Russia at war 1941-1945

rifles?" "Very well, I shall," said Zhukov. "But you, too, do your stuff."

Siyazov went on phoning hour by hour. The 999th regiment had been fighting for

seventeen hours when another phone call came. An overjoyed excited Siyazov

reported: "Comrade Commander, Vedenin (the Regiment's commander) has just

phoned to say that his men and the German tanks have joined up. Traffic may be

resumed along the Tula-Moscow highway."

[Boldin, op. cit., pp. 184-5.]

At Tula, December 3 turned out to be the most critical day; at most other sectors of the front, however, the Germans had been virtually stopped about a week earlier, and already preparations were in full progress for the Russian counter-offensive which was to start on the 6th.

Towards the middle of their second offensive against Moscow, the Germans were

beginning to suffer from the cold. A little over a week after Guderian had bitterly

complained that he couldn't move his tanks because of the mud and was hoping for an

early frost, which would make it easier to advance on Moscow, he started to complain equally bitterly about the frost for which he had longed. On November 6 he wrote:

It is miserable for the troops and a great pity that the enemy should thus gain time while our plans are postponed until the winter is more and more advanced. It all

makes me very sad... The unique chance of striking a single great blow is fading

more and more. How things will turn out, God only knows.

And then he said that, on November 7, "we suffered our first severe cases of frostbite".

By November 17 he sounded even more downcast:

We are only nearing our final objective step by step in this icy cold and with all the troops suffering from this appalling supply situation. The difficulties of supplying us by railroad are constantly increasing... Without fuel, our trucks can't move... Yet our troops are fighting with wonderful endurance despite all these handicaps... I am thankful that our men are such good soldiers.

It was all most distressing. As he later wrote:

The 1941 harvest had been a rich one throughout the country, and there was no

shortage of cattle. (But) as a result of our wretched rail communications only a

small amount of food could be sent to Germany from the area of the Second Panzer

Army.

[Guderian, op. cit., pp. 246-9. Here is also to be found the much more dubious story about the wonderfully good care the Germans were taking to supply the Russian civilians at Orel and elsewhere with food! As we shall later see, Orel suffered from an appalling famine in the winter of 1941-2 under Guderian's tender care. See p. 690.]

On November 17, we learned that Siberian troops had appeared ... and that more

were arriving by rail at Riazan and Kolomna. The 112th Infantry Division made

contact with these new Siberian troops. Since enemy tanks were attacking

simultaneously... the weakened troops could not manage this fresh enemy. Before

judging their performance it should be borne in mind that each regiment had

already lost some 500 men from frostbite, that, as a result of the cold, the machine-guns were no longer able to fire and that our 37-mm. antitank gun had proved

ineffective against the Russian T-34 tanks. The result of all this was a panic... This was the first time that such a thing had occurred during the Russian campaign...

The battle-worthiness of our infantry was at an end...

For all that, Guderian continued to attack Tula, and also records the fact that his troops did, at one moment, cut the Tula-Moscow highway as well as the Tula-Moscow railway;

but it is clear from his story that something went wrong—though he does not say

anything except that "the strength of the troops was exhausted, as was their supply of fuel."

All subsequent attacks on Tula failed, largely, according to Guderian, for the same

reasons, and because on December 4 the thermometer had dropped to minus 31°C., and

on the 5th to minus 68° (sic). This is a physical impossibility, and must be regarded, it seems, as a Freudian lapse, betraying Guderian's urge to blame everything on the

weather!

The Russians, while denying that it was exceptionally cold in November, agree that it was very cold indeed in December; what they very rightly point out is that it is a stupid fallacy to imagine that Russian soldiers do hot suffer, like anybody else, from extreme cold! What they do say, however, is that the Soviet troops had far better winter clothing than the Germans:

General Blumentritt bitterly admits that the German soldiers were destined to

spend their first winter in Russia fighting heavily, and with nothing to wear but summer clothes, overcoats and blankets. At the same time, according to him, "most of the Russian effectives were well supplied with short fur jackets, padded jackets

(telogreiki), felt boots (valenki) and fur hats with ear-flaps. They also had fur gloves, mittens and warm underwear." We can only agree with these lamentations of the beaten Nazi general. The facts he mentions merely show... that the Soviet High

Command proved more farsighted than the German High Command... For the first

time in World War II the Nazi Army was passing through a severe crisis. The Nazi

generals were deeply discouraged by the enormous losses their troops had suffered, and by their failure to end the war against the Soviet Union in 1941. All their hopes of warm, comfortable billets in Moscow had gone up in smoke.. .

[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 268.]

The almost astronomical figures of German losses quoted at the time for obvious

propaganda purposes by both Stalin and the Sovinformbureau communiqués are not

repeated in present-day Soviet histories of the War. In the course of the second German offensive against Moscow (November 16 to December 5), says the History, the German losses were: 55,000 dead, over 100,000 wounded and frostbitten, 777 tanks, 297 guns and mortars, 244 machine-guns, over 500 tommy-guns which is a reasonable estimate, not

greatly differing from the losses suggested, for instance, by Guderian.

[Ibid., p. 265.]

The total German losses for the first five months of the war are now put not at Stalin's four and a half million, but at 750,000, not counting the losses of Germany's allies. This figure is even slightly lower than that given by the Germans themselves. As Hillgruber and Jacobsen say: "There is no doubt that German losses were very high during the first phase of the Russian campaign, especially during the Battle of Moscow... The total losses of the German army in the east were, up to December 10, 1941 (not counting the sick), 775,078 men (roughly, 24.22 per cent of the eastern armies which, on the average,

totalled 3.2 million men). According to Halder's Diary the losses were as follows (in round figures) up to the second half of the second Moscow offensive:

Total up to 31 July 213,000 men

Total up to 3 August 242,000 men

Total up to 30 September 551,000 men

Total up to 6 November 686,000 men

Total up to 13 November 700,000 men

Total up to 23 November 734,000 men

Total up to 26 November 743,000 men

Of these nearly 200,000 were dead, including 8,000 officers.

As against this, the German authors glumly remark, 156,000 was the total of the German losses (of whom, some 30,000 dead) during the whole of the Western campaign in 1940!

[ B. S. Telpukhovsky, op. cit., German edition, footnote on p. 93.]

Chapter XII THE MOSCOW COUNTER-OFFENSIVE

In preparing for its winter counter-offensive, the Soviet High Command had a minimum and a maximum programme.

[As is implied in IVOVSS]

The minimum programme was to restore communications with blockaded Leningrad, to

lift the threat hanging over Moscow, and to close the Germans' access to the Caucasus.

The maximum programme was to break the Leningrad blockade, to encircle the Germans

between Moscow and Smolensk and to recapture the Donbas and the Crimea. As things

turned out, even the minimum programme was only partly carried out: Rostov, the

"padlock of the Caucasus" had been liberated by the Russians at the end of November, and the Germans were pushed back to the Mius line, but apart from a local offensive in the Donbas, later in the winter, which recaptured a small salient including Barvenkovo and Lozovaya, the Russians got no further. In the Crimea, Sebastopol was holding out, but the Russian landing on December 26 on the Kerch Peninsula in the Eastern Crimea

was to end in disaster in the following spring. On the Leningrad front the recapture of Tikhvin on December 9 alleviated Leningrad's supply position considerably. But the land blockade as such continued. The Russian advance in the Moscow area was more

spectacular, yet despite the liberation of large territories—one of the Russian thrusts, for instance, went nearly all the way to Velikie Luki, a matter of about 200 miles—the

Germans succeeded in holding the Rzhev-Gzhatsk-Viazma triangle of fortified hedgehog positions, less than a hundred miles west of Moscow.

It was Hitler who, against the advice of many of his generals— these advocated a major withdrawal—insisted on holding Rzhev, Viazma, Yukhnov, Kaluga, Orel and Briansk;

and, with the exception of Kaluga, all these places were held. Many of the discouraged generals—among them Brauchitsch, Höppner and Guderian—were sacked, while von

Bock fell "ill". In the north, von Leeb was also relieved of his command for reasons of

"health" and was replaced by General Küchler, a more wholehearted Nazi. Hitler had been greatly disappointed by von Leeb's failure to capture Leningrad in August or

September, just as he had been incensed by von Bock's failure to capture Moscow.

Rundstedt also fell into temporary disfavour after the Russian recapture of Rostov.

The Russian counter-offensive was launched on December 5-6 along almost the whole

560 miles from Kalinin in the north to Yelets in the south, and during the very first days spectacular progress was made nearly everywhere. A characteristic of the fighting in winter conditions was the avoidance, as far as possible, of frontal attacks on the enemy's rearguard, and the formation of mobile pursuit units, calculated to cut the enemy's lines of retreat and create panic among them. Such pursuit units, comparable to the Cossacks of 1812, who mercilessly harassed the Grande Armée, were composed of tommygunners, ski troops, tanks and cavalry—notably the cavalry units under General Belov and General Dovator. But the results of these tactics often proved disappointing, and the cavalry units suffered particularly heavy casualties.

The behaviour of the Germans in this winter war varied from place to place; usually they still offered stubborn resistance, but were clearly obsessed by the fear of encirclement; thus, when by December 13 the Russians closed in on Kalinin and Klin and summoned

the German garrisons to surrender, these rejected the ultimatum, but nevertheless

hastened to pull out before it was too late—not without first, it is true, setting fire to as many buildings as possible. In other places, however, the German retreat often

degenerated into a panic flight. West of Moscow and in the Tula area, miles and miles of roads were littered with abandoned guns, lorries and tanks, deeply embedded in the snow.

The comic "Winter Fritz", wrapped up in women's shawls and feather boas stolen from the local population, and with icicles hanging from his red nose, made his first

appearance in Russian folklore.

On December 13, Sovinformbureau published its famous communiqué announcing the

failure of the German attempt to encircle Moscow, and describing the first results of the Russian counter-offensive. The newspapers published photographs of the outstanding

Soviet generals who had won the battle of Moscow: Zhukov, Lelyushenko, Kuznetsov,

Rokossovsky, Govorov, Boldin, Golikov, Belov and Vlasov, the future traitor!

By the middle of December the Red Army had advanced nearly everywhere between

twenty and forty miles, and had liberated Kalinin, Klin, Istra, Yelets, and had completely relieved Tula; in the second half of December the offensive continued, the Russians

recapturing Kaluga and Volokolamsk, where, in the main square, they found a gallows

with eight bodies hanging from it—seven men and one woman. These were allegedly

partisans whom the Germans had publicly hanged to terrorise the population.

If, on some sectors of the front the Germans were literally on the run, in others they continued to fight very stubbornly; thus, in Kaluga, one of the towns which Hitler had ordered to be held at all costs, the Germans were only driven out after several days of heavy street fighting.

True, the Germans were often handicapped by a shortage of adequate winter clothing; but the bitter cold and the deep snow did not make things easy for the Russians either. It should also be stressed that the Russians had no marked superiority, either in trained men or in equipment. According to the present-day Russian History the State Defence Committee and the Stavka had, on the eve of the Russian counter-offensive, failed, despite enormous efforts, to achieve the necessary superiority in the Moscow area, where the Germans had concentrated their most powerful army group. They still had a

superiority of 1.1:1 in men, of 1.8:1 in artillery and of 1.4:1 in tanks, while Soviet troops, both in the Kalinin and the Moscow sectors, had been weakened by the defensive battle for the capital. The available strategic reserves which were thrown in, especially in the areas of the main thrusts, helped to overcome the enemy's superiority in manpower, but were not sufficient to tip the scales, the more so as the Germans still had more tanks and guns at their disposal.

[ IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 260.]

The Red Army was very severely handicapped by a shortage in motorised transport.

There were only 8,000 trucks available on the Moscow sectors of the front, a totally inadequate number. Not even half of the required ammunition, food and other supplies could be delivered by motor transport, and many hundreds of horse-sleighs had to be

used to make up for the shortage in trucks. Although the carrying capacity of the horse-sleighs was small, they had the advantage of getting through snow-drifts more easily than heavy lorries.

The shortage of the Red Army's motor transport in 1941-2 is very striking when one

thinks of the hundreds of thousands of American trucks which were to increase so

enormously the Red Army's mobility from 1943 on—but not before.

Numerous measures were taken, despite all these difficulties, to move the Army's supply bases nearer the Front; but if the great Russian counter-offensive in the winter of 1941-2

proved in the end to be only a partial success, it was due, as we shall see, to several factors; shortage of transport, especially as the lines of communications grew longer and longer; a growing shortage of arms and ammunition; and, finally, the exhausting nature of the winter war. Before spring came, the Red Army was terribly tired. Also, the High Command had made a number of errors.

In very heavy fighting during the whole of December, and the first half of January, the Red Army had driven the Germans a considerable distance away from Moscow; but the

progress of the Russian offensive was very uneven; the northern flank had advanced

furthest west—by some 200 miles, and the southern flank by nearly as much, but due

west of Moscow itself, the Germans were clinging to their Rzhev-Gzhatsk-Viazma

springboard. The Stavka's directives of December 9 show that the Russian command was planning a vast encirclement of the German forces opposite Moscow, with one pincer

striking north of them and the other south. Hitler, on the other hand, who after the purge among his generals had assumed the supreme command himself, ordered Army Group

Mitte to defend fanatically the positions held west of Moscow, and to take no notice of the enemy breaking through on their flanks.

The Germans had suffered severe losses in the Battle of Moscow; they were fighting in unusual winter conditions, their morale was often low; nevertheless they continued to represent a formidable force.

By January 1, the Russians, drawing on their reserves, achieved equality in manpower and, on some sectors of the front, even a certain superiority in tanks and aircraft—tanks, 1.6:1, aircraft, 1.4:1 —but the Germans still had a 3:1 superiority in anti-tank weapons. In short, notwithstanding the Red Army's great successes in December and the first half of January, its superiority was, according to present-day Soviet historians, totally

insufficient for the major offensive the Soviet Supreme Command had in mind.

It was very cold in January 1942, and the heavy snowfall had made transport extremely difficult.

[Temperatures averaged minus 20° to 25 °C, (4° to 13° of frost Fahrenheit.)]

Except for a relatively small number of ski troops, the Russian troops could, in fact, move only along the roads, and not without much difficulty at that. As the Russians advanced, the difficulties of using aircraft also increased, since there were no airfields ready for use in the newly liberated areas. Yet a further set of instructions dated January 7, 1942, confirms that the Soviet High Command was still determined to break up, encircle and destroy all the German forces between Moscow and Smolensk. But as the Russians

advanced rapidly in the north, and only slowly in the centre, the line of the front had nearly doubled in length by the middle of January. On January 15, Hitler, though

resigned to abandoning some territory, gave a further order to his troops to take up strong defensive positions east of Rzhev, Viazma, Gzhatsk and Yukhnovo. Rigorous

disciplinary measures were introduced, and Haider, the Chief of Staff, issued a directive denouncing panic and bewilderment and prophesying that the Russian offensive would

soon peter out.

The Russian History now admits that the strengthening of German resistance by propaganda, disciplinary measures, and reinforcements from the west, was underrated by the Soviet High Command. Already on January 25, the Russians suffered their first major setback in failing to take Gzhatsk by storm; in the south—west of Tula—the German

resistance was stiffening as well, and on this sector of the front the Red Army came virtually to a standstill by the end of January.

But the Supreme Command still persisted with its plan for a big encirclement, and

decided to drop a large number of paratroops in the enemy rear, to cut enemy

communications and to serve as a link between the pincers which were expected to close round the Germans near Smolensk. Yet German resistance was increasing everywhere

and all Russian attempts to break through to Viazma, the nodal point in the German

defences, were doomed to failure.

In a number of places the Germans started counter-attacking. Renewed massive tank

attacks, especially in the Viazma area, produced more heroic deeds on the part of the Russians, similar to that of the Panfilov men at Volokolamsk in December. Inside a

cartridge case embedded in a tree trunk a note was found after the war written by a dying soldier, Alexander Vinogradov, who, with twelve others, had been sent to stop German tanks from advancing along the Minsk highway—

... And now there are only three of us left... We shall stand firm as long as there's any life left in us... Now I am alone, wounded in my arm and my head. The number

of tanks has increased. There are twenty-three. I shall probably die. Somebody may find my note and remember ne; I am a Russian, from Frunze. I have no parents.

Goodbye, dear friends. Your Alexander Vinogradov. 22.2.42.

It is quite clear that the Russian High Command overrated both the Russian armies'

driving force and the breakdown in the morale and organisation of the Wehrmacht after the setbacks they had suffered in December and the first part of January.

The plans to encircle and smash all the German forces between Moscow and Smolensk,

as well as to recapture Orel and Briansk proved much too ambitious. With the Germans mostly dug in, and the Russians advancing, the conditions created by a particularly harsh winter ultimately affected the Russians more than it did the Germans. Not only were

reserves in both men and equipment insufficient (industrial production of war material was, as explained before, at its lowest ebb), but what reserves were used were thrown in piecemeal. Thus, the Stavka's order that Briansk be recaptured, and reinforcements be sent to that area, diverted the Red Army from its main aim, which was to smash the

Germans in the Viazma area. The orders issued by the Stavka as late as March 20 that the Red Army should occupy a line close to Smolensk (Belyi-Dorogobuzh-Yelnya-Krasnoye,

twenty-eight miles south-west of Smolensk), that it should join up with the Russians'

units in the enemy rear, and that it should capture Gzhatsk by April 1 and Viazma about the same time, as well as Briansk, and capture Rzhev not later than April 5, turned out to be totally unrealistic.

The thaw that set in at the end of March reduced still further the Red Army's mobility; nor did the Red Army, by this time, have much air support, and its supply lines had

practically broken down. By the end of March the Russian offensive came to a complete standstill. For many months after the offensive had stopped parachutists and other troops in the enemy rear under Cavalry General Belov, and the local partisans, continued to harass German communications, but the net result of the January-March 1942 operations was bitterly disappointing after the enthusiasm caused by the Battle of Moscow proper.

[According to the Russians the bulk of the men in the Suchevka pocket did not break out until the following June.]

Russian losses were much higher than those of the Germans; the troops were worn out, and the shortage of equipment and ammunition began to be keenly felt by the middle of February. True, large areas had been liberated—the whole of the Moscow province, most of the Kalinin province, the whole of the Tula, and most of the Kaluga province. But the large Rzhev-Gzhatsk-Viazma springboard, which was to continue to threaten Moscow,

had remained in German hands. Some deadly fighting was to go on for this in the

summer of 1942, and it was not till the beginning of 1943 that the Germans were driven out of it. Many soldiers who had fought at various parts of the front later told me that perhaps the most heart-breaking months in their experience were February-March 1942.

After the high hopes that had been raised by the Battle of Moscow, everything seemed to be going wrong again. The Germans had lost the Battle of Moscow, but they were clearly very far from finished.

Commenting on the results of the Russian winter offensive, the present-day Russian

History makes the following important points:

The moral effect even of the incomplete victory of the Red Army during the winter campaign of 1941-2 was enormous, and decisively strengthened the Soviet people's

faith in ultimate victory;

The effect on highly dubious neutrals like Turkey and Japan was little short of

overwhelming;

Thanks to the Russian winter offensive, it was now possible to stop the evacuation of central-Russian industry to the east, which meant that the output of armaments and munitions in the Moscow area in particular could be resumed and intensified; in

some cases, plants were brought back from the east.

Nevertheless, the winter offensive did not achieve all the desired results:

The offensive took place in exceptionally difficult conditions. The Red Army still lacked the experience of organising and conducting a large-scale offensive

operation. The extreme cold, the deep snow, the very limited number of usable

roads, severely limited manoeuvrability. The delivery of supplies and the

organisation of airfields met with enormous difficulties. Nor could the country supply

the Army with all it needed by way of equipment, armaments and munitions. All this

had a bad effect on the tempo of the offensive, and on the performance of the troops,

and often prevented the Red Army from making the best use of favourable conditions

for the annihilation of large enemy groupings. This first attempt to mount a strategic counter-offensive and then a general offensive along the whole front was marked by some serious mistakes on the part of the Supreme Command, and of the command

of separate army groups.

[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 359. (Emphasis added.)]

What were these mistakes and shortcomings?

1) The Supreme Command did not always make the best use of the reserves at its

disposal. Often troops were thrown into battle without sufficient preliminary training.

The recognition of this error was reflected in the new regulations issued by the State Defence Committee on March 16, 1942.

2) On the whole, the Red Army also lacked large mechanised and armoured units, which greatly reduced the troops' striking force and the speed of their advance; the Germans, on the contrary, used concentrated tank formations in their counter-attacks, even in the winter conditions of 1941-2.

What is more, having over-estimated the results of the December-January counter-

offensive, the Supreme Command did not use its reserves rationally. In the course of the subsequent winter campaign, the Stavka scattered its reserves unnecessarily: nine new armies were thrown in: two were sent to the Volkhov Front, one to the North-West Front, one to the Kalinin Front, three to the Western (Moscow) Front, one each to the Briansk and South-West Front—

When, at the final stage of the Battle of Moscow, conditions were thought

favourable for encircling and routing of Army Group Mitte, the Stavka no longer had the necessary reserves, and the strategic operation, which had been successfully developing, remained uncompleted. If massed forces had been concentrated against

Army Group Mitte—i.e. on the decisive "Western" Front—this Army Group would undoubtedly have been smashed.

3) The concentrated use of the air force at the initial stage of the Battle of Moscow could, for a number of reasons, not be kept up.

4) Partisan activity in the enemy rear was of great value to the Red Army, and had, according to Guderian's admission, a very depressing moral effect on the German troops.

But many mistakes were also made in the conduct of partisan warfare;

As it turned out, the constitution of large and vulnerable partisan formations

proved a major error... The enemy did not have to deal with numerous and elusive

small partisan bands over wide areas. Instead, he resorted to large military

operations in the areas of partisan activity. This compelled the partisan units to adopt defensive tactics, which are not in the nature of partisan warfare, and their losses, therefore, were very heavy.

*

Stalin's Order of the Day on Red-Array Day on February 23, 1942 and on May-Day 1942

sounded, paradoxically, less optimistic than his two speeches in November 1941 with the Germans right outside Moscow. He no longer suggested that the war would be won "in six months, perhaps in a year".

The hatred of the Germans had, if anything, grown since the Battle of Moscow. In

recapturing numerous towns and many hundreds of villages, the Russian soldiers got

their first first-hand experience of the "New Order". Everywhere the Germans had destroyed whatever they could; all but three houses had been burned down at Istra, for instance, where they had also blown up the ancient New Jerusalem Monastery. In several towns and villages, which the Red Army entered, there were gallows with "partisans"

hanging from them. Later, in 1942,1 explored some of the towns and villages that had been occupied then destroyed by the Germans—it was always the same grim story.

The Germans in towns and villages round Moscow; the Germans in ancient Russian cities like Novgorod, Pskov and Smolensk; the Germans in the suburbs of Leningrad; the

Germans at Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana; the Germans at Orel, at Lgov, at Shchigry, the old Turgeniev country, the most Russian of all the Russian areas. They were robbing, and looting and killing; when they were retreating they would burn down every house, and in the depth of winter civilians were left without house and home. Nothing like this had happened to Russia before—except under the Tartar invasions. The anger and resentment against the Germans, mixed with a feeling of infinite pity for the Russian people, for the Russian land, defiled by the invader, produced an emotional reaction of national pride and national injury which was extraordinarily well reflected in the literature and music of 1941 and the early part of 1942.

Some of the best poems, though unknown at the time—they were not published until

1945—reflecting the bitter anxiety during the first months of the invasion, were written by Boris Pasternak—

Do you remember that dryness in your throat

When rattling their naked power of evil

They were barging ahead and bellowing

And autumn was advancing in steps of calamity?

"Barging and bellowing" and "rattling their naked power of evil", as Pasternak put it, was not exactly the same thought—something like a "Martian Invasion"—conveyed by that horrible, inhuman little theme of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony? Today it may seem noisy, melodramatic, repetitive (the theme, is, indeed, repeated louder and louder and louder no fewer than eleven times); yet, as a documentary of 1941, as a reflection of the feeling that here was "naked evil" in all its stupendous, arrogant, inhumanly terrifying power over-running Russia there is almost nothing to equal it:

The lament for the Russian Land took on other forms, too. Konstantin Simonov's poems became immensely popular during that winter of 1941-2. For instance the agonising

picture of the Russian retreat from the Smolensk province, with lines like these:

... And it seemed that outside every Russian village

Our grandfathers had risen from the dead,

And were shielding us with their outstretched arms,

And praying for us, their godless grandchildren...

Russia, our homeland, what is it? I ask you;

It's not Moscow houses, where we cheerfully lived,

It is rather these poor huts where our grandfathers laboured,

And the Russian graves with their simple crosses...

Here was a kind of nostalgia for the Russian land, even in its poorest and most archaic form.

Or the still more famous Wait for me, with its irrational, almost religious undertones: Wait for me, and I'll return, only wait very hard.

Wait, when you are filled with sorrow as you watch the yellow rain;

Wait, when the winds sweep the snowdrifts,

Wait in the sweltering heat,

Wait when others have stopped waiting, forgetting their yesterdays.

Wait even when from afar, no letters come to you,

Wait even when others are tired of waiting...

Wait even when my mother and son think I am no more,

And when friends sit around the fire, drinking to my memory.

Wait, and do not hurry to drink to my memory, too;

Wait, for I'll return, defying every death.

And let those who did not wait say that I was lucky;

They will never understand that in the midst of death,

You, with your waiting, saved me.

Only you and I will know how I survived:

It's because you waited, as no one else did.

This literal translation naturally does not render the rhythm of the original; as a poem it is, in fact, very mediocre; but, nevertheless, from the autumn of 1941, when it was first published, right through 1942, it was the most popular poem in Russia, which millions of women recited to themselves like a prayer.

It is difficult at this distance, except for those who were in Russia at the time, to realise how important a poem like this was to literally millions of Russian women; no one could tell how many hundreds of thousands had died at the front since June 22, or had been taken prisoner or were otherwise missing.

Almost equally important were some other poets and writers. People were deeply moved for instance by Zoya, Margarita Aligher's poem on the partisan girl who was hanged outside Moscow—a poem later turned into a play. This represents the girl's hallucinations during the night between her torture by the Germans and her execution, Stalin appearing in the last scene to say that Moscow has been saved. Important, too, was Surkov's poetry, e.g. his prose poem, A Soldier's Oath written in 1941:

I am a Russian man, a soldier of the Red Army. My country has put a rifle in my

hand, and has sent me to fight against the black hordes of Hitler that have broken into my country. Stalin has told me that the battle will be hard and bloody, but that victory will be mine.

I heard Stalin, and know it will be so. I am the 193 million of free Soviet men, and to all of them Hitler's yoke is more bitter than death...

Mine eyes have beheld thousands of dead bodies of women and children, lying along the railways and the highways. They were killed by the German vultures... The tears of women and children are boiling in my heart. Hitler the murderer and his hordes shall pay for these tears with their wolfish blood; for the avenger's hatred knows no mercy...

Of the greatest importance, too, as morale-builders, were Ehren-burg's articles in Pravda and Red Star—brilliant and eloquent diatribes against the Germans, which were very popular in the Army. They were, occasionally, criticised on the ground that he tended to ridicule the Germans, forgetting what a powerful, deadly enemy they were. His

suggestion that all Germans were evil was, of course, at variance with the official ideological line (repeated once again in Stalin's order of the day of February 23), but

"Ehrenburgism" was fully approved in the circumstances as the most effective form of hate propaganda. Nor was he alone in taking this propaganda line: there were also

Sholokhov and Alexei Tolstoy, and many others. The "all Germans are evil" motif was to become even more outspoken in the fearful summer of 1942.

Chapter XIII THE DIPLOMATIC SCENE OF THE FIRST

MONTHS OF THE INVASION

Diplomatically, the Soviet Union was in a very strange position at the time of the German invasion. The only two embassies in Moscow that seemed to count in the eyes of the

Soviet authorities before that were the German and the Japanese Embassies, and, of all ambassadors, Count von der Schulenburg was the one the Russians cultivated most. The Japanese Ambassador was also being courted, especially since the Matsuoka visit a few months earlier. As a gesture of appeasement towards Hitler, diplomatic relations had been broken off in May 1941 with Norway, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece; but Vichy

France was represented by a full-fledged Ambassador, Gaston Bergery.

Apart from Sweden, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Finland, very few neutral countries were represented; and if, with the American Embassy, under Laurence A. Steinhardt,

relations were correct, but no more, the British Embassy, under Sir Stafford Cripps, was officially treated with deliberate coolness, almost bordering on rudeness. Cripps had the greatest difficulty in maintaining contact with the Soviet Foreign Commissariat, and, till the outbreak of the war in June 1941, he had not been privileged to meet Stalin, and had to content himself with occasionally seeing Vyshinsky, whose manner was far from

forthcoming.

There is in Churchill's Second World War [ Vol. 3, pp. 320-3.] a very curious passage concerning the one and only message he sent Stalin on April 3, asking Russia, in effect, to intervene in the Balkans.

PRIME MINISTER TO SIR STAFFORD CRIPPS

Following from me to M. Stalin, provided it can be personally delivered by you:

I have sure information from a trusted agent that when the Germans thought they

had got Yugoslavia in the net—i.e. after March 20—they began to move three out of the five Panzer divisions from Rumania to Southern Poland. The moment they

heard of the Serbian revolution this movement was countermanded. Your

Excellency will readily appreciate the significance of these facts.

Eden, in his dispatch to Cripps accompanying the Churchill message asked that Cripps should point out to Stalin (if he were to see him) that the Soviet Union now had an

opportunity of joining forces with Britain in the Balkans by furnishing material help to Yugoslavia and Greece; this would delay a German attack on Russia.

Cripps meantime had sent a detailed letter along the same lines to Vyshinsky; and he therefore thought that Churchill's "fragmentary" message would do more harm than good.

I greatly fear that the delivery of the Prime Minister's message would not be merely ineffectual, but a serious tactical mistake. If, however, you are unable to share this view, I will of course endeavour to arrange urgently for an interview with Molotov.

"I was vexed at this," Churchill wrote, "and at the delay which had occurred."

After some acrimonious exchanges between Churchill and Cripps via Eden, Cripps finally wired more than a fortnight later (after Yugoslavia had already been invaded) that he had sent the text of Churchill's message to Vyshinsky; and on April 22 he wrote to Eden:

"Vyshinsky informed me in writing today that message had been conveyed to Stalin."

In the summer of 1941, in talking to me, Cripps alluded to this episode, when he said: In London they had no idea what difficulties I was up against here. They did not

want to realise that not only Stalin, but even Molotov avoided me like grim death; for several months before the war, Vyshinsky was my only contact, and a highly

unsatisfactory one at that. Stalin, I can tell you, did not want to have anything to do with Churchill, so alarmed was he lest the Germans found out. And Molotov was no

better. At the same time, they let it be understood that they didn't mind their

military talking to our military.

Churchill later commented:

I cannot form any final judgment upon whether my message, if delivered with all

the promptness and ceremony prescribed, would have altered the course of events.

Nevertheless I still regret that my instructions were not carried out effectively. If I had had any direct contact with Stalin I might perhaps have prevented him from

having so much of his air force destroyed on the ground.

It was clear from what Gripps later said that the message could certainly not have been delivered "with all the promptness and ceremony prescribed" for the simple reason that Stalin would not even dream of having any such "ceremony". Finally, it is also clear that this particular message, suggesting that the Russians intervene in the Balkans, would have produced no results, since Stalin had firmly set his mind to continue in his policy of co-existence with Hitler. Moreover, it would have arrived too late to save Yugoslavia.

But even if the Russians were frightened of being dragged into a Balkan war they might all the same have listened to Cripps when the latter persisted in warning them of the imminent German attack on the Soviet Union. At the same time Eden kept on warning

Maisky who, as the latter later assured me, did not fail to pass these warnings on to Moscow. But it was no good.

Cripps had no reason to be satisfied with the Soviet leaders; nevertheless, when the invasion started, he did his utmost to restore normal relations between Britain and the Soviet Union. There is a suggestion in Churchill's Second World War that the Russians were at first wholly unresponsive to his famous broadcast of June 22—

... except that parts of it were printed in Pravda... and that we were asked to receive a Russian military mission. The silence at the top was oppressive, and I thought it my duty to break the ice. I quite understood that they might feel shy, considering all that had passed since the outbreak of the war.. .

[Volume III, p. 340.]

Maybe they were shy; but, in reality, they were delighted and, as I often heard it said at the time, "pleasantly surprised " by Churchill's broadcast; with their peculiar mentality, they had thought an Anglo-German deal not entirely out of the question, and they had been confirmed in this suspicion ever since the Hess episode.

Although Stalin did not communicate with Churchill personally until after the latter had written to him on July 7, he hastened to establish close relations with Cripps. Barely a week after the invasion, the first batch of the British Military Mission, with General Mason MacFarlane at its head, flew to Moscow. At the same time Cripps had been

discussing with both Stalin and Molotov the terms of a joint Anglo-Soviet Declaration, which was to be made public on July 12. The idea of this joint declaration originated on the Russian side, as is apparent from Churchill's message to Cripps of July 10.

It is reasonable to suppose that if Stalin did not communicate with Churchill immediately after the latter's broadcast of June 22, it was because the Soviet Government was

bewildered by what was happening. After all, it took Stalin fully eleven days after the invasion to formulate anything in the nature of a policy statement even to his own people.

Also without necessarily feeling "shy", Stalin may well have had a variety of long-standing inhibitions, doubts and reservations about British policy, and may have been anxious to secure the Anglo-Soviet Declaration before proceeding any further. And

when, finally, on July 18, he did write to Churchill, it was to propose the establishment of a Second Front—"in the west (northern France) and in the north (the Arctic)".

The best time to open this Front is now, seeing that Hitler's forces have been

switched to the east... It would be easier still to open a Front in the north. This would call for action only by British naval and air forces, without landing troops or artillery. Soviet land, naval and air forces could take part in the operation. We would be glad if Great Britain could send thither, say, one light division or more of the Norwegian volunteers, who could be moved to Northern Norway for insurgent

operations against the Germans.

Churchill, in his reply of July 21, dismissed all this as totally unrealistic, including the Norwegian light division, which was simply "not in existence", but proposed a number of naval operations in the Arctic, and the establishment of a number of British fighter squadrons at Murmansk.

On July 26, Churchill wrote to Stalin again, saying that 200 Tomahawks would soon be sent to Russia; that two or three million pairs of ankle boots "should shortly be available in this country for shipment", and that, moreover, "large quantities of rubber, tin, wool and woollen clothes, jute, lead and shellac" would be provided.

All this was only a small beginning; but it should be remembered that in the summer of 1941 Britain was, in fact, Russia's only ally; the United States was not in the war yet.

This would partly explain a certain petulance in Stalin's tone in his relations with Britain, and particularly with Churchill: this was the only country from which he could "demand"

direct military co-operation; but since such direct military aid was clearly not

forthcoming, the most important thing to do was to try to obtain from the West the

maximum economic aid in the form of armaments and raw materials; and, in this respect, the United States was far more important than Britain.

The big question—and Stalin was fully aware of it—which bothered both Britain and the United States was whether Russian resistance to Germany could, or could not, last any length of time. As one could guess at the time, and as we know now, Churchill was by no means certain that Russia would "last" long.

The British military were almost unanimous in believing that Russia would be defeated in a short time: even at press conferences given during the first days of the war at the Ministry of Information in London, War Office spokesmen made no secret of it. Their

tone became slightly different by the middle of July, largely, one suspects, as a result of the dispatches sent from Moscow by General Mason MacFarlane who, while referring

occasionally to "this bloodstained régime", nevertheless did not underrate the fighting qualities of the Red Army. Mason MacFarlane, with whom I had numerous talks in

Moscow, appeared convinced, even during the blackest moments, that the Russians were at any rate determined to fight a very long war, and that even the loss of Moscow—which was not to be ruled out early in October—would not mean the end.

Opinion at the American Embassy in Moscow was rather divided. The Military Attaché,

Major Ivan Yeaton, was convinced that the Red Army would be smashed in a very short

time; Ambassador Steinhardt took less gloomy a view; but the big clash between the two schools of thought was not to come until later, with the appointment as Lend-Lease

representative in Moscow of Colonel Philip R. Faymonville. This appointment was made by President Roosevelt at Harry Hopkins's suggestion. Faymonville had accompanied

Harriman to Moscow at the end of September, and he was convinced from the start that the Red Army's prospects were by no means as hopeless as Yeaton had been making out

ever since the beginning of the invasion.

The fact that Faymonville should have been appointed to Moscow at Hopkins's

suggestion was highly significant. It was Hopkins who unquestionably decided, during his visit to Moscow at the end of July that the Russians could, if not win the war, at any rate hold out for a very long time, and this was also the view held by Faymonville. And after the Battle of Moscow, Faymonville became finally convinced that the Russians

would not lose the war.

Harry Hopkins's visit was of crucial importance to the whole future of American-Soviet and Anglo-Soviet relations. As Robert E. Sherwood wrote:

The flight [from Archangel] to Moscow took four hours, and during it Hopkins

began to be reassured as to the future of the Soviet Union. He looked down upon the hundreds of miles of solid forest, and he thought that Hitler with all the Panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht could never hope to break through country like this.

On arriving in Moscow

Hopkins had a long talk with Steinhardt in which he said that the main purpose of his visit was to determine whether the situation was as disastrous as pictured in the War Department, and particularly as indicated in the cables from the Military

Attaché, Major Ivan Yeaton.

The views of Ambassador Steinhardt, as described by Sherwood, tally with Steinhardt's attitude, as I was able to observe it in Moscow in the summer of 1941.

Steinhardt said [to Hopkins] that anyone who knew anything about Russian history

would hardly jump to the conclusion that the Germans would achieve easy

conquest. Russian soldiers might appear inept when engaged in offensive operations

—they had done so in the Napoleonic wars and again in Finland. But when they

were called upon to defend their homeland they were superb fighters, and there

were certainly a great many of them. But, Steinhardt emphasised, it was supremely difficult for any outsider to get a clear picture of what was really going on... because of the prevailing attitude of suspicion toward all foreigners and consequent

secretiveness. Hopkins said that he was determined somehow or other to break

through this wall of suspicion.

[ The White House Papers of Harry Hopkins, by Robert E. Sherwood. Volume I, pp. 327-8 (London, 1949).]

Then came his account of Hopkins's first meeting with Stalin:

After Hopkins's introductory remarks to the effect that the President believed that the most important thing to be done in the world today was to defeat Hitler and

Hitlerism, and that he therefore wished to aid the Soviet Union, Stalin spoke.

He welcomed Hopkins to the Soviet Union and then, describing Hitler and

Germany, spoke of the necessity of there being a minimum moral standard between

all nations... The present leaders of Germany knew no such moral standard and

represented an anti-social force in the world today...

"Our views coincide," he concluded.

Then, turning to Hopkins's question what Russia would require that the USA could

deliver immediately, and, second, what would be her requirements on the basis of a long war, Stalin listed in the first category anti-aircraft guns of medium calibre, together with ammunition— altogether 20,000 pieces of anti-aircraft artillery, large and small. Second, he asked for large-size machine-guns for the defence of his cities.

Third, he said he needed a million rifles; "if the calibre was the same as the one used in the Red Army, then he had plenty of ammunition."

In the second category, he mentioned first, high-octane aviation gasolene, second, aluminium for the construction of aeroplanes and, third, the other items already

mentioned in the list already presented to our government in Washington.

And then came this striking remark from Stalin: "Give us antiaircraft guns and the aluminium and we can fight for three or four years."

After a long meeting with Molotov, which was chiefly devoted to a somewhat

inconclusive discussion about Japan, Molotov suggesting, in the course of it, that the United States give Japan "a warning" against attacking Russia, Hopkins had a second meeting with Stalin.

Since the outbreak of the war, Stalin said, the number of German divisions at the Russian front had been increased from 175 to 232, and he thought Germany could mobilise 300.

Russia had only 180 divisions at the beginning, but had 240 now, and could mobilise 350.

Stalin stated that he can mobilise that many by the time the spring offensive begins in May 1942... He is anxious to have as many of his divisions as possible in contact with the enemy, because the troops then learn that Germans can be killed and are

not supermen... He wants to have as many seasoned troops as possible for the great campaign next spring.

He made much of "insurgent troops" [i.e. partisans] fighting behind the enemy lines, and claimed that there had been no mass surrenders of troops on either side.

He thought the Germans would soon have to go on the defensive themselves, but

nevertheless, admitted that while the Russians had a large number of tanks and

motorised divisions, none of diem were a match for the German Panzer divisions.

All the same, he believed that the large Russian tanks were better than any German tanks...

The Red Army, he said, had now 4,000 large tanks, 8,000 medium tanks and 12,000

light tanks; the Germans had a total of 30,000 tanks.

His tank production now was only 1,000 per month, he said, and Russia would be short of steel.

He urged that orders for this steel be placed at once. Later he said it would be much better if his tanks could be manufactured in the United States. He also wished to purchase as many tanks as possible to be ready for the spring campaign. He said the all-important thing was the production of tanks during the winter—the tank losses were very great on both sides, but Germany could produce more tanks per month

this winter than Russia. He would like to send a tank expert to the United States and would give the United States his tank designs.

[ Sherwood, op cit., pp. 337-8.]

"He gave", Hopkins goes on, "a much more glowing account of Russia's aircraft position, and said that the German claims of Russian air losses were 'absurd'." Nevertheless, "he expressed considerable interest in training pilots in America, and left me the impression that there would soon be a shortage of pilots."

Stalin repeatedly stated that he did not underrate the German Army. Their

organisation was of the very best, and they had large reserves of food, men, supplies and fuel... The German Army is [therefore] capable of taking part in a winter

campaign in Russia. He thought, however, that it would be difficult for the Germans to operate offensively much after September 1, when the heavy rains would begin.

After October 1 the ground would be so bad that they would have to go on the

defensive. He expressed great confidence that the line during the winter months

would be in front of Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad, probably not more than 100 km.

away from where it was now. He... thought the Germans were "tired", and had no stomach for an offensive. .. Though Germany could bring up forty divisions, making 275 divisions in all, these divisions probably could not get there before the hard weather set in.

[Ibid., p. 340.]

At this second meeting, Stalin again insisted that the Red Army's first need was antiaircraft guns—"vast quantities of these to give protection to its lines of communications; secondly, aluminium for the construction of aeroplanes; thirdly, machine-guns and

rifles."

As regards the ports of entry, he thought Archangel "difficult, but not impossible" since icebreakers could keep the port free all winter; Vladivostok he thought dangerous, as Japan could cut it off at any time, and the roads and railroads of Persia "inadequate".

"He [Stalin] expressed repeatedly his confidence that the Russian lines would hold within 200 km. of their present position ... and indicated that the front would be solidified not later than October 1."

It is clear from what Hopkins told Stalin that he was not entirely convinced that the Russians would survive the autumn:

"I was mindful of the importance that no (economic) conference be held in Moscow until we knew the outcome of the battle now in progress. .. This battle was still in the balance. Hence my suggestion that we hold this conference at as late a date as

possible. Then we would know whether there was to be a front and approximately

the location of the front during the coming winter months."

Nevertheless, basing himself on Stalin's belief that the front would be "solidified not later than October 1" Hopkins recommended to the US Government that such a conference (the future Stalin-Beaverbrook-Harriman conference) be held between October 1 and

October 15.

In conclusion, Stalin said that he thought German morale pretty low, and that the

Germans would be demoralised still further by an announcement that the United States was going to join in the war against Hitler.

Stalin [Hopkins continued] said it was inevitable that we [the USA] would finally come to grips with Hitler on some battlefield. The might of Germany was [still] so great that, even though Russia might defend herself, it would be very difficult for Britain and Russia combined to crush the German military machine... He believed

the war would be bitter and perhaps long ... and he wanted me to tell the President that he would welcome American troops on any part of the Russian front under the

complete command of the American Army... Finally, he asked me to tell the

President that, while he was confident that the Russian Army could withstand the

German Army, the problem of supply by the next spring would be a serious one and

that he needed our help.

In a remarkable article on his meetings with Stalin, Hopkins later wrote:

... He welcomed me with a few swift Russian words. He shook my hand briefly,

firmly, courteously. He smiled warmly. There was no waste of word, gesture or

mannerism. It was like talking to a perfectly co-ordinated machine, an intelligent machine... The questions he asked were clear, concise, direct... His answers were ready, unequivocal, spoken as if the man had had them on his tongue for years... If he is always as I heard him, he never wastes a syllable. If he wants to soften an abrupt answer... he does it with that quick managed smile—a smile that can be cold but friendly, austere but warm. He curries no favour with you. He seems to have no doubts. He assures you that Russia will stand against the onslaught of the German Army. He takes it for granted that you have no doubts, either... He laughs often

enough, but it's a short laugh, somewhat sardonic perhaps. There is no small talk in him. His humour is keen, penetrating.

[Sherwood, op. cit., p. 345.]

Although Hopkins had, obviously, come with instructions which forbade him to assume

that the Russians would not be beaten before the winter had set in, Stalin not only enormously impressed him as a person, but also convinced him that the Russians would hold the Germans, and were preparing for a very long war. "A man," Sherwood wrote of the Hopkins-Stalin meetings, "who feared immediate defeat would not have put

aluminium so high on the list of priorities. .. The very nature of Stalin's requests proved that he was viewing the war on a long-range basis."

And Sherwood added:

Hopkins later expressed extreme irritation with the military observers in Moscow

when they cabled darkly pessimistic reports that could be based on nothing but

mere guesswork coloured by prejudice.

[Sherwood, op. cit., p. 345.]

This Hopkins account of his meetings with Stalin is invaluable. It is, in fact, the only detailed first-hand account there is of Stalin at the height of the German invasion. Several points are worth noting. Anxious to obtain American aid, Stalin painted a more

favourable picture than was warranted by the progress of the war at the end of July 1941.

He carefully avoided any suggestion of the Red Army's acute shortage of tanks and

aircraft. He knew that he could hardly expect anything at once and therefore stressed himself the desirability of building up the Soviet air force and armour in readiness for a spring campaign in 1942. He quite deliberately created the impression of planning for a long-term war. But he was not "currying favours"; he took it for granted that it was in both Britain's and America's interests to help Russia.

He went, of course, seriously wrong in assuming that the Germans would not advance

more than 125 miles, that the Russians would keep not only Moscow and Leningrad, but also Kiev, and that the front would become stabilised by the beginning of September, or the beginning of October at the latest. Was there not an element of bluff in his apparent optimism?

It was on the basis of Hopkins's reasonably optimistic forecast that the Stalin-

Beaverbrook-Harriman conference was to meet on September 29, a day before the "final"

German offensive began against Moscow.

The assurance given to Hopkins that Kiev would be held may well have accounted in part for Stalin's determination to hold on to the capital of the Ukraine; a decision which had, as we know, disastrous results.

One may well wonder, all the same, whether Stalin was not much more nervous about the general situation than would appear from Hopkins's account. The most striking

suggestion that Stalin made to Hopkins was that he would "welcome American troops on any part of the Russian front under the complete command of the American Army". More alarmist still were to be some of Stalin's dispatches to Churchill after the greater part of the Ukraine had been overrun by the Germans. Thus, on September 3 he wrote:

The position of the Soviet troops has considerably deteriorated in such vital areas as the Ukraine and Leningrad. The relative stabilisation of the front, achieved some three weeks ago, has been upset by the arrival of thirty to thirty-four German

infantry divisions and enormous numbers of tanks and aircraft... The Germans are

looking on the threat in the west as a bluff... They think they can well beat their enemies one at a time—first the Russians and then the British.

The loss of Krivoi Rog, etc., (he went on) has resulted in a lessening of our defence capacity and has confronted the Soviet Union with mortal danger... The only way out of this more than unfavourable situation is to open a second front this year

somewhere in the Balkans or in France... and simultaneously to supply the Soviet

Union with 30,000 tons of aluminium by the beginning of October and a minimum

monthly aid of 400 aeroplanes and 500 tanks (small or medium).

Without these two kinds of aid the Soviet Union will be either defeated or weakened to the extent that it will lose for a long time its ability to help its allies by active operations at the front against Hitlerism.

[Correspondence between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Presidents of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-5, vol. I, p. 21 (Moscow, 1957), to be later referred to as Stalin-Churchill Correspondence or Stalin-Roosevelt Correspondence.]

And, ten days later, on September 13, Stalin again wrote to Churchill, saying that if the opening of a second front was not feasible at present, then—

it seems to me that Britain could safely land twenty-five to thirty divisions at

Archangel or ship them to the southern areas of the USSR via Iran for military cooperation with the Soviet troops on Soviet soil in the same way it was done during the last war in France. That would be a great help.

[Ibid., p. 24.]

The suggestion that British troops should come to help Russia on Russian soil, as well as the warning that Russia might be defeated betrayed real anxiety on Stalin's part;

nevertheless, he concluded his message to Churchill on a characteristic note of bravado.

In reply to a British proposal that if, as a result of the situation at Leningrad, the Baltic Fleet were lost, the British should, after the war, make up for these Russian losses, Stalin remarked:

The Soviet Government... appreciates the British Government's readiness to

compensate for part of the damage... There can be little doubt that, if necessary, the Soviet people will actually destroy the ships at Leningrad. But responsibility for the damage would be borne not by Britain but by Germany. I think, therefore, that

Germany will have to make good the damage after the war.

[Ibid., p. 25.]

The most direct example of Anglo-Soviet co-operation in 1941 was the joint occupation of Iran. After previous consultations with the British Government, the Soviet

Government informed the Iranian Government that it would "introduce Soviet troops into Iran in connexion with the widespread anti-Soviet activity of German agents in that

country". The troops would be "introduced" in virtue of Article 6 of the Soviet-Iranian Agreement of 1921 which provided for such an occupation in the event of a third party threatening the independence of Iran and the security of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Note recalled that, since the German invasion of Russia, the Soviet Government had

already sent three warnings to the Iranian Government but without any effect.

It was also on August 25 that the British Ambassador in Iran, Sir Reader Bullard,

informed the Iranian Government of the entry of British troops into Iran. This joint occupation had the double purpose of preventing Germany from using Iran as a base of operations against both Russia and the Iranian oilfields, and of opening a supply route from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea. Since the Allies, and, in particular, Churchill, considered both the other routes—via Vladivostok or via the Russian Arctic—highly

precarious, this project was held to be of vital importance as an alternative. The joint operation went off remarkably smoothly; a new Iranian Government was set up, and

before long, the pro-German Rezah Shah abdicated, to end his days in exile in

Johannesburg, where he died in 1944.

British and Russian forces met in amity, and Teheran was jointly occupied on

September 17, the Shah having abdicated on the previous day in favour of his gifted twenty-two-year-old son. On September 20 the new Shah, under allied advice,

restored the Constitutional Monarchy... Most of our forces withdrew from the

country, leaving only detachments to guard the communications, and Teheran was

evacuated by both British and Russian troops on October 18.

[Churchill, op. cit., p. 432. Later, when Iran became the great route for supplies to Russia, numerous Russian, British and American troops were to be seen in Teheran once more.

For a time after the evacuation of the Polish "Anders" army from Russia, the Poles were also very active at Teheran. The Russians, whom I was able to observe there at the end of 1943, made a point of being extremely "correct" in their behaviour, and drunkenness, not uncommon among the British and Americans, was strictly prohibited and

severely punished. The Russians at that time did also engage in a good deal of

propaganda in Persia, notably by opening a large hospital in Teheran. With the support of various public welfare schemes they encouraged a separatist movement in Persian

Azerbaijan. In 1946, under American pressure, they had to abandon these political

schemes and had to withdraw their troops.]

*

The Beaverbrook-Harriman Mission arrived in Moscow on September 28. Several

meetings were held under the chairmanship of Molotov, and on two occasions

Beaverbrook and Harriman had long conversations with Stalin. Beaverbrook was a strong

"help-Russia" man, and the economic conference was a prelude to the granting of a first lend-lease loan of a billion dollars by the USA to the USSR. It was decided to ship a wide variety of arms, raw materials and machinery in considerable quantities to the Soviet Union, while in return certain Russian raw materials were to be delivered to the USA and Britain. The closing speeches of the conference by Beaverbrook, Harriman and Molotov were extremely cordial. Molotov stressed "the great political importance of the conference, which had foiled the Hitlerites' intention to destroy their enemies one by one, demonstrating to the world that a mighty front of freedom-loving peoples had been

created, led by the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the USA." The final communiqué said that Britain and America were going to supply "practically everything that Russia had asked for". As I noted in Moscow on October 4:

The conference is over, and is being acclaimed on all sides as a huge success.

Impressed by the remarkable speed with which the conference got through its work, people aire perhaps apt to forget the limited scope of the talks and the limited

possibilities of delivering the stuff to Russia... The Russian papers are making a big display of the success of the conference, of the "united anti-Hitler front" by three of the greatest industrial powers in the world, et cetera. People reading the papers in tram-cars appear to be pleased, though I don't think they are overwhelmed. They

know that a fearfully hard winter is ahead of them...

Beaverbrook has been very much in the centre of things, and has pretty well

eclipsed everybody, including Harriman ... and Gripps. This may be unfair, for

Cripps and the Military Mission certainly did a lot to prepare the Conference...

Even so, Beaverbrook's dynamics have unquestionably contributed to the success of the Conference; and his nightly talks with Stalin seem to have been decisive in

smoothing away the rough edges... Beaverbrook has fully realised that the Russians are the only people in the world today who are seriously weakening Germany, and

that it is in Britain's interest to do without certain things and to give them to Russia... He and Eden are said to be the most whole-hearted pro-Russians in the

Cabinet now. At the little press conference yesterday he was bursting with

exuberance. Slapping his knees he was saying that the Russians were pleased with

Beaverbrook, and the Americans were pleased with Beaverbrook— "Now, aren't

they, Averell?" to which Harriman replied: "Sure, you bet." ... Beaverbrook is praising Stalin up to the skies... I imagine he has been genuinely impressed by

Stalin's practical mind, his organising ability, and his qualities as a national leader...

At the Kremlin banquet last night, cold and sceptical Molotov made an unusually

warm speech.. .

[Alexander Werth, Moscow "41 (London, 1942), pp. 226-7. Beaverbrook's attitude to Russia had manifested itself much earlier as is borne out by the Harry Hopkins Papers on Churchill's famous "pro-Russian" broadcast of June 22: "He conferred that day principally with Beaverbrook and Sir Stafford Cripps... Although one would hardly have expected it of him, Beaverbrook was a vehement supporter of immoderate and unstinted aid to the Soviet Union and was subsequently an ardent, persistent and sometimes (to Churchill) embarrassing proponent of the Second Front. At the urging of these two men, as well as his own inclination, Churchill went on the air that Sunday with one of his most powerful speeches." (Sherwood, op. cit., p. 305.)]

The impression Beaverbrook gave of the Moscow visit not only to the correspondents on the spot, but also to Churchill in his dispatch of October 4—"the effect of this agreement has been an immense strengthening of the morale of Moscow"—and the comments made by the Russians seem wholly at variance with the account given after the war by

Churchill:

Their reception was bleak and discussions not at all friendly. It might almost have been thought that the plight in which the Soviets now found themselves was our fault. (They) gave no information of any kind. They did not even inform them of the basis on which Russian needs of our precious war materials had been estimated. The Mission was given no formal entertainment until almost the last night... It might almost have been that it was we who had come to ask favours.

[Churchill, op. cit., p. 416.]

There is no doubt that at the time the Russians were extremely pleased with the political significance of the conference and the propaganda capital they could make of it and that they were anxiously looking forward to the long term prospect of American help on a

large scale. On the other hand the British deliveries that were immediately available were, of course, a mere drop in the bucket.

[Churchill's message to Stalin of October 6, promised that the convoy, due to arrive at Archangel on October 12, would carry twenty heavy tanks and 193 fighter planes, the

convoy due on October 29 140 heavy tanks, 100 fighter planes (Hurricanes), 200 Bren

carriers, 200 anti-tank rifles and 50 two-pounder guns]

Even if "the reception was bleak"—although Beaverbrook then gave the very opposite impression—it is more than probable that the news from the front had something to do with it. While Beaverbrook and Harriman were still in Moscow, the great German

offensive against Moscow had started, first in the Briansk and three days later in the Viazma sector. Whatever the future value of the Economic Conference was to be, the

Battle of Moscow had to be won by the Russians alone with what was left of their

operational equipment.

While Soviet diplomatic activity was chiefly concerned with the establishment of closer relations with Britain and the USA, the German invasion had created a number of

additional diplomatic problems. Finland, Hungary, Rumania and Italy were now in a state of war with the Soviet Union, and Churchill was reluctant to declare war on Hungary, Rumania and especially on Finland; indeed, the problem of Finland was to lead to some considerable Anglo-Soviet friction.

Soviet relations with Vichy France were broken off, and, barely a week after the German invasion, Pétain authorised the formation of a French Anti-Bolshevik Legion; a number of Swedish volunteers also joined the Finnish Army, while a Blue Brigade was formed in Spain for operations in Russia, particularly at Leningrad. Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan hastened to assure Russia of their neutrality, though in the case of Iran these assurances were not accepted. Later in the year the Soviet Government demanded that Afghanistan expel numerous Axis agents from its territory—a demand with which the Afghan

Government nominally complied, except that Signor Pietro Quaroni, the Italian

Ambassador at Kabul, continued to remain at the centre of Axis activity in Afghanistan—

until in 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, he was appointed Italian Minister to Moscow!

Much was made in Moscow of the German war on "Slavdom"; on August 10 and 11 the first All-Slav meeting was held. It called on all the Slav peoples to wage a holy war against Germany, and the appeal was signed by "representatives of the peoples of Russia, Belorussia, the Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria".

Already on July 18 a mutual-aid agreement had been signed in London between Maisky,

representing the USSR and Jan Masaryk, representing the Czechoslovak Government in

exile. The agreement provided for an exchange of ministers and the formation of

Czechoslovak military units under the command of a Czechoslovak officer approved by

the Russians; these units would be under the supreme command of the USSR.

Dorothy Thompson relates that the only person in London she met in July 1941 who

believed the Russians would not be crushed by the Germans was President Benes.

[Sherwood, op. cit., p. 320.]

Russia's diplomatic relations with "independent" Slovakia had, of course, automatically lapsed, and were not mentioned.

The question of whether and on what terms diplomatic relations with Poland were to be restored presented a much trickier problem.

On the face of it, the Maisky-Sikorski agreement of July 30, 1941 was little different from the Soviet-Czechoslovak agreement twelve days before; in reality it touched on

some extremely awkward matters.

It must have been a little embarrassing for the Russians to agree to the first paragraph declaring all Soviet-German territorial agreements made in 1939 to be null and void; there was also the problem of Polish citizens in the Soviet Union, which had to be faced somehow. In order to resolve this awkward question a protocol was attached to the main agreement in which the Soviet Government granted an amnesty to "all Polish citizens now imprisoned in the Soviet Union, either as prisoners-of-war or for any other valid reasons".

Apart from that—as in the case of the Soviet-Czechoslovak Agreement—it provided for

an exchange of Ambassadors and for mutual aid in the common war against Nazi

Germany.

This agreement, which had been preceded by some acrimonious discussions on the future borders of Poland, was, in the event, to mark the beginning of another most unhappy

phase in Polish-Russian relations. On the surface and for the moment, however, Soviet-Polish co-operation was developing normally and on August 14 a military agreement was signed in Moscow between the Soviet Supreme Command, represented by General

Vassilevsky and by the Polish Supreme Command, represented by General Bogusz-

Szyszko; within its terms General Sikorski appointed General Anders Commander-in-

Chief of the Polish armed forces on Soviet territory, and it was announced that he "has begun to form the Polish Army". General Anders had been only just released from a Soviet jail.

On September 4, Mr Kot arrived in Moscow as the first Polish Ambassador, and in

December General Sikorski came to Russia, and had some long—and highly awkward—

conversations with Stalin. But this will be dealt with later.

Apart from Poland and Czechoslovakia, relations were also restored during the first

months of the war with Yugoslavia, Norway, Belgium and Greece. There was also an

important exchange of notes between Maisky and de Gaulle on September 27, 1941. The

Soviet Government recognised de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French, proposed to de Gaulle all possible aid in his struggle against Germany, and expressed its determination to fight for the "complete restoration of the independence and greatness of France". De Gaulle replied in the same vein.

It is hardly surprising that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour should have come as a great relief to the Russians at a time when the Red Army had just launched their

December counter-offensive on the Moscow sector of the front. It was, of course,

possible that the flow of supplies from Britain and the United States would slow down as a result; but this consideration was outweighed by the immense fact that the USA had now entered the war and that the drive of the Japanese armed forces to the west and south had, at least for the time being, removed the threat of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union.

On December 16 Roosevelt wired to Stalin proposing that the Russians take part in a

conference at Chungking, along with Chinese, British, Dutch and US representatives.

Stalin, in his reply, dodged the issue, though he added: "I wish you success in the struggle against the aggression in the Pacific."

[Stalin-Roosevelt Correspondence, p. 18.]

PART THREE The Leningrad Story

Chapter I THE DEAD OF LENINGRAD

There were many mass tragedies in the Second World War. There was Hiroshima, where

200,000 people were killed in a few seconds, and many thousands of others were maimed and crippled for life; there was Nagasaki, on which the second atom bomb was dropped.

In Dresden 135,000 men, women and children were killed in two nights in February

1945. At Stalingrad on August 23, 1942, 40,000 people were killed. Earlier in the war, there had been the London Blitz and "small stuff" like Coventry, where some 700 people were killed in one night. There were the massacres in hundreds of "Partisan" villages in Belorussia; and there were the Nazi extermination camps where millions perished in gas chambers and in other horrible ways. The list is almost endless.

The tragedy of Leningrad, in which nearly a million people died, was, however, unlike any of the others. Here, in September 1941, nearly three million people were trapped by the Germans and condemned to starvation. And nearly one-third of them died—but not as German captives.

[In the words of Harrison Salisbury, one of the best foreign observers of the Russian wartime scene: "This was the greatest and longest siege ever endured by a modern city, a time of trial, suffering and heroism that reached peaks of tragedy and bravery almost beyond our power to comprehend... Even in the Soviet Union the epic of Leningrad has received only modest attention, compared with that devoted to Stalingrad and the Battle of Moscow. And in the west not one person in fifty who thrilled to the courage of the Londoners in the Battle of Britain is cognisant of that of the Leningraders." (New York Times Book Review, May 10, 1962.)]

Leningrad—the old St Petersburg—had been the capital of the Russian Empire for over

two centuries. With its Neva embankments, its bridges, its Winter Palace and Hermitage and dozens of other palaces, with its Admiralty and St Isaac's Cathedral, and its Bronze Horseman (the famous statue of Peter the Great), its Nevsky Prospect, its Summer

Garden and its canals, with their hump-backed granite bridges, it was—and is—one of

the most beautiful cities in the world.

For two centuries it had been not only Russia's capital, but its greatest cultural centre. No Russian city had so many literary associations as St Petersburg. Pushkin, Gogol,

Dostoevsky, Innokenti Annensky, Blok and Anna Akhmatova, to mention only a few,

would never have been what they were but for that haunting city— so dazzling in its

grandeur, grace and harmony to Pushkin; so mysterious, so sinister, so surrealist, if one may say so, to Gogol and Dostoevsky; the Gogol of The Nose; the Dostoevsky of The Idiot and Crime and Punishment.

St Petersburg—Petrograd at the time—was also where the two Revolutions of 1917 had

begun. In 1918, the Soviet Government moved Russia's capital to Moscow, and for three or four years afterwards, Petrograd was almost a dying city, hungrier than most. From 1919 to 1921 more than half its population had fled, and of those who had stayed behind, many thousands died of hunger. So hunger was not new to Leningrad. However, by 1924, its revival—above all, its industrial revival—began, and, by 1941, it was a flourishing industrial and cultural centre again and the greatest educational centre in the Soviet Union, with, proportionately, a larger student population than any other city.

Though no longer the capital of Russia, it had its own, slightly snobbish local patriotism, and tended to look down on Moscow as an upstart. It had, too, had its bad spells under the Soviet régime. Kirov had been assassinated here in December 1934, and that had

started the Great Purges of the late thirties. Leningrad had had its share, perhaps more than its share, of the Stalin-Yezhov Purges. Characteristically, a gifted writer and poet like Olga Bergholz, who was to play so important a part as one of the principal

"Leningrad-can-take-it" speakers on the Leningrad radio during the famine winter of 1941-2, had spent several months in prison in 1937 on some fantastic trumped-up charge.

Other members of her family had also suffered in the Purges. And yet, Olga Bergholz's book of reminiscences, The Daytime Stars, is one of the most moving books on the fearful days of the Blockade. There is, for instance, an unforgettable description of how, faint with hunger and with only a crust of bread and one cigarette to last her a day—the other cigarette she kept for her father—she wandered for ten miles through the snowdrifts and across the ice of the Neva, almost stumbling over dead bodies, to see her father, an elderly doctor, himself nearly dead of hunger, and with patients around him dying. She is a typical Leningrad phenomenon—a woman who was ready to die for Leningrad, but

who, at heart, hated Stalin.

And so, in September 1941, three million people were trapped by the Germans; never had a city of that size endured what Leningrad was to endure during the winter of 1941-2.

Chapter II THE ENEMY ADVANCES

In Leningrad the news on June 22, 1941 of the German invasion produced a wave of

mass meetings, and in the next two weeks an immense number of Leningraders

volunteered for the opolcheniye formations. At the great Kirov Works alone, 15,000 men and women applied for immediate military service. Not all these applications could be accepted, since it was essential that the Kirov Works should go on producing armaments.

The original plan, therefore, to form fifteen workers' divisions had to be abandoned, and, on July 4, it was decided to limit the opolcheniye divisions to three, until further notice.

By July 10, the first opolcheniye division was sent to the front, followed a few days later by the second and third. They had only a few days' training, which had taken place in the main squares of Leningrad. These three opolcheniye divisions were rushed to the so-called Luga defence line, which was 175 miles long and was only sparsely defended by three rifle divisions and the pupils of two military schools, who had also been rushed there from Leningrad. By July 14, the Germans had already succeeded in establishing a large bridgehead north of Luga, on the right bank of the Luga river; it was from there that they were to develop their subsequent offensive against Leningrad.

The situation was extremely grim, and it seems that Voroshilov, the C. in C. of the

Northern Armies, and Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad Party organisation, were in a truly desperate state of mind, as one may judge from the order read out to all the Red Army units of the "North-West Direction" on July 14:

Comrades Red-Army men, officers and political workers! A direct threat of an

enemy invasion is now suspended over Leningrad, the cradle of the Proletarian

Revolution. While the troops of the Northern Front are bravely fighting the Nazi

and Finnish Schützcorps hordes all the way from the Barents Sea to Tallinn and Hangö, and are defending every inch of our beloved Soviet land, the troops of the North-Western Front, often failing to repel enemy attacks, and abandoning their

positions without even entering into combat with the enemy, are only encouraging

by their behaviour the increasingly arrogant Germans. Certain cowards and panic-

stricken individuals not only abandon the Front without orders, but sow panic

among the good and brave soldiers. In some cases both officers and political

workers not only do nothing to stop the panic, and fail to organise their units for

combat, but increase even more, by their shameful behaviour, the panic and

disorganisation at the Front.

The order went on to say that anyone abandoning the Front without orders would be tried by a field tribunal which could order them to be shot, "regardless of rank and previous achievements".

[A. V. Karasev Leningradtsy v gody blokady (The Leningraders in the Years of the Blockade) (Moscow, 1960), p. 65.]

In the middle of July the Leningrad Party organisation decided to mobilise hundreds of thousands of men and women to build fortifications; the work was supervised by

members of the city and provincial committees of the Party, by secretaries of the regional committees, etc. Several defence lines were built—one, from the mouth of the Luga to Chudovo, Gatchina, Uritsk, Pulkovo and then along the Neva; another, a line of

Leningrad's "outer defences", from Peterhof to Gatchina, Pulkovo, Kolpino and Koltushski; and then several lines in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, including one in the northern suburbs, facing the Finns.

By the end of July and the beginning of August nearly a million people were engaged in the building of defences:

People of the most different trades and professions—workers, employees,

schoolchildren, housewives, scientists, teachers, artists, actors, students, etc.—

worked with their picks and shovels. From morning till night they went on, often

under enemy fire.

[ Ibid., p. 69.]

Much of the digging done in these conditions, by people not used to this kind of work, was inevitably hasty and amateurish; many of the trenches dug were not deep enough,

and the minefields and barbed-wire defences were often laid and built in a haphazard manner. Nevertheless, when one considers that the Germans had reached the Luga line, 125 miles south of Leningrad, within three weeks of the Invasion, and that it took them over six weeks after that to reach the outskirts of Leningrad, it is clear that this building of defence lines played an important role in saving Leningrad. Altogether, the people of Leningrad succeeded in digging 340 miles of anti-tank ditches, 15,875 miles of open

trenches, and erecting 400 miles of barbed-wire defences, 190 miles of forest obstacles (felled trees, etc.), and 5,000 wooden or concrete firing points, [ Ognevyie tochki (firing points) included not only proper pillboxes, but even the most rudimentary gun and

machine-gun emplacements.] not counting the various defences built inside Leningrad

itself.

But, except for one successful Russian counter-attack in the Soltsy area at the southern end of the "Luga Line", near Lake Ilmen, on July 14-18, the most the Russians could do was to hold the various defence lines between the Luga River and Leningrad as long as possible.

The state of mind of these hundreds of thousands of people who were digging trenches and building fortifications, day after day, can well be guessed; the spirit of self-sacrifice was there, sure enough, but mixed with a great deal of bitterness. General Fedyuninsky tells how, on one occasion, some miles outside Leningrad, he saw a large group of young and elderly women digging like mad: "You are digging well, girls," he remarked. "Yes,"

said an elderly woman, "we are digging well, but you fellows are fighting badly."

[Fedyuninsky, op. cit., p. 68.]

This was perhaps unfair; the soldiers were doing what they could; but there was

everywhere a desperate shortage of both reserves and heavy equipment. Everywhere,

except along part of the Luga Line, the Germans had great superiority. Thus, Major-

General Nikishov, Chief of Staff of the Northern (i.e. Finnish) Front, wrote in August in a dispatch to Marshal Shaposhnikov:

The difficulties in the present situation arise from the fact that neither divisional commanders, not army commanders nor the commander of the Army Group, have

any reserves at all. Even the smallest enemy breakthrough has to be stopped up with improvised sub-units drawn from other parts of the Front.

Moreover, many of the opolcheniye troops had no experience at all; the kind of hardships to which they were subjected may be gauged from the example of the newly-formed 1st

opolcheniye division which, after a forced thirty-seven miles march, during which they were constantly attacked by German aircraft, was promptly thrown into battle against German motorised and panzer troops:

This first battle which the men had ever fought proved a terrible ordeal both to

them and their officers. Not only were they totally inexperienced, but they had no weapons with which to fight the enemy tanks, and when there were large-scale

armoured attacks, they inevitably retreated.

[Karasev, op. cit., p. 99.]

The strong Russian stand along a large part of the Luga Line since the middle of July nevertheless forced the Germans to regroup their forces and it was not till August 8 that the "final" offensive against Leningrad began. The defenders of the Luga Line were outflanked both in the west and in the east, and by August 21, they found themselves at the tip of a salient, thirteen miles wide and nearly 130 miles deep, with the Germans crashing ahead towards the Gulf of Finland south-west of Leningrad and towards Lake

Ladoga south-east of the city. For fear of being encircled, they had to pull out—which they did in chaotic conditions. On August 21 the Germans captured Chudovo, thus

cutting the main Leningrad-Moscow railway, and, by the 30th, after heavy fighting, they captured Mga, and cut Leningrad's last railway link with the rest of the country. Having concentrated an enormous number of tanks and planes both south-west and south-east of Leningrad, the Germans now confidently expected to take the city by storm. Despite

desperate Russian resistance, the German forces broke through to the south bank of Lake Ladoga. They captured a large part of the left bank of the Neva, including Schlüsselburg, but failed to cross the river. Leningrad was now isolated from the rest of the country, except for highly precarious communications across Lake Ladoga. South and south-west of the city the position of the Russians was equally desperate, with the Germans having broken through to the Gulf of Finland only a few miles south-west of the city and

attacking heavily in the Kolpino and Pulkovo areas some fifteen miles south of

Leningrad. The Russians, however, maintained a large bridgehead at Oranienbaum,

opposite Kronstadt, and to the west of the point at which the Germans had reached the Gulf. In the north, on September 4, the Finns occupied the former frontier station of Beloostrov, twenty miles north of Leningrad, but were thrown out on the following day.

As early as August 20, at the meeting of the Leningrad Party aktiv, Voroshilov and Zhdanov admitted the extreme seriousness of the situation. Zhdanov said that the whole population, and particularly the young, must be given a rudimentary training in shooting, grenade-throwing and street-fighting.

Either the working-class of Leningrad will be turned into slaves, and the best among them exterminated, or we shall turn Leningrad into the Fascists' grave.. .

[ D. N. Pavlov, Leningrad v blokade (Leningrad During the Blockade) (Moscow, 1961), pp. 14-15.]

On the following day the famous Appeal to the people of Leningrad, signed by

Voroshilov, Zhdanov and Popkov, chairman of the Leningrad Soviet, was published:

Let us, like one man [it concluded] rise to the defence of our city, of our homes and families, our freedom and honour. Let us do our sacred duty as Soviet patriots in our relentless struggle against a hated and ruthless enemy, let us be vigilant and merciless in dealing with cowards, panic-mongers and deserters, let us establish the strictest revolutionary discipline in our city. Armed with such iron discipline and Bolshevik organisation, let us meet the enemy and throw him back.

During those days there was no certainty at all that the Germans would not break into Leningrad. As Pavlov later wrote:

Everything had been prepared for destroying the enemy forces inside the city.

Factories, bridges and public buildings were mined, and their wreckage would have fallen on the enemies' heads and stopped their tanks. The civilian population, not to mention the soldiers and sailors of the Baltic Fleet, were prepared for street

fighting. The idea of fighting for every house was not an act of self-sacrifice, but aimed at destroying the enemy. Later, the experience of Stalingrad was to show that such warfare could succeed.. .

[ Pavlov, op. cit., p. 19.]

This sounds rather like a piece of bravado; for the problem of feeding and supplying Leningrad, with its nearly three million population, would, in such conditions, have been infinitely more complicated than at Stalingrad. Nevertheless, it is certain, as I was told in Leningrad in 1943, that the possibility of gradually abandoning the southern (and main) part of the city, and of clinging on to the "Petrograd Side" and the Vassili Island on the right bank of the Neva was not entirely ruled out during those desperate days.

The shelling of Leningrad began on September 4, and on September 8, 9 and 10 the city was subjected to some particularly fierce air-raids. That of September 8 caused 178 fires, including that of the famous Badayev food stores—about the destruction of which such exaggerated stories were told, especially after the fearful famine had started.

Firewatching was better organised on September 9, and all but a few incendiaries were rapidly put out. The anti-aircraft guns brought down five planes, but the slow Soviet Chaika fighters were almost helpless against the Messerschmidts; it was then that, in desperation, several Russian pilots rammed the German planes.

In these first major raids, the Germans also dropped many delayed-action bombs and

land-mines, and, not being used to handling these, many volunteers (and there were

volunteers for everything in Leningrad) lost their lives.

There are numerous stories of desperate fighting during those days at Pulkovo, Kolpino and Uritsk—the latter only two or three miles from the Kirov Works, in the south-west of Leningrad; but except for a footnote in the official History saying that Zhukov was in command of the defence of Leningrad from September 11 till the middle of October,

post-war accounts are silent about the changes that took place in the High Command. The dramatic story I heard from several people in Leningrad in 1943 was that about

September 10, when there was practically complete chaos at the front, Voroshilov,

believing that everything was lost, went into the front line, in the hope of getting killed by the Germans. But on September 11 Stalin dispatched Zhukov to Leningrad, and it was

Zhukov who fully reorganised the defence of the city within three days; in a press

interview I attended in Berlin in June 1945, Zhukov proudly referred to this fact, though without going into any details, and Vyshinsky said "Yes, it was Zhukov who saved Leningrad." It was, undoubtedly, during the short Zhukov reign—after which he was placed in charge of the defence of Moscow—that the front round Leningrad became

stabilised.

Having failed to take Leningrad by storm, the German High Command (not

unreasonably) supposed that the city would, before long, be starved into surrender. But Hitler, characteristically, ordered that no capitulation be accepted and that the city be

"wiped off the face of the earth", as Leningrad would present a danger of epidemics and would, moreover, be mined, and so constitute a double threat to any soldiers entering it.

This order (and, incidentally, the German failure to take Leningrad) was to be explained by Jodl at Nuremberg:

Field-Marshal von Leeb, the Supreme Commander of Army Group North at

Leningrad ... pointed out that it would be absolutely impossible for him to keep

these millions of Leningrad people fed and supplied, if they were to fall into his hands, since the supply situation of the Army Group was catastrophic at the time.

That was the first cause. But shortly before, Kiev had been abandoned by the

Russian armies, and hardly had we occupied the city than one tremendous explosion after another occurred. The major part of the inner city was burned down, 50,000

people were made homeless. German soldiers ... suffered considerable losses,

because large amounts of explosives went up into the air... The purpose of the order was exclusively that of protecting German troops against such catastrophes; for

entire staffs had been blown into the air in Kharkov and Kiev.

[ Trial of German Major War Criminals, vol. 15 (London 1947), pp. 306-7. (To be referred to in future as TGMWC.)]

An order from the Führer's headquarters, dated October 7, 1941 and signed by Jodl,

reiterated the Führer's order not to accept capitulation "at either Leningrad or, later, Moscow". Refugees from Leningrad, says the order, must be driven back by fire if they approach the German lines, but any flight to the east by "isolated individuals", through small gaps in the blockade was to be welcomed, since this could only add to the chaos in eastern Russia. This order also said that Leningrad should be razed to the ground by air bombing and artillery fire.

The date of this document is significant: by the beginning of October, the Germans had given up hope of capturing Leningrad by storm. Leningrad, and most of the Leningrad

isthmus continued to remain in Russian hands, and was tying down an army estimated by the Russians at 300,000 men. Although there was no guarantee that the Germans might

not attempt another all-out attack on Leningrad, the desperate preparations made at the end of August and the beginning of September for defending every house and for

destroying any German paratrooper landing in the large open squares of Leningrad lost their immediate urgency; nevertheless the building of firing points and pillboxes inside practically every house (especially corner buildings) continued right on to December; 10,000 soldiers and 75,000 civilians were engaged in this work.

[Karasev, op. cit., p. 123.]

17,000 firing points were set up inside houses and over 4,000 pillboxes were built inside Leningrad, as well as fifteen miles of barricades. Mighty batteries of shore, naval and army artillery were being installed right round Leningrad, and the Baltic Fleet was

invaluable. Even the gun from the cruiser Aurora which had given the signal for the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, was now stationed on the Pulkovo heights, south of Leningrad. But, by a strange irony, though Leningrad was in grave danger, Moscow in October was in even greater danger, and, despite the blockade, 1,000 guns and

considerable quantities of ammunition and other equipment were flown from Leningrad

to Moscow!

[ Karasev, op. cit., p. 133.]

A grim thought, especially in view of the desperate shortage of ammunition on the

Leningrad Front later in the winter, when the hunger blockade had enormously reduced the output of ammunition in Leningrad itself.

The immediate danger of a German occupation of Leningrad had been averted by the

middle of September; but it was only too clear that, cut off from the "mainland", except for the Lake Ladoga route, the only real hope of keeping the city supplied with food, raw materials and fuel—as well as armaments and ammunition that could not be made on the spot—lay in the breach of the land blockade. In September the Russians made a desperate effort to drive the Germans out of the Mga-Siniavino salient, running to the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, and so to clear the Leningrad-Vologda railway line. But although the Russians succeeded in establishing a small bridgehead on the south bank of the Neva, west of Schlüsselburg, and even in holding it, right through the winter, at terrible cost in lives, the Germans had fortified the Mga-Siniavino area so strongly that no progress could be made, and the German defences here were not to be broken up until February

1943.

[The story of this futile attempt to capture the Mga salient, which ended with the last defenders of the Neva bridgehead being wiped out on April 29, 1942, was one of the

most tragic episodes of Leningrad's attempt to loosen the German stranglehold.]

Chapter III THREE MILLION TRAPPED

So, by the beginning of September, Leningrad was completely isolated by land from the Russian "mainland", and nearly three million people had been trapped there. The only remaining communications were worse than precarious. In 1941 Russia was desperately

short of planes, and, with the Germans enjoying complete air control in the Leningrad area, any Russian plane there was in grave danger of being shot down, even at night.

Apart from that, Lake Ladoga, without any proper harbours, was the only route by which Leningrad could communicate with the "mainland".

How was it possible that so many people should have remained in Leningrad, even

though the dire threat of a German occupation had hung over the city ever since the

middle of July? And what hope was there of feeding this enormous population in case

Leningrad was encircled?

It was clear, even during the war, that there had been some very serious miscalculations somewhere; but the factual material published in the last few years shows that this tragic situation was created by a whole series of specific mistakes. There had been lack of foresight on the part of the authorities who, primarily concerned with slowing down the German advance, had given almost no thought at all to the question of food supplies

inside the city; also, for several crucial weeks, when the Germans seemed to have been stopped on the Luga Line, there had been an excess of optimistic propaganda; this was responsible for much wishful thinking among the people of Leningrad, who simply did

not visualise the city being either occupied or blockaded.

This lack of foresight is illustrated by a number of striking facts. Thus, during the German blitzkrieg advance through the Baltic Republics and right into the Leningrad province in June and July, many thousands of tons of grain were evacuated by rail from areas about to be overrun by the Germans, but to the east, and not to Leningrad. At the same time, the evacuation of industrial plants from Leningrad continued to be delayed.

The very slow progress of the evacuation in July and August was due to wishful thinking: people did not believe that the Germans would come anywhere near the city. It is true that, owing to the danger of air-raids, children began to be evacuated in June and early July, but oddly enough to places like Gatchina and Luga, on the Germans' direct road to Leningrad. Soon afterwards they had to be hurriedly brought back to Leningrad, and

some—but not all—were then evacuated to the east, where they remained in perfect

safety until the end of the war.

Altogether the evacuation of Leningrad throughout July and August was very slow

indeed. Only 40,000 people—mostly workers of plants earmarked for evacuation, and

their families—left for the east, besides about 150,000 refugees from the Baltic

Republics, Pskov, etc.

Some local authorities regarded a refusal to be evacuated as a manifestation of patriotism, and actually encouraged such attitudes. One could often hear such officials say: "Our population is ready to dig trenches right in the front line, but it doesn't want to leave Leningrad." This was typical of Leningrad's mood, but it overlooked the fact that there were many people—children, old people and invalids, who were of no use to the defence of the city, and were merely a drain on the city's scant food reserves.

[Pavlov, op. cit., pp. 58-59.]

Moreover, in July and August, most Leningraders did not know exactly where the

Germans were, and since during those two months, the city was not being bombed, they adopted an optimistically complacent attitude.

The situation called for strong administrative evacuation measures, but the authorities hesitated to apply them. As a result there were caught in the blockade 2,544,000 civilians (including 400,000 children) in Leningrad proper, and 343,000 people in the suburbs and other localities inside the ring of the blockade—a total of nearly three millions.

[ Pavlov, op. cit., p. 60.]

To these "mouths to be fed" should, of course, be added the troops who were later to constitute the "Leningrad Front" proper. The mass-evacuation of civilians did not start until January 1942, across the Ice Road of Lake Ladoga. By this time, hundreds of

thousands of civilians had already died of hunger.

The whole extent of the disaster of Leningrad cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of the food reserves available at the beginning of the blockade, of the

rationing measures taken, and of the meagre supplies brought from outside against

appalling difficulties.

On September 6, two days before the land blockade was finally complete, Popkov, head of the Leningrad Soviet, cabled to the State Defence Committee in Moscow, saying that there was very little food left in the city and urging that as much as possible be sent by rail immediately.

[On that day Popkov still hoped that Mga would be recaptured by the Russians. (Ibid., p.

60.)]

But the railways had already been cut, and two days later, all other land communications as well. On September 12 it was established that, on the basis of the rationing system that had been introduced on July 18 in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities, the stocks

available in Leningrad for both troops and civilians only amounted to:

Grain and flour ............... 35 days' supply

Cereals and macaroni ......... 30 days' supply

Meat, including live cattle ... 33 days' supply

Fats .............................. 45 days' supply

Sugar and confectionery ...... 60 days' supply

In addition, the Army and the Baltic Navy had some small "emergency reserves" of food; but these did not amount to much.

Short of breaking through the blockade, and re-establishing rail communications with the

"mainland", there was little hope of replenishing these meagre reserves. Lake Ladoga was very poorly equipped, and what little shipping it had was under constant German air

attack. The food reserves in Leningrad were, moreover, constantly threatened with further destruction by air raids. Considerable quantities of grain, flour and sugar had already been destroyed, notably on September 8, largely because even some of the most

elementary air-raid precautions had not been observed. There was still no centralised control, and the food in the city was held by numerous organisations; thus, for several days after the ring of the blockade had closed, it was still possible to eat in "commercial"

restaurants, which were not subject to rationing, and which used up as much as twelve per cent of all the fats and ten per cent of all the meat consumed in the city. Certain tinned goods, such as tinned crab, could still be bought in shops without ration-cards for some time after September 8.

The explanation given now for all this carelessness is that both the civilian and the military authorities were so concerned with building defences and keeping the Germans out of Leningrad that they had "no time to give much thought to the problem of food.

[ Pavlov, op. cit., p. 64.]

An example of the general confusion, both in Leningrad and elsewhere, quoted by the

same author, is the order sent from Moscow to Leningrad, several days after the blockade had begun, to despatch several wagon-loads of sugar and confectionery from Leningrad to Vologda!

The first sign that the authorities were alarmed by the food situation in Leningrad was the decision, on September 2, to cut down rations to 22 oz. of bread a day for workers, 14 oz.

for office workers and 11 oz. for children and dependants. On September 12, there was a second cut in rations—the bread ration now was just over 1 lb. for workers, 11 oz. for office-workers and children and 9 oz. for dependants.

There was also a reduction in the meat and cereals rations [By cereals (krupa) are meant millet, rice, semolina, buckwheat, etc.], but, to make up for this, the sugar, confectionery and fats ration was increased as follows:

Sugar and conf.

Fats

Workers

4.5 lb. monthly

2 lb. 2 oz.

3 lb. 12.5 oz.

Employees

1 lb. 2 oz.

monthly

Dependants

3 lb. 5 oz. monthly

11 oz.

Children (to

3 lb. 12.5 oz.

1 lb. 2 oz.

12)

monthly

These sugar and confectionery rations of three to four pounds a month and of fats of one to two pounds a month, though by no means generous by ordinary standards, were wholly out of proportion with Leningrad's miserable food reserves; those in charge of

Leningrad's defence still had the over-optimistic idea that the blockade would, somehow, be broken before long.

This did not happen, and to economise on "real" flour, the authorities soon had to embark on a feverish search for substitutes, which could be used as admixtures in the baking of bread. When, in September, several barges carrying grain were sunk by the Germans on Lake Ladoga, a large proportion of the grain was recovered by divers and though,

normally, it would have been unfit for human consumption, this mouldy grain was to be used as an admixture. As from October 20, bread was composed of 63% rye flour, 4%

flax-cake, 4% bran, 8% wholemeal, 4% soya flour, 12% malt flour, 5% mouldy flour; a

few days later, with the malt flour reserves running out, new substitutes began to be used, such as cellulose, after it had been processed in a certain way, and cotton cake. "During that highly critical period, these substitutes represented a saving of twenty-five days'

rations." True, the cellulose and mouldy flour gave the bread a mouldy and bitter taste,

"but, in those days, taste was what people stopped worrying about".

Needless to say, oats which was intended as fodder for horses, was consumed by people, and horses—at least a small number of which it was essential for the Army to keep—

were fed on tree leaves and the like. Other incredible substitutes for proper food were devised. In the port of Leningrad a stock of 2,000 tons of sheep guts was discovered; this was turned into a horrible jelly, the smell of which had to be neutralised through the admixture of cloves; at the height of the famine, this sheeps' gut jelly was often to be supplied to ration-card-holders instead of meat.

As distinct from all other cities in the Soviet Union during the war, where people could buy a few extras in the kolkhoz market, the population of Leningrad was absolutely and solely dependent on its ration cards.

There were, of course, some black sheep. In September and the first half of October there were numerous cases of fraud; many people managed to have two or more ration cards;

often the cards of people who had died or left the city. There were also many cases of forged cards; since there was scarcely any lighting in the shops, the sales staff were often unable to distinguish between real and forged cards. Particularly atrocious were cases when ration cards were stolen. The loss of a card was often equal to a death sentence.

An employee of the printing works where ration cards were printed, was found in

possession of 100 such cards; she was shot. It was also suspected that some forged cards had been dropped on Leningrad by German planes, to add to the confusion. In the middle of October a "re-registration" of all ration-cards holders was ordered; this showed that some 70,000 ration cards had, before that, been unnecessarily honoured. People had used the cards of the absent, the dead, or of some who were now in the Army.

At the height of the famine in December there was a "epidemic" of lost ration cards; in October 5,000 ration cards had been genuinely or fraudulently lost; in November the

figure rose to 13,000, in December to 24,000. The usual story was that the card had been destroyed in an air-raid. It is perhaps surprising that not more people should have resorted to this subterfuge, since the difference between one and two ration cards in December often meant the difference between life and death. The authorities' refusal to replace these lost ration cards, except when such loss and destruction could be more or less

satisfactorily proved, soon put an end to the "epidemic".

If, in September and October, most rations were still honoured, this was no longer true in November; the shortage of cereals, meat and fats was particularly serious, and card-holders had to accept substitutes. Some of these, such as 6 oz. of egg-powder instead of 2

lb. of meat, were not "equivalents" by the widest stretch. Other meat-substitutes were the horrible jelly from sheep's guts, or an evil-smelling jelly made out of calves' skins, of which a stock had been discovered in a warehouse. In November and especially

December, there were practically no fats (butter, oil or margarine) left, nor any kinds of substitutes.

During the first few months of the blockade the distribution of food was rather chaotic; in theory, anyone could have his ration coupon honoured anywhere; but this often produced queues of unequal length. In December, everybody had to register in a particular shop; the distribution centres were thus able to send each shop approximately its correct share

—not that this meant that all ration coupons could be honoured.

In November and December, the whole of Leningrad was living on starvation rations;

even many privileged ration holders (workers and technical and engineering staffs)—

representing 34.4% of the population—died of hunger; still lower ration cards were held by office workers (17.5%), dependants (29.5%) and children (18.5%). This system has

been severely criticised by Soviet authors—especially in relation to children's ration cards: a child of eleven certainly needed more food than a child of three, and it was particularly unfair to put children on the even lower dependants card once they had

reached the age of twelve.

As we have seen, the first cut in rations was decided on September 2; the second was on September 10, the third, on October 1, the fourth on November 13, and the fifth, the all-time low, on November 20. Already after the fourth cut, people began to die of hunger.

Apart from the food shortage, there was also a catastrophic fuel shortage in Leningrad.

Both oil and coal supplies were virtually exhausted by the end of September. The only hope was to cut whatever timber was still available in the blockaded territory.

On October 8, the City and Provincial Committees decided to cut timber in the Pargolovo and Vsevolozhsk areas north of the city...

The wood-cutting teams consisted mostly of women and adolescents; they arrived in the woods without proper instruments or clothing, and there was no housing and no transport there. The whole plan was threatened with collapse. Ely October 24 only one per cent of the plan had been fulfilled... in one area, only 216 people were working, instead of 800 as originally planned... In the circumstances the Komsomols, mostly girls, were sent out to Pargolovo and Vsevolozhsk. Without warm clothes and shoes, and sometimes wearing

only light shoes and overcoats, and suffering from hunger and cold, these girls of the Leningrad Komsomol nevertheless did wonders. Thus the girls of the Smolny area built, in forty degrees of frost [Centigrade], a narrow-gauge line from the forest to the nearest railway line. They built barracks, supplied them with rudimentary stoves, and so

delivered substantial quantities of timber to Leningrad.

[ Karasev, op. cit., pp. 237-8.]

This slightly eased the fuel situation in Leningrad, without, however, solving it. By the end of October, the city's electric-power supply was only a small fraction of what it had been. The use of electric light was prohibited everywhere, except at the General Staff, the Smolny [The headquarters of the Leningrad Defence Council under Zhdanov, and of the

City Soviet and other central organisations. Originally a famous school for young

gentlewomen, it had been the headquarters of Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the 1917

Revolution.], Party offices, civil defence stations, and certain other offices; but ordinary houses, as well as most offices had to do without light throughout the long winter nights.

Central heating was abandoned in flats, offices and houses, and in factories central heating was replaced by small wood stoves. Owing to the lack of electricity, most

factories had to close down, or use the most primitive methods for making the machines turn at all—such as bicycle pedals. Tram-cars were sharply reduced in number in

October, and in November they stopped running altogether. No food, no light, no heat, and, on top of it all, German air-raids and constant shelling—such was the life of

Leningrad in the winter of 1941-2.

Chapter IV THE LADOGA LIFELINE

With Leningrad firmly encircled by the Germans by the beginning of September,

desperate remedies had to be devised for bringing supplies to the city. It could no longer be assumed that the blockade on land would be broken within a short time. Therefore, on September 9, the Leningrad War Council decided to build a harbour in the small bay of Osinovets, on the west bank of Lake Ladoga near the end of a suburban railway line,

some thirty-five miles north-east of Leningrad. Through it some capital equipment could, it was reckoned, be evacuated from Leningrad, and food and other supplies brought in.

The port was intended to handle twelve vessels a day by the end of September. The

Ladoga naval flotilla, supplied with some anti-aircraft guns, was supposed to protect the new port.

Needless to say, with the Germans only some twenty-five miles south of Osinovets, their planes not only kept a constant watch on the new harbour, but also on the primitive little harbour of Novaya Ladoga on the south side of the lake through which the supplies went, as well as on any cargoes crossing the lake between the two points. Many tugs and barges were sunk during the first weeks of the "Ladoga Lifeline", including several with women and children evacuees from Leningrad.

*

This flimsy lifeline proved inevitably disappointing. During the first month in which the new improvised harbour of Osinovets was open, only 9,800 tons of food were brought

from beyond Lake Ladoga. This represented an eight-days' food supply for Leningrad,

which was thus reduced to living on its reserves during the remaining twenty-two days.

This was all the more disastrous as, by November, the half-frozen lake would be unusable for either vessels or road transport. Some urgent measures were therefore taken, and, between October 14 and 20, 5,000 tons of food were brought from Novaya Ladoga to

Osinovets; but this was still very little. Between October 20 and the beginning of

November, 12,000 tons of flour and 1,000 tons of meat were rushed from inside Russia to Lake Ladoga, and, despite constant German air attacks, and autumn gales that were now sweeping the lake, most of this food was safely delivered in Leningrad. Apart from food, a considerable quantity of munitions was also transported.

But by November 15, Lake Ladoga ceased to be navigable. Summing up the results of

this stage of the Ladoga lifeline, Pavlov writes:

The water lifeline in the autumn of 1941 was a great help to the besieged city.

Between September 12 and the end of navigation on November 15, 24,000 tons of

flour and cereals, 1,131 tons of meat and dairy produce were delivered, besides

considerable quantities of munitions and fuel. The 25,000 tons of food represented only a fraction of what was required, yet this enabled Leningrad to hold out an

extra twenty days, and in a besieged fortress every day counts. The workers of the Volkhov river fleet, the sailors and dockers of Ladoga, the soldiers and officers who took part in these operations, many of them losing their lives, were defending every ton of food against storms, fires, enemy aircraft and looting. The work they did is unforgettable.

[Pavlov, op. cit., p. 118.]

By November 16 a new phase was reached in the ordeal of Leningrad. The city could

now be supplied only by air. Although the Battle of Moscow was at its height, the State Defence Committee gave Leningrad a few transport and fighter planes to fly supplies

from Novaya Ladoga to Leningrad—a distance of about 100 miles. Thereupon the

Germans proceeded to bomb the Novaya Ladoga airfield, and two-thirds of the supplies had to be flown from airfields further inland. Moreover, the air convoys were constantly attacked by the Germans while flying over the lake, and a number of Russian planes were shot down. In view of the very limited cargo space, only pressed meat and other

concentrated foodstuffs were delivered to Leningrad in this difficult and costly way. This small-scale "air-lift" could not, in the long run, solve the problem of feeding nearly three million people.

On top of it all, there now came some truly disastrous new military reverses. At the beginning of November, the Germans attempted to capture the whole southern bank of

Lake Ladoga, including the railway junction of Volkhov; General Fedyuninsky's troops just managed to stop the Germans outside Volkhov; but, further east, the Germans

succeeded in cutting the main Leningrad-Vologda railway line, and, on November 9, they captured Tikhvin. The loss of Tikhvin was critical. Small quantities of food could still, with great difficulty, be delivered by air. The problem of delivering larger quantities of food across Lake Ladoga, even when it was well frozen, became almost insoluble. The

Volkhov and Novaya-Ladoga food bases had gone out of action when the Germans had

cut the railway to the east of them. The new rail-head was now a small station called Zaborie, in wild forest country some 100 miles east of Volkhov and some sixty miles east of Tikhvin. Only a state of mind bordering on despair could have persuaded the

Leningrad War Council to order the building of a "motor road" of nearly 200 miles, along old forest paths and through virgin forest, in a wide circle from Zaborie to Novaya

Ladoga. Soldiers and peasants were mobilised to build this "road" at the height of winter; and it was actually completed on December 6. The whole area was almost uninhabited

and:

Along a large stretch, the road was so narrow that lorries meeting each other could not pass; moreover, the deep snow, the steep hills in a country wholly unfamiliar to the drivers led to constant breakdowns and stoppages. Fortunately, it so happened that three days after the road had been completed, the military situation sharply changed for the better, with the Red Army's recapture of Tikhvin. It is obvious that the new road could not save Leningrad for any length of time. A convoy of trucks

which left Zaborie for Novaya Ladoga took fourteen days to return to its base, and in three days, between Novaya-Ladoga and Yeremina Gora over 350 trucks had got

stuck in the snow. These convoys had travelled at the rate of twenty miles a day.. .

[Pavlov, op. cit., p. 155.]

By driving the Germans out of Tikhvin and beyond the Volkhov river between December

9 and 15 General Meretskov's troops literally saved Leningrad.

[Another great advantage of the recapture of Tikhvin was that it put an end to the threat of a German-Finnish "junction".]

The Germans, whose radio had screamed its head off about the imminent surrender of

Leningrad the day Tikhvin fell, said very little about the loss of the Leningrad "padlock".

Had Tikhvin remained in German hands, it is impossible to see how Leningrad could

have been supplied, since the improvised 200-mile road was as good as useless. And, at that time, with the Russian counter-offensive at Moscow at its height, there could be no question of providing Leningrad with a sufficient number of transport and fighter planes for a super-airlift. Not only did General Meretskov's troops drive the Germans out of Tikhvin, but by the end of December the troops of the Volkhov Army Group had also

driven the Germans a considerable distance away from Voibokalo, half-way between

Volkhov and Mga (the latter still in German hands). By January 1, 1942, trains could travel all the way from Moscow and Vologda to Voibokalo, where the supplies were

taken by lorry across the now frozen Lake Ladoga to Leningrad. But the organisation of the "Road of Life" across the ice of Lake Ladoga is a long and complicated story, and it would be wrong to suppose that, with the liberation of Tikhvin on December 9,

Leningrad's supply troubles were over.

Chapter V THE GREAT FAMINE

Already in November, people in Leningrad (in the first place, elderly men) began to die of hunger, euphemistically described as "alimentary distrophy". In November alone over 11,000 people died; the cut in rations on November 20—the fifth since the beginning of the Blockade—enormously increased the death-rate.

On paper, but only on paper, these all-time-low daily rations were as follows:

Workers and Engineering and technical

Office Workers

Dependants

Children

staff

Bread

9 oz.

4.5 oz.

4.5 oz.

Fats

0.66 oz.

0.33 oz.

0.25 oz.

Meat

l.75 oz.

1 oz.

0.5 oz.

Cereals

1.75 oz.

1.16 oz.

0.75 oz.

Sugar and

1.75 oz.

1.16 oz.

1 oz.

conf.

8.16 oz. or 581

7 oz. or 466

8.33 oz. or 684

Total

15 oz. or 1,087 calories

calories

calories

Even these incredible figures for calories, representing, especially for the last three categories, only a tiny fraction of the human body's requirements, are an "optimistic"

exaggeration. Since the meat and fats rations were not honoured, or else were replaced by wholly inadequate substitutes (sheep-guts jelly, etc.), the calory content of the rations was even lower, except (it is claimed) in the case of children. In December 52,000 people died, as many as normally died in a year; while in January 1942, between 3,500 and

4,000 people died every day; in December and January 200,000 people died. Although,

by January, the rations had been somewhat increased, the after-effects of the famine were to be felt for many months after; altogether, according to the official Russian figures quoted at the Nuremberg Trial, 632,000 people died in Leningrad as a direct result of the Blockade—a figure which is undoubtedly an under-estimate. In 1959 I was told by

Shostakovich, who had been in Leningrad during the early stages of the blockade, that 900,000 people died, and even higher figures have been quoted.

Apart from hunger, people also suffered acutely from cold in their unheated houses.

People would burn their furniture and books— but these did not last long.

To fill their empty stomachs, to reduce the intense sufferings caused by hunger,

people would look for incredible substitutes: they would try to catch crows or rooks, or any cat or dog that had still somehow survived; they would go through medicine chests in search of castor oil, hair oil, vaseline or glycerine; they would make soup or jelly out of carpenter's glue (scraped off wallpaper or broken-up furniture). But not all people in the enormous city had such supplementary sources of "food".

Death would overtake people in all kinds of circumstances; while they were in the streets, they would fall down and never rise again; or in their houses where they would fall asleep and never awake; in factories, where they would collapse while

doing a job of work. There was no transport, and the dead body would usually be

put on a hand-sleigh drawn by two or three members of the dead man's family;

often, wholly exhausted during the long trek to the cemetery, they would abandon

the body half-way, leaving it to the authorities to deal with it.

[Pavlov, op. cit., pp. 136-7.]

According to another witness:

It was almost impossible to get a coffin. Hundreds of corpses would be abandoned in cemeteries or in their neighbourhood, usually merely wrapped in a sheet... The

authorities would bury all these abandoned corpses in common graves; these were

made by the civil defence teams with the use of explosives. People did not have the strength to dig ordinary graves in the frozen earth... On January 7, 1942 the

Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet noted that corpses were scattered all over the place, and were filling up morgues and cemetery areas; some were being buried any old way, without any regard for the elementary rules of hygiene.

[Karasev, op. cit., p. 189.]

Later, in April, during the general clean-up of the city—which was absolutely essential to prevent epidemics, once spring had come—thousands of corpses were discovered in

shelters, trenches and under the melting snow, where they had been lying for months. As the Secretary of the Leningrad Komsomol wrote at the time: "The job of disposing of these corpses was truly terrifying; we were afraid of the effect it might have on the minds of children and very young people. A dry matter-of-fact communiqué would have read

something like this: 'The Komsomol organisations put in order all trenches and shelters.'

In reality this work was beyond description."

[Ibid., p. 227.]

Hospitals were of very little help to the starving. Not only were the doctors and nurses half-dead with hunger themselves, but what the patients needed was not medicine, but food, and there was none.

In December and January the frost froze water mains and sewers, and the burst pipes all over the city added to the danger of epidemics. Water had to be brought in pails from the Neva or the numerous Leningrad canals. This water was, moreover, dirty and unsafe to drink, and in February, about one and a half million people were given anti-typhoid

injections.

Between the middle of November and the end of December, 35,000 people were

evacuated from Leningrad, mostly by air; on December 6 many people were allowed to

leave the city across the ice of Lake Ladoga, but, up to January 22, this evacuation went on in an unorganised way: thousands simply proceeded across Lake Ladoga on foot, and many died before they even reached the south bank of the lake.

It was not till January 22 that, with the help of a fleet of buses travelling along the new Ice Road, the evacuation across Lake Ladoga started in real earnest.

There is some conflicting evidence about the effect of the famine on people: on the

whole, people just died with a feeling of resignation, while the survivors went on living in hopes: the recapture of Tikhvin and the slight increase in rations on December 25 had a heartening effect. Nevertheless, Karasev talks of numerous cases of "psychological trauma" produced by hunger and cold, German bombing and shelling, and the death of so many relatives and friends. There are no exact figures of the number of children who died of hunger; but the death-rate among these is believed to have been relatively low, if only because their parents would often sacrifice their own meagre rations.

Both local patriotism and an iron discipline, partly enforced by the authorities, account for the virtual absence of any disorders or hunger riots. That the measures taken against

"anti-social" behaviour were extremely drastic may be judged from the statement by Kuznetsov, head of the Leningrad City Party Organisation, who said in April: "We used to shoot people for half-a-pound of bread stolen from the population." There were, inevitably, a few racketeers here and there; but, on the whole, the discipline was good.

Pavlov tells the following significant incident:

The driver of a truck was delivering loaves of bread to a bakery, when a shell hit the front of the truck and killed the driver... The loaves of bread were scattered over the pavement. Conditions were favourable for looting. Yet the people who gathered

round the wrecked vehicle, raised the alarm, and guarded the bread till the arrival of another truck. All these people were hungry, and the temptation to grab a fresh loaf of bread well-nigh irresistible. And yet not a single loaf was stolen.

[Op cit., p. 109.]

Whether, on the other hand, as Pavlov implies, a man who started screaming at people in a bread-queue urging them to loot the shop was an enemy agent or simply a man driven half-insane by hunger is difficult to say; many people were driven half-insane, as is suggested by Karasev and other writers.

Morale, even in the appalling conditions of the famine at its height, was kept up in all kinds of ways: there are many accounts of the theatrical shows that continued throughout the winter, given by actors almost fainting with hunger, and wearing (like the audience) whatever they could to keep themselves warm.

Much is also made of the role played by the Leningrad Komsomol organisations to help people in dire distress. The Komsomol organised bytovyie otriady ("everyday life teams") of several thousand young people:

These teams consisted of a total of 1,000 young people; moreover, in each district, some 500 or 700 temporary helpers were frequently mobilised. Tired and worn out,

these young people, mostly girls, would help the population to overcome their

terrible difficulties. Visiting dirty and freezing houses, they would use their swollen hands, cracked with cold and hard work, to chop wood, or light the little burzhuika

stoves, or bring pails of water from the Neva, or bring dinner from a canteen, or wash the floor or clothes, and the pathetic smile of a completely exhausted

Leningrader would then express his gratitude for this hard and honourable work.

In the Primorski district alone, the members of these Komsomol teams examined in

February-March 1,810 flats, looked after 780 sick people and, altogether, helped

7,678 persons... The Komsomol teams were authorised to resettle people into more

suitable houses, place homeless children in children's homes, and arrange about

evacuations... Largely through the help of the Komsomol teams, over 30,000

orphans were settled in the eighty-five new children's homes set up between January and May 1942.

[Karasev, op. cit., p. 190.]

Most of these children were the orphans of parents who had died in the famine.

If the civilian population of Leningrad had to suffer all the pangs of hunger, and many had to die, since there was no alternative so long as large scale evacuation was

impossible, there could be no question of letting the soldiers starve; for everything ultimately depended on them. Even so, the soldiers' rations had to be cut, too. The Red Army rations established on September 20, 1941, amounted to 3,450 calories in the case of front-line troops and 2,659 calories in the case of "rear personnel", with two intermediary categories between them.

In the conditions of Leningrad such rations could not be maintained for long. Between the middle of November 1941 and February 1942, the ration of front-line troops was

reduced to 2,593 calories, and that of "rear" troops to 1,605 calories; from November 20

—that is, at the height of the hunger blockade—front-line soldiers were getting 1 lb. of bread and about 4 oz. of meat, besides small quantities of other food. This, at the height of winter, was far from satisfactory, though the knowledge of what was happening in

Leningrad at the same time made the soldiers feel that they were highly privileged in comparison with the civilians. Whenever civilians visited the front, soldiers gladly shared their meagre rations with them. Moreover, most of the reserves of potatoes in Leningrad were handed over to the Army's field kitchens, and this created an illusion of "bulk"; also, the army bread was of slightly better quality than that given to civilians.

The soldiers, however, suffered severely from the Leningrad tobacco shortage, and all kinds of admixtures were devised—such as hops and dried maple leaves. Desperate

remedies were resorted to in order to keep the troops well supplied with tobacco, which was found to be essential for morale. Very few soldiers, it was found, would agree to exchange their tobacco even for chocolate, which was among the "concentrated" foods brought to Leningrad by air.

Chapter VI THE ICE ROAD

There were only two drastic remedies for the appalling famine from which Leningrad had suffered, especially since the end of October: one was the evacuation of as many people as possible; the other was the organisation of a reliable supply-line for food, fuel and raw materials. The organisation of an ice road across Lake Ladoga had been in the Leningrad authorities' minds ever since the blockade on land had closed round Leningrad on

September 8; the lake was expected to freeze in November or early December. But

everything depended on the intensity of the frost; to build a proper motor road across the ice, it was essential that the ice should be uniformly two metres thick. This thickness could be reached rapidly in only extremely cold weather of at least minus 15°C.

By November 17 the ice was only one metre thick, but by November 20—that day of the

all-time-low ration cut in Leningrad —it reached a thickness of 1.8 metres; horse-drawn vehicles were sent across the ice, but the horses were so underfed that many of them collapsed and died. The drivers were instructed to cut up such horses, and deliver them to Leningrad as meat. At last, on November 22, the first motor transport ventured on to the lake; but the ice was still so thin that only small loads could be carried by the two-ton lorries, and even so, several of them fell through the ice. On the following day a system was adopted of attaching sleighs to the lorries, and putting most of the load on the sleighs, so as to spread out the pressure on the ice more evenly. Between November 23

and December 1 only 800 tons of flour were transported across the ice in these various ways, and, in the process, some forty lorries were lost, some of them falling through the ice, often together with their drivers. The results of this first attempt to use the Road of Life were negligible. It should be remembered that, at this time, Tikhvin was in German hands, and that most of the food transported during that week came from the meagre

stores that had been accumulated on the south side of the lake before the fall of Tikhvin on November 9. New supplies—if any—were now expected to reach Lake Ladoga along

the incredibly long improvised road from Zaborie, far to the east of Tikhvin. To maintain the starvation rations that had come into force in Leningrad on November 20, it was

essential to bring to the city at least 1,000 tons of food a day, besides ammunition and petrol which were absolutely essential to the troops of the Leningrad Front. Even in the best possible conditions, not more than 600 tons a day could be expected from the

Zaborie road. Thus, the liberation of Tikhvin on December 9 truly meant that Leningrad had been saved.

[Pavlov, op. cit., p. 156.]

Not that the recapture of Tikhvin solved all problems—far from it. Although Tikhvin, on the main Vologda-Leningrad line, had now become the main food base for Leningrad and became, as soon as it was recaptured, "like a gigantic ant-heap" (Pavlov), the task of transporting food and other supplies from Tikhvin to Leningrad was still an extremely arduous one. Since the Germans, in their retreat, had blown up all the railway bridges between Tikhvin and Volkhov, there was no alternative, for the time being, to

transporting the supplies by road, namely from Tikhvin to a number of points on the lake, such as Kabona or Lednevo, a matter of over 100 miles of very bad winter roads. It was not till January 1 that the railway bridges between Tikhvin and Volkhov were rebuilt; by this time, the Germans had also been driven a long distance away from Volkhov and

Voibokalo (roughly to their original "Mga salient" which they had captured in September), and it was Voibokalo, on the main Leningrad-Vologda railway line, and just south of the Schüsselburg Bay, which became the main "food base". It was only some thirty-five miles from Osinovets, on the Leningrad side of the lake. What is more, during the following weeks, a branch line was built, in incredible winter conditions, from

Voibokalo to Kabona, a matter of some twenty miles, so as to bring the trains right up to the lake, where the food was then put in lorries.

Although the food supplies in Leningrad were still worse than precarious at the end of December, the War Council decided to increase the bread ration slightly on December

25. This was not enough to reduce the death-rate, but it had an important effect on

morale.

Altogether, between the beginning of the blockade on September 8 and January 1, some 45,000 tons of food were delivered to Leningrad in the following ways (in tons):

By

By

By the ice

Total

water

air

road

Grain and Flour

23,041

743

12,343

36,127

Cereals

1,056

—

1,482

2,538

Meat and meat products

730

1,829

1,100

3,659

Fats and cheese

276

1,729

138

2,143

Condensed milk

125

200

158

483

Egg powder, chocolate,

—

681

44

725

etc.

Total:

25,228 5,182

15,265

45,675

Considering that there were about two and a half million people still in Leningrad, these quantities were, of course, extremely small, and, what is more, the quantities delivered by January 1 across the ice were worse than disappointing. It should, it is true, be added that, apart from food, a certain quantity of ammunition and petrol were also brought into

Leningrad during this period.

Altogether, neither in December nor even in January, could the Ice Road be said to be working satisfactorily, and at the beginning of January Zhdanov expressed his extreme discontent at the way things were going. What complicated matters still further was the decrepit state of the small railway line (in the past a derelict suburban line, built long before the Revolution) between Osinovets and Leningrad. The railway even lacked

water-towers, and engines had to be filled with water by hand, and trees had to be cut on the spot to supply them with damp and wholly inadequate fuel. The line which used to have one train a day, was now expected to carry six or seven large goods trains. The half-starved railwaymen were fighting against terrible odds.

There was also an acute shortage of packing material in Russia and a high proportion of the food taken to Leningrad was wasted as a result. It was not, in fact, until the end of January or rather, until February 10, 1942, when the branch-line from Voibokalo to

Kabona was completed, and not until after a good deal of reorganisation had been done, that the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga began to work like clockwork. By this time

several wide motor-roads had been built across the ice, and hundreds of lorries could now deliver food to Leningrad, and also evacuate many thousands of its inhabitants, many of them half-dead with hunger. The Germans did what they could to interfere both with the building of the railway line to Kabona and with the ice-roads themselves; these roads were both bombed and shelled, but Russian fighter planes protected them as far as

possible, and traffic police were stationed along the roads. One of their duties was to lay little bridges across any holes or cracks in the ice made by German bombs or shells.

By January 24, 1942, food supplies had sufficiently improved to allow a second increase in Leningrad's rations; workers were now getting 14 oz. of bread, office workers 11 oz., dependants and children 9 oz., and front line troops 21 oz.; on February 11, the ration was increased for the third time.

On January 22 the State Defence Committee decided to evacuate half-a-million people

from Leningrad; priority was given to women, children, old and sick people. In January 11,000 people were evacuated, in February 117,000, in March 221,000, in April 163,000; a total of 512,000. In May, after shipping on Lake Lagoda had been restored, the

evacuation continued, and between May and November 1942, 449,000 more people were

evacuated, making a total, in 1942, of nearly a million people. Moreover, the evacuation of industry, which had been so harshly interrupted in September 1941, was resumed:

between January and April, several thousand machine tools, etc., were evacuated across the ice to the east. What is more, a petrol pipeline was laid, between April and June 1942, across the bottom of Lake Ladoga to supply Leningrad with fuel. The German attempts to wreck the pipeline by dropping depth-charges into the lake failed. Similarly, when the Volkhov power station resumed work in May 1942, an electric cable was laid across the bottom of Lake Ladoga, to supply Leningrad with electric power.

The Ladoga Life Line—ice in winter, water in summer, continued to function

satisfactorily right up to January 1943 when the land blockade was broken and trains began, soon afterwards, to run through the narrow "Schlüsselburg Gap".

With the population enormously reduced, first by famine, and then by evacuation,

feeding Leningrad no longer presented an insuperable problem. Indeed after March 1942, to make up for what the city had suffered, Leningrad rations were higher than in the rest of the country, and special canteens with extra-good food were set up, particularly for workers in poor health. Nevertheless, the winter famine had left a mark on very many people. During the summer months of 1942 a high proportion of workers were too ill to work— in one armaments plant mentioned by Karasev, thirty-five per cent of the workers were too ill to work in May, and thirty-one per cent in June. On May 23, 1942, the poet Vera Inber, whose husband worked in a Leningrad hospital, noted in her diary:

Our hospital compound has been cleared of rubble, and has become almost

unrecognisable—better even than before the war, I'm told. In place of heaps of

rubbish there are now new vegetable plots. In the students' hostel they have opened a "reinforced nutrition" dining room; there are several in every district. Weak, pale, exhausted people (second degree distrophy) slowly wander about, almost

surprised at the thought that they are still alive... Often they sit down for a rest, and expose their legs to the rays of the sun, which heals their scurvy ulcers... But among Leningraders there are also some who can no longer move or walk (third degree

distrophy). They lie quietly in their frozen winter houses, into which even the spring seems unable to penetrate. Such houses are visited by young doctors, medical

students and nurses; the worst cases are taken to hospital; we have put up 2,000 new beds in our hospital, including the maternity ward; so few children are born

nowadays, one might say none are born at all!

[Vera Inber, Pochti tri goda (Nearly Three Years), (Leningrad, 1947), pp. 118-19.]

A very high death-rate persisted at least until April; and although, by June, people stopped dying of hunger or its after-effects, the strain of what they had lived through, as well as of the constant bombing and shelling of the city, continued to make itself felt.

Karasev speaks of a widespread "psychic traumatisation", marked, in particular, by high blood-pressure; this condition was four or five times more frequent than before the war.

Nevertheless, with the population reduced to only 1,100,000 in April and to some

650,000 by November 1942, conditions of life became relatively more normal. 148

schools (out of some 500) were opened with 65,000 pupils, and the children were given three meals a day.

Although the front outside Leningrad seemed in 1942 to have been stabilised, the danger of another all-out German attempt to capture the city was ever-present, and there were several (more or less false) alarms. On the other hand, the attempts made by the Red Army to break the land blockade failed.

The news throughout the "black summer" of 1942 of the Germans crashing ahead into the Caucasus and towards Stalingrad, had a depressing effect. The fall of Sebastopol—which had so many points in common with Leningrad—seemed particularly ominous, and there

was also a feeling that if Stalingrad fell, the fate of Leningrad, too, would be sealed.

The Russian counter-offensive at Stalingrad not only created a tremendous feeling of optimism in Leningrad, as it did in the rest of the country, but it also enormously

improved the prospects of breaking the German blockade. This was now achieved as a

result of a week's heavy fighting in January 1943, when the troops of the Leningrad Front under General Govorov and those of the Volkhov Front under General Meretskov, joined forces, and so hacked a ten-mile corridor through the German salient south of Lake

Ladoga. Schüsselburg was recaptured and, in a very short time, a rail link was established with the "mainland" and a pontoon bridge built across the Neva; as a result, trains could travel from Moscow to Leningrad.

[Vera Inber (op. cit., p. 194) wrote in March 1943, "only freight trains cross the pontoon bridge across the Neva at Schüsselburg. The railwaymen call this place 'the corridor of death'. It is under constant German shell fire.]

But the memory of the terrible winter months of 1941-2 lingered on, and when I went to Leningrad in 1943, they were still the main subject of conversation.

Chapter VII LENINGRAD CLOSE-UP

When I went to Leningrad in September 1943, the German lines were still two miles from the Kirov Works, on the southern outskirts of the city.

[With the exception of Henry Shapiro of United Press who went there a few weeks

earlier, I was the only foreign correspondent allowed to visit Leningrad during the

blockade. To me, as a native of Leningrad, who had lived there until the age of seventeen, this was a particularly moving experience. After an absence of twenty-five years, I visited all the familiar places, including the house where I had spent my childhood and school years. Many houses in the street had been destroyed by bombing and in the house where I had lived a large number of people had died of hunger in 1941-2. I have described my visit fully in an earlier book {Leningrad, London, 1944), but as it is out of print I make no excuse for reprinting from it, in this chapter, a few accounts of visits and conversations which convey something of the spirit of Leningrad during the blockade.]

The total population had now been reduced to some 600,000, and the city, though as

beautiful as ever, despite considerable damage caused by shells, bombs and fires, had a strange half-deserted look. It was a front-line city, sure enough, and a high proportion of its people were in uniform. There was practically no more bombing, but the shelling was frequent, and often deadly. It had caused great damage to houses, especially in the

modern southern parts of Leningrad, and many people would recall horrible "incidents"

when a shell had hit a queue at a tram-stop or a crowded tram-car: some of these had happened only a few days before.

Yet, in a strange way, life seemed almost to have returned to normal. Most of the city looked deserted and yet, in the late afternoon, when there was no shelling, there were large crowds of people walking about the "safe" side of the Nevsky Prospect (the shells normally landed on the other side) and even little luxuries were sold here, unavailable at the time in Moscow, such as little bottles of Leningrad-made scent. And the "Writers'

Bookshop" near the Anichkov Bridge in the Nevsky was doing a roaring trade in

secondhand books. Millions of books had been burned as fuel in Leningrad during the

famine winter; and yet many people had died before having had time to burn their books, and—a cruel thought—some wonderful bargains could now be got. Theatres and cinemas

were open, though whenever the shelling started they were promptly evacuated. In the Marsovo Pole (the Champs de Mars) and in the Summer Garden—whose eighteenth-century marble statues of Greek gods and goddesses had been removed to safety—

vegetables were being grown, and a few people were pottering around the cabbages and potatoes. There were also cabbage beds round the sandbagged Bronze Horseman.

Almost from the moment I arrived in Leningrad—after travelling there by plane via

Tikhvin and then, at night, only a few yards above the waters of Lake Ladoga—I began to hear stories about the famine. For instance this conversation on the very first night with Anna Andreievna, the genteel old lady who looked after me at the Astoria:

The Astoria looks like a hotel now, but you should have seen it during the famine! It was turned into a hospital—just hell. They used to bring here all sorts of people, mostly intellectuals, who were dying of hunger. Gave them vitamin tablets, tried to pep them up a bit. But a lot of them were too far gone, and died almost the moment they got here. I know what it is to be hungry. I was so weak I could hardly walk.

Had to use a walking stick to support me. My home is only a mile away, in the

Sadovaya... I'd have to stop and sit down every hundred yards... Took me sometimes over an hour to get home...

You don't know what it was like. You just stepped over corpses in the street and on the stairs. You simply stopped taking any notice. It was no use worrying. Terrible things used to happen. Some people went quite insane with hunger. And the practice of hiding the dead somewhere in the house and using their ration cards was very

common indeed. There were so many people dying all over the place, the authorities couldn't keep track of all the deaths... You should have seen me in February 1942.

Oh, Lord, I looked funny! My weight had dropped from seventy kilos to forty kilos in four months! Now I am back to sixty-two—feeling quite plump...

On the following day I had a conversation at the Architects' Institute, where they were already working on the future restoration of the various historic buildings, such as the palaces of Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo) and Peterhof that had been wrecked by the Germans: We went on with this blueprint work right through the winter of 1941-2... It was a blessing for us architects. The best medicine that could have been given us during the famine. The moral effect is great when a hungry man knows he's got a useful job of work to do... But there's no doubt about it: a worker stands up better to

hardships than an intellectual. A lot of our people stopped shaving—the first sign of a man going to pieces... Most of these people pulled themselves together when they were given work. But on the whole men collapsed more easily than women, and at

first the death-rate was highest among the men. However, those who survived the

worst period of the famine finally survived. The women felt the after-effects more seriously than the men. Many died in the spring, when the worst was already over.

The famine had peculiar physical effects on people. Women were so run down that

they stopped menstruating... So many people died that we had to bury them without coffins. People had their feelings blunted, and never seemed to weep at the burials...

It was all done in complete silence, without any display of emotion. When things

began to improve, the first signs were that women began to put rouge and lipstick on their pale, skinny faces. Yes, we lived through hell right enough; but you should have been here the day the blockade was broken—people in the street wept for joy, and strangers fell round each others' necks. Now life is almost normal. There is this shelling, of course, and people get killed, but life has become valuable again.

Also, I remember this conversation, one day, with Major Lozak, a staff officer who

conducted me round the Leningrad Front:

In those days there was something in a man's face which told you that he would die within, the next twenty-four hours... I have lived in Leningrad all my life, and I also have my parents here. They are old people, and during those famine months I had

to give them half my soldier's ration, or they would certainly have died. As a staff officer I was naturally, and quite rightly, getting considerably less than the people at the front: 250 grams a day instead of 350. I shall always remember how I'd walk

every day from my house near the Tauris Garden to my work in the centre of the

city, a matter of two or three kilometres. I'd walk for a while, and then sit down for a rest. Many a time I saw a man suddenly collapse on the snow. There was nothing

one could do. One just walked on... And, on the way back, I would see a vague

human form covered with snow on the spot where, in the morning, I had seen a man

fall down. One didn't worry; what was the good? People didn't wash for weeks;

there were no bath houses and no fuel. But at least people were urged to shave. And during that winter I don't think I ever saw a person smile. It was frightful. And yet, there was a kind of inner discipline that made people carry on. A new code of

manners was evolved by the hungry people. They carefully avoided talking about

food. I remember spending a very hungry evening with an old boy from the Radio

Committee. He nearly drove me crazy—he would talk all evening about Kant and Hegel. Yet we never lost heart. The Battle of Moscow gave us complete confidence

that it would be all right in the end. But what a change all the same when February came and the Ice Road began to function properly! Those tremendous parcels that

started arriving from all over the country—honey and butter, and ham and

sausages! Still, our troubles are not at an end. This shelling can really be very upsetting. I was in the Nevsky once when a shell landed close by. And ten yards

away from me was a man whose head was cut clean off by a shell splinter. It was

horrible. I saw him make his last two steps already with his head off—and a bloody mess all round before he collapsed. I vomited right there and then, and was quite ill for the rest of the day—though I had already seen many terrible things before. I

shall never forget the night when a children's hospital was hit by an oil bomb; many children were killed, and the whole house was blazing, and some perished in the

flames. It's bad for one's nerves to see such things happen; our ambulance services have instructions to wash away blood on the pavement as quickly as possible after a shell has landed.

From that visit to Leningrad I brought back countless impressions of human suffering and human endurance. The front round Leningrad had by this time become stabilised, and

Leningrad, though still surrounded, was confidently watching the Germans in full retreat along most of the Russo-German front, and waiting for its own turn to be finally

liberated. Although there was no longer any famine, life was still desperately hard for many people, not least the men and women of the Kirov Works, which were almost in the front line. Here, as well as in another important plant, I was not only shown what life was like then, but also told what it had been like during the famine. Here are two accounts.

First a visit to an important factory making optical instruments:

Here most of the smaller wooden buildings had been used up for fuel during the previous two winters. It was a large factory building, the outer brick walls of which were marked by shell splinters. Comrade Semyonov, the director of the factory, with a strong hard face, and wearing a plain khaki tunic to which were pinned the Leningrad medal and the Order of Lenin, was a typical Soviet executive to look at and listen to—very precise and to the point. In his office was a collection of the various things the factory was now making— bayonets, detonators and large optical lenses, and on the wall were portraits of Stalin and Zhdanov... Altogether, I had noticed in Leningrad a certain aloofness towards Moscow, a feeling that although this was part of the whole show, it was also, in a sense, a separate show, one in which Leningrad had survived largely through its own stupendous efforts.

Semyonov said that this was the largest factory in the Soviet Union for optical

instruments... "But during the first days of the war the bulk of our optical equipment was evacuated east, because this was considered one of the key factories for defence. One couldn't afford to take any risks with it. Early in 1942 we had a second evacuation, and those of the skilled workers who hadn't gone in the first evacuation were sent away—that is, those who were still alive."

"Already in the first weeks of the war, when most of our equipment and skilled men had been sent away, we started here on an entirely new basis—we started working

exclusively for the Leningrad Front, and we had to make things for which we had the

equipment— and there wasn't much of it. Our people had no experience in this kind of work. Even so, we started making things our soldiers needed most. But Leningrad has a great industrial tradition, a great industrial culture, and our hand-grenades and anti-tank-mine detonators turned out to be the best of any made. We made hundreds of thousands of these... Throughout the blockade we have also been repairing small arms, rifles and machine-guns; and now we are also working again on optical instruments—among them

submarine periscopes. For our Baltic Fleet isn't idle, as you know..."

I asked Semyonov to tell me something about life at the factory during the hunger

blockade. He was silent for a few seconds... "Frankly," he said, "I don't like to talk about it. It's a very bitter memory... By the time the blockade started half our people had been evacuated or had gone into the army, so we were left here with about 5,000. I must say it was difficult at first to get used to the bombing, and if anyone says it doesn't frighten him, don't you believe it! Yet, though it frightened people, it also aroused their frantic anger against the Germans. When they started bombing us in a big way in October 1941 our

workers fought for the factory more than they did for their own houses. One night we had to deal with 300 incendiaries on the factory grounds alone. Our people were putting the fires out with a sort of concentrated rage and fury. They had realised by then that they were in the front line—that was all. No more shelters. Only small children were taken to shelters, and old grannies. And then, one day in December, in twenty degrees of frost, we had all our windows blown out by a bomb, and I thought to myself: 'No, we really can't go on. Not till the spring. We can't go on in this temperature, and without light, without water, and almost without food.' And yet, somehow—we didn't stop. A kind of instinct told us we mustn't—that it would be worse than suicide, and a little like treason. And sure enough, within thirty-six hours we were working again—working in altogether hellish

conditions, with eight degrees of frost in the workshops, and fourteen degrees of frost in this office where you are sitting now. Oh, we had stoves of sorts, little stoves that warmed the air a couple of feet around them. But still our people worked. And, mind you, they were hungry, terribly hungry..."

Semyonov paused for a moment and there was a frown on his face. "Yes," he said, "to this day I cannot quite understand it. I don't quite understand how it was possible to have all that will-power, that strength of mind. Many of them, hardly able to walk with hunger, would drag themselves to the factory every day, eight, ten, even twelve kilometres. For there were no trams. We used all sorts of childish expedients to keep the work going.

When there were no batteries, we used bicycle pedals to keep the lathes turning."

"Somehow, people knew when they were going to die. I remember one of our elder

workers staggering into this office and saying to me: 'Comrade Chief, I have a request to make. I am one of your old workers, and you have always been a good friend to me, and I know you will not refuse. I am not going to bother you again. I know that today or

tomorrow I shall die. My family are in a very poor way— very weak. They won't have

the strength to manage a funeral. Will you be a friend and have a coffin made for me, and have it sent to my family, so that they don't have the extra worry of trying to get a coffin?

You know how difficult it is to get one.' That happened during the blackest days of

December or January. And such things happened day after day. How many workers came

into this office saying: 'Chief, I shall be dead today or tomorrow.' We would send them to the factory hospital, but they always died. All that was possible and impossible to eat, people ate. They ate cattle-cake, and mineral oils—we used to boil them first—and

carpenter's glue. People tried to sustain themselves on hot water and yeast. Out of the 5,000 people we had here, several hundred died. Many of them died right here... Many a man would drag himself to the factory, stagger in and die... Everywhere there were

corpses. But some died at home, and died together with the rest of their family and, in the circumstances, it was difficult to find out anything definite... And since there was no transport, we weren't usually able to send people round to enquire. This went on till about February 15. After that, rations were increased and the death-rate dropped. Today it hurts me to talk about these things..."

One of the Leningrad memories that stands out most clearly in my mind is the afternoon I spent in September 1943 at the great Kirov Works, where work continued even then

under almost constant shelling from the German lines barely two miles away. For here, even in 1943, one had a glimpse of Leningrad's darkest and grimmest days; to the Kirov workers these were not a memory of the past; they were continuing to live here through a peculiar kind of hell. Yet to these people, to be a Kirov worker, and to hold out to the end, had become like a title of nobility. The workers here were not soldiers; sixty-nine per cent were women and girls—mostly young girls. They knew that this was as bad as

the front; in a way it was worse: you did not know the thrill of direct retaliation. The great revolutionary tradition of the Putilov, now the Kirov Works, had much to do with it.

The day before, in a children's rest home in Kamenny Island, I had talked to a girl called Tamara Turanova:

She was a little girl of fifteen, very pale, thin and delicate, obviously run down. On her little black frock was pinned the green-ribboned medal of Leningrad:

"Where did you get that?" I asked. A faint smile appeared on her pale little face. "I don't know what he was called," she said. "An uncle with spectacles came to the works one day and gave me this medal." "What works?" "Oh, the Kirov Works, of course," she said.

"Does your father work there, too?" "No," she said, "father died in the hungry year, died on the 7th of January. I have worked at the Kirov Works since I was fourteen, so I

suppose that's why they gave me this medal. We're not far away from the front." "Doesn't it frighten you to work there?" She screwed up her little face. "No, not really; one gets used to it. When a shell whistles, it means it's high up; it's only when it begins to sizzle that you know there's going to be trouble. Accidents do happen, of course, happen very often; sometimes things happen every day. Only last week we had an accident; a shell landed in my workshop and many were wounded, and two Stakhanovite girls were

burned to death." She said it with terrible simplicity and almost with the suggestion that it wouldn't have been such a serious matter if two Stakhanovite girls hadn't lost their lives.

"You wouldn't like to change over to another factory?" I asked. "No," she said, shaking her head. "I am a Kirov girl, and my father was a Putilov man, and really the worst is over now, so we may as well stick it to the end." And one could feel that she meant it, though it was only too clear what terrible nervous strain that frail little body of hers had suffered. "And your mother?" I asked. "She died before the war," said the girl. "But my big brother is in the army, on the Leningrad Front, and he writes to me often, very often, and three months ago he and several of his comrades came to visit us at the Kirov

Works." Her little pale face brightened at the thought of it, and, looking out of the window of the rest home at the golden autumn trees, she said: "You know, it's good to be here for a little while."

The next day, after driving down the Peterhof Road through the heavily-battered southern outskirts of Leningrad, with the German lines running along the other side of the Uritsk inlet of the Gulf of Finland, I arrived at the Kirov Works, where I was received by

Comrade Puzyrev, the director, a relatively young man with a strong, but careworn face...

"Well," he said, "you are certainly finding us working in unusual conditions. What we have here isn't what is normally meant by the Kirov Plant... Before the war we had over 30,000 workers; now we have only a small fraction of these ... and sixty-nine per cent of our workers are female. Hardly any women worked here before the war. We then made

turbines, tanks, guns; we made tractors, and supplied the greater part of the equipment for building the Moscow-Volga canal. We built quantities of machinery for the Navy...

Before this war started, we began to make tanks in a very big way, as well as tank and aircraft engines. Practically all this production of equipment proper has been moved to the east. Now we repair diesels and tanks, but our main output is ammunition, and some small arms... "

Puzyrev then spoke of the early days of the war at the Kirov works. It was a story of that lutte à outrance so typical of the people and workers of Leningrad. Like one man they reacted to the German invasion, but the highest pitch of self-sacrifice was reached as a result of the "Leningrad in danger" appeal made on August 21 by Voro-shilov, Zhdanov and Popkov.

"The workers of the Kirov Plant," Puzyrev said, "were in reserved occupations, and hardly anybody was subject to mobilisation. Yet no sooner had the Germans invaded us than everybody without exception volunteered for the front. If we had wanted to, we

could have sent 25,000 people; we let only 9,000 or 10,000 go.

Already in June 1941 they formed themselves into what was to become the famous Kirov Division. Although they had done some training before the war, they couldn't be

considered fully-trained soldiers, but their drive, their guts were tremendous. They wore the uniform of the Red Army, but they were in fact part of the opol-cheniye, except that they were rather better trained than other opolcheniye units. Several such workers'

divisions were formed in Leningrad... and many tens of thousands of them went out from here to meet the Germans, to stop them at any price. They fought at Luga, and Novgorod and Pushkin, and finally at Uritsk, where, after one of the grimmest rearguard actions of this war, our men managed to stop the Germans, just in the nick of time... The fight put up by our Workers' Division and by the people of Leningrad who went out to stop them was absolutely decisive... It is no secret—a large proportion of the Workers' Divisions never came back..."

One felt that Puzyrev regretted at heart that such good industrial material should have had to be sacrificed on the battlefield; but, clearly, in 1941, when it was touch-and-go for both Moscow and Leningrad, such fine points had to be put aside; he was glad, all the same, that when the worst was over, many of the survivors had been taken out of the army and put back into industry.

He then spoke of the evacuation of the Kirov Plant. Before the German ring had closed, it had been possible to evacuate only one complete workshop—525 machine tools and

2,500 people. But nothing more could be sent east till the spring.

"However, our most highly skilled workers, who were badly needed in Siberia and the Urals, were evacuated by air, together with their families. They were flown to Tikhvin, but after the Germans had taken Tikhvin, we had to fly them to other airfields, and from there the people had to walk to the nearest railway station, walk through the snow, in the middle of a bitter winter, often dozens and dozens of kilometres... Already in the early part of the winter a lot of equipment from Kharkov, Kiev and other places, and also some from Moscow, had reached the Urals, and our skilled people were badly needed to handle the stuff and to organise production. Chelia-binsk, for example, had never made tanks before, and our people were needed for starting this large-scale production of tanks in the shortest possible time... We were then in the middle of that most critical transition period when industry in the west had ceased to function, and had not yet started up in the east...

The people who left here in October were already working at full speed in their new

place, 2,000 kilometres away, by December! ... And in what conditions all this was done!

Trains carrying the equipment were attacked from the air, and so were the transport

planes taking the skilled Leningrad workers and their families from Leningrad.

Fortunately the percentage of transport planes shot down was not high. But the flying had to be done mostly at night, in very difficult conditions..."

Puzyrev's story of the Kirov Plant during the worst months of the famine was much the same as the story told me by Semyonov, the director of the optical instruments plant:

"Those were terrible days," he said. "On December 15 everything came to a standstill.

There was no fuel, no electric current, no food, no tram-cars, no water, nothing.

Production in Leningrad practically ceased. We were to remain in this terrible condition till the 1st of April. It is true that food began to come in in February across the Ladoga Ice Road. But we needed another month before we could start any kind of regular output at the Kirov Works. But even during the worst hungry period we did what we could... We repaired guns, and our foundry was kept going, though only in a small way. It felt as if the mighty Kirov Works had been turned into a village smithy. People were terribly cold and terribly hungry. Many of our people died during those days, and it was chiefly our best people who died— highly skilled workers who had reached a certain age when the

body can no longer resist such hardships...

"As I said before, there was no water and no electric current. All we had was a small pump which was connected with the sea down there; that was all the water supply we

had. Throughout the winter —from December to March—the whole of Leningrad used

snow for putting out incendiaries... The only very large fire was that of the Gostiny Dvor.

[The famous shopping arcade in the Nevsky Prospect.]

Here, at the Kirov Works, not a single workshop was destroyed by fire.

"People were so faint with hunger that we had to organise hostels, so that they could live right here. We authorised others who lived at home to come only twice a week... At the end of November, we had to call a meeting to announce the reduction of the bread ration from 400 to 250 grams for workers, and to 125 grams for the others —and very little else.

They took it calmly, though to many it was like a death sentence... "

And Puzyrev then said that the soldiers on the Leningrad Front asked that their own

rations be reduced, so that so drastic a reduction in the rations of the Leningrad citizens could be avoided; but the High Command decided that the soldiers were receiving just a bare minimum for carrying on—which, at that time, was 350 grams of bread, and not

much else.

"We tried to keep people going by making a sort of yeast soup, with a little soya added. It wasn't much better, really than drinking hot water, but it gave people the illusion of having 'eaten' something. .. A very large number of our people died. So many died, and transport was so difficult, that we decided to have our own graveyard right here... And yet, although people were dying of hunger, there was not a single serious incident...

Frankly, I find it hard to this day to understand how people resisted the temptation of attacking bread vans or looting bakeries. But they didn't... sometimes people came to me to say good-bye... They knew they were going to die almost at once. Later, in the summer of 1942, a lot of people who had survived the famine were sent east to supplement their comrades from Kiev, Kharkov and other places... "

By 1943, food was no longer a major problem in Leningrad; nevertheless, with the city under constant shellfire, and the German lines only two miles away, the Kirov Works

continued to live through a hell that was only different in degree.

"How," I asked, "can you carry on at all when shellfire is heavy? Have you any casualties? And how do your people stand up to it? " "Well," he said, "there is, I suppose, a sort of Kirov Works patriotism. Except for one or two very sick people, I have never yet come across anybody who wanted to quit... "

He pulled out a drawer of his desk and brought out a pile of forty or fifty envelopes with postmarks. These were letters from Leningrad workers who had been evacuated, and who were begging to be allowed to return to Leningrad, alone or with their families.

"They know how difficult conditions here are," he said, "but they also know that they wouldn't be a food problem to us any longer. But we can't agree to their return. These skilled Kirov workers are doing a valuable job of work out there; here we haven't much equipment, and the place is run as a sort of emergency war factory. Not unlike Kolpino, some ten miles away from here, where munitions are turned out in underground foundries

—right in the front line..."

"The way to keep the place going," he then said, "was by having it decentralised. We have divided up the work into small units, with only a corner of each workshop taken up with people and machinery; and this section, as far as possible is protected against blast and splinters. But misfortunes—or rather, a certain normal rate of casualties, will occur.

This month—and it's been a relatively good month—we have had forty-three casualties—

thirteen killed, twenty-three wounded and seven cases of shell-shock."

"You ask how they take it? Well, I don't know whether you've ever been for any length of time under shellfire. But if anybody tells you it's not frightening, don't you believe it. In our experience, a direct hit has a very bad effect for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. In a workshop that's had a direct hit, production slumps heavily during that time, or stops almost completely, especially if many people have been killed or injured. It's a horrible sight, all the blood, and makes even our hardened workers quite ill for a day or two... But after that, they go back to work, and try to make up for the time lost by what's called the

'accident'. But I realise all the same that working here is a perpetual strain, and when I see that a man or girl is going to pieces, I send him or her to a rest-home for a fortnight or a month..."

Later he took me round some of the workshops. It happened to be a quiet day, with

almost no German shelling. The enormous plant was, I could now see, much more

smashed up than the outside view from the street suggested. In a large space, with badly shattered buildings around, stood an enormous blockhouse... The concrete walls were

twelve inches thick, and the roof was made of powerful steel girders. "Nothing but a direct hit from a large gun at close range can do anything to this," said Puzyrev. "It was built during the worst days when we thought the Germans might break through to

Leningrad. They would have found the Kirov Works a tough proposition. The whole

place is dotted with pillboxes like this one..."

Then we went into one of the foundries. One end of it was quite dark, but behind a strong brick partition the other half of it was lit up by flames inside the open furnaces, with their red-hot walls. Dark, eerie shadows of men, but again mostly of girls, were moving about in the red glow. The girls, with patched cotton stockings over their thin legs, were stooping under the weight of enormous clusters of red-hot steel they were clutching

between a pair of tongs, and then you would see them—and as you saw it, you felt the desperate muscular concentration and will-power it involved—you would see them raise their slender, almost child-like arms and hurl these red-hot clusters under a giant steel hammer. Large red sparks of metal were flying and whizzing through the red semi-darkness, and the whole foundry shook with the deafening din and roar of machinery. We watched this scene for a while in silence; then Puzyrev said, almost apologetically, through the din: "This place isn't working quite right yet. We had a few shells in here the other day," and, pointing at a large hole in the floor now filled with sand and cement,

"That's where one of them landed." "Any casualties? " "Yes, a few."

We walked through the foundry and watched more closely all that the girls were doing.

As we were going out I caught a glimpse of a woman's face in the red glow of the flames.

Her face was grimy. She looked an elderly woman, almost like an old gipsy hag. And

from that grimy face shone two dark eyes. There was something tragic in those eyes—

there was a great weariness in them, and a touch of animal terror. How old was she?

Fifty, forty, or maybe only twenty-five? Had I just imagined that look of terror in her eyes? Was it that grimy face and the eerie shadows around leaping up and down that had given me that idea? I had seen some of the other girls' faces. They were normal enough.

One, a young thing, even smiled. Normal —yes, except for a kind of inner concentration

—as if they all had some bad memories they could not quite shake off...

*

Another striking memory is my visit to a secondary school in Tambov Street, in a modern and heavily shelled part of the city, three or four miles from the front. It was run by an elderly man, Tikhomirov, a "Teacher of Merit of the USSR", who had started as an elementary teacher back in 1907. This school was one of the few that had not closed

down even at the height of the famine. On four occasions it had been heavily damaged by German shells; but the boys had cleared away the glass, bricked up the walls that had been smashed, and had put plywood in the windows. During the last shelling in May, a woman-teacher had been killed in the yard of the school.

The boys were typical Leningrad children; eighty-five per cent of the boys' fathers were still at the Leningrad Front, or had already been killed there, while many others had died in the Leningrad famine, and nearly all their mothers—if still alive—were working in Leningrad factories, or on transport, or on wood-cutting, or in civil defence. The boys all had a passionate hatred for the Germans, but were fully convinced by now that these

svolochi (bastards) would be destroyed outside Leningrad before long. They had mixed feelings about Britain and America; they knew London had been bombed; that the RAF

was "bombing the hell out of the Fritzes"; that the Americans were supplying the Red Army with a lot of lorries, and that they (the boys) were getting American chocolate to eat; but "there was still no Second Front".

The headmaster, Comrade Tikhomirov, told me how they had "stuck it, and stuck it fairly well. We had no wood, but the Leningrad Soviet gave us a small wooden house not far

away for demolition, so we could use the timber for heating. The bombing and shelling was very severe in those days. We had about 120 pupils then—boys and girls—and we

had to hold our classes in the shelter. Not for a day did the work stop. It was very cold.

The little stoves heated the air properly only a yard around them, and in the rest of the shelter the temperature was below zero. There was no lighting, apart from a kerosene lamp. But we carried on, and the children were so serious and earnest that we got better results than in any other year. Surprising, but true. We had meals for them; the army helped us to feed them. Several of the teachers died, but I am proud to say that all the children in our care survived. Only it was pathetic to watch them during those famine months. Towards the end of 1941, they hardly looked like children any more. They were strangely silent... They would not walk about; they would just sit. But none of them died; and only some of those pupils who had stopped coming to school, and stayed at home,