The prioritisation of Moscow continued into November, as Leningrad’s own civilian population started to die on the streets. Typical is a letter from Zhukov to Zhdanov of the 2nd. It opens confidingly—‘My thoughts often return to the difficult and interesting days and nights when we worked and fought together. I greatly regret not having completed the business, I was convinced that I would’—but carries a sting in its tail. The Central Front’s generals had ‘squandered all their troops; nothing but the memory is left of them. From Budenniy all I got was a headquarters and ninety men; from Konev, a headquarters and two regiments.’ Could Zhdanov send forty 82mm and sixty 50mm mortars on the next air convoy, since ‘you have them in excess, while we have none at all?’{33} Zhdanov’s counter-requests for more transport planes and for deliveries of concentrated foods were fulfilled late or not at all.{34} ‘You assigned us twenty-four Douglases’, Zhdanov replied to yet another of Stalin’s demands for immediate breakout, transmitted by Malenkov. ‘So where are they? Get them sent as soon as possible.’{35}
Altogether, between 1 October and their virtual shutdown in December, Leningrad’s factories sent the Central Army Group 452 76mm field guns with over 29,000 armoured shells and 1,854 mortars of different sizes. With hindsight, they could arguably have been better put to use outside Leningrad itself, since they were not numerous enough to tip the balance in Moscow, but might have done so south of Ladoga, where the Germans’ foothold on the lake shore was only ten miles wide. Had the Red Army then established a secure land route out of the city—a year before it actually did so—not only would hundreds of thousands of civilians have been saved from starvation, but the city’s defence factories could have resumed normal production, to the benefit of the Soviet war effort as a whole. As it was, the autumn’s massive production effort crippled Leningrad, draining it of the resources either to break the siege or—save at the cost of mass civilian death—to survive it.
8. 125 Grams
Marina Yerukhmanova, nineteen-year-old descendant of Peter the Great’s favourite Alexander Menshikov, was, like Olga Grechina, a studious, sheltered girl to whom war was to give a harsh emotional and social education. Her first war work was in a ‘concert brigade’ seeing off soldiers on their way to the front. ‘The station platforms were covered with soldiers, sitting or lying, some with sobbing relatives. And then we appeared—four little girls with music stands and sheet music—and played quartets.’ Though she had been given the opportunity to evacuate to Tashkent with the Conservatoire, she had turned it down, preferring to remain with her family. When the air raids began they moved to an aunt’s safer ground-floor apartment—four adults, four children, four dachshunds and a baby squashing into a single room. The household saw its first death in early October, when Marina’s stepfather, a naval officer de-listed during the 1937 purges, suffered a heart attack two days before papers arrived reinstating him to the service. The family were able to give him a religious funeral at the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, and marked his grave with a large wooden cross (later stolen for fuel).
The death freed Marina and her younger sister Varvara to take jobs. They signed up as druzhinnitsy—unpaid auxiliaries, mostly teenage girls, who took on a wide variety of often dangerous wartime tasks under the direction of the police—at their mother’s workplace, the Hôtel de l’Europe, now requisitioned for use as a military hospital. Standing halfway down Nevsky Prospekt, the hotel—affectionately known as the ‘Yevropa’, or ‘Europe’—was Leningrad’s oldest and grandest, founded in the 1830s and rebuilt, complete with lifts, air bells and central heating, in the 1870s. To the Yerukhmanov girls it seemed an ‘Elysium… Everything was expensive and of good quality—furniture, carpets, curtains, crockery… The showers still had hot water, and the laundry still functioned, where a languid, superior sort of woman handed us out our tunics. Everywhere order and cleanliness reigned.’ To start with they worked downstairs in the kitchens, under a giant, red-haired ‘tsar’ of a head chef, who was ceremoniously robed in full whites each morning and whose stomach wobbled as he walked. Upstairs, slender Tartar waiters with pomaded hair and ‘theatrical’ manners served the lightly wounded in the ground-floor ‘Big Restaurant’. ‘They taught us how to lay the tables, greet our “guests”… God preserve you if you served food on cold plates.’ The head waiter gave the girls ‘scoldings, which he loved to pepper with the most shocking swear words. The first few times we didn’t know where to look. Mama said firmly, “Children, pretend you haven’t heard.”’ Though officially forbidden to sleep on the premises they quietly moved in, camping on a balcony above the riotously eclectic ‘Eastern’ dining room, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling, vaguely Egyptian plasterwork and great stained-glass window showing Viking longboats sailing down a river under the walls of an ancient Rus kremlin. Though she worked fifteen-hour days without pay, Marina remembered the hotel with gratitude: ‘Our Yevropa hid us and protected us, gave us time to catch our breath.’{1}
Marina’s mother’s first reaction, on hearing Molotov’s announcement of war, had been to send her daughters out to buy soap, and to light the stove, so that she could start making sukhari, the dried rusks that are a traditional Russian standby in times of food shortage. Others did the same: by the time the siege ring closed, Marina remembered, the only goods available for purchase were dried fruits and blanched almonds at the market, prohibitively expensive caviar in the shops and useless toys and sports equipment in the Passazh department store.
In 1941 a fifty-year-old Russian had lived through three major famines—the first of 1891–2, when drought hit the Volga steppe; the second of 1921–2, caused by grain requisitioning and the post-revolutionary Civil War, and the third of 1932–3, when the Bolsheviks violently collectivised peasant farms, condemning to death perhaps seven million people. Though privileged in normal times, Leningrad was particularly vulnerable, having always been dependent on food imports from the more fertile south. The bog-bound village of Myasnoi Bor, or ‘Meat Wood’ (just north of Novgorod and the site of a disastrous wartime encirclement in the spring of 1942), was named for the quantities of cattle which foundered there on their trek north to market in the capital. Though the collectivisation famine largely passed the city by, during the Civil War grass grew in the streets, so many were the Leningraders who fled to the villages in search of something to eat.
Despite all this, the Leningrad authorities went into the siege woefully underprepared. When the last road out of the city was cut on 8 September an estimated 2.8 million civilians were caught within the siege ring, 2.46 million of them in the city, and another 343,000 in its surrounding towns and villages.{2} Troops and sailors within the ring numbered about another 500,000, making approximately 3.3 million mouths to feed in all. (The Germans seriously overestimated Leningrad’s population at more than four million, probably because they mistook the movement of families out of the vulnerable southern suburbs for the arrival of new refugees. They thus also overestimated how soon the city would begin to starve.{3}) On the same day that the city was cut off a junior trade commissar, Dmitri Pavlov, flew in from Moscow and started to make a detailed inventory of all food stocks held in warehouses, factories, army depots and other public institutions. At current consumption levels, he discovered, they would last not much more than a month. On hand were thirty-five days’ worth of grain and flour, thirty days’ worth of buckwheat, rice, semolina and macaroni, thirty-three days’ worth of meat and live cattle, forty-five days’ worth of oil and fats, and sixty days’ worth of sugar and confectionery.{4} Planes were not available for a large-scale airlift (none ever seems to have been considered), and though the Leningrad Party had already requested that five trainloads of food be delivered to Lake Ladoga for transfer to the city by barge, there were no port facilities to receive them on the lake’s shallow, sandbank-riddled western shore. (The decision to start building docks and warehouses, at the dacha village of Osinovets, was not taken until 9 September.{5}) Unless the blockade was broken quickly, Leningrad would have to survive on its own resources.