PAVEL LUKNITSKY RETURNED TO LENINGRAD FROM THE Fifty-fourth Army on March 5, improved in health and spirits. He drove almost directly to his home. As he entered Cheboksarsky Pereulok, a woman walked toward him in the dusk, chanting a lament: “Death! Death! Death!”
As she came nearer, she stared at Luknitsky with unseeing eyes and continued her monologue. He heard her say, “Death by starvation will take us all. The soldiers will live a while longer. But we will die. We will die. We will die.”
The woman passed him like a terrified spirit.
It was hardly an auspicious welcome, but Luknitsky threw over his shoulders his two big knapsacks, filled with food and supplies brought back from the “mainland,” and climbed the five flights to his apartment. Everything was in order—except that the roof had been blasted off.
Death stalked Leningrad at winter’s end.
The city was filled with corpses. They lay by the thousands on the streets, in the ice, in the snowdrifts, in the courtyards and cellars of the great apartment houses. The city and Party authorities were preparing to launch an enormous spring clean-up. But V. N. Ivanov, secretary of the Young Communists, was afraid of the psychological effect on his young boys and girls when they confronted the mountains of frozen, decayed and disintegrating bodies.
On one March night a sanitary brigade drove up to the courtyard “morgue” at the Hermitage and carted off forty-six bodies to the Piskarev-sky Cemetery. There were corpses in the gardens of the Anichkov Palace, now the Palace of Pioneers, on the Fontanka and in the vaults of the Alexandrinsky Theater. There were twenty-four bodies in the Nikolsky Cathedral, awaiting delivery to a cemetery—one in a coffin, twenty-three wrapped in sheets and rags. Bodies had piled up in the hospitals. In many institutions the doctors and nursing personnel were too ill or weak to care for patients. There had been 6,500 doctors in Leningrad at the start of the war. By January 1 there were only 3,379 and by April 1 only 3,288. Leningrad lost 195 doctors from January 1 to March 15.
Illness was as widespread as death. In one big factory 55 percent of the workers were on sick call in January (mostly starving), 61 percent in February and 59 percent in March. On February 20 only 2,416 of 10,424 workers at the Kirov metallurgical works reported for duty—23 percent. The Kirov works lost 3,063 workers by death in 1942. Of 6,000 on the Kirov rolls in March and April, 2,300 died.
Scurvy was universal. Professor A. D. Bezzubov invented a process for extracting vitamin C from pine needles. Eight factories were put to work making pine-needle extract, and 16,200,000 doses were produced in 1942.
Even more critical threats appeared. Typhus broke out in a children’s home at the corner of Mozhaisky Street and Zagorodny Prospekt in late February. The house was cordoned off. Only persons with medical clearance were permitted in and out. Fortunately, the epidemic was contained. Another case of suspected typhus appeared in the student dormitory at Erisman Hospital.
A special epidemiology committee was set up under Mayor Peter S. Pop-kov, and mass inoculation of the population was undertaken. By mid-March half a million Leningraders had been inoculated against typhus, typhoid and plague. More than four hundred disinfecting points were at work by April 10 and two thousand beds for contagious diseases were provided in children’s homes.
The city was choked with filth. The lunchrooms and cafeterias where many Leningraders were fed were so dirty they defied imagination. Dishes and tableware had not been washed for weeks. Often food was served in tin cans. Dishes were shoved to the feeble customers without spoons or forks. They could eat with their fingers or lap it up like dogs. The City Party Committee, fearful of a general epidemic, ordered special measures to clean up all food dispensaries.
The people were as dirty as their eating halls. There had been no baths, showers or laundries in the city since the end of December. Now they began to reopen, and by the end of March twenty-five baths were operating—at least on paper. In the second quarter of 1942 thirty-two baths and a hundred laundries were reopened.
But the big task was to clean the city. Unless the corpses, filth and debris could be removed, Leningrad would perish in the epidemics of spring. The job started on March 8, International Women’s Day, a traditional holiday, a day when every woman in Russia expects to get a present from every man who is close or dear to her—husband, brother, son, lover, father or friend.
This year it was a different kind of March 8. Several thousand women, spades and picks in hand, tackled the ice-clad streets. Vsevolod Vishnevsky made a typical note in his diary: “The city had a clean-up day. Cleaning up snow, streetcar routes, courtyards. People worked with enthusiasm. Belief in victory stirs them!”
That wasn’t exactly how it seemed to Maria Razina. A concert had been arranged for the evening, but she and her friend Liza were so tired and weak they could hardly walk there. It was frigid in the meeting hall. There were speeches and reports. Through an open door they could see a table set for dinner. No one wanted to hear the concert. All they wanted was to eat. A shivering young woman in an evening dress sang “The Lark.” Then the audience shouted, “Enough! Get dressed!” They trooped in to dinner—a piece of black bread, about 150 grams, two slices of sausage, a white roll and two apples. Later there was hot tea. They walked home beside the Neva. The snow was as high as a mountain. The two women agreed that the city must be cleaned and rapidly.
The job really got under way March 15 when more than 100,000 Lenin-graders turned out. Then on March 26 the City Council ordered all able-bodied Leningraders into the streets. Posters went up. The radio blared an appeal. On the first day 143,000 feeble, tottering men and women (mostly women) went into the streets. The next day there were 244,000; by March 31, 304,000; and by April 4, 318,000. Between March 27 and April 15, 12,000 courtyards were cleaned up, 3,000,000 square yards of streets were cleared and 1,000,000 tons of filth were removed.
Everyone went into the streets—old women, men hardly able to hold a shovel, children.
One of them was Hilma Stepanovna Hannalainen. She had worked all winter in the great Leningrad Public Library. The library never closed. In the basement the main catalogue had been set up adjacent to a small public reading room. Almost every day one or two hundred persons could be found there, sitting in fur hats and overcoats, huddled over books, reading by the light of small oil lamps. The librarians sent books to the hospitals. They answered a thousand questions put to them by the military and civil authorities: How could Leningrad make matches? How could flint and steel lighters be manufactured? What materials were needed for candles? Was there any way of making yeast, edible wood, artificial vitamins? How do you make soap? The librarians found recipes for candles in old works of the eighteenth century.
The library lost its light and heat January 26 and had to close the one reading room which had remained open. However, readers were permitted to use the director’s room and one or two other small rooms where there were temporary stoves. In May a general reading room was opened again. The library lost 138 of its staff during the war, most of them in the winter of 1941–42.
One of those who worked day after day quietly and without complaint was Hilma Stepanovna. She was not alone. With her was her five-year-old son Edik. Edik was solemn, serious, strong, square-faced, silent, solid—very much like his mother. He came each day. While his mother was busy with the catalogue, moving between the aisles, Edik sat on a stool, swathed in heavy coat, felt boots, fur hat. He never spoke and his eyes never left his mother. If one wanted to know into which aisle Hilma had vanished, one had only to look at Edik. His eyes focused on the spot where she had disappeared and did not leave it until she reappeared.
When the call came to clean the streets, Hilma Stepanovna and the library workers answered it. They gathered in Stremyanny Lane. There was a mountainous heap of rubbish and at the bottom of it the very well-preserved body of a young man. It was frozen so hard that an iron crowbar hardly made a dent.
Standing to one side, his eyes on his mother, was Edik. He never moved despite the cold.
A few days after the mountain on Stremyanny Lane had been cleared away Hilma Stepanovna disappeared. So did Edik. At first it was said they had been evacuated to the rear. Then the truth slipped out.
They had been arrested as “enemies of the people"—this strong, solid woman and her strong, solid five-year-old. Despite the blockade, despite Leningrad’s hardships, the vigilant secret police had not been inactive. They managed to send the mother and boy out of the besieged city to distant exile in Siberia. The reason was a conventional one in Stalin’s Russia. Her husband had been an editor of a Karelo-Finnish paper who was executed at the time of the winter war with Finland, and his wife and son had been left behind in Leningrad. For reasons known only to themselves, the police at the end of the cruel winter of 1941–42 decided to send Hilma Stepanovna and the youngster into exile. Thus began a wandering life that lasted more than twenty years. In 1945 Hilma tried to return to Leningrad but was ordered out of the city on twenty-four hours’ notice. She was permitted to live for a while in Estonia and then in Petrozavodsk. Not until 1964, nearly twenty-five years after her husband had been executed, was he formally “rehabilitated” by the Soviet authorities. Once again Hilma Stepanovna tried to return to Leningrad and once again she was refused permission to live in the city. She had lost her hearing in a bomb explosion during the Leningrad blockade and was completely deaf. In these conditions she found life very difficult.1
It was not only filth that had accumulated in Leningrad’s streets. The life of the city had ground to a halt. It had been months since mail or telegrams had been delivered. Nikolai Mikhailovsky and Anatoly Tarasenkov went to the central post office one day to see if there was any mail for the fleet newspaper from the “mainland.” They were halted at the door by an armed guard.
“What do you want?” the guard said angrily.
“We are looking for our mail,” they said.
“What kind of mail?” the guard asked in surprise.
“Ordinary mail.”
“One of you can come along,” he said, “and you can find out.”
Tarasenkov came back shaken. The great hall of the main post office was filled with thousands of boxes of mail. There were post bags halfway to the ceiling—all in disorder, the building unheated, unlighted, no one at work.
By March the jam almost burst the building. There were 280,000 boxes of mail, unsorted, stacked in disorder in corridors and halls. Communist Youth brigades were sent to the post office to try to move the accumulation. The first mail and telegrams in months were delivered March 8—about sixty thousand pieces—but it was a year before the backlog was cleared up. Sometimes the youngsters who tried to deliver the mail were badly shaken. One young Komsomol girl took a letter to deliver. She found everyone dead in the apartment of the addressee. She went back to the post office. It was locked, and there was no one to tell her what to do.
A woman who had gotten no letters for a year came home one night to find her mailbox full. She started to read, beginning with the first letter from her husband. She read the letters, one by one. Then she opened the last letter and fainted. It was from her husband’s commander, and it told of his death.
On April 11 Mayor Popkov signed an order directing the Streetcar Administration to establish normal operations on trolley routes No. 3, No. 7, No. 9, No. 10 and No. 12 at 6:30 A.M., April 15. (Routes No. 3 and No. 9 took you to the front.) The Streetcar Administration was not certain it could meet the directive, but by strenuous efforts 116 cars were sent out of the barns at 6 A.M. April 15. The sound of streetcar bells, the clatter of the cars over the rails, the sharp burst of sparks at the crossings, sent Leningrad wild. People cried on the Nevsky at the sight. “Really!” one exclaimed. “I rode the streetcar! I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like I hadn’t been on a tram for ten years.”
A German prisoner, Corporal Falkenhorst, told his captors he had lost faith in Hitler when he heard the sound of streetcars in the Leningrad streets on the morning of April 15.
“The city again is lively,” Vishnevsky wrote. “A Red Army unit, probably convalescents, came by with a band. So surprising, so strange, after Leningrad’s quiet. Streetcars are moving, jammed with passengers. On Bol-shoi Prospekt there is trade and exchange. Money will buy more than in winter. Many are selling clothing—of the dead.”
Actually, black market prices had risen a little. A packet of cigarettes would buy 150 grams of bread—against 200 grams a bit earlier. Bread sold at 60 rubles for 100 grams. The speculators were calculating that soon the ice on Lake Ladoga would go out and that supplies would be short, at least for a time. People still posted notices on walls that they would trade mahogany beds and Bekker pianos for bread.
The tensions in Leningrad had not lightened. Vishnevsky felt the strain, heightened by what he called “intrigues and lack of understanding.” He did not spell out what he meant, but he was having difficulty getting approval of a script for the Leningrad in Battlefilm, and Ivan (the Terrible) Rogov, the Navy Political Commissar, had come to town. Vishnevsky noted that “evidently there are deep nervous marks left from the literary dramas and wounds of 1930–1937–1938.” What Vishnevsky was hinting was that the fatal quarrels, feuds and purges of the thirties had continued through the most horrible moments of the war.
Vera Inber found that winter’s end brought most difficult times. She was deathly concerned about her husband, the physician Ilya Strashun. She had never seen such colors as appeared in his face—dust yellow with red spots. He was walking with a cane because he had a badly swollen foot. She feared he had been exposed to typhus in treating a student in the dormitory. The toll of death around her was rising more rapidly than ever—a good friend, Professor P.; the husband of Yevfrosinya Ivanovna; another friend named Dina Osipovna. She felt so exhausted. She was not afraid of bombs, shells or hunger but of spiritual exhaustion, of the limits of weariness at which you begin to hate things, sounds and objects. She worried that her nerves would give out and that she would be unable to write. She decided to sleep in another room, hers was so cold. She lay down on a divan. But she could not sleep. She kept thinking of a friend, now dead, who had slept there. At 1 A.M. she heard distant bombardment, but she got the feeling that it was actually an air raid and that she had not heard the alarm. In the strange room she fell into such terror as she had never experienced. She began to tremble. Finally, she woke up her husband. He said, “It’s nonsense, dear.” It did not seem so to her. She ran down to the shelter. It was locked. The night was bright as day—a full moon on the snow. She went back to her room and tried to read a French novel. Nothing worked. The panic went on the next day. Her strength was at the breaking point.
In this fateful atmosphere the first steps were being taken to put Leningrad back onto its feet. Party Secretary Kuznetsov called his regional Party chiefs, heads of factory units and directors of institutions to Smolny March 9. He told them the city must begin immediately to produce basic military supplies—shells, ammunition, mines. Power stations began to work again. New generators went into operation at the 5th and 1st Power Stations. Beginning March 20 the city got 550,000 kilowatt hours of power—more than three times the February rate.
The Party re-established its ties with the outer world. A delegation of partisans from the Leningrad region emerged from the marshes and forests. It was met at Kobona, on the eastern edge of Lake Ladoga, by Aleksei Kosygin, in chargé of the Ladoga evacuation, Party Secretary Kuznetsov and other Leningrad officials. The partisans came into Leningrad for a meeting at Smolny with Zhdanov and the Leningrad Military Command. Delegations from Soviet cities began to arrive. A Moscow Young Communist group came in, headed by the Moscow City Young Communist chief, A. N. Shelepin, now a member of the Soviet Politburo.
The Chief of Artistic Affairs in Leningrad, B. I. Zagursky, was confined to his bed in a tiny room in the Bolshoi Drama Theater at the end of winter 1942. Nonetheless, he called in Karl I. Eliasberg, director of the Radio Committee orchestra. Eliasberg and his wife were suffering from dystrophy and were being treated in the statsionar on the seventh floor of the Astoria Hotel. Not since early December had there been a concert in Leningrad. Eliasberg brought with him a list of his orchestra members. Twenty-seven names were underlined in black pencil. They were dead. Most of the others were underlined in red. They were near death from dystrophy. Eight names were not underlined. They were available to play.
A few days later an announcement was made on the radio that a symphony orchestra was being formed. Volunteers were asked. Toward the end of March about thirty musicians gathered for rehearsal. These were all the able-bodied musicians in Leningrad.
The first concert was given April 5 in the Pushkin Drama Theater. (The Philharmonic Hall had been hit by a shell and was not yet repaired.) The performance started at 7 P.M., after the Musical Comedy Theater’s presentation of Silva had finished.
Eliasberg appeared on the rostrum in a starched shirt and tail coat. Underneath he wore a cotton-padded jacket. He stood firm and tall, although he had to be helped to the theater. He had gone from the Astoria to his home on Vasilevsky Island to pick up the shirt and suit. A German artillery attack started. Had he not been given a lift by a Baltic Fleet commissar, he might not have made it. The concert was not long. The artists were too weak for a full presentation. They played Glazunov’s Triumphal Overture, excerpts fromSivan Lake, an aria sung by Nadezhda Velter, and concluded with the Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla.
The Road of Life was coming to an end. Day by day with the advance of spring the ice became more spongy, the danger of breakthroughs more likely. Evacuation of refugees from Leningrad by the ice road was halted April 12 by Kosygin. He reported to the State Defense Committee that from January 22 to April 12 he had removed from Leningrad a total of 539,400 persons, including workers, employees, families and military personnel, 347,564; trade school pupils, 28,454; students, scientific workers, professors and teachers and their families, 42,319; orphans, 12,639; peasants from Karelia, 26,974; wounded, 40,986; plus 15,152 tons of valuable machinery and supplies.2
The ice road had continued to improve its performance. From November to April 24, when the last supplies came through, it delivered 356,109 tons of freight, including 271,106 tons of food. It built up in Leningrad reserves of flour for 58 days, cereals for 57 days, meat and fish for 140 days, sugar for 90 days, fats for 12 3 days.
The road delivered 52,934 tons in January, of which 42,588 tons were food. The average delivery was 1,708 tons a day. In February this was lifted to 86,041 tons, of which 67,198 tons were food. Average deliveries were 3,072 tons daily. In March a peak of 113,382 tons was reached, including 88,607 tons of food, a daily average of 3,660. The April total was 87,253 tons, including 57,588 tons of food, a daily average of 2,910 tons.
The road delivered 31,910 tons of military supplies and 37,717 tons of fuel.
The last supplies to come by ice road were onions. Three carloads arrived at the eastern base April 23. The road had been closed, but drivers worked through the twenty-third and twenty-fourth and managed to bring 65 tons of onions across the lake.
Leningrad got through the winter with no attention from the Luftwaffe. There had been no raids throughout January, February and March. However, the Nazi artillery had stayed active. In January 2,696 shells fell on Leningrad, in February 4,771, and in March 7,380. The bombardment killed 519 Leningraders and wounded 1447.3
On April 15 Leningrad marked the 248th day of siege. The city had survived. But the cost had no equal in modern times. In March the Leningrad Funeral Trust buried 89,968 persons. In April the total rose to 102,497. Some of these burials were due to the clean-up, but the death rate was probably higher in April than in any other month of the blockade.
There now remained in Leningrad, with evacuation at an end, 1,100,000 persons.4 The total of ration cards was 800,000 less than in January. When Leningrad’s supply resources—the 58 days of flour, the 140 days of meat and fish—were calculated, it was on the basis of a population on April 15 only one-third what it had been when the blockade began August 30 with the loss of Mga.
More people had died in the Leningrad blockade than had ever died in a modern city—anywhere—anytime: more than ten times the number who died in Hiroshima.5 By comparison with the great sieges of the past Leningrad was unique. The siege of Paris had lasted only 121 days, from September 19, 1870, to January 27, 1871. The total population, military and civilian, was on the order of one million. Noncombatant deaths from all causes in Paris during November, December and three weeks of January were only 30,236, about 16,000 higher than the number in the comparable period of the preceding year. The Parisians ate horses, mules, cats, dogs and possibly rats. There was a raid on the Paris zoo and a rhinoceros was killed and butchered. There were no authenticated instances of cannibalism. Food was scarce, but wine was plentiful.
In the great American siege, that of Vicksburg between May 18 and July 4, 1863, only 4,000 civilians were involved, although the Confederate military force was upwards of 30,000. About 2,500 persons were killed in the siege, including 119 women and children. No known deaths from starvation occurred. Horses, mules, dogs and kittens were eaten and possibly rats.
Leningrad exceeded the total Paris civil casualties on any two or three winter days. The Vicksburg casualties, military and civil, were exceeded in Leningrad by starvation deaths on any January, February, March or April day.
How many people died in the Leningrad blockade? Even with careful calculation the total may be inexact by several hundred thousand.
The most honest declaration was an official Soviet response to a Swedish official inquiry published in Red Star, the Soviet Army newspaper, June 28, 1964, which said: “No one knows exactly how many people died in Leningrad and the Leningrad area.”
The original figure announced by the Soviet Government of deaths by starvation—civilian deaths by hunger in the city of Leningrad alone—was 632,253. An additional 16,747 persons were listed as killed by bombs and shells, providing a total of Leningrad civilian deaths of 649,000. To this were added deaths in nearby Pushkin and Peterhof, bringing the total of starvation deaths to 641,803 and of deaths from all war causes to 671,635. These figures were attested to by the Leningrad City Commission to Investigate Nazi Atrocities and were submitted at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.
The Commission figures are incomplete in many respects. They do not cover many Leningrad areas, including Oranienbaum, Sestroretsk and the suburban parts of the blockade zone. Soviet sources no longer regard the Commission totals, which apparently were drawn up in May, 1944, as authoritative, although they were prepared by an elaborate apparatus of City and Regional Party officials, headed by Party Secretary Kuznetsov. A total of 6,445 l°cal commissions carried out the task, and more than 31,000 persons took part. Individual lists of deaths were made up for each region. The regional lists carried 440,826 names, and a general city-wide list added 191,427 names, providing the basic Commission-reported total of 632,253.6
Impressive evidence has been compiled by Soviet scholars to demonstrate the incompleteness of the Commission’s total. All official Leningrad statistics are necessarily inaccurate because of the terrible conditions of the winter of 1941–42. The official report of deaths for December, 53,000, may be fairly complete, but for January and February the figures are admittedly poor. Estimates of daily deaths in these months run from 3,500 to 4,000 a day7 to 8,000. The only total available gives deaths for the period as 199,187. This is offered by Dmitri Pavlov. It represents deaths officially reported to authorities (probably in connection with the turning in of ration cards of the deceased). The number of unregistered deaths is known to be much higher. The Funeral Trust buried 89,968 bodies in March (it has no records for January and February), 102,497 m April and 53,562 in May. It continued to bury 4,000 to 5,000 bodies a month through the autumn of 1942, although by this time Leningrad’s population had been cut by more than 75 percent. Thus mortality as a result of the blockade and starvation continued at a high rate through the whole year.
The Funeral Trust buried 460,000 bodies from November, 1941, to the end of 1942. In addition, it is estimated that private individuals, work teams of soldiers and others transported 228,263 bodies from morgues to cemeteries from December, 1941, through December, 1942.
No exact accounting of bodies delivered to cemeteries was possible in Leningrad during the winter months, when thousands of corpses lay in the streets and were picked up like cordwood, transported to Piskarevsky, Vol-kov, Tatar, Bolshaya Okhta, Serafimov, and Bogoslovsky cemeteries and to the large squares at Vesely PÖselok (Jolly Village) and the Glinozemsky Zavod for burial in mass graves, dynamited in the frozen earth by military miners.
Leningrad had a civilian population of about 2,280,000 in January, 1942. By the close of evacuation via the ice road in April, 1942, the population was estimated at 1,100,000—a reduction of 1,180,000, of whom 440,000 had been evacuated via the ice road. Another 120,000 went to the front or were evacuated in May and June. This would indicate a minimum of deaths within the city of about 620,000 in the first half of 1942. Official statistics show that about 1,093,695 persons were buried and about 110,000 cremated from July, 1941, through July, 1942.
To take another approach. Leningrad had about 2,500,000 residents at the start of the blockade, including about 100,000 refugees. At the end of 1943 as the 900 days were drawing to a close, Leningrad had a population of about 600,000—less than one-quarter the number of residents at the time Mga fell August 30, 1941.
The most careful calculation suggests that about 1,000,000 Leningraders were evacuated during the blockade: 33,479 by water across Ladoga in the fall of 1941; 35,114 by plane in November-December, 1941; 36,118 by the Ladoga ice road in December, 1941, and up to January 22, 1942; 440,000 by Ladoga from January 22 to April 15; 448,694 by Ladoga water transport from May to November, 1942; 15,000 during 1943. In addition, perhaps 100,000 Leningraders went to the front with the armed forces.
This suggests that not less than 800,000 persons died of starvation within Leningrad during the blockade.
But the 800,000 total does not include the thousands who died in the suburban regions and during evacuation. These totals were very large. For instance, at the tiny little station of Borisova Griva on Ladoga 2,200 persons died from January to April 15, 1942. TheLeningrad Encyclopediaestimates deaths during evacuation at “tens of thousands.”
What is the actual death total for Leningrad? Mikhail Dudin, a Leningrad poet who fought at Hangö and spent the whole of the siege within the lines at Leningrad, suggests that it was a minimum of 1,100,000. He offers this simple figure on the basis of 800,000 bodies estimated buried in mass graves at Piskarevsky Cemetery and 300,000 at Serafimov Cemetery. There is more than a little truth in the observation of the Leningrad poet, Sergei Davydov, regarding Piskarevsky: “Here lies half the city.”
No official calculation includes a total for military deaths, and no official figures on these have been published. It is known, however, that 12,416 military deaths attributed to hunger diseases occurred in the winter of 1941–42. Over-all military deaths are likely to have ranged between 100,000 and 200,000 in the Leningrad fighting—possibly more.
One of the most careful Soviet specialists estimates the Leningrad starvation toll at “not less than a million,” a conclusion shared by the present Leningrad Party leaders. Pravda on the twentieth anniversary of the lifting of the blockade declared that “the world has never known a similar mass extermination of a civilian population, such depths of human suffering and deprivation as fell to the lot of Leningraders.”
Estimates of the Leningrad death toll as high as 2,000,000 have been made by some foreign students. These estimates are too high. A total for Leningrad and vicinity of something over 1,000,000 deaths attributable to hunger, and an over-all total of deaths, civilian and military, on the order of 1,300,000 to 1,500,000, seems reasonable.
It is germane, perhaps, to note that the Leningrad survivors of the blockade thought in January, 1944, that the starvation toll might be 2,ooo,ooo.8
The Soviet censors in 1944 refused to pass estimates stating the Leningrad death toll as 1,000,000 or 2,000,000. For nearly twenty years after the blockade they insisted the total was 632,253—not more, not less. Even today Dmitri V. Pavlov insists that new estimates, made by Soviet and foreign students, are incorrect. In a third edition of his magnificent Leningrad v Blokade, the best single source for many details of the siege, he incorporated an attack on the new totals. It is impossible, he insists, to remain silent in the face of assertions that a million or more people died in Leningrad. “Believe it or not,” he insists, “there is no foundation for such serious conclusions.” He insists that calculations based on the movement of Leningraders in and out of the city are unsound. He contends that the new estimates understate the number of Leningraders who entered military units (he puts the figure at not less than 200,000 rather than the 100,000 which Soviet authorities now use). He insists that the 632,253 calculation was accurate (he says it was completed in May, 1943, although the document is dated May, 1944, and other Soviet authorities contend it was not submitted until May, 1945).9
Pavlov concludes that “the life of the Leningraders was so grim that there is no need for historians or writers dealing with these events to strengthen the colors or deepen the shadows.”
In this Pavlov is right. But the truth is that the Soviet Government from the beginning made a deliberate effort to lighten the shadows of the Leningrad blockade.
The death toll was minimized for political and security reasons. The Soviet Government for years deliberately understated the military and civilian death toll of World War II. The real totals were of such magnitude that Stalin, obviously, felt they would produce political repercussions inside the country. To the outside world a realistic statement of Soviet losses (total population losses are now estimated at well above 25 million lives) would have revealed the true weakness of Russia at the end of the war.
The Leningrad death toll had implications both for Stalin and for the Leningrad leadership, headed by Zhdanov. It raised the question of whether the key decisions were the right ones, whether all had been done that could have been done to spare the city its incredible trial. In these decisions the personal and political fortunes of all the Soviet leaders were intermingled.
Zhdanov declared in June, 1942, that there had been no line between the front and the rear in Leningrad, that everyone “lived with a single spirit—to do everything possible to defeat the enemy. Each Leningrader, man or woman, found his place in the struggle and with honor fulfilled his duty as a Soviet patriot.”
This was not quite true, and it begged the question of whether the siege had to be endured, whether it could have been lifted, whether it could have been avoided. These were the questions for which the leadership might have to answer.
Whether Zhdanov was certain of the correctness of these decisions is not clear. Not long before he died on August 31, 1948, he is said to have questioned himself and his acts, acknowledging that “people died like flies” as a result of his decisions but insisting that “history would not have forgiven me had I given up Leningrad.”
Pavlov asked himself the same questions: Why did Leningrad remain in blockade for so long, and was everything done that could have been done to break the blockade? His conclusion was that the Soviet Command simply did not have the strength to do more than was done.
Meanwhile, “history” was corrected in the Soviet way. The sacrifice of Leningrad was understated; the death toll was minimized; the chance of political repercussions was reduced, at least for the time being.
Not until many years later was the inscription carved on the wall of the memorial at Piskarevsky Cemetery:
Let no one forget; let nothing be forgotten!
For some years, at any rate, a determined effort was made to forget a very great deal that had happened during the siege of Leningrad.
1 Her case was taken up by the Young Communist magazine Yunost in 1965. After publishing an expose the magazine directed an appeal to the Leningrad authorities to display some consideration for Hilma Stepanovna. Whether the appeal was heeded is not known. (Yunost, No. 5, May, 1965, pp. 97–99.)
2 N.Z., pp. 340–341. Slightly differing totals are given by others. Karasev makes it 554,186 (p. 200). The same figure is given by poo (p. 106). Pavlov makes it 514,069 (op. cit., 3rd edition, p. 189.)
3 The Germans resumed their air attacks on Leningrad in April. There were heavy actions April 4, 5, 14, 19, 20 and 23, directed primarily against the Baltic Fleet ships, still frozen in the Neva, and against Kronstadt and the heavy naval gun emplacements. (Pan-teleyev, op. cit., pp. 309-315.) The attack of April 4 was the heaviest of the war. (N.Z., p. 343.)
4 Zhdanov used the same figure in July when proposing a further evacuation to bring the city’s population down to a “military city” of 800,000. (Karasev, op. cit., p. 254.)
5 Deaths at Hiroshima August 6, 1945, were 78,150, with 13,983 missing and 37,426 wounded. In another tragedy of World War II, the Warsaw uprising, between 56,000 and 60,000 died.
6 The Commission report as published in the official Leningrad documentary compilation is dated “May, 1944,” but the authoritative study of this document by V. M. Koval-chuk and G. L. Sobolev asserts it includes deaths reported to May, 1945. (Voyenno Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 12, December, 1965, p. 192.) The Commission was set up by decision of the Leningrad City and regional Party committees April 14, 1943. (Karasev, op. cit., p. 12.) Among its members were Mayor Popkov, Chief Architect N. V. Baranov, Academicians A. A. Baikov, A. F. Ioffe, L. A. Orbeli, I. A. Orbeli, I. Ye. Grabar, A. V. Shchusev, and the writers, A. N. Tolstoy, N. S. Tikhonov, Vera Inber, Anna Akhmatova, Olga Forsh and Vsevolod Vishnevsky. (Leningrad v VOV, p. 690.)
7 This is the estimate of two reliable and conservative Leningrad authorities. (Karasev, op. cit., p. 184; N. D. Khudyakova, Vsya Strana S Leningradorn, Leningrad, 1960, p. 57.)
8 This is what they told the author, who was present in Leningrad at the time.
9 Pavel Luknitsky comments that the official figures cannot account for all the deaths, particularly those who died during evacuation. (Luknitsky, op. cit., p. 539.)