NOT MUCH WAS CHANGED IN LENINGRAD BY THE JANUARY victory, not as much as the Leningrad survivors had hoped. Danger stayed at their sides. The hardships did not vanish, and the city lived in fear that its tenuous connection with the “mainland” might be broken at any moment.
That connection was maintained through what quickly came to be called “the corridor of death"—a narrow strip of territory at Shlisselburg where the German guns were only five hundred yards distant. At any moment Leningrad’s link with the rest of Russia might be severed. In fact, only seventy-six trains managed to slip through the corridor of death in February, and the record in March was little better. Again and again heavy German artillery shells blasted the trackage into tangles of torn rails. The guns were mounted on the Sinyavino Heights in full view of the railroad tracks. In eleven months the Germans cut the railroad twelve hundred times. Often the trains could not make their way through for days. Usually passage was attempted at night, running blacked out without signal lights. Not until Special Engine Column No. 48, an elite military rail unit, was set up to handle operations through the corridor of death did service begin to improve. In the end 4,500,000 tons of freight were delivered to Leningrad in 1943, largely in the last months of the year. The cost in lives was heavy.
The danger which hung over the city lay in the fact that the Nazis hoped to close the narrow corridor and reimpose a full blockade. Not for a moment did this thought leave the minds of General Govorov and Party Secretary Zhdanov. The Germans, to compensate for being driven back a few miles, shelled Leningrad savagely. Not since September 4, 1941, when the first German long-range guns went into action at Tosno, had the shelling been so deadly.
There was no reason for Leningrad to relax. German strength had shown no sign of weakening, despite the great Russian victory at Stalingrad in January, 1943, in which the Nazi Sixth Army under Field Marshal von Paulus had been shattered with the loss of 300,000 German troops. The Germans still stood on the Pulkovo Heights, where they could see with unaided eyes the Admiralty spire and the upward thrusting needle of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They held all Leningrad’s environs, all the Baltic littoral, all the ancient lands of Novgorod, all Central Russia to within 130 miles of Moscow itself, all the rich lands of the Black Earth belt, all the Ukraine and the Black Sea’s northern shores. Allied operations were moving ahead in Africa, but there was still no second front in Europe. Supplies from the United States to the Soviet Union were still only a trickle. The tide was slowly turning against Hitler, but this was hardly evident to the grim populace of Leningrad.
The city now bore little resemblance to the majestic capital of prewar 1941. It was more like that Petersburg of which Turgenev wrote: “. . . these empty, wide, gray streets, these gray-white, yellow-gray, gray-pink peeling plaster houses with their deep-set windows—that is our Northern Palmyra. Everything visible from all sides, everything clear, frighteningly sharp and clear, and all sadly sleeping.” The city did not sleep, but it was empty. There were not many more people walking the streets of Leningrad than walked the streets of Turgenev’s Petersburg in i860 or 1870.
The people were somnambulant, numb from the terrible events which they had survived, uncertain of what lay ahead. The January victory affected their psychology more than their physical beings. The ration was increased to 700 grams of bread a day, almost a loaf and a half, on February 22. That was for workers in heavy industry. The ration for other workers was 600 grams, for employees 500 and for dependents and children 400. No one got fat. Supplies were uncertain. Meat and butter were seldom available. Not until well into 1943 did American canned butter, Spam, powdered eggs, powdered milk and sugar appear. Leningraders were grateful, although as they said, “Russian sugar is sweeter and Russian butter tastes better.”
The city looked forward to celebrating May Day, 1943, as the first real holiday since the outbreak of war. But it was wet, cold, windy and snowy. The snow began in early morning and continued for hours—clinging, water-laden snow that turned the Champs de Mars, the Summer Gardens and the Smolny grounds into a fairyland of dark columns and snow-bowed branches. There was no parade in Palace Square, but factory workers were given the day off—their first free day since June 22, 1941, except for the winter of 1941–42 when hardly a factory operated for lack of fuel, lack of electricity and the illness and death of the working force. Food stores stayed open, and there was no time off for factories which were engaged in continuous operations, for power and water stations and communications facilities.
Red flags and bunting decorated the city, along with hundreds of badly painted portraits of Stalin and Zhdanov—more of Zhdanov than of Stalin. There were speeches on the radio. Mayor Peter Popkov spoke. So did Admiral Tributs, commander of the Baltic Fleet, and General Govorov. Govorov declared that the winter offensive had smashed eight German divisions and cost the enemy 100,000 men. But he warned that German reserves were pouring in and “the storming of the city may occur at any moment.”
The imminence of a new German attack was much in Soviet minds. Party Secretary Zhdanov met a few days later in Smolny with top Party workers. He demanded greater attention to AA defenses and workers battalions. He warned all that Leningrad “is a military city.”
The warnings of Govorov and Zhdanov were hardly needed. The Germans delivered their own reminder on May Day. There had been heavy shelling of the city for several days, so heavy that the hearing in Vera Inber’s right ear was affected. At 9 A.M. on May Day she was awakened by the rocking of her apartment building. Eight heavy shells, one after the other, landed in the vicinity. Probably, she thought, they were fired from railroad guns. Vishnevsky also attributed the shelling to railroad guns. Everyone in Leningrad had become a specialist in heavy armament by this time.
One shell hit a trolleycar on the Nevsky, killing almost all the passengers. Another hit the public library. The shelling went on all day at irregular intervals. Each time the German guns opened up, Soviet counterbattery fire suppressed them.
In the evening Vsevolod Vishnevsky, his wife and Vsevolod Azarov went for a walk in the brooding quiet. The flags fluttered in the occasional wind. They had a holiday meal—a few drinks of vodka, some soup with meat, rice pastries, fruit compote and tea. (“Luxury!” was Vishnevsky’s comment.) Later he read Tolstoy’s Childhood and Youth, drank a cup of coffee with his wife and talked about the psychology of citizens of a besieged city, the differences in feeling between those in the city and those in the trenches.
The threat of a new German frontal assault hung over Leningrad. The Nazis were still strong, and just ahead lay the terrible Battle of Kursk, possibly the bloodiest of the war. General Govorov was cautious as to what summer might bring. On June 3 he suggested that the “worst is behind us. In 1941 we stopped the Germans; in 1942 we didn’t give them a yard; in 1943 we began to break the blockade, and it is our duty to carry the task to a victorious end.”
He spoke-these words at Smolny at a session of the Leningrad City Council attended by Party Secretaries Zhdanov and Kuznetsov as well as Admiral Tributs. The occasion was the presentation of the first medals “For the Defense of Leningrad.” The medals were authorized for everyone who had survived the Leningrad siege. Mayor Peter Popkov handed them out. No. 40 went to Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, the composer. He noted that they were handed out alphabetically. His initial being the second in the alphabet, he got a low number. Vsevolod Vishnevsky got No. 98. (“In the first hundred!” he commented.)
Vera Inber got her medal on June 8 along with other writers, intellectuals and scientists. She was so moved she was unable to say a word. “This little metal disk joins to itself all of Leningrad,” she noted.1
The summer drifted along. The lilacs this year, Vera Inber noticed, were extraordinary. She could not remember their being so heavy, so fragrant, so numerous. Birdcherry was everywhere. Leningrad was supposed to average thirty-five cloudless days a year. It seemed as though a new record for sunshine might be set this summer. Despite severe difficulties some artistic and scientific institutions trickled back. The Bolshoi Drama Theater was permitted to come for a temporary visit at the end of March. It stayed on and in June was permitted to resume permanent operations. The Musical Comedy Theater put five new productions into rehearsal. The stadium reopened May 30 for a summer football season (won by the Dynamo Club). The second anniversary of war, June 22, the 661st day of the siege, passed almost without notice. Vishnevsky remarked in his diary that it was the summer solstice—eighteen hours and fifty-two minutes long. He spent most of the day arguing with members of the Military Council about his new play, The Walls of Leningrad. They wanted him to eliminate “negative characters.” Vishnevsky told his critics, “I am sorry to see this bureaucratic cautiousness and calculation. Much is being forgotten and has been forgotten about the fall of 1941. This play is entirely authentic and taken from life.”
The process of forgetting, as Vishnevsky was to learn, had only begun. Early in the year a new House of Scientists had been set up by the City Party organization. It set out to produce a book on the role of Leningrad scientists in the days of the war and blockade. The printer’s proofs of this work still lie in the archives of the Leningrad Public Library. Its publication was never permitted.
Late July and August brought the worst shelling of the war to Leningrad. Never had Vera Inber experienced so terrifying a day as July 24. The Germans fired in short bursts. One shell hit an overloaded streetcar on the Liteiny Bridge. Vera Inber saw from her window an ordinary pickup truck arrive at the hospital filled with wounded. An hour later another truck arrived, filled with bodies. She saw an exposed shinbone poking out from under the canvas. The admitting director took one look at the truck’s load and ordered it to the morgue. That evening Vera Inber talked with a surgeon. The summer’s problems were bad, but those of the winter of 1942 had been worse. Then, he recalled, when he was doing an operation, the blood and pus froze on his hands, covering them like gloves. Now he had more wounded to care for, but primitive sanitary conditions had been restored to the hospital.
Vera Inber found the new shelling worse to endure than the trials of the winter of 1941–42. She began to be afraid—involuntarily afraid—of going out on the street. The whine of shells filled the air. “Already the first yellow leaves lie on the asphalt,” she noted August 10. “Day after day the threatening monotone of whining shells. (Even right now.) I can’t help it. I’m afraid to go on the street. And not only me. It is very hard.” Even Vsevolod Vishnevsky found his optimism deserting him. His diary entries noted how tired he was, how difficult to keep up his spirits. “I feel tired and washed out,” he wrote September 1. “It’s from the blockade. We’ve got to break the blockade—completely—and we are falling behind.”
The shelling was so heavy that the square in front of the Finland Station began to be called “the valley of death” and the Liteiny Bridge was christened “the devil’s bridge.” Extraordinary steps were ordered to reduce casualties. Trains were rerouted from the Finland Station to the Piskarevsky and Kush-elevka stations. The Aurora and Molodezhny movie houses were closed. Changes were made in 132 streetcar stops, hours were revised for movies and theaters, special sandbagging was ordered at ninety stores and eight establishments were moved. In street after street new signs in white and blue paint went up: “Citizens: In case of shelling this side of the street is the most dangerous.” The July, 1943, casualties were 210 killed and 921 wounded. There was serious reason to believe that the Germans had infiltrated agents who were giving their gunners corrections on their fire. Colonel N. N. Zhdanov was placed in chargé of a special counterbattery offensive to try to bring the Nazi guns under control.
Rumors swept Leningrad that the war would be over September 15. Vishnevsky, typically, blamed the rumors on Nazi agents. An elderly writer told him that the poet Nikolai Tikhonov had predicted the war would last at least another year. What was Vishnevsky’s opinion? Vishnevsky hedged. The war would go on through the winter, but it might be shortened “if our allies fight.” (This was at the height of the Soviet campaign for a second front.) Vishnevsky’s friend persisted. Was there any chance of the shelling coming to an end? Vishnevsky said, accurately, that there was no hope until the blockade was finally lifted. The German shelling remained at a very high level. In September, 11,394 shells fell in the city, 124 persons were killed, 468 wounded. For the first time since the start of the war the artillery barrage had become the chief concern of people. There were days when the life of the city was brought almost to a halt. Even so, Luknitsky noticed, the militia girls who had replaced regular police in directing traffic stayed on the job, calm, lively and jolly. Not infrequently they were wounded or killed by shell fragments. Another girl would promptly fill the spot. Men and women were better dressed, men mostly in uniform. But women looked much prettier, their summer clothes bright and attractive. Everyone again had a garden plot. In the Champs de Mars on benches surrounded by patches of potatoes and turnips, well-dressed (but callus-handed) ladies sat in the sunshine reading Shakespeare, the stories of Jack London or the newest issue of the literary journal Oktyabr. Nikolai Chukovsky believed that never in history had Leningrad been so beautiful as in the summer of 1943. The emptiness of the city emphasized for him its unbelievable beauty. Even the ruins seemed to possess an unearthly quality, particularly when the northern lights played across the sky and shed their curious flat colors on the gardens, courtyards and squares.
The city was still filled with empty apartments, but a commission had begun to inspect them, carefully noting the contents and attempting to ascertain whether the owner was dead, evacuated or serving at the front. People put carpets down on their floors, pictures back on the walls. A woman told Luknitsky, “I don’t want to live any longer like a pig. I don’t know whether I’ll survive the next hour, but right now I am going to live like a human being.” Schools slowly resumed—374 had opened before the end of the year—but industrial life barely flickered. Many plants produced only 5 or 10 percent of prewar output, and the number of factory workers was five times less than in 1940. Leningrad was still a front-line city.
In the worst days of blockade, in February, 1942, when the city lay dark, frozen, starving and near death, the City Council had set its surviving architects, among them Academician Nikolsky in the cellar of the Hermitage, to drafting plans for the future Leningrad—not just the reconstruction of Leningrad but what came to be called the Restoration, the Renaissance of the Northern Palmyra. Created by men working without light, without heat, with mittened hands, the plans gradually took shape—the dream of the new Leningrad, a city that would combine the old grandeur of imperial Petersburg with the new greatness of Soviet Leningrad. On January 19, 1943, the day after the breakthrough, the City Council ordered the plans put into action. At first, of course, only repairs could be considered (and in the summer of 1943 the German bombardment was destroying Leningrad more rapidly than it could be rebuilt). Indeed, in all of 1943 only eight buildings and 60,000 square feet of housing were rehabilitated. But on October 14 the City Council ordered ready by January 1 a complete architectural and technical design for a new Leningrad which would transform the city into a monument of contemporary technology, appearance and comfort.
People began to count on change, on better times. Vera Inber overheard a remark: “In such a time humor has to be kept on a leash.” She wondered about that. So did others. Leningrad had begun to tell jokes—not very good jokes, but jokes. Vishnevsky scribbled them in his diary:
Two German soldiers talking:
Fritz: “How would you like to fight?”
Hans: “I’d like to be a German soldier with a Russian general, British arms and American rations.”
“Why are you fighting?”
Hitler: “For living space.”
Stalin: “Because we were attacked.”
Churchill: “Who told you we are fighting?”
Vera Inber jotted down a couple of children’s blockade remarks:
Child: “Mama,
what’s ham?”
The mother explained.
Child: “And has anyone ever tasted it?”
A little girl to her mother: “Mama, what’s a giant and what kind of a ration does he get?”
Vissarion Sayanov put down some exchanges:
“Where are you from?”
“I’m a Leningrader from Tambov.”
A front soldier: “Yesterday I suddenly saw a crow fly out of some bushes on the other bank. I thought there must be Germans there so I gave a shot and a wolf ran out.”
“There are a lot of animals around.”
“Yes, especially two-legged ones.”
Leningrad was coming to itself again. As Vishnevsky put it: “The Germans now are just a hindrance. The people have begun to plan the future.”
But there were other aspects of Soviet life, not so pleasant, that once again came to the fore: the sharp literary and political quarrels, the inner tensions which so often turned Soviet life into agony.
During the worst days almost all of this had vanished. Leningrad had become one family. Again and again the diarists of Leningrad, the survivors, spoke of this feeling. As seventeen-year-old Zina Vorozheikina, a student in the tenth grade, put it: “All of us Leningraders are one family, baptized by the monstrous blockade—one family, one in our grief, one in our experience, one in our hopes and expectations.” Some even suggested that when the war ended Leningrad boys should marry only Leningrad girls—they had become a special breed, a special people.
But the blockade did not end the political and social processes of Soviet life. Vishnevsky noted that even so fine a woman as Vera Inber could not resist delicately “sticking a knife in the ribs” of her fellow poet, Olga Berg-golts, for writing “minor, sad, old-fashioned” poems about the blockade.
In late October Olga Berggolts and Georgi Makogonenko, one of the Radio Leningrad staff who had sat up all through the night of January 12, 1942, outlining their projected book, Leningrad Speaking, presented to the Leningrad Writers Union a scenario for a film about the Leningrad siege. Vishnevsky found it observant, precise, sincere, pure. It was a story which centered about Young Communists who helped the people in their frozen, bleak, starvation-haunted flats during the winter of 1941–42.
“But,” wondered Vishnevsky, “can the cinema convey the truth about Leningrad, about its people, about their spirit?”
The question was pertinent. The film, in fact, suffered the same fate as Leningrad Speaking. It never saw the light of day.
Vishnevsky himself was preoccupied with his play about the siege, The Walls of Leningrad. He had begun work on it late in 1942 and telegraphed his close friend Aleksandr Tairov, director of Moscow’s Kamerny Theater,2 January 2, 1943, that he was “writing a big play.” He gave a first reading May 25, 1943, to a group of Baltic Fleet propaganda workers and the director of the Baltic Fleet Theater, L. Osipov.
On June 17 he read a new version to a group that included Nikolai Tikhonov, Vissarion Sayanov, Vera Inber, Aleksandr Zonin and some others.
He capsulized their opinions for Tairov:
Tikhonov: This is one of your strongest things ... a saga of the sailors. . . .
Inber: The play is remarkably strong and emotionally fulfilling. There will be difficulties. . . .
L. Osipov (director of the Baltic Fleet Theater): Vsevolod Vishnevsky has given us a play, very close to us, very strong. . . .
A. Zonin: The play is philosophical—the people are connected with the fate of their country, with history and not with sexual-personal themes.
Pilyugin (director of the Bolshoi Drama Theater): It is an attractive work. Like all plays of Vishnevsky, it is difficult for the theater.
By mid-August the play was put into production by the Baltic Fleet Theater. In October the chief naval propaganda commissar, the fearsome Ivan (the Terrible) Rogov, asked Vishnevsky to play down one of his chief characters, Prince Belogorsky, a naval officer who had served under the Czar and was a member of the nobility. Rogov also wanted more “discipline and heroism.”
At 6 P.M. on November 23 Vishnevsky appeared at the Vyborg House of Culture, where the play was to be performed. The cast gave him a present, a desk set and two candlesticks, made out of shell casings.
There was a full house—members of the Fleet Military Council, members of the City Council, girls from the AA batteries, sailors and friends of Vish-nevsky’s. The audience was excited. At the conclusion the curtain had to be raised eleven times in response to applause. The chief of the Leningrad Arts Committee, Boris Zagursky, congratulated Vishnevsky. Everything seemed fine. Then the director rushed to Vishnevsky pale and trembling: “The Military Council member forbids the play to be performed. In fact, he said, he strongly forbids it.”
This was Vice Admiral N. K. Smirnov, and his complaint was simple: Too many negative characters; the portrait of the commissar was almost a burlesque, that of Prince Belogorsky dubious; regular officers played too small a role.
As Vishnevsky commented: “In their opinion the tragic days of September, 1941, should appear on the stage in ordinary colors, all ‘cleaned up.’ To show openly the trials, the trauma, the difficulties, and how they were overcome grates on their eyes and ears. Maybe this is understandable from the point of view of 1943. Maybe it is fully understandable (?).”
What Vishnevsky meant to convey by the question mark is not clear. But he went on to recall bitterly the fatal literary wars of the 1930’s. Neither in his extended correspondence with Tairov nor in his bulging diary did he confide his innermost thoughts. Instead, he noted in his diary that he had placed an exact account of what had happened and of all the discussions in a special folder in his files. It remains there to this day, unpublished.
He struggled to control his feelings:
I am thinking intensely about the general tasks of literature, about the difficulties of the work of writers, of how practically I can determine the fate of this play. Evidently what is needed now by the situation is not philosophical argument, not a tragic painting, but simple shock, agitational messages. I understand that, but it seemed to me that this time I had written an “optimistic” tragedy. I thought all evening, all night. I must save this work—the first important play about the defense of Leningrad. I must rework and revise it.
Unable to sleep, he picked up William Shirer’s Berlin Diary and tried to read. But he could not keep his mind off his play. His telephone kept ringing, with people complimenting him, asking him when the premiere would be.
He decided to send a letter to one of the Leningrad Party secretaries, Makhanov, to enlist his support:
I have written a play on a most difficult theme . . . about one of the most tragic moments in the history of the war—about the autumn of 1941 in Leningrad. . . . This production is part of my soul, part of my heart. You had a good reaction to the play and approved its appearance in Zvezda [the magazine]. Then came a sudden turnabout. Evidently on the stage the text sounded sharper and more tragic than in the reading. The army and the fleet are on the eve of the decisive offensive on the Leningrad front, and they need some other kind of play. . . .
Vishnevsky’s appeal was fruitless. The verdict was simple: “The negative characters are clearly stronger than the positive. The former prince is a patriot and a hero. The commissar is a fool.”
As Vishnevsky bitterly commented: “Really—haven’t commissars ever been fools?”
The question was vain. The play was dead. Nothing Vishnevsky could do would revive it. Something worse was at hand. Leningrad did stand on the eve of liberation. The moment for which Vishnevsky had been waiting for nearly nine hundred days was near. But he was not to be there to witness it. On December 6 he was at the Party Bureau and got an outline of the forthcoming offensive. The news bolstered his shaken spirits. The next day he was summarily ordered to Moscow. No protest availed. He was not to see the end of the blockade. Orders were orders. Like a good soldier he made his preparations, typically noting in his diary: “Moscow! The heart of Russia, the center of the new world! I will have interviews and meetings. How has it changed in two and a half years? How will we find our home?”3
Preparations for the liberation of Leningrad had begun in September, 1943. All summer long fighting had gone on in an effort to wrest the Sinyavino Heights from the Germans. The Sixty-seventh Army attacked July 22 and was engaged until mid-September, but despite heavy losses the Russians could not dislodge the Germans. On the Central Front the Russians had defeated the Germans in the savage Battle of Kursk-Orel and had liberated Kharkov once again. German losses had been heavy, and the Soviet High Command was now planning with confidence for fall-winter offensives to drive the Nazis from central Russia and the Ukraine.
General Govorov held his first staff meeting to draw up plans for finally smashing the blockade on September 9. Two variants were drafted: Neva I and Neva II. Neva I was for use in the event the Germans, weakened on other fronts, withdrew on their own from the Leningrad area. The Stavka in Moscow warned General Govorov of this possibility, and Leningrad had similar intelligence of its own. The Germans had begun to set up defense posts at river crossings which would be used in a retreat. They were putting in mine fields and preparing to destroy bridges.
The principal effort, naturally, was devoted to Neva II. In its final version it called for a three-pronged offensive, driving from the Oranienbaum foothold, the Pulkovo Heights and in the direction of Novgorod (this attack to be carried out by General Meretskov’s Volkhov front).
The offensive would not start until winter, when the ice was hard and troops could move more easily. The Leningrad Command had long since discovered that winter was the season which gave them a natural advantage over the Germans.
General Govorov carried out a detailed inspection of the Oranienbaum position in mid-October. It would be necessary to move large quantities of troops and guns into the area, and Govorov wanted to be certain that nothing went wrong. He then met at Smolny with Admiral Tributs, the top naval command, and Party Secretaries Zhdanov and Kuznetsov. The Baltic Fleet had a major assignment—to shift secretly the Second Shock Army from Leningrad to Oranienbaum before ice hindered movement in the Neva River. It was no small task, involving 2 rifle corps, a tank brigade, 600 guns, mountains of shells and equipment. Beginning November 5, each night blacked-out caravans put out from the wharves at the Leningrad factory, Kanat, and from the naval base at Lisy Nos and landed on the Oranienbaum side without loss 30,000 troops, 47 tanks, 400 guns, 1,400 trucks, 3,000 horses and 10,000 tons of ammunition and supplies. After the ice froze, another 22,000 troops, 800 machines, 140 tanks and 380 guns were sent over.
The familiar arguments broke out between Leningrad and Moscow. Marshal Voronov was afraid that the Leningrad artillerists after three years of static defense might not be able to meet breakthrough conditions. He sent in some commanders who had distinguished themselves at Stalingrad and in the bloody summer battle at Kursk. Voronov was concerned about the Oranienbaum operation. He recommended that light artillery be employed, fearful that heavy guns could not be moved across the Gulf of Finland. He was reassured when General G. F. Odintsov, the Leningrad artillery chief, reported that 1,300 carloads of war materials had been landed on the Oranienbaum place d’armes and that, on the front as a whole, a concentration of 200 guns per kilometer had been achieved.
General Govorov urged Marshal Voronov to come to Leningrad for the offensive. “Leningrad is your native city,” Govorov said. “Come and help us with the artillery.”
This was not entirely without guile. Leningrad was trying to get more guns. Voronov was resisting. Finally, Party Secretary Zhdanov telephoned: “You are a Leningrader. You must be objective. You know our needs. We don’t even have enough revolvers.”
The argument grew sharp. Voronov declined to make more guns available. Zhdanov took the case to Stalin.4 In the end 21,600 guns were provided for the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts, more than 600 antiaircraft guns, 1,500 Katyusha rocket guns, 1,475 tanks and self-propelled guns and 1,500 planes. It was probably the greatest concentration of fire power ever assembled— more than the Russians had massed at Stalingrad.
The Leningrad and Volkhov fronts had 1,241,000 officers and men. Opposing them was Field Marshal von Kiichler’s Army Group Nord. Its strength was estimated at 741,000 men. He had 10,070 guns, 385 tanks and 370 planes, divided between the Eighteenth and Sixteenth armies.
Top Soviet commanders had been brought in to direct the principal armies. The Second Shock Army was commanded by the veteran Lieutenant General I. I. Fedyuninsky, who had repeatedly demonstrated his brilliance on the Leningrad front. The Forty-second Army, which was to drive over the Pulkovo Heights, was led by Colonel General I. I. IVkslennikov.
One frosty, sunny morning in early January, 1944, General Govorov went to the Pulkovo Heights. No square meter of the Leningrad front had seen more fighting than this bloody hill, still dominated by the wrecked buildings of the Leningrad observatory. Today the front was quiet and sparkling brilliantly under its cover of snow. Govorov clÖsely inspected the scene with his corps commander, Major General N. P. Simonyak. He visualized how it would be transformed in the first seconds of the crushing artillery barrage. He could not see the place where the Forty-second Army would meet with the Second Shock Army emerging from Oranienbaum. But he knew where it was. He knew how precisely timed the operation must be. The first objective was the recapture of Gatchina. Who held Gatchina controlled the front. Once Soviet troops had re-entered that battered town, the Germans must withdraw from Mga because they would have only one escape route left. Mga—soon it would be back in Russian hands again. Soon the terrible chapter of the Leningrad encirclement would unroll in the reverse direction. Govorov sighed. He could not think of Mga without a feeling of depression. “To Mga,” he said frankly, “my heart has never been inclined.”
He went back to his headquarters and called in his artillerymen once again. “On the tempo of our advance,” he warned, “hangs the fate of Leningrad. If we are held up, Leningrad will be subjected to such a terrible shelling that it will be impossible to stand it—so many people will be killed, so many buildings demolished.”
On January 11 a final meeting was held at Smolny. Every detail was checked. General Govorov said his men were fully ready. Long-range artillery had already begun methodically to destroy Nazi strongpoints. The air arm was carrying out intensive bombardment. There were 155,000 Communists and 115,000 Young Communists to stiffen the Leningrad front. The partisan forces in the rear of the Germans had been instructed to carry out simultaneous attacks and sabotage of rear bases, supplies and communications.
The operation was timed to start on the morning of January 14 from the Oranienbaum place d’armes. The attack from Pulkovo was to be launched January 15. The forces of General Meretskov were to attack January 14.
General Govorov flew in a light U-2 observation plane to the Oranienbaum sector to be present for the jump-off. During the night long-range bombers attacked German communications, railroads, command points. Heavy artillery at Pulkovo and Kolpino opened up to try and demolish the extraordinary reinforced steel-and-concrete firing points (often sunk two or three stories into the ground) which constituted the backbone of the Nazi defenses.
January 14 was the 867th day since the Germans had taken Mga, the 867th day that Leningrad had been cut off from normal communications with the “mainland,” the 867th day of the siege.
The tension in Smolny was almost more than nerves could bear. They were waiting for word from the commander, from General Govorov with the Second Shock Army on the Oranienbaum place (Tarmes. But the front was drenched in fog. The reconnaissance planes of the Thirteenth Air Army of Lieutenant General S. D. Rybalchenko were unable to take off. There was no correction for artillery fire. Bombing planes were grounded.5 General Govorov tried to return to Leningrad, but fog held him on the ground. Yet the Soviet forces had jumped off. The enormous concentration of guns on the place d’armes had laid down 104,000 shells on the Nazi lines in a one-hour-and-five-minute bombardment, not counting Katyusha rocket fire. The great cannon of the Baltic Fleet and the batteries at Kronstadt, Seraya Loshad and Krasnaya Gorka joined in.
The fog was so thick that General Bychevsky, the engineering chief who fought all through the Leningrad siege, was unable to see anything from the command post of General Maslennikov of the Forty-second Army at Pulkovo. But Bychevsky’s sappers were delighted. They went on clearing a path through the mine fields, invisible to the Germans. General Govorov, unable to restrain his impatience, insisted on flying back to Leningrad over the violent objection of the air commander, General M. I. Samokhoin. Years later General Odintsov, who accompanied him, still remembered vividly how they circled and circled in the fog before locating the Leningrad airfield.
The Second Shock Army made progress, despite the fog. It advanced about two miles on a six-or-seven-mile front—not brilliant but not bad. It had still not emerged, however, from the roadless marshes and wastes that lay between it and its objectives. Snow began to fall.
The night of January 14-15 was sleepless at Smolny, at Blagodatny Lane, where the Forty-second Army had its headquarters, and in the mangled outskirts that stretched from shell-torn Sheremetyev Park to Pulkovo and Sred-nyaya Rogatka. The first echelon divisions were at forward positions, ready to attack.
Everyone in Leningrad knew what was happening. The roar of artillery, the crash of bombs filled the air. For three years Leningrad had awaited this day, this shaking of the earth, this roar in the heavens.
The artillery barrage for the Pulkovo attack was timed to begin at 9:30 A.M., January 15. It was to last one hundred minutes.
Just before that hour Party Secretary Zhdanov appeared at the artillery observation post of Colonel N. N. Zhdanov. He had told him the night before: “We’re of the same family [actually they merely shared a common name]. Tomorrow I would like to be at your command point. I hope you can arrange this.”
Colonel Zhdanov was not delighted. His post was in the unfinished Palace of Soviets building, giving a good view from Ligovo to Pushkin. The Germans knew very well that there was an observation post in the building. They often showered it with fire. It would do Colonel Zhdanov no good if Party Secretary Zhdanov was killed at his post. He decided to take some precautions. He constructed a strongpoint on the ground floor, where he proposed to delay the Party Secretary for a few minutes, getting him to put on warm clothes before taking him up to the observation post by a rope lift that his soldiers had built into the unfinished elevator shaft. The delay, he calculated, would be sufficient to enable the Soviet barrage to start, after which he did not think the Germans would have time to bother with the observation post. His calculations proved correct. Zhdanov was delayed until the Soviet barrage was a few minutes under way. He was lifted up safely, watched the troops begin to move out to the German lines, and then was brought down to return to Smolny. In the course of the artillery preparation the Russians laid down 220,000 shells—not counting rocket shells—on the Nazi positions.6 Three air wings bombed the Nazi trenches and forward installations. The storm of the German “circle of steel” which Colonel General Lindemann had assured his nervous troops could never be broken had begun. In the first day the Russians drove a wedge from one to nearly three miles deep into the Nazi lines on a three-mile front. General Maslennikov was not pleased with these results. He hurled epithets and threats at his commanders, particularly Generals N. A. Trushkin of the 109th infantry and I. I. Fadeyev of the 125th, although, in the opinion of General Bychevsky, the fault lay not with the troops but with the extremely strong German fire, which had not yet been suppressed.
Aleksei Panteleyev had been evacuated from Leningrad in June, 1942. On January 8, 1944, he boarded the train to return to Leningrad. It was a quiet, pleasant ride, marred only by a busybody typist returning to her Smolny job who gave the impression that Leningrad lay in ruins. (“You lived on Vasilevsky Island? Wait till you see it! Your house was on Basseinaya? Well, if you want to know, not one stone is left on top of another.”) There was a tense moment going through the “corridor of death” at Shlisselburg, where the German guns were only a few hundred yards away. He ticked off the stations: Tikhvin . . . only the walls of the city were left . . . bullet holes everywhere . . . milk 60 rubles a pint, cranberries six rubles a glass. Volkhovstroi ... no railroad station . . . piles of rubble. Budogoshch . . . forests . . . children on the station platform ... no shell holes.
Panteleyev stayed at the Astoria. He was awakened early in the morning of the fifteenth by such thunder as he had never heard. It was the roar of thousands of cannon. It waxed and waned. It was so tremendous the chandelier began to sway and plaster fell from the walls. There was no radio. His window looking out on St. Isaac’s was frosted over. At 10 A.M. he went into the street. The thunder was titanic. The offensive had begun. He walked down the Nevsky. In a courtyard gate stood a young woman with a baby in her arms. The child was wrapped in a bright blue silk blanket and a white shawl—and, thought Panteleyev, over her head, high over her head, fly thousands of shells on their way to the German lines.
Panteleyev walked across the Anichkov Bridge. Here he had last seen Tanya Gurevich in September, 1941. She had been killed by the bomb which destroyed the Gostiny Dvor. Now on this January day he visited her sister, Rebekka Gurevich, in the Erisman Hospital. A young woman doctor at the hospital had been killed just three days earlier crossing Leo Tolstoy Square. And while Rebekka Gurevich was in the hospital, a shell exploded outside her apartment and filled it with splinters. He read in Leningradskaya Pravda the decision of the City Council to give back to the great boulevards and avenues of Leningrad their prerevolutionary names. The Nevsky (which had never been called anything else) lost its nominal name of 25th of October Street and became again the Nevsky. No longer would the signs on the Sadovaya read “3rd of July Street.” And Suvorov, Izmailovsky, Bol-shoy and all the other avenues returned to their original names. It could not, Panteleyev thought, have been done at a more appropriate moment.
The next day, the sixteenth, there was a thaw. Bad for the offensive; it slowed down the troops. The thaw continued during the night and the next day. There was rain. Panteleyev saw some pigeons outside the Nikolsky Cathedral. They were the same gentle Nikolsky pigeons which had always been there. But in February, 1942, when he had last been in the cathedral, there were no pigeons—only twenty-four bodies awaiting burial. He came to the building at the corner of Voznesensky and Yekaterinhofskaya, where the Agulyan confectionery store had been in the days of NEP in the early 1920’s. He had lived in this building for eight years. Now it was a family tomb—the tomb of the Lebedev family. There had been two old aunts, a grandmother and Tanya, the daughter, a dear, extraordinarily talented person. Now all were dead. Tanya had been expelled from the Workers’ Literary University when it was discovered that her father had been a clergyman. In the blockade the two aunts and the grandmother died. Panteleyev saw Tanya a day or two before her death. She would not eat. She handed Panteleyev a piece of fried leather. “You eat it, Aleksei Ivanovich. I don’t need it. I am going to die anyway.”
She wouldn’t take the leather back. It stuck in Panteleyev’s throat.
Another resident of the building was Grigory Belykh, Panteleyev’s collaborator in the jolly satire, The Republic of Shkid. Belykh was an early victim of Stalin’s. Why, no one knew. He died of tuberculosis in the prison hospital named for Dr. Gaaz in 1938. Even as he died in the prison hospital, Panteleyev thought, Belykh understood everything. Panteleyev and his friends wrote Stalin trying to get him released. The answer came after Belykh died. It was: No. Raya Belykh, Grigory’s wife, starved to death in this building in 1942. Panteleyev had no idea where she was buried. Her daughter Tanya had been evacuated to a children’s home, suffering from tuberculosis.
Panteleyev walked to the Kamenny Island, to the hospital where he had been taken in March, 1942, dying of dystrophy and cholera. There he had lain on a mattress on the floor for three days and nights—the mattress soaked with melting snow, the water in the carafe frozen, dark by day and dark by night, no electricity, no glass in the windows, no heat. How had he survived? Even now he could not say—possibly by sheer animal tenacity, possibly by the pitiful portions of food and the small attentions of the living corpses who served as nurses.
He spent the night of the eighteenth with his mother on Ulitsa Vosstaniya. Nearby there was a market where you could buy vodka for 300 to 350 rubles a pint, bread for 50 to 60 rubles a kilo, butter for 100 rubles for 100 grams and Belomor cigarettes for 30 rubles. A kitten cost 500 rubles. Everyone in town wanted one.
On the nineteenth the temperature dropped. The pace of the offensive picked up. When Panteleyev emerged into St. Isaac’s Square, he saw before the great cathedral a Russian woman, on her knees, praying, crossing herself, bowing her forehead to the ground in the orthodox Russian manner. People passed with their sleds loaded with wood. She did not move. Finally, she rose and walked quickly away—perhaps to work at the nearby post office.
The offensive went on. Rebekka Gurevich said she had not eaten and had hardly slept, so many wounded were pouring in. “Soon Leningrad will be part of the mainland,” one boy said as he awaited an amputation. The great warships on the Neva were silent. Possibly the Germans had been driven beyond their range.
At the Kuznetsky market Panteleyev found potatoes on sale at 65 rubles a kilo and felt boots for 3,500 rubles (the same kind the cannibals sold in the Haymarket two years earlier). There were also tobacco, cigarettes (only Belomors), flashlights, soap, meat, candy, milk and tangerines. Most of the sellers were war veterans, many of them crippled, many of them drunk, most of them quarrelsome. A rumor was going around the city that once the blockade was lifted all of Leningrad would be sent to rest homes for two months.
By January 22 reports said that the Germans were retreating in great disorder. Soviet troops were said to be having difficulty keeping up with them.
On January 27 at 8 P.M., over the sword point of the Admiralty, over the great dome of St. Isaac’s, over the broad expanse of Palace Square, over the broken buildings of Pulkovo, the dilapidated machine shops of the Kirov works, the battered battleships still standing in the Neva, roared a shower of golden arrows, a flaming stream of red, white and blue rockets. It was a salute from 324 cannon marking the liberation of Leningrad, the end of the blockade, the victory of the armies of Generals Govorov and Merets-kov. After 880 days the siege of Leningrad, the longest ever endured by a modern city, had come to an end.7
Panteleyev boarded his return train for Moscow two hours later. Truth to tell, he thought, the salute was not up to Moscow standards. Not enough guns. Too many were still firing on the Germans. But that did not make any difference. That evening he had shared a glass of vodka with Mikhail Ar-sentyevich, the janitor of his mother’s old building on Ulitsa Vosstaniya. Before the war Mikhail Arsentyevich hadn’t drunk. He’d gotten into the habit during the siege. Forty persons in that building had died of starvation. Almost all of them were taken away on a child’s sled by the janitor. He took them to a kind of morgue set up in an old garage or stable. Gradually it filled with bodies. That was when he got into the habit of drinking.
Panteleyev leaned back in his compartment, writing in his notebook. At midnight the train halted at Malaya Vishera (where once the Second Shock Army and General Vlasov had headquarters). The car was carefully locked against “any internal enemies.” One such Panteleyev heard on the platform in the darkness. He was an invalid, a demobilized sailor. He wanted to buy a pint of vodka and a pack of cigarettes in the buffet car. But he was not permitted on the Red Arrow.
“What did I fight for?” he shouted. “I fought for my country. And I can’t buy a pack of cigarettes?”
Someone tried to quiet him, but as the train pulled out Panteleyev still heard him crying, shouting and tearing at his clothing.
Pavel Luknitsky was with the advancing troops at Rybatskoye on the evening of January 27. He had gone up through the ruined suburbs. Earlier he had stood outside the shell of Peterhof, had seen the arctic precipice which the great cascade of fountains had become, had seen the gaping hole where once Samson rested among the fountains, had stumbled through the dugouts and gun emplacements on the terraces leading down to the Baltic Sea. He and the poet Aleksandr Prokofyev stood beside the ruined cascade when Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov, Mayor Peter Popkov and other high officials and generals arrived to inspect the damage.
“We will not rebuild it,” Popkov said. “We will level it all.”
Luknitsky interjected: “No, Peter Sergeyevich. We must preserve it. For all time.”
Many who saw the ruins agreed with Luknitsky that they should be preserved as an eternal reminder of German barbarity.8
Luknitsky was with the Soviet troops who entered Pushkin. The façade of the great Catherine Palace was intact. But inside the building was a ruin. The great hall was gone. So was the amber room. The amber had vanished, along with it the parquet floor of amaranth, rosewood and mahogany. The Zubovsky wing had been turned into a barracks for the Spanish Blue Division. Under the great Cameron Gallery a 500-pound bomb had been placed. Fortunately, it had not gone off. The Half-Moon where Popov and his wife played piano duets had been smashed by shellfire. Just beyond the Half-Moon stood a great linden tree under which Konstantin Fedin and Popov had talked not long before the Germans entered Pushkin. As Luknitsky stood, dazed by the sight, a Red Army officer came up and directed his attention to four great hooks which swayed from a limb of the tree. “That’s where the Nazis hanged their victims here in Pushkin,” he said. “We cut down four bodies which we found there.”
Vera Inber found it impossible to write about the end of the siege. On the night of January 27 she put down in her diary: “The greatest event in the life of Leningrad: full liberation from blockade. And I, a professional writer, have no words for it. I simply say: Leningrad is free. And that is all.”
Olga Berggolts visited Peterhof and Pushkin. She wrote a brief poem:
Again from the black dust, from the place
Of death and ashes, will arise the garden as before.
So it will be. I firmly believe in miracles.
You gave me that belief, my Leningrad.
It was quiet in Leningrad now, Olga Berggolts noted. Only a few days ago, as recently as January 23, shells had fallen in the city. Now it was so still that it was hard to believe.
“In Leningrad it is quiet,” she wrote.
And on the sunny side of the Nevsky, the “most dangerous side,” children are walking. Children in our city now can peacefully walk on the sunny side. . . . And can quietly live in rooms letting on the sunny side. And can even sleep soundly at night, knowing that no one will kill them, and awake in the quiet, quiet sunrise alive and healthy.
She remembered how the workers of the old Putilov factory, the Kirov works, had said in September, 1941: “Soon death will be more afraid of us than we of death.” Now, she thought, it was finally clear. It was not Leningrad which had been frightened by death. It was death which had been frightened by Leningrad.
The long ordeal, the ordeal of the nine hundred days, was over. Or so it seemed on the evening of January 27, 1944.
1 A rumor went around Leningrad that only soldiers and “the specially chosen” would get medals. Vishnevsky wrote a story which was published in Leningradskaya Pravda July 4, emphasizing that all Leningraders who had been in the city during the siege would be so honored. (Vishnevsky,Sobrannye Sochineniya, Vol. 3, p. 246.)
2 Tairov’s Kamerny Theater was suspended in 1950 after a long period of harassment by the literary dictators of the late Stalin era.
3 Vishnevsky and his wife left for Moscow December 9. He carried the manuscript of The Walls of Leningrad with him. His wife had made a scale drawing of the stage settings. Vishnevsky, against his violent protest, was compelled to take a medical examination and go to a convalescent home because of his “nervous condition.” He did not leave Moscow to return to Leningrad until March 5, 1944. In the interval he revised and watered down The Walls of Leningrad. It was viewed by Rogov, the iron naval commissar, June 30, 1944, and finally publicly presented in Moscow August 21. The original version has never been published. (Anisimov, Literaturnoye Nasledstvo Sovetskikh Pisatelei Na Frontakh Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny, Vol. II, pp. 239-240; Vishnevsky,Sobrannye Sochineniya, Vol. Ill, pp. 458 et seq.)
4 The rows between Stalin, the Stavka, the Politburo and the generals grew more savage as the war advanced. Stalin intervened in the most trivial decisions. If an antiaircraft unit was to be moved, he would insist, “Who will take responsibility if the German planes attack this objective?” No one could guarantee anything in war and if, as was often the case, a man like Marshal Voronov assumed responsibility, Stalin could have his head if something went wrong. If Stalin gave an order, it did not mean that Malenkov or Beria would carry it out. One day Stalin ordered Malenkov and Beria to give Marshal Voronov 900 trucks for a sudden troop movement. Later Beria said, “I’ll give you 400 machines and this conversation is finished!” Only when Voronov threatened to go back to Stalin did he get the 900 trucks. The common penalty with which Stalin threatened his associates and with which they threatened each other was death—execution by the firing squad. (Voronov, Istoriya SSSR, No. 3, March, 1965, pp. 9 et seq.)
5 Only 109 planes were able to participate in the preattack strike because of the bad weather. (Barbashin, op. cit., p. 331.)
6 The Volkhov artillery preparation laid down 100,300 shells. (N.Z., p. 561.)
7 The length of the siege is sometimes calculated at 882 days (from August 28, 1941, when rail communications via Mga were cut) or at 872 days (from the fall of Shlissel-burg, September 8, 1941). The 880 days is calculated from August 30, 1941, the date of the fall of Mga.
8 A decision was made almost immediately to restore Peterhof and all the ruined imperial monuments. Years of labor and millions of rubles have gone into the effort, not yet completed.