There are three of us in the room, but two
No longer breathe. They are dead.
I understand it all,
But why do I break the bread
In three pieces?
INCREDIBLE AS IT SEEMED TO ADMIRAL PANTELEYEV, throughout October and into November the people of Leningrad assumed that almost any day the blockade would end. Even when the ration was cut, cut again and then again, friends said to Panteleyev: “Tell me, please, Yuri Aleksandrovich, when do they plan to lift the blockade?” With them there was no question of can the blockade be lifted; just a matter of timing, as though, Panteleyev thought, they were asking when the Red Arrow express was due to arrive from Moscow.
Panteleyev assured his friends that the siege would be broken very soon. But he knew that the truth was far different, that week by week the situation was growing worse, not better, and that, in fact, each effort to break the blockade had only deepened the plight of the city.
The first serious attempt to smash the German ring had been a desperate gamble in late September by Marshal Zhukov. He threw two divisions and a brigade of marines across the Neva River at a place called Nevskaya Dubrovka, northwest of Mga. The troops managed to win a toehold on the south side of the river but nothing more. Marshal Zhukov tried several other long shots, including amphibious landings around the Peterhof Palace. None worked. The Peterhof marines were wiped out almost to the last man.
But Moscow and Leningrad both knew that something had to be done. Stalin telegraphed Leningrad October 12 ordering a counteroffensive, and on October 15 Marshal N. N. Voronov arrived on the scene to make sure that the orders were carried out.
Voronov had been absent from his native city only about two weeks— just long enough to become involved in a dangerous row with Stalin’s police chief, Lavrenti P. Beria. The dispute arose when Stalin questioned Voronov about an allocation of 50,000 rifles for Beria’s police troops. Voronov said he didn’t know why they were needed. Beria, a Georgian like Stalin, started making an explanation in Georgian. But Stalin was angry. He shut off Beria and cut the figure to 10,000 rifles. Beria blamed Voronov. “Just you wait,” he said. “We’ll tie your guts into knots!” On that note Voronov was delighted to go back to Leningrad, taking with him a small envelope in which, written on thin cigarette paper, were the Stavka plans for breaking the Leningrad blockade.
When Marshal Voronov arrived with the Stavka orders, General Ivan I. Fedyuninsky convened his Leningrad Military Council and decided to launch the offensive almost immediately—on October 20—with a simultaneous push by the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth armies and the Neva Operating Group, a task force on the Neva River front. The High Command specified that almost all the mobile resources of the Leningrad front be thrown into the operation—eight rifle divisions, not less than 100 60-ton KV tanks, large-caliber artillery, all available rocket weapons or “Katyushas” and such air strength as could be assembled, including remnants of the Baltic Fleet air arm.
Actually, Fedyuninsky could mobilize only 63,000 men, 475 guns and 97 tanks (including 59 KV’s). The Germans, he estimated, had a force of 54,000 men and 450 cannon.
Presumably for morale purposes, the Leningrad Command ordered all political commissars to take every possible step to “halt empty and harmful gossip” about the imminent arrival of new armies from the east which would liberate the city. “The city of Lenin is capable of liberating itself. We have everything we need: weapons and men.”
This was brave but foolish talk.
The “liberating” attack was doomed from the start. Four days before the date set for the Red Army offensive the Nazis launched their own attack. General Rudolf Schmidt, commander of the 39th Motorized Corps, supported by the German 1st Army Corps, hit at the hinge of the Soviet Fourth and Fifty-second armies. Soon the Russians were reeling back in confusion. Within days they were fighting desperately to prevent the Germans from tightening the siege by forging a second circle around the city.
The Soviet Fourth and Fifty-second armies stood east and slightly south of Leningrad, guarding the rail line which approached Leningrad from the east through the junction point of Tikhvin. If General Schmidt captured Tikhvin, he would breach the only route by which the Russians could now bring food, fuel and ammunition to Lake Ladoga for transshipment to Leningrad. The capture of Tikhvin would seal the fate of Leningrad. The only alternative supply route would involve the 220-mile haul over primitive forest tracks to the Lake Ladoga ports. It was not credible, even by Russian standards, that sufficient supplies could be brought in by such means to maintain a city which still contained roughly three million persons, civilian and military.
The old rule of war that when one thing goes badly everything goes badly was striking Leningrad.
The promised Soviet offensive never really got going. The Germans had caught the Russians off balance, and the Soviet margin of superiority was too thin to produce a breakthrough.
There were, inevitably, other problems. General Fedyuninsky, new to the Leningrad Command and junior to several of his subordinate army commanders, asked Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky, Chief of Staff in Moscow, to be relieved. He pointed out that General Khozin, commander of the Fifty-fourth Army, was a lieutenant general whereas he was only a major general. Fedyuninsky had served under Khozin as a battalion commander when Khozin commanded a division.
Leningrad Party Secretary Zhdanov sought to persuade Marshal Voronov to take Fedyuninsky’s job. Zhdanov had worked clÖsely with Voronov, a Leningrader and a man of great military prestige and experience. Voronov, however, was wary. He knew the difficulties and dangers. He temporized. He pointed out that he was a Deputy Commissar of Defense, Chief of Red Army Artillery and the special representative of the High Command in Leningrad. If he asked for the Leningrad Command, Moscow might think he was trying to evade his responsibilities. It wasn’t a convincing argument, but Zhdanov had to leave the decision up to Moscow. Moscow did the obvious. It sent Fedyuninsky to take over the Fifty-fourth Army and brought in Khozin, the Fifty-fourth Army chief, to take Fedyuninsky’s job.
Voronov’s role in these days was equivocal, to say the least.
“Never before in history,” he wrote in his memoirs, “had Leningrad been in such a dangerous position. The honor of our generation depended on our saving her.”
Yet he refused the Leningrad Command, and his principal efforts were directed not at saving the city from strangulation by the Germans but at shipping out of Leningrad guns, munitions and supplies for use on other fronts, particularly the Moscow front.
In his first conversation with Voronov on his arrival October 15, Zhdanov asked for more matériel and more munitions. Voronov replied that there were large quantities of military supplies in Leningrad and suggested the city should be able to boost its production to not less than a million shells of all calibers in November and even more in December. Meanwhile, he proposed to organize the shipment out of Leningrad of items needed elsewhere and in return would see about delivering powder and other products which Leningrad might need for shell production.
Under the influence of Voronov, Leningrad set a production quota of 1,722,000 shells and mines for December. (It was not, of course, fulfilled. By mid-December shell production dropped to zero.) Voronov actually shipped out of Leningrad 452 76-mm field guns, 120-mm mortars and 82-mm guns and 560 50-caliber machine guns. He advised Supreme Headquarters that he had on hand 50,000 shell casings for 76-mm armored shells and could send them out at the rate of 350 to 370 per plane. (He was using DC-3’s for the most part or TB-3’s.)1 Moscow couldn’t believe the figures at first. Later, they began to ask, “Can’t you send more from Leningrad? Load up the planes quickly.” He shipped 30,000 shell casings by mid-December.
Voronov’s real task seems to have been to extract from Leningrad every last resource before final catastrophe befell the northern capital. Behind Voronov’s assignment lay grim logic. The ring about Leningrad was tightening inexorably. Leningrad had won the great battle in September. But it well might perish in the smaller struggle of November.
In fact, one more Soviet army was now falling apart under the hammer of the Germans. The Fourth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General V. F. Yakovlev, was stationed in the dismal marshes along the Volkhov River, protecting the approaches to Budogoshch and Tikhvin on the lone rail link to Lake Ladoga. Neither Yakovlev nor his commanders had experience in fighting under such conditions. The roads were boggy tracks over porous soil. The weather was increasingly cold, with rain turning to sleet and snow. The troops were wet all day and wet all night.
Yakovlev gave ground slowly, but soon his forces were threatened with encirclement. He yielded Budogoshch on October 23 in the hope of saving Tikhvin, but General Schmidt outmaneuvered him.
The alarmed Supreme Command in Moscow ordered the 191st and 44th divisions airlifted from inside Leningrad to protect the approaches to Tikhvin.
But General Yakovlev fed his reserves into battle, one by one, without waiting to build up his strength. It was a fatal error. By November 6 the situation was hopeless. The Fourth Army had been cut into three segments. The central group, still under General Yakovlev’s direct command, comprised the 44th and 191st divisions. They were falling back on Tikhvin.
There could be no thought among the bitter, weary Soviet troops of celebration of the November 7 holiday. Brief meetings were held in some units. Most were too busy fighting or trying to retreat through the endless marshes. On the morning of November 7 General G. Ye. Degtyarev, chief artillery officer, got a telephone call from General Yakovlev. “Obviously,” Degtyarev commented, “it was not any holiday greetings.”
The Nazis were breaking through the crumbling Soviet lines, directly threatening Tikhvin. The 44th Division had been cut in two. General Yakovlev encountered officers of the division, fleeing in confusion. He ordered them back to the lines and forbade any retreat. Then he personally set out to try and find some troops which might reinforce the front.
It was futile. That night the Military Council of the Fourth Army met at Berezovik, a village just north of Tikhvin. No longer could there be any doubt that the junction point would fall. General Degtyarev and a few others went into Tikhvin by the swampy back roads late at night in order to direct the removal of supplies. The oil depots already were burning, and the sound of detonations as sappers blew up the dumps was continuous. On November 8 General Schmidt’s forces entered Tikhvin and the last rail link to Lake Ladoga was cut. All day on the ninth the Berlin radio blasted: “Achtung! Achtung! Tikhvin has fallen!”
A second chain of encirclement was taking shape around Leningrad. The Germans were so close to Gostinopolye, the transshipment base for Ladoga supplies, that they were able to bring the warehouses under artillery fire. The supplies caught fire, the shipping chief and his aide were killed, and the workers began to flee. They were halted at gunpoint by one of their fellows, a middle-aged soldier named Aleksei Fedorenko from Astrakhan. Fedorenko had fled with his companions but suddenly realized what he was doing. He got a grip on himself, pointed his gun at the others and terrorized them into going back and continuing to load food for Leningrad.
The peril caused Party Secretary Zhdanov to send one of his most trusted associates to the Tikhvin front—Terenti F. Shtykov, a Party secretary specializing in military and security matters. Shtykov was a native Leningrader. He was too young to have participated in the Revolution but had been a Young Communist and an ambitious factory worker in the Proletarian factory in Leningrad. He went to night school and in 1936 at the age of twenty-nine started to climb the Party ladder. Two years later he became a Leningrad regional Party secretary. From the start of the war he had been occupied with military questions. After the war he was to acquire a special distinction—the only close associate of Party Secretary Zhdanov, the only member of the Leningrad City and Party hierarchy, to survive the dreadful “Leningrad Affair,” one of the most bloody of the special purges of the late Stalin era.
Now in these critical days he had been sent to assess the Tikhvin situation. It did not take him long to act. It was apparent that General Yakovlev had Tost control of the situation. Shtykov went immediately to Sviritsa, the headquarters of General Meretskov who commanded the Seventh Special Army, defending the Svir River directly north and east of Tikhvin. The fall of Tikhvin threatened Meretskov’s position. The two got in touch with Moscow on November 7 and talked first with Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky and then with Stalin. Stalin said he had no reserves at his disposal. He proposed that the command of the Fourth Army units adjacent to Meretskov’s front be turned over to Meretskov. The command change was dated November 9, the day after the fall of Tikhvin. Meretskov immediately ordered his reserves forward toward the broken Fourth Army lines. He himself took a light plane and flew to Bolshoi Dvor, just east of Tikhvin where Fourth Army headquarters was said to be located. His plane came down at dusk, whirling up clouds of snow as it halted. At first glance the field appeared to be deserted. One of Meretskov’s companions said, “Haven’t our troops abandoned this field? I don’t see either planes or people.” Another added, “On what airfield have we landed?”
Meretskov was relieved to see an air force major approach his plane. The major said that he had been ordered to destroy the airfield and get out.
Meretskov gathered such troops as were present into a log hut on the edge of the field and gave them a pep talk. In a few days, he said, the Germans would be thrown out of Tikhvin. He saw some doubtful grimaces. The mood of the men was low. After the long retreat, the unsuccessful battles, the heavy casualties, they had lost hope of victory. He talked to the officers. Most of them had fallen back through Tikhvin. They could not explain why it had surrendered so quickly, and they did not know why it had not been defended. The explanation, Meretskov later became convinced, was the usual one. The divisions had been bled white. Most of them numbered no more than a thousand men. They had been cut off. They were out of ammunition. They had lost their arms. And General Yakovlev had lost control of them.
Meretskov’s first task was to restore order and confidence. He began to call in Yakovlev’s surviving commanders. Among them was General Degtyarev, Yakovlev’s artillery chief, worn and dirty, just in from Tikhvin, where he stayed to the last, trying to get supplies out. Degtyarev was worried. He knew that Meretskov was stern and demanding. He did not relish having to go before the new commander in chief directly from fallen Tikhvin, for whose loss he regarded himself as guilty. Meretskov froze him with a long, searching look. The General was a heavy-set man of forty, with thick lips and cold gray eyes which narrowed as he gazed at Degtyarev.
“I want to ask you,” Meretskov said, “why it was that during the retreat your artillery was not able to carry out its assignments.”
Degtyarev’s heart sank. He did not know whether Meretskov was aware that he was among the many Red Army officers who had been purged in 1938 and “rehabilitated” on the eve of World War II. But he recognized the familiar terms in which guilt was to be assigned. He braced his shoulders and said, “I am prepared to take the responsibility for the failures which we suffered at Tikhvin.”
What Degtyarev meant, in the language of the Red Army, was that he was prepared to be shot. He stood silently. Meretskov got up, emerged from behind his desk and began to pace the room. He stared long and hard at Degtyarev. Then he sat down, picked up a pencil, put it down and said, “It is good that you are ready to take the responsibility. But the chief thing is not that. It is how we go on from here, in order not to repeat our mistakes.”
Degtyarev could breathe again. He was not going before the firing squad.
The task ahead would not be easy. Already the Germans were turning north toward Volkhov. They were within a few miles of Volkhovstroi, site of the big power station serving the Leningrad region, a monument of the Revolution. It had been completed in 1926, the first unit in Lenin’s program for the electrification of Russia.
The loss of Volkhov would put the seal to Leningrad’s fate—if Tikhvin had not done so.
Volkhov was defended by the Fifty-fourth Army, which, since he had traded jobs wth General Khozin on October 26, was commanded by General Ivan Fedyuninsky, an energetic and able officer. With the fall of Tikhvin he had asked Leningrad for reinforcements and had been given one division— the 3rd Guards.
“We’ve nothing more to give you,” Khozin said, “now or in the future.”
As Fedyuninsky watched his right flank where the remnants of the Fourth Army, under Chief of Staff General Lyapin, were falling back, his concern mounted. Lyapin was, in Fedyuninsky’s view, indecisive and unsound. He had set up his rear bases so far from the front that he was unable to maintain his supply lines.
Fedyuninsky sent a telegram to Supreme Headquarters November 10 asking that the remaining Fourth Army units under Lyapin’s command be turned over to him. He added: “If this can still be done today, then the situation may be saved. If it is done tomorrow, then it will be too late. Volkhov will fall.”
Fedyuninsky was directing his army from a command post in the forest, located in a dugout so small that it could accommodate no more than four or five persons at one time. As he awaited an answer to his telegram, Dmitri V. Pavlov, the Leningrad food chief, arrived with Captain V. S. Cherokov, commander of the Ladoga fleet.
Pavlov went right to the point.
“What do you think?” he risked. “Can we expect to hold Volkhov or should we begin to evacuate the stores? I want a frank answer.”
Fedyuninsky told them about his telegram. As they sat there, he was called to the telegraph apparatus. A message in the clear was coming in. His request was granted. He was to take over the remaining Fourth Army troops, and the defense of Volkhov was placed on his shoulders. A confirming telegram came in late on the evening of November 11. The transfer was to take place at 6 A.M. the next day.
Fedyuninsky, Pavlov and Cherokov immediately started for the village of Plekhanovo, where General Lyapin had his headquarters. It was a big, peaceful settlement. Smoke was coming out of the chimneys and women were drawing water from the village well. A red dog came barking out of a barn. They spotted the headquarters hut by the telephone wires and an automobile which stood outside, carefully camouflaged with cut fir branches.
“Where is General Lyapin?” Fedyuninsky asked the duty officer.
“He is resting and ordered that he not be disturbed,” the officer replied.
“Wake him up!” Fedyuninsky ordered. In due course General Lyapin appeared. He had taken his time about dressing. Fedyuninsky told him of the change of command. “By tonight I suggest that you get up to the front,” he added.
Fedyuninsky’s next step was to obtain permission to destroy the Volkhov Hydroelectric Plant, if necessary, to keep it from falling into German hands. He got the authorization November 12. Then he called in Major General Chekin of the engineering corps and ordered him to prepare the plant for destruction. Most of the power machinery had already been evacuated. The last shipment had gone out on November 5. Of ten turbines only two small ones remained—mostly to supply the little city of Volkhovstroi and the military command. Only twenty-six power station workers, headed by Director I. F. Zhemchuzhnikov, were still on hand. They had orders that if the Germans broke through they were to drain off the oil and run the turbines on dry bearings, destroying them. A detachment of sappers under the personal direction of Major General Chekin placed explosive chargés under the power plant. General Chekin had orders not to detonate the chargés without personal word from General Fedyuninsky. Fedyuninsky was determined that destruction would be carried out only as a last resort because of the historical association of the plant with Lenin and the Revolution.
The Germans were already within a few miles of the station. But Fedyuninsky thought he could save it. All of his forces had been categorically ordered not to retreat. The order was issued by Fedyuninsky and countersigned by his Military Council member V. A. Sychev and by G. Kh. Bumagin, a Leningrad Party secretary. Word was taken to each unit by political agitators and commissars. It meant one thing: any soldier or officer who retreated would be subject to summary court-martial and execution.
Fedyuninsky was dead serious. The 310th Infantry Division was the last unit holding the Germans back from the Volkhov station. Colonel Zamirov-sky, an old friend from service together in the Far East, telephoned. The Germans were attacking his command post. What should he do? Obviously he expected Fedyuninsky to permit him to retreat. Fedyuninsky said, “Go on righting. If you can’t hold the enemy at a distance, then hold on in the command post.”
“Yes, sir,” Zamirovsky replied. Two hours later he called again. He had driven the Germans back half a mile.
“Good,” Fedyuninsky said. “If you drive him back half a mile every two hours, your command post will be secure by dark. Good luck.”
Fedyuninsky’s hopes rose. But he suffered a blow from an unexpected quarter—a blinding toothache. He chewed tobacco. He put a hot water bottle on his cheek. He rinsed his mouth with vodka. Nothing helped. And there was no dentist at hand. Finally he called in a woman military doctor.
“Which tooth is it?” she asked. “You have three close together on the right side.”
“How do I know?” Fedyuninsky wailed. “You can see how my cheek is swollen. Take them all out.”
The woman shrugged, got out her instruments and yanked the three teeth. Fedyuninsky went back to the task of trying to save Volkhov.
November those in chargé of Leningrad’s fate came to remember as the most alarming of many alarming months. Each new communiqué of the Soviet Information Bureau was more depressing than the last. The Battle of Moscow raged on. No one knew whether the Soviet capital would hold out. And no one knew whether the second iron collar would remain around Leningrad’s choking neck. Indeed, there were even more urgent fears. Would the Germans press on, sweep around the eastern shores of Ladoga, make contact with the Finns and drive east to Vologda, the junction point northeast of Moscow? Might not Moscow soon find itself cut off, just as Leningrad was? Such a possibility could not be excluded.
In this critical situation Mikhail I. Kalinin, the President of the Soviet Union, himself a Leningrader, an old Leningrad worker, an old Putilov worker, an ancient and respected figure—one of the few in the government —wrote a personal letter to the State Defense Committee, that is, to Stalin. He said:
The difficulty and danger of the Leningrad situation have obviously increased. It seems essential to me that we must seek out and establish reliable routes for supplying Leningrad in winter conditions—by sledge, automobile and plane. The Germans obviously are driving for a distant goal, aiming for Vologda in order to cut us off from possible connections with America.
Kalinin proposed that a member of the State Defense Committee or some equally responsible figure work out practical measures to thwart the German objective.
Stalin, for once, was not deaf to a proposal by Kalinin.
“Your observations regarding Leningrad and Vologda,” he replied, “are perfectly correct and timely. We will take all essential steps.”
A special airlift was ordered on November 16 to bring not less than 200 tons of high-calorie foods daily into Leningrad, including 135 tons of concentrated cereals and soup, 20 tons of sausage and canned pork, 10 tons of dried milk and egg powder, 15 tons of butter and 20 tons of fats. The air force was ordered to provide 24 heavy transports and 10 heavy bombers to fly the food in. It was far from enough to save the city, and the quotas were seldom met. But it was a help.2
At Stalin’s call the Supreme Command ordered an immediate offensive to relieve the pressure on Volkhov and free Tikhvin. What would be the result was far from clear. Meantime, Leningrad stood at the brink of catastrophe.
Party Secretary Zhdanov summoned the Leningrad Military Council to his Smolny office to explore what aid could be given the forthcoming operations. Lieutenant General M. S. Khozin, the front commander, was absent. He was spending almost all his time with the Fifty-second, Fourth and Fifty-fourth armies as they prepared their plans.
Zhdanov seemed very, very tired to Colonel Bychevsky, the chief of engineers. Zhdanov’s asthma was much worse. His breath came in sharp, uneven gulps. His heavy face was puffed with fatigue and only his dark eyes glowed. He took a long Russian cigarette, creased its cardboard tube, lighted it, blew a ring of smoke and said, “The situation of Leningrad is very serious, and if we do not take steps, it will become critical. We must think of every way in which we can help the troops on the Volkhov front.”
The discussion turned to the possibility of strengthening the Red Army foothold south of the Neva River at Nevskaya Dubrovka. Enormous efforts had gone into maintaining this position. The last light tanks in the Leningrad reserve had been put across the river the night before. Eight already had been destroyed by the Nazis, and the remaining six had been dug in as stationary firing points.
“To talk about an offensive from the place (Tonnes in such conditions borders on the senseless,” the front’s armored commander, General N. A. Bolotnikov, observed. “If you want to help the Fifty-fourth Army, then you need heavy tanks. Without them the infantry can do nothing. You can ask Bychevsky about trying to put KV tanks across. He hasn’t any pontoons, and there is ice over almost the entire Neva.”
Party Secretary Kuznetsov interjected nervously: “Are you proposing that we give up the place d’armes to the Germans?” Kuznetsov looked even more tired than Zhdanov. His face was hatchet-thin, his crooked nose pencil-sharp, his eyes fever-bright.
The discussion underlined the precariousness of Leningrad’s position. To move tanks across the ice Bychevsky needed enormous quantities of wire netting. He thought he might find it somewhere in the city. But pontoons had to be produced by a factory. He asked Zhdanov to approve 5,000 kilowatts from the city power stations to power the machines. Zhdanov pulled a battered notebook from his pocket. “I can’t give you 5,000,” he said. “Maybe I can get 3,000.” Bychevsky sighed so loudly Zhdanov raised his eyebrows. Bychevsky said his pontoon men were on a rear-echelon ration of 300 grams of bread a day. They didn’t have the strength to carry on. Zhdanov promised to boost their ration to front-line levels, 500 grams a day, for the duration of the effort.
The strain was beginning to tell on Zhdanov and the other leaders as well. These men, civilian and military commanders alike, worked normally eighteen, twenty or twenty-two hours a day. Most of them snatched a few moments’ sleep, head down on a desk, or a cat nap on a couch in the office. They ate a little better than the general population. Zhdanov and his associates, like the front commanders, received a military ration: a pound or more of bread a day plus a bowl of meat or fish soup and possibly a little cereal or kasha. They had a lump or two of sugar to suck with their tea. They lost weight on this diet, but did not become emaciated, and none of the principal commanders or Party chiefs fell victim to dystrophy. But their physical strength was exhausted, their nerves were frayed, and most of them suffered permanent damage to their hearts and circulatory systems.
Zhdanov, more than some of the others, showed visible signs of fatigue, exhaustion and nervous debilitation. One November day he went to the front for a firsthand look at winter fighting conditions. He saw through the telescopic observation lenses that the Nazi troops around Shlisselburg had white winter camouflage coats and skis. The Red Army men were still wearing dark greatcoats and cotton-padded jackets. They had no skis.
Back at Smolny he summoned Lieutenant General Lagunov, chief of supply services, and asked why the Soviet troops were not yet equipped for winter. Lagunov said orders for winter camouflage capes had been given tardily, and they would not be ready for five or six days. There were few skis in the army warehouse. There were skis in the hands of civilian sports clubs, but it would take time to assemble them.
Lagunov was one of Zhdanov’s best friends, an intelligent, precise, honest officer. But Zhdanov turned on him in towering rage. He chargéd Lagunov with lethargy and carelessness.
“I give you three days!” he shouted. “If in that time you haven’t gotten the skis and capes—remember we are in a besieged fortress and the Defense Act is strictly applied to all violators.”
In a word, Lagunov was to get the skis and capes within seventy-two hours or be shot. Fortunately, he fulfilled the order.
On November 24 the Supreme Command issued its directive calling for coordinated blows by three armies—the Fifty-fourth, the Fourth and the Fifty-second. The Fourth was to act first, followed by the Fifty-second on December 1 and the Fifty-fourth on December 3.
General Meretskov met with his Military Council on November 30. His face was ashen with fatigue. The VC high-security telephone from Moscow rang. Meretskov answered. “The Kremlin is calling,” the operator said. General Degtyarev and his colleagues sat silently, listening and watching. Obviously a member of the State Defense Committee was talking. By Meretskov’s answers it was apparent he was speaking of the terrible situation in Leningrad.
“I very well understand the situation of the defenders of Leningrad,” they heard Meretskov say. “But it is not so easy for us either. At Tikhvin a fresh division of Germans has appeared, the 61st Infantry. The enemy still has a large superiority in strength.”
Then they heard someone saying, “Wait a minute!”
Meretskov was silent. He nervously rubbed his prominent high forehead. It was clear to the listeners. He was waiting for Stalin. The members of the Military Council froze in their chairs.
Meretskov offered no more explanations. Now he listened, simply interjecting, “I understand. ... I will take measures. ... It will be done.”
The talk was short. He hung up. Again he ran his hand over his brow. He went silently to the map, looked at it for a long time and then turned to the council, a grim smile on his lips.
“Well, that’s the way it is,” he said. “And you are offended when I put you on the griddle!” He walked back and forth from one end of the room to another. Then he spoke.
“We will join the troops within an hour. All of us.”
Stalin was not toying. Three days later he sent a special commission to Meretskov’s headquarters. It was headed by that ugliest of police bullies, G. I. Kulik, a lieutenant of Beria’s.3 Kulik was the police general who was personally responsible for much of the present difficulty. His ignorant and cowardly direction of the Fifty-fourth Army in September was credited by many Soviet military men with the major role in the Leningrad disaster. Marshal Voronov, for instance, put the blame on Kulik for the whole Leningrad encirclement. But Kulik still had the confidence of Stalin and Beria, and now he had been sent out to check the plans for the Tikhvin offensive.
Kulik cross-examined each of Meretskov’s commanders in turn. Degtyarev outlined the artillery preparations, noting that the Germans had no shortage of ammunition. He conceded that the Fourth Army had a superiority over the Germans in number of guns.
Kulik attacked savagely: “With this superiority in artillery why haven’t you cleared a way for the infantry into Tikhvin?”
Degtyarev tried to point out that his artillery concentration was only five or six guns per kilometer.
“You are sitting in your headquarters and you don’t know what is going on with the troops!” Kulik shouted. “You should have been shot long ago. Tikhvin was lost because of you.”
“It is hard to say how this might have finished for me,” Degtyarev recalled later. But Meretskov came to his defense, and Kulik finally subsided, muttering threats. Meretskov opened his offensive on the morning of December 5 with Kulik watching every move. There was one final row. Meretskov and Kulik tried to get more ammunition from Moscow. Moscow, just launching the historic offensive which was to drive Hitler back from the capital and administer his first serious defeat, said they needed all the shells they had themselves.
Fortunately, Meretskov’s troops pushed forward savagely through the snow that drifted five and six feet deep and day by day fought closer to Tikhvin despite temperatures of 20 and 30 below zero. His drive was assisted by Fedyuninsky’s Fifty-fourth Army, advancing from the north with the aid of KV 60-ton tanks which, incredibly, had been brought over the ice of Lake Ladoga. Their turrets had been demounted to reduce their weight.4
The final attack was marked by one oddity. The Germans announced over the radio that General Fedyuninsky had committed suicide. Party Secretary Zhdanov telephoned Fedyuninsky and wished him long years of life, and the next day a VC call came in from his wife in Sverdlovsk.
Mrs. Fedyuninsky hadn’t heard about the rumor of her husband’s suicide. But she was delighted to talk with him.
On December 8 Meretskov’s Fourth Army fought into Tikhvin. By December 9 the city was firmly in Soviet hands again. It had been held by the Germans precisely one month. Its recapture on the seventieth day of the siege was the first real sign that the lines around Leningrad could be held, that the second ring could not be fastened about the northern capital, that the Nazi dream of striking to the east to Vologda and cutting off Moscow from the rear, from Siberia, from America, would be thwarted.
It coincided with a directive signed by Hitler December 8, No. 59, in which he ordered Army Group Nord to strengthen its control of the railroad and highway from Tikhvin and Volkhov to Kolchanovo in order to secure the possibility of joining hands with the Finns in Karelia.
Tikhvin was a real victory. Whether it would save Leningrad and its millions of people, now entering the skeletal world of starvation, of life without heat, without light, without transport, no one knew for certain.
On December 9 the Leningrad streetcar system, except for a few freight lines carrying ammunition, ceased operation. The ninety cars on the eight remaining routes halted. From now on Leningrad would walk with weak and tired feet on icy, drifted streets. “There is almost no electricity in the city,” Director A. K. Kozlovsky of the Northern Cable factory wrote in his diary December 2. “Today there was none in our factory.”
Pavel Luknitsky returned to Leningrad from the front on the night of December 8. He sat at his desk, writing in his diary at 11:30 P.M. on December 11:
A dark night. In this room as in all the others in this house on Shchors Street and almost all the houses in Leningrad there is frost and unbroken darkness. Yes . . . Tikhvin has been liberated in the nick of time. Last night “changes in tram routes” were announced. But the trams have almost all ceased to run. Leningradskaya Fravda tonight came out in two pages instead of four. There is much new destruction. Snow drifts in the streets. People with exhausted faces walk slowly—dark shadows on the streets. And more and more coffins, roughly made, are pulled on sleds, by the stumbling, slipping, weak relatives of the dead, Worst of all—the darkness . . . hunger and cold and darkness ...
Leningrad had won another victory. Would she survive it?
The Germans didn’t think so. Colonel General Haider, the diarist of the Wehrmacht, jotted down under date of December 13: “The Commander of the army group is inclined to the view—after the failure of all attempts by the enemy to liquidate our foothold on the Neva—that we may expect the complete starvation of Leningrad.”
1 In the last six months of 1941 Leningrad produced 713 tanks, 480 armored cars, 58 armored trains, 2,405 field guns, 648 antitank guns, 10,000 machine guns, 3,000,000 shells, more than 80,000 bombs and rockets {Leningrad v VOV, p. 186). The October production quota (not fulfilled) was 1,425,000 shells, 800,000 mines (Karasev, op. cit., p. 158). Karasev estimated that more than 1,000 guns were shipped by air from Leningrad for use by Moscow in the December, 1941, offensive (ibid., p. 133). From October 31 to December 31, 11,614 Kirov plant workers, 6,000 workers of the Izhorsk factory and 8,590 wounded officers and men were evacuated from Leningrad by air (ibid.). As early as June three heavy naval batteries, including one from Battery K at Kronstadt, had been shipped to the Vyazma front. (Kuznetsov, Oktyabr, No. 8, August, 1968, p. 176.)
2 From September 13 to December 31, 6,000 tons of high-priority freight, including 4,325 tons of food and 1,660 tons of arms and munitions, were flown into Leningrad (N.Z., p. 256). From October 21 to December 31, 3,357 tons of high-calorie food were flown in. Some 64 planes had been assigned to the route, but only 20 or 22 were normally in condition to fly. They brought in 40 to 50 tons a day. (Karasev, op. cit., pp. 132, 133.)
3 Kulik served in Spain and was known there as “General No No” because the only Spanish he knew was “No.” He used it on every occasion, appropriate or inappropriate. On his return to Moscow he was promoted and occupied a rank equivalent to that of marshal at the outbreak of war. He fell into encirclement on the Central Front but managed to make his way out and was sent south as a Stavka representative. He was reduced in rank for gross errors of conduct, but, in the words of Admiral Kuznetsov, this had little effect on him. (Nakanune, p. 244.) Voronov says he was demoted to major general for “failure to fulfill responsible assignments for the High Command in the first days of the war.” (Voronov, op. cit., p. 354.)
4 This detail, reported by Fedyuninsky himself, is probably in error. The KV’s actually seem to have moved over the ice in January to assist a later offensive. (A. Saparov, Doroga Zhizni, p. 146.)