THE WHITE NIGHTS BROUGHT BACK TO LENINGRAD AN appearance of ease and relaxation. In the Summer Gardens fields of cabbages replaced grassy lawns. Between the antiaircraft batteries on the Champs de Mars sprouted potato patches. Here and there were small signs: “Dr. Kozin’s garden,” “Aleksandr Prokofyev’s garden” and dozens like it. On the steps of the Kazan Cathedral a copper samovar bubbled and women drank tea made of some kind of herbs. Everyone rolled his own cigarettes with paper torn from strips of old Pravdas. They lighted them with magnifying glasses. No matches were needed so long as the sun shone.
There were flowers in the city—mignonettes, daisies, field roses. The streetcars were jammed. Only lines Nos. 12, 3, 7, 30, 10, 20 and 9 ran regularly. Often they stopped because of shelling. There were no buses, no taxis. Signs appeared on the streets: “In case of shelling this side is the most dangerous.” Girls sold soda water at sidewalk stands, and a kvass wagon was parked on the Nevsky. Old fishermen tried their luck along the Fon-tanka and the Moika.
Death was more rare. Pavel Luknitsky walked through Leningrad one July day. He saw only two corpses—one on the Fontanka wrapped in a blanket on a wheelbarrow, the other in a coffin being pulled in a hand cart.
To be sure, people were thin and drawn. But they moved more swiftly, and many were ruddy from the summer sun. There were not many queues and, truth to say, not many people. The streets were empty. Too many had died, too many had been evacuated, and more were going all the time.
Everywhere people picked greens. Posted on the walls of buildings were check lists of edible wild plants. They recommended young nettles, dandelions, burdocks, goosefoot, rape, sorrel. One woman discovered a nettle patch outside the Catherine Gardens. She picked a panful and made a delicious summer soup. Never mind her nettle-burned hands.
There were still children in Leningrad. They ran and played. Sometimes it was “war,” sometimes doctor-and-nurse with dystrophy victims. Sayanov encountered some youngsters who made their “patient” lie on a stove while they debated whether she should be evacuated or whether she could be cured by a special diet.
Luknitsky was sitting on a street bench one day, writing in his diary. An old woman (he knew instantly that she was really young and that only starvation and hardship made her look old) came up to him, carrying a portable phonograph in a red case, a black umbrella and a battered bag on her back. She tried to sell him the phonograph. She told him her husband was at the front, she had had no word from him, had been evacuated from her home and had no place to go with her child.
The Writers’ House on Ulitsa Voinova was clean once more—no more bodies in the back rooms. Meals were served in the dining room by waitresses in neat uniforms—supper from three to five without ration coupons for members of the union: a full bowl of good barley soup, borsht, kasha and, for dessert, a kind of glucose or a chocolate bar.
No great problem now about looking after writers. Ilya Avramenko, the poet, and Luknitsky decided to evacuate all those not doing war work. They checked the prewar list of 300 members. There were 107 in the army, mostly on the Leningrad front; 33 had died of hunger, n had been killed at the front, and 6 had been arrested.
Of those arrested two, Lozin and Petrov, had been shot. Three had been put in prison on political chargés. These included one whose name Luknitsky did not remember and another named Borisoglebsky. The third was Abramovich-Blek—the gallant, onetime officer in the Czar’s navy who had jokingly promised in September, 1941, a place in his nonexistent barge on Lake Ladoga to “Lady Astor,” the manager of the Astoria Hotel restaurant. Another writer, named Herman Matveyev, had been arrested for speculation. Already 53 writers had been evacuated. There remained about 30 in civilian status to be sent out.
What tragedy befell Abramovich-Blek is not clear. But a grim clue can be found in Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s diary. Vishnevsky had “discovered” Abramovich-Blek as a writer, had sponsored his literary debut. On July 24, 1942, Vishnevsky noted:
A certain B——k somewhere in an after-dinner conversation openly defended Fascist conceptions. . . . He was removed from the ship and taken into custody. Where do such types come from?
B——k, Vishnevsky insisted, secretly was hoping for Hitler’s victory. Vishnevsky claimed he had seen a certain number of writers of the B——k type. They disguised themselves in Soviet colors, and their work was inevitably false and hypocritical.
Whether Vishnevsky believed his protégé was a traitor or whether he was covering his own tracks, there is no way of telling. The incident underlined the fact that the vigilance of the secret police had not slackened despite the heroism of the Leningraders.
Vissarion Sayanov decided to visit the composer Boris V. Asafyev. The wonderful old Leningrad bookstores were open again. Many book lovers had sold their libraries for bread. Many had died and left their books to be sold by their heirs; many were sold by thieves who ransacked empty apartments. Book trade was one of the few that thrived in Leningrad. (There was no basis for Vishnevsky’s paranoid suspicion that saboteurs had burned up the total stock of new editions of War and Peace and Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories.)
Sayanov stopped in a bookshop on his way to Asafyev and picked up a pamphlet about a production of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at the Mariinsky Theater, May 3, 1921. The author was Igor Glebov—the nom de plume of Asafyev. He opened the pages and was struck by a phrase: “From the beginning to the end of the opera the claws of death quietly and steadily draw the victim closer and closer.”
He read on:
“The terrible design of the music of The Queen of Spades is to be found in its ceaseless beating into our brain of a feeling of the inevitability of death and, thus, delicately, frighteningly, moving us nearer and nearer to the terrible end.”
Sayanov bought the book and presented it to Asafyev.
“How strange!” Asafyev said. “It’s as though I had not written this, but someone else.”
They came upon another sentence written by Asafyev twenty years before: “When spring came, there was no one in the world as happy as the people of this sovereign city.”
Of this they had no doubt.
Sayanov was struck by his conversation with Asafyev. It dealt not with everyday living problems, food, rations, hunger. Asafyev had lived in the bomb shelter of the Pushkin Theater most of the winter. He had come to the margin of death. But he did not talk about his personal problems. He talked about the musical structure of the songs of the western Slavs and gave Sayanov a paper he had written on the opera The Bronze Horseman. Not a word about the terrible January days when Asafyev lay in his bed in the dark to conserve heat, light and strength, composing music in his mind and then, after daylight came, quickly writing down the notes while he still had the strength. In those days Asafyev wrote his whole autobiography in his mind, but it was many months before he was able to put it on paper.
Walking the streets of Leningrad, Luknitsky saw a group of women at the bridges over the canals and rivers, washing clothes or dishes. They looked healthy. Some had lipstick. Their clothing was not only washed but ironed.
On the Liteiny a hunchback set up a scales and did a rushing business. Everyone wanted to know how much weight he had lost during the winter. An old bootblack appeared at the corner of Sadovaya and Rakhov streets. He had to rest between shoeshines, he was so weak. A shine cost 5 rubles, a can of shoe polish the same. There were cigarettes for sale at street corners. Prices in the black market were becoming stabilized: a quart of vodka, 1,500 rubles; 100 grams of bread, 40 rubles; a pack of cigarettes, 150 rubles; fishcakes, 3 rubles. Musical comedy tickets were exchanged for two bread rations.
On the Nevsky the rubble of broken buildings had been carted away to be used in making bomb shelters and pillboxes. In the dental gaps made by destroyed buildings false fronts were erected. They were painted to resemble the building exteriors, windows and doors faithfully reproduced. Going quickly down the street it seemed undamaged. On the false front of a building at the Nevsky and Morskaya the date “1942” appeared – whether to mark the date of destruction or pseudo reconstruction was not clear. A shell went through one onion tower of the “Church of the Blood” erected on the site of Alexander IPs assassination. It was repaired with plywood, and no damage could be seen. The Engineers Castle took a direct hit (many persons were killed, for it was being used as a hospital), but from the outside it appeared whole.
The exterior appearances were deceptive. The city looked more peaceful. It seemed more peaceful. But in reality it still stood in deadly danger. And the danger was growing. To the south the German summer offensive was in full swing. Soviet troops had yielded Sevastopol and the Crimea. The Germans were in motion across the broad waist of the South Russian steppes, driving toward the Volga. Nazi troops were thrusting deep into the Caucasus.
Everywhere there were signs that they would soon try once again to take Leningrad. For more than a month German troop movements had been seen. Vishnevsky heard that German strength was 50 percent higher than in the spring. There were more and more reconnaissance flights. On July 10 Lieutenant General Leonid A. Govorov told the Leningrad commanders that a new test of strength was in the offing. Party Secretary Zhdanov warned that the Germans would again try to take the city by storm. With the occupation of the Crimea, Hitler had ordered Manstein’s Eleventh Army north for a new offensive against Leningrad. The 24th, 28th, 132nd and 170th infantry divisions of the Eleventh Army quickly appeared before Leningrad. They were followed by the 5th Mountain Division, the 61st Infantry and the 250th Spanish “Blue” Division. Vast quantities of heavy siege guns (including a 440-mm Big Bertha), many from the Skoda, Krupp and Schneider works, arrived. They had been successfully used by the Nazis in taking Sevastopol. By the end of July the Germans had massed twenty-one infantry and one tank division and one separate infantry brigade before Leningrad and at nearby Mga and Sinyavino.
In this atmosphere the Leningrad troops were once again ordered to take the offensive. The objective was to lift the siege—the fourth attempt. But there were other objectives: to lessen, if possible, the terrible German pressure in the south. The worst crisis of the war was at hand. Leningrad must, at any cost, prevent the Germans from shifting forces to the south and southwest.
The main responsibility of the new offensive was placed on General Meretskov’s Volkhov command, which was stronger than the Neva Operating Group of General Govorov.
Steps were taken to boost Leningrad’s morale. On July 25—Navy Day— for the first time German prisoners of war were paraded down the Nevsky, the only Germans to reach the heart of Leningrad. There were several thousand of them—unshaven, dirty, lousy, wearing jackets of ersatz wool. Many were plainly afraid of the crowds, mostly women who set up a shout: “Give them to us! Give them to us!” Troops and police held the women back. Here and there a child threw a stone or stick at the bedraggled Nazis. Not all, however, were cowed. Some sneered at the crowd, some laughed.
Vishnevsky noted discouragingly in his diary that some of these “whorehouse dregs” were the sons of workers, that many failed to bow under cross-examination, continuing to mouth Nazi slogans. Some, he said, burst into tears when told they would have to rebuild all that had been destroyed in Russia before being permitted to return to their homes.
At 7 P.M. on August 9 the doors of Philharmonic Hall opened. Again there were lights—some lights anyway—in the crystal chandeliers. Sunlight streamed through the great windows, repaired with plywood after the winter’s bombing. Here was everyone in Leningrad: Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Vera Inber (by chance they met, walking in the greenhouse of the Botanical Gardens that afternoon, the one where the palms had frozen to death in the winter and where now, again, Victoria Regina lilies were beginning to bloom, where peonies were being cut and dark barberry branches were sending forth shoots); Lieutenant General Govorov, handsome in his uniform; Party Secretary Kuznetsov, dark, lean-faced but more at ease than during the winter months; and on the podium, Director Karl Eliasberg. Everyone was wearing his good black suit or her best silk dress, the most fashionable crowd the siege had seen. The score of the Seventh Symphony had been sent to Leningrad by plane in June, and rehearsals had gone on for more than six weeks.
The glory and majesty of the symphony were played against a crescendo of Leningrad’s guns. General Friedrich Ferch, Chief of Staff of the Nazi Eighteenth Army, learning that his troops were listening to a radio broadcast of the symphony (it was carried by direct hook-up to all parts of the Soviet Union and by shortwave to Europe and North America), ordered cannon fire into the area of the Philharmonic Hall. But General Govorov, the counterbattery specialist, had foreseen this possibility. Soviet guns silenced the German batteries.1
Generals Meretskov and Govorov, Admiral Tributs, and Party secretaries Zhdanov and Kuznetsov met August 21 near Tikhvin to agree on final plans for the new effort to lift the blockade. There was dispute between Leningrad and Volkhov, between Zhdanov and Govorov on one side and Meretskov on the other. Leningrad wanted to take the lead. Stalin supported Meretskov and insisted that “the basic weight of the proposed operation should lie on the Volkhov front.”
Zhdanov sharply challenged Meretskov, insisting that Leningrad could lift the blockade by forcing the Neva with the Neva Operating Group. Meretskov and Stalin thought—correctly—that he was wrong.
Meretskov got more in reinforcements and arms than he had expected from Moscow in the light of the Stalingrad crisis. Stalin sent him 20,000 rifles and tommy guns, although he had asked for only 8,000 to 10,000. They were shipped by a roundabout route to deceive the Nazis about the coming offensive. The men were sent in closed railroad cars marked “fuel,” “food,” “hay.” Tanks were sent on flatcars covered with hay.
The offensive failed. It rumbled on into October but never gave promise of breaking the German lines. Once again Leningrad troops forced the Neva River, sending three rifle divisions across in daylight September 8 in the face of terrible German fire. Govorov took the responsibility for the fiasco and proposed to try again. He especially trained some troops and brought in amphibious tanks. The new action started September 26. It went just as badly. Rain set in. Once again Govorov took the hard decision. He ordered theplace (Varmes liquidated and the troops withdrawn to the north bank of the Neva on October 8.
Meretskov had no better luck. His troops pushed forward a short distance, but by September 20 Manstein was counterattacking, trying to cut off the Soviet forward positions. The bad-luck Second Shock Army bogged down in the marshes. General Meretskov plunged into action to help extricate the 4th Guards Rifle Corps. Twice his personal car was destroyed by a direct hit. He got word that Stalin was urgently calling him on the VC high-security phone, but not until September 30 did he emerge from the marshes and put through the call.
“Why didn’t you come to the direct wire?” Stalin demanded.
“I lost two machines,” Meretskov replied. “But more than that I was afraid that if I left the command point of the corps, behind me would come dragging the staff of the corps and after them the staff of the units.”
He reported he had extricated the surrounded troops. That was the end of the fourth effort to lift the Leningrad siege. It was October 6—the 402nd day of the siege. But the threat of a new German attack on Leningrad had been removed. Manstein had lost 60,000 men, killed or taken prisoner, 260 planes, 200 tanks and 600 guns and mortars. “Better be three times at Sevastopol than stay on here,” men of the Manstein command said.
Yet somehow the mood of Leningrad was changing. The city was preparing for its second winter of war in a new spirit. The manager of the Astoria Hotel, a young woman named Galina Alekseyevna, mascara on her eyelashes, sang as she mounted the marble, circular staircase. “Why am I so happy?” she asked Pavel Luknitsky. “I really don’t know. The city is being shelled, and I am singing. I never used to sing in the morning. I used to live quite well, but I cried all the time. The things I cried for! It makes me laugh to think of them. Now I’ve lost everyone. All my dear ones. I thought I couldn’t survive that. But now I’m ready for anything. If I die, I die. I’m not afraid of death any more.”
Luknitsky felt the same—except when he encountered the red tape of the army administration. He had a pass issued by the army in Moscow—it carried twenty stamps and signatures. And even this, often, would not persuade an army commander to give him a meal, a ration card or transportation.
What was changing the mood of the city was events. Party Secretary Kuznetsov spoke at Philharmonic Hall:
“The enemy recently created a large group of divisions which had been active on the Sevastopol front. But thanks to the Sinyavino [Volkhov] operation and the action of the troops of the Leningrad front, this group was smashed. And the time is not far distant when our troops will receive the order: Break the circle of blockade!”
He got a big ovation.
Now Leningrad prepared to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. No parade. The time for that was not yet. But there were holiday entertainments. Vishnevsky and two colleagues, Aleksandr Kron and Vsevolod Azarov, had written a musical comedy about the Baltic Fleet, not a very comical subject, in seventeen days. It was called The Wide, Wide Sea. Vishnevsky never had the remotest connection with music or comedy. In fact, he went to Rose Marie to see what a musical was like and burst into tears. The Wide, Wide Sea was written to orders—orders of the Baltic Fleet Political Administration. Vishnevsky had simply responded, “Yes, sir!” and then set about to discover what it was he was supposed to do. He flung himself into the project with such enthusiasm that he hardly noticed that nothing had come of an invitation Party Secretary Kuznetsov gave him on September 30 to go to the United States as Pravda correspondent, an invitation that was a by-product of Wendell Willkie’s trip to Russia. Vishnevsky had plunged into that, too (he started to read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt to prepare himself). But a few days later he was told the trip was off. He never knew why.
The usual preholiday reception was held at Smolny. Vishnevsky attended. So did the full Leningrad Party leadership—Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, the other Party secretaries, Lieutenant General Govorov. Vishnevsky was filled with emotion—twenty-five years of the Revolution, twenty-five years of Bolshevism. It had started in this very hall on the evening of November 8, 1917, when Lenin stepped to the platform and quietly said, “We will now proceed to construct the Socialist order.” Vishnevsky tried to contain himself, but it was not easy. He looked at the honor guard—Baltic sailors with wide, bright faces—just like 1917. They listened to Stalin’s speech. The news was good. Rommel had been defeated in the western desert. The chandeliers were bright with light (an underwater power cable across the depths of the Ladoga now linked Leningrad with the reactivated Volkhov power station), and the hall was all white and marble and gold. The crowd was mostly in uniform—70 percent of the Party was in the armed forces, 90 percent of the Young Communists.
Vishnevsky did not notice the adjutant who quietly walked up to General Govorov as he sat on the stage at the Assembly Hall. The officer whispered to Govorov, “There is a call for you.” Govorov silently left the stage and hurried to the VC wire to Moscow. The conversation—with Stalin—could hardly have been more brief. The words which Stalin uttered were cryptic. He ordered Govorov to proceed with “War Game No. 5.”
In his address to the nation that holiday eve Stalin had said that soon “there will be a holiday in our streets.” He was referring to Stalingrad, where the Nazi offensive had one more week to run and the Soviet counter-offensive was only a fortnight distant. Soon, he was hinting, Russia would have something to celebrate. To Govorov the coded words meant that Leningrad would have something to celebrate as well.
“War Game No. 5” was a rather sophisticated code by Soviet standards. Dmitri Shcheglov listened one evening to a field telephone operator. “Jasmine” was calling “Rose.” Rose reported to Jasmine in a code in which reconnaissance units were called “eyes,” sailors were called “ribbons” (from the ribbon on their sailor hats), artillery was “black” (their uniform piping). The general was “the old man.” The commander of the Eighth Army was “grandpa.” Shells were cucumbers. Shcheglov wondered who was fooling whom.
As the war progressed, slightly more complex codes were employed. But not much. Stalin in April, 1943, was “Comrade Vasilyev,” in May and August he was “Comrade Ivanov.” Marshal Zhukov was “Konstantinov” in April, 1943, and “Yuryev” in May, 1943. In April, 1943, Marshal N. F. Vatu-nin was “Fedorov,” Nikita S. Khrushchev was “Nikitin,” and F. K. Korzhenevich was “Fedotov.” In May, 1943, Marshal Rokossovsky was “Kostin.”
Most code names derived from the commander’s given name. Those for Stalin utilized the commonest of Russian surnames—something like calling him Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones.
Stalin tended to refer to his commanders by family name, contrary to the ordinary Russian habit of using given name and patronymic. In conversation, if Admiral Kuznetsov, for instance, referred to “Andrei Aleksandro-vich” (meaning Zhdanov), Stalin would interject, although he very well knew who was meant: “Now which Andrei Aleksandrovich do you mean?” He made an exception for Marshal Shaposhnikov. Shaposhnikov could be called “Boris Mikhailovich” without any question from Stalin.
“War Game No. 5” was Govorov’s instruction to proceed with plans for the offensive to lift the Leningrad blockade. Govorov went to his office, opened his safe and took out a fat folder. It had been his habit since he assumed the Leningrad Command to jot down endlessly ideas, plans, notations for the offensive. Now he locked himself in his office on the second floor of Smolny, told his adjutant to let no one in, even on the most urgent business, and began to select the documents he needed.
The November holiday meeting had almost concluded before Govorov returned to his place on the Smolny platform.
Soon a small group of Govorov’s commanders, General Bychevsky, chief of engineers, General Georgi Odintsov, chief of artillery, and a few others set to work. This was to be effort No. 5 to break the blockade. And it was to be different. A preliminary draft went to Moscow November 17 and a more detailed plan November 22.
Leningrad was to have as much strength as Volkhov. There was to be a new army, the Sixty-seventh, led by General Dukhanov, one of the best commanders, a man under whom Govorov had once served before the war, when Dukhanov commanded the Leningrad Military District and Govorov was chief of an artillery regiment.
Govorov worked with intense concentration. He literally shut himself in his office, studying his charts and maps, pacing the floor from one end to another, drinking countless glasses of very hot, very strong tea. He was a little farsighted and used glasses for reading and for examining maps. He was a careful, studious man, painstaking about details. Once Vissarion Saya-nov said to Govorov that in the early days of the war the Russians had fought bravely but seemed to lack skill in tactics and put too much weight on German military theory.
“Well,” Govorov replied, “it seems that way not only to you but to anyone who understands military science. Of course, this is not the time to talk about that. But the time will come when all the mistakes that were committed at the beginning of the war will be discussed at the top of our lungs.”
This time, if Govorov could help it, there would be no mistakes.
On the twenty-ninth of November he called in his commanders and laid out the general design of the offensive. The Neva would be forced on an eight-mile front from Nevskaya Dubrovka to Shlisselburg. The Volkhov front would thrust in the Sinyavino area to meet the Leningrad front. There would be a first echelon of four rifle divisions with a brigade of light tanks, a second echelon of three divisions and two brigades of heavy and medium tanks. The second echelon was to go into action within forty-eight hours of the start of the battle. The heavy tanks would cross immediately. There would be 2,000 guns—three times as many as in the disastrous attacks of 1941–42. Plans were to be ready within a month.
Formal orders for the offensive were issued by Stalin on December 8.2 The objective: to end the blockade of Leningrad. The code for the operation: Iskra, the spark, a name long associated with the Revolution and with Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, the name of the first Social Democratic newspaper, the one which Lenin edited before the break between the Men-sheviks and the Bolsheviks.
General Govorov’s opponent was Colonel General Lindemann, commander of the Eighteenth Army. Lindemann had more than twenty-five divisions at his disposal. He was well aware of the importance of the forthcoming battle. In an order to his troops he said: “As the source of the Bolshevik Revolution, as the city of Lenin, it is the second capital of the Soviet. Its liberation will constantly be one of the important goals of the Bolsheviks. For the Soviet regime the liberation of Leningrad would equal the defense of Moscow, the battle for Stalingrad.”
Lindemann was right.
Govorov was determined to leave nothing to chance. For security all orders were handwritten and in only one copy. Units were prohibited from moving by day. Only small units could be moved through Leningrad and only by varying routes. The established routine of radio communications was maintained, and new units were forbidden the use of radio. No new intelligence operations were permitted, and artillery fire was deliberately dispersed.
Govorov met with the Sixty-seventh Army staff on Christmas Day. With him was Party Secretary Zhdanov, Party Secretary Ya. F. Kapustin, Party Secretary A. I. Makhanov and Mayor Peter Popkov and Marshal Voro-shilov. Voroshilov had been assigned by Stalin as liaison between Moscow and Leningrad. The notorious Police General Mekhlis3 had been assigned as Political Commissar to General Meretskov on the Volkhov front, and Party Secretary Kuznetsov had been temporarily named Commissar of the Second Shock Army on the Volkhov front in an attempt to keep that ill-fated army from once again falling into encirclement.
Govorov ordered the Sixty-seventh Army to carry out a full simulation of the forthcoming attack, an operation in which 128 hours of preparation were invested.
The ice was still thin on the Neva, and General Bychevsky and his engineers kept searching for means of strengthening it so they could put T-34 tanks across the river. Major L. S. Barshai of the Leningrad Subway Construction Trust devised a wooden outrigger to which the tank treads would be bolted. This enabled the weight to be distributed across the ice. It looked promising. As Bychevsky showed a model to General Govorov, Marshal Voroshilov walked in. He insisted on coming to a demonstration the next day on the Neva near the Novo-Saratov settlement. Bychevsky was hardly pleased when all the brass—Voroshilov, Govorov, Party Secretary Kuznetsov, General Odintsov and some others—turned up for the test.
The tank started out on the ice with turret open, at Govorov’s insistence. Behind it marched Voroshilov with Govorov at his side. The tank slithered out on the ice. It had gone about 150 yards when the ice cracked in every direction. Govorov yanked Voroshilov back from a yawning hole as the tank plunged under the water. A moment later tankist Mikhail Ivanov, wet, freezing but alive, bobbed up. Someone handed him a flask of vodka.
“Give him the Order of the Red Star,” Voroshilov ordered. “And as for you, Bychevsky, we will have a conversation later.”
Once again Bychevsky was in trouble. Fortunately, Govorov was not so disturbed. He ordered Bychevsky to continue his experiments.
It was a quiet New Year’s in Leningrad. There were only 637,000 people left in the city—not a quarter of the number there a year before. Vera Inber had a party. Most of the Leningrad writers—all of them engaged in war work of some kind—came. So did many of the physicians at her husband’s Erisman Hospital. There were cake and wine, vodka and caviar. Aleksandr Kron was there. So were Nikolai Chukovsky and Lev Uspensky. Vsevolod Vishnevsky came in late on the snowy, fresh evening. He had been broadcasting one of his blustery orations (“1943 will bring justice! This year will be oursl The blow is nearing. Forward, friends!”). Vera Inber had written out fortunes for each guest on bits of paper. Vishnevsky’s said: “Don’t think about the future; the future is thinking about you.” He liked that.
Vera Inber’s husband, Dr. Strashun, cut his finger opening a bottle. One of his colleagues bandaged it with the virtuosity born of treating thousands of more serious wounds. There was a radio speech by President Kalinin and a communiqué reporting enormous trophies and thousands of prisoners at Stalingrad. But Vera Inber was filled with disquiet. She had planned to put down on paper her achievements and her failures for 1942—and her hopes for the New Year. She didn’t succeed. She didn’t write anything. Her mood was low again. There was another air raid, and she was having trouble with the fifth chapter of “Pulkovo Meridian.” Olga Berggolts spoke on the radio. She was more hopeful. She remembered New Year’s of 1942. How much better things looked now. She read a poem which she called “The House-warming”:
Again winter. The snow flies . . .
The enemy still at the city gates,
But I call you to the housewarming.
We’ll meet the New Year with a party . . .
We’ll breathe warmth into the house
Where death lived and darkness reigned
Here will be life. . . .
Because of the weakness of the Neva ice, generals Govorov and Meretskov proposed to Moscow December 27 that the date for the offensive be set back to January 12. Stalin’s reply came in on December 28. It read:
YEFREMOV, AFANASYEV, LEONIDOV:
The Stavka of the Supreme Command approves your proposal concerning the timing of preparations and beginning Operation Iskra.
“Yefremov” was the code name for Marshal Voroshilov, “Afanasyev” that of General Meretskov and “Leonidov” that of General Govorov.
The action began at 9:30 A.M. on January 12. More than 4,500 guns opened up on the Germans. The barrage lasted two hours twenty minutes on the Leningrad front, one hour forty-five minutes on the Volkhov front. It was not the familiar story of too little, too late or too weak. The unearthly roar of the multibarreled rockets, the Katyushas, shook the ice-clad earth.
At 11:42 A.M. a green rocket flashed over the Neva. General S. N. Bor-shchev, whose 268th Infantry Division was to lead the attack, suddenly froze. He saw his troops, mistaking the signal, start to push across the ice, not waiting for the Katyushas to complete their fire. It was too late to halt them. He could only watch in fear that turned to triumph as the men picked their way safely across the ice, their losses minimized by the sudden move.
General Dukhanov’s divisions, the 268th led by General Borshchev and the 136th led by General N. P. Simonyak (one of the heroes of the fighting at Hangö), stormed across the Neva. They met heavy Nazi counterattacks, and the 268th was in serious trouble before the combined weight of the Soviet attack began to be felt. The Second Shock Army of Meretskov’s Volkhov front pushed straight west toward a link-up with Dukhanov’s forces.
Most of the Leningrad correspondents couldn’t get permission to go to the front. Luknitsky had been at Dukhanov’s command post but was ordered back to Leningrad on the evening of January 11. Orders had been given: “Not one correspondent is permitted here.” Luknitsky raced back to Leningrad. It was not until 3 P.M. on January 13 that he and the others were permitted to join the attacking troops.
Sayanov joined the 86th Division pushing into Shlisselburg. It was late night, and the blue light of the moon shone down on the endless drifts which covered the low-lying land. On the edges of the snowy field he saw black shell holes torn in the earth. Everywhere sprawled a jumble of Nazi arms—cannon, machine guns, tommy guns, boxes of ammunition, shells, grenades, a box of iron crosses, cases of cognac, Goebbels’ leaflets, tin cans, straw boots, broken cartons of cigarettes, stray wagon wheels. By morning, Sayanov thought, the wind will have dusted over the battlefield and it will disappear under the white powder. But now he could follow the course of the fighting. Here lay the body of a Russian soldier, a youth not more than twenty-three. Even in death he gripped his rifle firmly. He had been firing on the enemy to the last. A heap of expended cartridges lay beside him, his eye was still at the gunsight and his finger on the trigger. Someone had thrown a white camouflage cape over the boy and thrust a stick in the snowdrift with his helmet on it. There was a white paper glued to the helmet, probably the boy’s name and possibly that of his family.
The battle raged on. From his headquarters at Novgorod three times Field Marshal von Kiichler ordered the Shlisselburg garrison to hold out to the last man.
Rows broke out among the Soviet generals. Marshal Georgi Zhukov, hero of the Battle of Moscow, hero of Stalingrad, had been sent in to “coordinate” between the Volkhov front and Moscow.4 He got on the VC high-security line to General Simonyak of the 136th Division. Why didn’t Simonyak attack the Sinyavino Heights? The Nazi positions there were holding up the Second Shock Army.
“For the same reason the Second Army doesn’t attack them,” Simonyak replied. “The approach is through a marsh. The losses would be great and the results small.”
“Tolstoyite! Passive resister!” shouted Zhukov. “Who are those cowards of yours? Who doesn’t want to fight? Who needs to be ousted?”
Simonyak angrily replied that there were no cowards in the Sixty-seventh Army.
“Wise guy,” snapped Zhukov. “I order you to attack the heights.”
“Comrade Marshal,” Simonyak rejoined. “My army is under the command of the Leningrad front commander, General Govorov. I take orders from him.”
Zhukov hung up. Simonyak got no order to attack the Sinyavino Heights.
Steadily the Russians pushed ahead. By January 14 the distance separating the Leningrad and Volkhov troops was less than three miles. The confidence of Moscow in the outcome was demonstrated by Stalin’s action in promoting Govorov on January 15 to the rank of colonel general. The next day the distance between the two fronts had dwindled to three-quarters of a mile. At midevening on January 17 General Govorov gave a final order: The gap between the two fronts was to be closed by any means. By this time Shlisselburg was almost surrounded. The 86th Division was attacking from the south, and the 34th Ski Brigade of Colonel Ya. F. Potekhin had circled around to the east. The end was near. The German commanders, desperately trying to keep an escape corridor open, ordered a counterattack at 9:30 A.M., January 18. It failed.
Within hours the units of the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts were joining hands—the basic blockade of Leningrad had been broken. The first meeting of Soviet troops came in the morning near Workers’ Settlement No. 1, about five miles southeast of Shlisselburg. There at 9:30 A.M. Simonyak’s 123rd Rifle Brigade met a unit of the 1240th Regiment of the 372nd Division from the Volkhov front.5
It was dark before Shlisselburg fell. There had been fifteen thousand people in the old fortress city before the war. Only a few hundred were left. The rest had been shipped to Germany, died of hunger or had been executed by the Germans. Oreshek, the hard little nut, the fort which had held out for five hundred days, stood like a battered battleship just off the Shlisselburg piers. Sayanov spent a night at Oreshek, interviewing the defenders. Water trickled down the thick walls. The air was dank. A little oil lamp stood on the table. “It’s very gloomy,” Sayanov said. “It reminds me of one of the cells where they held the revolutionaries.”
“It is,” the commander replied.
All Leningrad was waiting. Each evening for days the people had waited for the “last-minute news at 11 P.M.” Would the blockade be lifted? When?
All day on the eighteenth rumors ran through the city. Then just before 11 P.M. came the communiqué, read in the solemn tones of Yuri Levitan, Moscow’s No. 1 announcer:
“Troops of the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts have joined together and at the same time have broken the blockade of Leningrad.”6
Vera Inber had no night pass, but she had to get to Radio House. She had to, and she feared she would be too late. Radio House was a long way from Aptekarsky Island. But her fears were groundless. No passes were needed. Everyone was on the street. Leningrad radio stayed on the air until 3A.M. For once there was no plan, no censor. People spoke. Music played. Poems were read. Speeches were made.
“This snowy moonlit night of January 18-19 will never vanish from the memory of those who experienced it,” Vera Inber told the people of Leningrad. “Some of us are older and others are younger. All of us will experience happiness and grief in our lives. But this happiness, the happiness of liberated Leningrad, we will never forget.”
Vsevolod Vishnevsky was at the command post of the fleet artillery when the communiqué came in. He promptly jotted in his diary: “Seventeen months of blockade, of torment, of expectation. But we held out! Now there is a holiday in our street!”
Pavel Luknitsky was in Shlisselburg. At three minutes to 1 A.M., January 19, less than two hours after the victory communiqué, he managed to get a direct military telegraph line to Moscow and sent off the first story to the Moscow press about the lifting of the blockade. A scoop.
Olga Berggolts wrote a poem:
My dear ones, my far ones, have you heard?
The cursed circle is broken. . . .
But she warned:
The blockade is not yet completely broken.
Farewell, my loved ones. I am going
To my ordinary, dangerous work
In the name of the new life of Leningrad.
It was true. The flags went up in the streets, red flags everywhere. Girls danced down the pavement. They spoke to everyone. They threw their arms around soldiers. It made Vishnevsky think of the February Revolution. In the Radio House studios everyone kissed each other—Olga Berggolts, Boris Likharev, Yelena Vechtomova, Director Yasha Babushkin.
The siege had lasted 506 days. But, though the Germans had been pushed back, they still sat on Leningrad’s doorstep. Their guns still raked the city.
On February 7 Pavel Luknitsky went to the Finland Station. Shell holes gaped. The train shed was a tangle of steel and girders. But the platform was decorated with red flags and bunting. At 10:09 A.M. a light locomotive, No. L-1208, pulling two passenger cars and a string of freight cars, chuffed into the station. It had come from the new line connecting Leningrad with the “mainland” via the new Shlisselburg bridge across the Neva and Vol-khovstroi.7 A band struck up. The crowd cheered. Mayor Popkov spoke. So did Party Secretary Kuznetsov. Just before noon the meeting ended and the train dispatcher snouted: “Train No. 719, Leningrad-Volkhovstroi, Engineer Fedorov, is prepared to depart!”
It was the 526th day of the blockade. Train service had begun again by an indirect, roundabout way, over temporary bridges and running a murderous corridor of Nazi artillery fire. The blockade was lifted, but only partially. Most Leningraders thought the full and final end of the siege was at hand. They were wrong. Many days, many weeks, many months, many lives lay between that February day and the ultimate freeing of the city.
1 There is disagreement among Soviet witnesses on this. Yuri Alyanskii, who was present, contends no German shells fell in the city because of precautionary fire by Soviet batteries. (Zvezda, No. 11, November, 1961, p. 195.) V. M. Gankevich says Ferch ordered his guns to fire but they were immediately silenced. (Gankevich, op. cit., p. 80.) N. N. Zhdanov, then one of Leningrad’s artillery specialists, says the Germans were kept from opening fire by Govorov’s counterbattery barrage. (N. N. Zhdanov, Ognevoi Shchit Leningrada, Moscow, 1961, p. 76.) Neither Inber, Vishnevsky nor Bogdanov-Berezovsky mentions shelling. All were present. (Inber, Izbranniye Proizvedeniya, Vol. III Leningrad, 1958, pp. 347–348; Vishnevsky, op. cit., p. 598; Bogdanov-Berezovsky, V Gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny, Leningrad, 1959, p. 146.) General Friedrich Ferch was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. In 1955 he was turned over to Western Germany and soon thereafter released, (Istoriya VOVSS, Vol. III, p. 128.)
2 N.Z., p. 427. Barbashin gives the date as December 2. Moscow ordered preparations completed by December 31. (Barbashin, op. cit., p. 237.)
3 Admiral Kuznetsov, who heartily hated both Mekhlis and the other police general, G. I. Kulik, characterized Mekhlis as “a most unsuitable man for the role of representative of the center at the front. Possessed of wide authority, he always tried to supersede the commander and do everything his own way, but at the same time taking no responsibility for the outcome of the military operation.” This trait was first noted during the winter war with Finland in 1939–40. Mekhlis was sent to the Ninth Soviet Army as Stalin’s representative. Mekhlis removed dozens of officers and when the 44th Division fell into Finnish encirclement, demanded that its commander, A. I. Vinogradov, be shot. Vinogradov was arrested but escaped execution. At the post-mortem on the Finnish war held in April, 1940, Stalin told Mekhlis, according to Kuznetsov, “You, being right on the spot, had the habit of depositing the command in your pocket and doing with it as you pleased.” Mekhlis took this as a compliment, Kuznetsov contends, and during World War II continued to act in this style. In the first few months of war Mekhlis headed the Army political propaganda organ and was described by an associate, Lev Kopilev, as “a man remarkably energetic, remarkably vigorous and even more decisive but even less competent, the master of varied but superficial knowledge and self-confident to the point of willfulness.” Mekhlis was removed from his post as Deputy Commissar of Defense, reduced in rank and reprimanded by Stalin for his role in the Soviet loss of the Crimea in the spring of 1942. Mekhlis, typically, sought to shift blame to the army and demanded that a new general be appointed. Stalin accused him of wanting a “Hindenburg” to command the Soviet troops. Moscow had no Hindenburgs at its disposal, Stalin said, and chargéd that Mekhlis was just trying to evade responsibility for his errors. He was formally reprimanded for crude interference in the functions of the front commander and for giving orders which did not conform to the military situation. Mekhlis tried to implicate Naval Commander A. S. Frolov of the Kerch naval base in the disaster and threatened to have Frolov shot if Admiral Kuznetsov did not bring him up on summary court-martial. Admiral Kuznetsov refused. Despite all this, Mekhlis was back in Stalin’s favor within a few months and was named Political Commissar to the Bryansk front in 1943, serving with General I. V. Boldin, one of the ablest Soviet commanders. Soviet planes carried out an attack on advanced German positions on August 24, 1943. Mekhlis became convinced the planes were attacking Soviet, not Nazi, lines. He ordered the squadron grounded and sent before a military tribunal for execution. Only the intervention of an officer who had witnessed the successful air attack on the Nazi lines saved the airmen. (Shtemenko, op. cit., pp. 18, 50, 55, Kuznetsov,Nakanune, pp. 243–244; VOVSS, p. 156; Lev Kopolev, in Literaturnoye Nasledstvo Sovetskikh Pisatelei Na Frontakh Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny, Vol. I, p. 535; A. P. Teremov, Pylayushchiye Berega, Moscow, 1965, p. 47.)
4 Marshal Zhukov’s name has vanished from most Soviet accounts of the battle. Marshal Meretskov, with whom Zhukov worked, has written several extensive versions without ever mentioning his name—another instance of Soviet military politics.
5 General Dukhanov says the first meetings occurred at 11:30 A.M. and 11:45 AM at Workers’ Settlements No. 1 and No. 5 respectively. (Dukhanov, Zvezda, No. 1, January, 1964, p. 156.) Gankevich says the meeting occurred at Settlement No. 1 at 10:30 and at No. 5 at 11:45 AM (Gankevich, op. cit., p. 120.) Several Soviet sources, including N.Z., treat the meeting at Settlement No. 5 as the first. Major Melkoyan of Leningrad’s 123rd Rifles and Major Melnikov of Volkhov’s 372nd drew up an “Act” to commemorate their meeting. They timed it at 9:30 A.M., signed the document and stamped it with the official stamps of the 123rd and 372nd divisions. (Istoriya VOVSS, Vol. Ill, pp. 138-139.)
6 The Germans lost 13,000 killed, 1,250 in prisoners, in the operation. General Fedyu-ninsky, General Meretskov’s deputy, was seriously wounded by mortar fire January 20, and General Bolotnikov, Leningrad front armored commander, was killed January 22. (Fedyuninsky, op. cit., pp. 140–142.)
7 One version claims the train brought a load of food from Chelyabinsk. (N.Z., p. 438.)