in the early days. The road was often shelled and strafed by the Nazis. Kilometer No. 9 was a special danger point. There were cracks in the ice and unexpected weak spots. So many machines were lost that Zhdanov called a Military Council meeting and asked Lagunov, “Don’t you think that we will lose all our transport and find ourselves without trucks?”

  Lagunov said he had made arrangements with Vice Admiral F. I. Krylov to raise the sunken machines as soon as the ice thickened.

  Even heavier loss of machines occurred on the abominable forest road to Zaborye. In three days 350 trucks were abandoned in snowdrifts on the Novaya Ladoga-Yeremina Gora section. Two transport units lost 94 trucks, most of them running off the unmarked shoulders of the highway. The total losses on the ice and on the forest road were 1,004 machines. There was also the problem of maintenance. At one time, of 3,500 trucks engaged on the ice road 1,300 were out of service, awaiting repairs.

  As the ice thickened, more and more trails were opened across the lake. By midwinter there were as many as sixty of these tracks with a total length of nearly a thousand miles.

  But in December the route still worked slowly, slowly, slowly. It met neither the expectations of Zhdanov nor the needs of the city.

  There was, however, the beginning of slight improvement from December 10 onward—and not because the trucks moved faster or ice conditions suddenly got better.

  The improvement was due to the recapture of Tikhvin on December 9. On that day Leningrad had on hand nine or ten days’ supply of flour, including all the remaining stores at Novaya Ladoga, on the eastern side of the lake. The bread being provided Leningrad was made almost entirely of “edible” cellulose, sawdust and flour sweepings. It did not support life. The death toll rose day by day. Leningrad required a minimum of 1,000 tons of supplies a day—not just food, but kerosene, gasoline, munitions.

  Even if the Zaborye highway worked at maximum efficiency, not more than 600 or 700 tons a day could be expected.

  The recapture of Tikhvin changed all this.

  “Without exaggeration,” wrote Dmitri Pavlov, the food chief, with characteristic understatement, “the defeat of the German Fascist troops at Tikhvin and the recapture of the Northern Railroad line up to Mga station saved from starvation thousands of people.”

  This put back into operation the Tikhvin-Volkhov railroad, the connections to Novaya Ladoga and, by the end of December, the line to Voibokalo. By December 25 the perilous, difficult, agonizing haul from Zaborye had been abandoned.2

  Another help was the introduction on Lake Ladoga of the 1 ½-ton GAZ-AA truck and soon thereafter of the 3-ton Zis-5. These trucks could move across the ice at speeds of twenty, thirty and even forty miles an hour. They cut transit time to a little more than an hour, reducing exposure to Nazi gunfire and making two or three trips a day possible for hardy drivers.

  Service facilities were built on the ice—first-aid stations, traffic-control points, repair depots, snow-clearing detachments, bridge-layers (to put wooden crossings over weak points or crevasses). Soon there were 19,000 persons enrolled in the ice-road effort.

  Party Secretary Zhdanov and Kuznetsov personally inspected the ice road, seeking some means of improving turnover. They imposed delivery norms (2 ¼ tons a day for the GAZ-AA trucks), introduced a premium system, reorganized the direction of the supply system and were able to bring deliveries up to 700 tons by December 22 and to 800 tons by December 23.

  This tiny improvement came very late. Death was stalking the Leningrad streets. The Party committee in the Central Kuibyshev District was struggling with a question which had no precedent—how to organize the trucking of bodies from the local hospital to the cemetery. Bodies were beginning to pile up in the courtyards by the hundred.

  Party Secretary Kuznetsov had a bitter conversation one day with Major General P. A. Zaitsev at Smolny. Zaitsev was complaining that because of a lack of adequate support he had lost eight hundred men in three days’ fighting. Kuznetsov gloomily observed: “Why do you think we are moving sappers out of the front lines? In order to dynamite mass graves in the cemeteries to bury civilians.”

  The December death toll was 53,000 persons, more or less—equal to that for the whole of 1940. The total was nearly five times that of the admittedly incomplete figure of 11,085 in November. Party members tottered into regional offices, put their cards on the desk and wandered off, mumbling, “Tomorrow I’ll die. . . .”

  One day Zhdanov called in General Mikhail Dukhanov. He had received a report of a dangerous outbreak of dysentery among youngsters in a boarding school. With typical Soviet bureaucratic suspicion he thought the school administration might be stealing food and depriving the children.

  Dukhanov appeared at the school shortly after daybreak, hoping to catch the thieves at work. He watched the food checked out of the storehouse and into the kitchen, watched it cooked and examined the inventory. All was in order.

  He stood by as the children ate breakfast�
��25 grams of bread and a mug of hot water with salt. He went to the dormitory. Youngsters who were strong enough put on their heavy jackets and went to the street where they were tearing down a wooden house for firewood. The others lounged listlessly on their beds.

  For lunch they had 50 grams of bread and a pat of butter, a little soup made of frozen beets and some cereal which seemed to be mostly linseed-oil cake. General Dukhanov noticed that many children put part of their soup and cereal into jars. He thought they were saving it to eat later on. But he was mistaken. Soon those who were able to walk appeared in heavy clothes. They were going home to visit their relatives. Most of them clutched a glass or jar in which they were carrying food for a starving mother, brother or sister. General Dukhanov wanted to halt the youngsters and speak to them. But he suddenly realized there was nothing to say. He went back that evening and reported to Zhdanov that there was no stealing, just lack of food.

  He asked Zhdanov if he had been right not to stop the children as they were leaving the school.

  Zhdanov spoke slowly: “I would have done the same thing.”

  Then he turned and took up the telephone: “This is Zhdanov speaking. Within forty minutes put down a heavy barrage on the Nazi regiments of Majors Gnidin and Witte. What for? In order to inflict heavy casualties on the Fascists. Report to me when you have carried out the instructions.”

  Zhdanov hung up and turned back to General Dukhanov. “Go home and rest. Thank you for the report. We will evacuate those children immediately.”

  It was about this time that a ski detachment of sailors from the battleship Marat was sent on a night scouting expedition across the ice to reconnoiter the German gun positions around the Peterhof Palace. They found that the grandiose sculpture of Samson by Mikhail Kozlovsky which dominated the great cascade leading down to the sea was missing—it had been disassembled and shipped off to Germany.

  When the sailors reported their discovery, the Marat was ordered to lay down a special barrage on the positions around Peterhof—in reprisal for the theft.

  On the night of December 23 Zhdanov sat down with Party Secretary Shtykov, just back from Vologda, where he had been expediting movement of supplies.

  “We’d like to increase the Leningrad ration from 125 grams,” Zhdanov said. “Can you guarantee that the supplies will come in without interruption?”

  It was a critical question. Shtykov considered a few moments, then replied slowly and solemnly, “I can.”

  There was on hand in Leningrad at that moment a little more than two days’ supply of flour. The ice road had brought in only 16,449 tons of food since its start—an average of 361 tons a day. The next evening, the twenty-fourth, the Leningrad Military Council, at Zhdanov’s initiative, ordered the first increase in the Leningrad ration—a miserable 100 grams (a slice of bread) for workers, and 75 grams for all others, including children.

  It was, as Pavlov insisted twenty-five years later, a very daring and crucial act. There was no reserve in case of accident or interruption of the supply route. If something happened and the ration again had to be cut back, Pavlov could hardly bear to think of the dreadful consequences.

  Zhdanov’s act was a bold gamble. But he hoped that the deliveries by the ice road would continue to grow. And—although no Leningrad historian directly mentions the fact—the terrible toll of death within the city was already radically reducing the numbers of persons who had to be fed.

  There was another reason for confidence on Zhdanov’s part. He had just paid his first visit to Moscow since his return to Leningrad in the critical days of late June.

  There had been a conference at the Kremlin—Stalin; Zhdanov; Marshal Boris M. Shaposhnikov, Chief of Staff; General Kirill Meretskov, commander of the newly created Volkhov front; General M. S. Khozin, commander of the Leningrad front; Lieutenant General G. G. Sokolov of the Twenty-sixth Army (soon transformed into the Second Shock Army); and Major General I. V. Galanin of the Fifty-ninth Army.

  The conference was convened December 11 in the full flush of the recovery of Tikhvin, the recapture of Rostov and Marshal Zhukov’s rapidly developing and successful offensive to drive the Nazis back from Moscow. Shaposhnikov described his plan for breaking the Leningrad blockade in which Meretskov with the Fourth, Fifty-second, Fifty-ninth and Twenty-sixth (Second Shock) armies was to play the principal role. The Fifty-ninth and Second Shock armies were just being re-formed. Shaposhnikov said Meretskov’s task was to drive the Germans from the territory east of the Volkhov River, to cross the river and smash the divisions on the western shores. Then Meretskov would drive northwest and in cooperation with the Leningrad front destroy the German siege forces.

  Optimism was high. Shaposhnikov emphasized the crisis in Leningrad and pointed out that it would not permit waiting for the full concentration of troops before beginning action. Zhdanov and General Khozin stressed the heavy toll of air and artillery bombardment in Leningrad and the rapidly rising toll of hunger and cold. People were dying in such numbers that every effort must be made quickly to liquidate the blockade.

  It was agreed that the Volkhov front should continue the attack already under way. The offensive would be a rolling one and continue without pause until Leningrad had been liberated and the grip of Army Group Nord broken. The participants, filled with confidence, flew north from Moscow. For the first time since his reverses of the summer Zhdanov must have felt that fate was turning his way. With a bit of luck and hard fighting by three army groups—the Leningrad, the Volkhov and the Northwest—Leningrad should be freed. The city had suffered terribly, but a change seemed to lie just ahead.

  The operative plans for the attack were transmitted to the Leningrad and Volkhov commanders on December 17. On the twentieth the offensive was to open. A very short term for preparation. But there was no time to waste, and Zhdanov and Meretskov did not wish to lose the momentum of the successful Tikhvin offensive.

  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:

  I am experiencing great difficulties in connection with the opening in the Astoria of a so-called statsionar, or feeding and medical station. The Union in the first drawing got three places. I have received many urgent requests. I have been especially disturbed by the call of L. Portov, who said several times in a pleading voice: “Please arrange it for me. Do it now. If you don’t, within a week it will be too late. I’ll not live.” And in spite of this I could promise him only second place, together with F. Rubtsov and A. Peisin who are terribly weak, but in even worse condition is A. Rabinovich, long ill with tuberculosis, V. Deshevov, almost unable to move, and I. Miklashevsky. It is so difficult to choose. . . .

  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.