The 900 Days (68 page)

On January 5 Zhdanov addressed another appeal to the men of the ice road. He cast his message in fateful language. The road continues to work badly—very badly. It brings to Leningrad not more than one-third the freight needed for survival even on the scantiest level of existence.

“The supply of Leningrad and the front hangs by a thread,” Zhdanov said. “The people and the troops are suffering unbelievable hardships.

“If the situation is quickly to be corrected, if the needs of Leningrad and the front are to be met, it all depends on you workers of the auto road —and on you only.”

There was nothing more Zhdanov or the Party or the Leningrad Military Command could do. Now it depended upon the workers
of the ice road
.

Dulled, frozen, weak, often unable to keep to their feet, the people of Leningrad knew that survival hung in the balance. But they did not know by what a slender thread. They lived on hope, nourished by the December 25 ration increase, by the belief that Mga would be taken. They believed in the ice road, and it was at this time they first began to call it “the Road of Life.”

Vera Inber was in a queue before a bakery one day. An old woman corrected a remark by her neighbor. “This is not black bread,” the old woman said. “This is rye bread. It is Ladoga bread. It is the whitest of the white. It’s holy bread, that’s what.” The old woman crossed herself and kissed the rough black loaf.

In her heatless flat Vera Inber fashioned the incident into a few lines for the poem with which she warmed herself in those arctic days, “Pulkovo Meridian.” There were many in Leningrad who echoed the sentiment of the old woman. The bread was holy. They did not know that each coarse slice they ate might be their last.

“Never,” wrote the authors of Leningrad’s official history,

Leningrad was dying.

¹
Pavlov,
op. cit.,
3rd edition, p. 135; Saparov,
op. cit
., p. 43; Kharitonov,
Voyenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal
, No. 11, November, 1966, p. 120. There is controversy as to the date the order for the road to Zaborye was issued. One account says the order was not approved until November 24 and that it was to be finished by November 30. (F. Lagunov,
Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal
, No. 12, December, 1964, p. 95.)

²
In the opinion of Dmitri V. Pavlov the Zaborye road played no substantial role in supplying Leningrad. (Personal communication, April 30, 1968.)

³
O. F. Suvenirov, in
V tor ay a Mirovaya Voina
, Vol. II. Moscow, 1966, pp. 159-166. Dmitri V. Pavlov mistakenly asserts that “no scurvy occurred during the whole of the war among Red Army troops.” (Pavlov,
op. cit
., 3rd edition, p. 103.)

⁴
One calculation was that each large truck carried 16,000 rations (Kharitonov,
op, cit.,
p. 37).

⁵
Kolpakov was publicly excoriated by Leningrad’s Mayor, Peter Popkov, January 13. (A. Dymshits,
Fodvig Leningrada
, Moscow, 1960, p. 288.)

ONE LATE NOVEMBER NIGHT A MIDDLE-AGED MAN, WORN and tired, in officer’s uniform, heavy wool greatcoat, fur collar and fur hat, walked out of the Smolny grounds, past the sandbagged pillboxes, showed his pass to the tommy gunners and turned into empty Tverskaya Ulitsa.

It was, he recalled later, like a scene out of Dante—the wastes of drifted snow, the thin rays of the moon, almost obscured by scudding clouds, and a silence so deep that each fall of his boots, each metallic squeak of leather on frozen snow, echoed in his ears.

He was weary, and when the wind hit him, it stabbed into his lungs. Snow sifted down on his fur hat and shoulders, and his feet seemed heavier and heavier. The procession of squares and boulevards turned into a desert of ice in which he was the only living being. He saw no homes, no people. There was no sound but that of the wind, of his boots and of his heavy breathing.

The city slowly, majestically, was freezing into death as the poet, Dmitri Grigorovich, envisaged: “. . . the winter twilight of Petersburg sinking into the black of night . . . and he alone . . . far, far from all, in the deep shadows, the snowy emptiness and the swirling wind.”

Presently he came to the bridge to the Summer Gardens and crossed over. He could not always be certain that he was not suffering hallucinations, but he thought he passed a woman, wearing a black cloak and black mask as though going to a masquerade. He realized in a moment that the mask was just the woolen face cloth with which so many Leningraders now protected themselves from the cold and wind.

On a bench in the drifted park he saw a couple, a man and woman, huddled together, resting, it seemed, from a long walk. He started toward them and nearly plunged into a darkly outlined hole—an excavation. No. A shell hole. He kept wondering about the two people sitting on the park bench. They seemed to be asleep. Perhaps he, too, should sit for a moment. As he went on, he glimpsed a man in the distance carrying a burden. The man walked a bit, then rested, walked a bit and rested. The burden on his shoulder seemed to sparkle in the shifting light. As the man came nearer, it was clear that he was carrying a body. A woman, no doubt, possibly his daughter.

When he looked again, the figure with the burden had vanished as though it had never been there. A feeling of terror gripped the man, and he found himself reaching for his pistol and drawing it from the holster. He could not have told why. Presently he shuddered and walked on through the world of shadow, of cold, of snow and of wind.

The walker was Nikolai Tikhonov, born in Leningrad, one of Russia’s best-known writers. He had not been in his native city when war broke out and had returned only in October as Leningrad began to descend into the white hell of starvation.

Tikhonov was living now at Smolny on the second floor in room No. 139. He shared these quarters with Vissarion Sayanov, Aleksandr Prokofyev and Boris Likharev, all of them poets.

Sometimes, they spent the night in room No. 139, reciting poems, dividing their tobacco, sharing their rations, pacing the corridors and arguing. As Boris Likharev wrote:

Sometimes they gathered in the flat where Sayanov first heard the news of war and looked out to see the white sails of boats on the blue Neva. There they now huddled about a smoky makeshift stove, burning legs from the kitchen table, listening to the beat of the radio’s metronome, which continued when no program was being broadcast, smoking “Golden Autumn” cigarettes (made of dried tree leaves), drinking hot tea or hot water, reading poetry and arguing about the war. Sometimes the talk and argument went on until dawn.

Other nights they gathered at Tikhonov’s flat on the Petrograd side near the Tuchkov Bridge or at Prokofyev’s apartment, also on the Petrograd side, near the Bourse Bridge. Wherever they met it was cold and dark. One late November morning Tikhonov returned to Smolny and told his comrades in room No. 139, “Last night I wrote a poem which touches the limits of frankness.”

This was Tikhonov’s great war poem, “Kirov Is with Us,” a poem which his friend Prokofyev felt was minted from new metal: “In Leningrad’s nights of iron to the city came Kirov. . . .” It was a poem evoking the spirit of the Leningrad leader whose assassination in 1934 had touched off Stalin’s most savage purge. It was a work, deeply inspirational, deeply evocative, deeply patriotic. It caught the spirit of the great city as it struggled for its life. Whether it struck a note which was likely to please Stalin was not so clear. But in the agony of Leningrad Tikhonov’s “Kirov Is with Us” became a legend.

The writers and the poets were luckier than ordinary Leningraders. They could throw themselves into creative work and to some extent forget the suffering which surrounded them.

The diary of Vsevolod Vishnevsky, the greatest optimist among them, discloses how difficult this was.

On November 19 he made these entries:

The next day (November 20):

But the jokes were as thin as the breakfast gruel. The same day he entered in his diary:

It was true. Aleksei Lebedev was dead. Vera Petrovna could not believe it. Even when she saw before her the yellow slip of paper from the Baltic Fleet Command, saying, “Your husband, Lieutenant Aleksei Lebedev, died in November, 1941, in battle for the socialist fatherland, true to his military duty, heroically and bravely.”

It could not be. There still was imprinted before her eyes the image of Aleksei as he lay asleep in her lap beside the Baltic Sea on that distant June 22 when an unknown girl came running to ask, “Haven’t you heard the radio? It’s war!”

Vera Petrovna had not often seen Aleksei since that day. On October 26 she met him on the Neva embankment near the Liteiny Bridge. She watched him approach, a long figure in a black-leather coat, black beard, hands deep in his pockets. He saw her and his eyes lighted. They embraced. And the next question was: “How are you getting on for food?”

He pulled out a couple of bars of chocolate, but she thrust them back into his pockets, saying she had no place to keep them. In reality she was afraid she’d start eating them if they stayed in her hands.

They had a few moments together and Alex read her a new poem:

It was their last meeting.

Aleksei’s mother got a letter: “Looking back at the city, so beautiful in its tragic colors in this gentle fall, I feel how good life is, how short it is, how senselessly war annihilates all that is good, all that humanity has achieved.”

Then, one day in late November Vera Petrovna got a letter, too. Her heart rose. The notice was not true. Aleksei was alive. She looked at the date. November n. It had been written two days before he went to sea on his last mission, a mission which she knew was to take him far in the rear of the Germans toward the Kiel Canal.

She opened the letter and read:

Lebedev put to sea as a lieutenant on the submarine L-2. The submarine was lost November 18 in the Baltic. Aleksei Lebedev was twenty-nine years old. His friends believed him one of the most talented of the Leningrad poets. The playwright Aleksandr Kron felt that his loss was sheer tragedy, not just an accident of war. The L-2, he was convinced, was poorly commanded. Kron, himself a naval man and a naval writer, knew submarine life. He knew how strong was the factor of morale, of training, of close-knit action and confidence in the command. A few days before his last voyage Lebedev confided to Kron that morale aboard the
L-2
was not good, that the commander imposed his orders from above, that the initiative of the crew was stifled.

“Who knows,” said Kron, “perhaps in that circumstance lies the cause of the loss of the L-2.”

On November 20, the day Leningrad’s ration was cut to 125 grams of bread daily, the composer Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky noted that fact in his diary, observing that “the food situation is becoming more difficult.”

He then proceeded to other matters—a recital at the Union of Composers by Boris Asafyev. The great hall of the union was darkened by metal screens over the balcony windows and was very cold. They used candles for light. There was no electricity. Fifteen members listened to Asafyev. All wore hats, heavy coats, overshoes.

Asafyev played “attractively and temperamentally and was childishly happy at the general reaction,” Bogdanov-Berezovsky noted. There was a long discussion of his performance and by rare chance no air raid during the several hours of playing and talk.

Bogdanov-Berezovsky’s next diary entry, for November 28, began: “Fourth day without warm food and only one tiny bread ration.”

The questions of what happened, of how they had come to the brink of catastrophe, pressed urgently on the Leningraders. Pavel Luknitsky sat one cold evening in the Writers’ House, listening to three young officers, convalescing from wounds, argue. A tank officer said he and his comrades had fought as best they could, but there had been mistakes at the top. Obviously, Russia hadn’t been prepared. An engineer disagreed. Russia had not been surprised either politically or materially.

“Politically,” snapped the tank officer, “maybe not. But matériel? What are you saying? Do you really think you can fight the Germans with T-26 tanks? Or a division of People’s Volunteers armed with shovels—can they stop the German Panzers? Do you call a bottle of flaming gasoline a modern military weapon? And what about automatic rifles?”

The engineer cited the KV 60-ton tank. He had seen five in action at Izhorsk.

“Sure,” snorted the tankist. “Five KV’s. And if we’d had five hundred, where would the Germans be now?”

An aviator joined in the conversation, complaining that Soviet planes readily caught fire because their frames were made with magnesium instead of Duralumin. Soviet Duralumin, he said bitterly, had been provided to the Germans before June 22.

Frankly, he said, it was simply unbelievable that the Germans had captured Minsk, had swept through Byelorussia, the Ukraine, capturing Pskov and driving up to the very outskirts of Leningrad.

The three young men turned to Luknitsky for some explanation. He was deep in thought. So many of his countrymen had suffered disillusion. Now they knew the bitter truth. No one was going to save them—not Stalin, not the Red Army. Only themselves, only each man and each woman, fighting as he could, struggling as he could, just the simple men and women of Russia, of Leningrad, fighting in their ruined city, starving in the zero cold, fighting as long as they had strength . . .

These thoughts stayed in Luknitsky’s mind as he came back to his flat. He learned of an incident that had happened the night before. A horse had fallen on the ice beside the house where his brother lived. In the morning only half the horse lay on the street. A policeman followed the tracks in the snow and found the missing half in a student dormitory. Horses were priceless. A soldier told of seeing one killed by a shell fragment. A score of people came running and within minutes had butchered the beast. He helped a girl cart home a horse’s leg. It was too heavy for her to lift.
¹

Luknitsky recalled a talk he had had with his father about their dog Mishka. His father proposed giving the dog to a military unit because they could not feed it. Luknitsky objected: “Wait a minute, maybe it would be better to eat the dog ourselves.” His father was appalled: “I would never under any circumstances eat our beloved dog.” But after a few days his father said, “I’ve been talking with a man. He takes the head and feet of dogs and makes a good stew. . . .” And the two had looked at Mishka’s sorrowful eyes, and each thought of how many tasty cutlets might be made from their faithful friend.

The problem of food worried Luknitsky more and more. He knew only too well the Germans were counting on starving them out. He knew that they must hold on until the Red Army tore loose the blockade. He tried to be bright and optimistic in public, to talk in easy confidence about the victory which was just around the corner. That, he felt, was his duty. But he was not blind. Speaking to himself, he had to ask: What will happen if the food situation is not improved? Even a man with the strongest spirit must have a minimum of calories to maintain strength. Hunger, general hunger, simply led to death.