Leningrad 1943

Inside a City Under Siege

Alexander Werth

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857735027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The Siege of Leningrad is the most powerful testimony to the immeasurable cruelty and horror of World War II. From 1941-1945, the Eastern Front was the site of some of the bloodiest atrocities of the war and the city of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, proved to be a decisive point in the conflict. German policy was resolutely determined to redraw the map of Europe, annihilate the Soviet Union and give large areas of territory to Finland. Through Hitler's ambition to completely eradicate the city and its entire population, it was decided that the most efficient method of invasion was to encircle and bombard the city into submission. After 872 days of aggression, one and a half million people lost their lives, mostly from starvation. As the sole British correspondent to have been in Leningrad during the blockade, Alexander Werth's eyewitness account presents a harrowing perspective on the savagery and destruction wrought by the Nazis against the civilian population of the city.
His writing evokes compelling images of terror - the oil bombing of children's hospitals, mass starvation and cannibalism - with rich and sophisticated commentary on the internal politics of Soviet party chiefs, soldiers and civilian resistance fighters. Both an authoritative historical document and a journalistic re-telling of the overwhelming sadness, grief and futility of 20th century warfare, this is an invaluable look at one of the greatest losses of human life in recorded history.

1
Moscow to Leningrad

This time it was really definite. The Narkowindel rang me up on Thursday night, September 23rd, and told me to be at the airport at 2 p.m. the next day. They said that Dangulov would accompany me and would pick me up in his car at the Metropole.

At the airport we were joined by Colonel Studyonov, our frequent guide on front trips. Little Dangulov who had never been in Leningrad before was as excited as I was about this trip, and it was something of an anticlimax to the ‘great adventure’ to see him emerge a few minutes later from the airport booking office holding in his hand three Moscow–Leningrad tickets, complete with their return halves! Then after a while an airport official said ‘Passengers for plane number so-and-so, come this way.’ That was our plane. There were several officers travelling; a young woman with a white coat and red beret, possibly an actress, and a middle-aged woman with a little boy. It seemed a healthy sign that children should be taken to Leningrad. Shortly before the plane took off – it was a comfortable twenty-seater Douglas – there was a heated discussion between the child’s mother and an airport official who charged her with taking more luggage than was allowed, and accused her of ‘cheating the State.’ I don’t know how the discussion ended. The cargo, apart from the passengers’ luggage, contained numerous packing cases and the matrix of the Moscow Pravda, which, no doubt, was going to be printed a day late in Leningrad. All this felt surprisingly normal.

And then we took off. The idea of going to Leningrad – after nearly 26 years – was hard to take in, and since I had been told nothing about the programme, I made no attempt to visualise anything lying ahead. There is a peculiar pleasure in abandoning oneself completely to the imprévu. We were flying north, leaving Moscow behind us almost at once. To the left I could see, among the autumn trees, the white sugar-cake pavilion of the Khimki bathing beach. There was a cold nip of autumn in the air, and I remembered regretfully how in this cold and rainy summer I had gone to bathe at Khimki only three or four times. Now the beach was quite deserted. Then we passed over a wooded belt of datchas, with an electric suburban train running along some railway. Moscow was now far behind us. And as we flew out of the immediate neighbourhood of Moscow into the great spaces of the northern forests – an ocean of dark-green fir trees with here and there a patch of fluffy bright yellow birches – I remembered the same scenery the day when I flew north out of Moscow in October 1941, when the fate of Moscow and of Russia was in the balance. The Germans were already at Viasma then. Then, as now, we flew under a ceiling of heavy leaden clouds, driven on by a cold north wind, and below there was the same vast expanse of dark-green fir trees with patches of fluffy yellow birches. But what a difference! Then, this country was in mortal danger, today it was in its hour of triumph.

The girl with the white coat and the red beret was dozing, at the back of the plane the middle-aged woman was playing with her two children – another one had turned up from somewhere – and in the front seats were three men with caps, two of them with Orders of the Red Banner, who looked like engineers or factory executives. The worst of air travel is that you never get to know your fellow travellers. Dangulov, sitting beside me, was talking excitedly about the trip, and also said that ‘next time we must try to go to the Caucasus together.’ He is a stocky little dark-skinned Circassian, with a passion for his native Caucasus, full of Caucasian stories, and altogether very good company. One day he told me the story of his family. It belonged to one of the few hundred Moslem families who, during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, embraced the Orthodox religion, came down from the mountains, and founded the town of Armavir in the Kuban Steppes, as a result of which they acquired Cossack privileges. Armavir was burned down by the retreating Germans early in 1943. Dangulov had been a war correspondent of the Red Star until earlier this year, when he was ordered to return to his old job at the Foreign Office.

It was nearly four o’clock. We were over the great forest area, somewhere east of Kalinin. The sun had come out, and over us was a blue, almost cloudless sky. The country was a greenish-brown, and in this marshland the fir trees were small and meagre. Then we flew over a string of dazzlingly blue little lakes; and then over many more miles of forest. There had been few villages on our route, but here was one at least – a large village of log huts by the side of a large blue lake, and a big white church with golden crosses glittering in the sun. By the side of the lake a herd of cows was grazing. But how thinly populated this area is between the two capitals of Russia! And small wonder, when you look at these vast expanses of marshes and forests, stretching as far as the horizon, that there should be in existence whole partisan regions in northern Russia, almost inaccessible to the enemy for lack of roads. And how depressing these endless forests of northern Russia must have been to the German invader!

Another half-hour or so, and then we flew along a wide blue river, with reedy banks, winding its way through the marshes and forests. On these marshy banks were several little log-hut villages, undamaged by war. And then we flew over the still blue waters of another lake in which were reflected the autumn tints of the red and golden trees. We were flying towards Tikhvin.

Somewhere not far from Tikhvin we stopped for half an hour at an aerodrome that looked from the air like an ordinary field. The soil was sandy, and around the airfield were tall slender pine trees. It was still sunny, but cold, much colder than in Moscow. ‘Beautiful air,’ I said, breathing the cold scent, of the pines. ‘Rubbish,’ said Colonel Studyonov, ‘you’re in the Leningrad Province now, and Leningrad is notorious for its foul air and filthy weather.’ He was an incorrigible Muscovite, and provided the first example that day of the old rivalry between the two capitals. Three sturdy youngsters, attached in some capacity to the airfield, came up and scrounged a few cigarettes from us. ‘Miserable trees,’ said the colonel.

There was something pleasantly leisurely about that flight to Leningrad. We walked among the pine trees for half an hour; then we were told to take our seats on the plane, but the girl with the red beret had disappeared behind the trees and we had to wait for a few minutes till she turned up, looking slightly embarrassed. Then we took off and again flew low over miles of forest. At one point we crossed a railway – was this the Tikhvin–Vologda line? Forests, marshes, little lakes. It was from this soil – ‘from the darkness of the forests, from the soft watery marshes’ as Pushkin wrote – that St. Petersburg rose, ‘proud and luxuriant.’

At sunset we landed at another airfield. It also looked like an ordinary field, without hangars, and with only foliage-covered netting forming camouflaged sheds for the aircraft. Around was the real north Russian scenery, with a very muddy road fringed by small fir trees and yellow birches, and a few izbas, some of which had been destroyed by bombs and other badly damaged. ‘Where’s the buffet?’ said the colonel. A bearded old man pointed to a dilapidated izba on the other side of the road. Here, at several rough wooden tables, some people were drinking tea. We sat down at the same table as a podgy little man with a high starched collar, a tie and a tie-pin, and a little Hitler moustache. The hut must have been newly repaired. The walls of the large room were covered not with wallpaper, but with newspapers of May 1943 – the Front Paper, the Red Star, and Pravda, the last containing pictures of the speakers at the All-Slav meeting in Moscow – among them the Metropolitan Nikelai and Wanda Wassiliewska. This was a sort of air force canteen, but passengers of the Leningrad plane – who were all more or less privileged persons – were allowed in. And what an introduction to Leningrad – hungry, half-starved Leningrad, as some still imagined it to be! The devushka always bright and cheerful like all canteen devushkas, brought us three big mugs of very sweet tea, and with it three large slices of very black and damp rye bread, and three enormous pats of butter, nearly the size of the hunks of bread, nearly a quarter of a pound each. It was a case of eating butter and bread rather than bread and butter. No doubt this was a privileged air force canteen – but still, things couldn’t be very desperate at this rate. The ceiling of the hut was made of new plywood, and on top of the newspapers pasted on the walls a poster had been pinned with a Russian soldier trampling on a swastika, beside which also lay a dead and particularly loathsome-looking Hun. Through the only glass pane in the window – the rest had been replaced by plywood – we could see the crimson sunset with the fir trees silhouetted against it. ‘Pleasant evening’ observed the podgy man with the tie-pin, wiping his penknife on the bread and closing it, and abandoning half his butter in the unequal struggle.

The sun had nearly set as we took off for the third time – this time for our non-stop flight to Leningrad. Again we flew over miles of dark-brown bogs and forests that now looked black in the last rays of the setting sun, and when they had faded to a faint glimmer on the horizon in front of us, everything turned dark grey, the land and the sky. We were flying very low now. Since our last landing a machine-gunner was stationed in the centre of the plane and was now looking round into the grey sky in all directions. The earth was black now, and the sky dark-grey; down below there were a few lights, and outside one house a bonfire was burning. ‘We sometimes fly this stretch with fighter escort, but no fighters were available tonight,’ said one of the crew. ‘It’s all right, though. When we fly so low, it’s very difficult for them to spot us in the twilight.’ The lights down below suddenly became more numerous, and we flew over a winding canal, running parallel to a coastline. ‘Ladoga,’ somebody said. Now, above and below, everything merged into one – a dark pearly-grey. We were almost skimming the smooth surface of the water. We could see a faint coastline before us – behind that coastline was Leningrad – and a thin line of fir forests in the south. In the distance, the red beacon of a lighthouse was signalling – was it signalling to us? And down below, in the water, were tiny little islands at regular intervals with anti-aircraft guns pointing upwards. This seemed a whole chain of little artificial islands built in the shallow bottom of the lake. Or were they floats? It was hard to make out; but one realised that here was one of those little things in the organisation of Leningrad’s defence which had made the city impregnable.

And then, suddenly, the machine-gunner in the turret became very fidgety. He grabbed the machine-gun and began to twist it about, as though taking aim. There was a moment of suspense. Then he relaxed. What had happened? In the darkness he had spotted a plane flying straight at us. Later he explained what had happened. It had turned out to be another Douglas, coming the opposite way. But for a couple of seconds in the almost complete darkness, he wasn’t sure.

And then we reached the opposite coast – the Leningrad coast. For several miles we flew over what looked like more forests; I strained my eyes to see the outline of the city somewhere to the left, but all was dark. Then suddenly several patches of ground were lit up, and a green flare shot up into the air – yes, a flare just like those they fire in Moscow on victory nights. The zoom of the engines began to soften, the propellers turned more slowly, and with a slight bump we landed on the patch of light. Then the lights went out again. ‘Priyekhali,’ somebody remarked. ‘We’ve arrived.’

2
First Contact

It was very dark outside, except for several cars and a bus, with their headlights half on. ‘How far are we from Leningrad?’ I asked. ‘Not very far,’ one of the crew said evasively. ‘Smart work,’ somebody said, ‘bringing the plane in like this, through the dark. Wonderful fellows, these civilian airmen of ours. They’re as nearly infallible as a man can be. Millions of miles some of them have flown, and never a hitch.’ We followed a black shadow with a torch, and were taken to one of the cars. An officer with a hard face asked to see our documents. He argued with our colonel, and slowly took down all particulars in the light of his torch. Our colonel showed no impatience, and when at last we were allowed to drive off he said, ‘This is Leningrad. This is the Front. They’re bound to be sticky.’

At first we drove through the dark along bumpy country roads; then we reached some main road. A good deal of traffic was coming the other way, with dim headlights on. Then we came to the first houses. It was hard to distinguish them, but no sky was showing through the windows – they had not been burned out. And behind some windows there were faint streaks of light. ‘It’s hard to drive in the dark,’ said the driver, an elderly man judging by the sound of his voice. ‘It’s, my fourth blackout winter.’ ‘Third,’ I thought, and then it occurred to me that Leningrad had been in the war-zone during the Finnish war too – 1939–40 – the winter of 1940–1 alone had been completely peaceful here. The winter of the London blitz.

We drove on in silence, but everybody was straining his eyes to see Leningrad. There wasn’t much to see. More houses, all seemingly intact, then one or two that were burned out. We were now on the outskirts of the town. Every few minutes an empty or nearly empty tramcar would come in the opposite direction. These places were still unfamiliar to me. ‘Okhta,’ said the driver, laconically. So that’s where we were, on the eastern outskirts of the town, beyond the river. The back of beyond – the subject of an allegedly true funny story I had heard years ago about a drunk who, sticking his head from under the cover of a horse-sledge says in bewildered drunken tones to the driver: ‘Driver, where have you brought me?’ ‘Where you told me to go – to the Vasili Island.’ ‘You ass,’ says the drunk, ‘if I had told you to drive me to Okhta, you would have driven me to Okhta, eh? I live in the Nevsky Prospect, near the Admiralty, you ass.’ (If it isn’t funny, try to imagine the same scene in a London taxi, and replace the place-names by say, Golders Green, Tooting and ‘off Trafalgar Square’ respectively.) But now Okhta had a modern unfamiliar outline – with blocks of flats and large five- and six-storey buildings. We turned right and crossed the Neva. To the right, against the dark sky, was a cluster of large buildings, with a church dome. ‘There’s the Smolny,’ somebody said. The Young Ladies’ Academy, where the Revolution was born; Lenin’s headquarters in October. The seat of the first Soviet Government. Then we drove down a long avenue. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Soviet Avenue,’ said the driver. For the first time I asked my ever-recurring, irritating question: ‘What was it called before?’ ‘Suvorov Avenue,’ he said. ‘With the Suvorov Museum?’ I asked. ‘Yes, there it is,’ he replied, pointing to a large unmistakably bombed-out house. ‘Destroyed in ’41. Pity. I remembered the large mural painting of Russian troops crossing the Devil’s Bridge on the Saint Gothard Pass during Suvorov’s last Italian campaign. Funny though, to have changed ‘Suvorov Avenue’ to ‘Soviet Avenue’ – it was done during the days when Suvorov wasn’t a suitable name to give a street. There were few people in the streets, but some traffic, and the trams with the dim little blue lights were still running. It was about ten o’clock. The curfew wasn’t till eleven.

Kirochnaya Street, then the Liteiny Avenue – all familiar places. In the Liteiny I distinguished the tall outline of what was once the Army and Navy Club. In 1916, I had come here to hear Skriabin’s Extase conducted by Kussevitzky. We all went frantic over it then. Tastes change. Recently in Moscow, with the Poème de l’Extase in the second part of the programme, I had heard an old lady say in the interval to another old lady, ‘My dear, let’s get away from the Extase!’

We turned into the Nevsky. The dim outline of the Alexandrinka was on the left, and of the Public Library, and the Gostiny Dvor, and then of the Kazan Cathedral, with its colonnade modelled after St. Peter’s in Rome. And in front of us was the tall needle spire of the Admiralty.

Just before reaching the Admiralty the car stopped and our colonel stepped out and asked us to wait. He disappeared into a dimly lit doorway, with two soldiers with bayonets outside. Dangulov and I stepped out of the car and walked up and down the smooth clean pavement. We were right in the heart of Leningrad. Before us were trees, and above them, the graceful shape of the Admiralty with its needle spire. All was quiet except for an occasional tramcar that rattled past, usually quite empty, with two dim coloured lights in front, and for the sound of an occasional motor horn. Then, through the stillness of the Leningrad night a loud-speaker began to talk along the Nevsky Prospect: ‘This is tonight’s communiqué. …’ More successes in all directions. The houses on either side of the Nevsky looked dark and enormously strange, it felt like being in a great European city.

I still couldn’t make out the driver’s face, but his voice sounded younger than I had thought at first. ‘Bad business, driving at night,’ he said. ‘I stick strictly to the regulations, but the militia still make a row about the headlights every time they have a chance. Them militia girls are very funny.’ ‘Have you been in Leningrad these last two years?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘since the start. It’s good to be heroes, but we could all do with a spot of ordinary quiet living. Yes, I’ve been through it all, me and the wife and the kid. Nearly died of hunger myself in ’41. It’s a lot better now; I get 600 grammes of bread. Not enough, really, considering what we Leningrad people have gone through.’ ‘Have you had much shelling lately?’ ‘Yesterday we had twenty minutes of it – the Moscow district got it. Nothing much today, though. But, my God, it used to be bad – especially a few weeks ago. They kept at it for ten days – non-stop; the damn thing went on from dawn till dusk. They’re slick sons of bitches – hit the bloody tramcar stop right at the corner of the Nevsky and the Sadovaya – busiest damned street corner in the whole of Leningrad. Everybody was killed or wounded – real nightmare when you see what it looks like. Another day they hit a crowded tramcar. But it’s better now than it used to be. They say it’s the air force that’s keeping them under control. It’s easy now, and after what we have stuck, we can manage to stick the rest. It mayn’t be long now.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if Smolensk and Vitebsk are taken by the Red Army, they may soon have to pull out.’ ‘If it happened tomorrow it would suit me all right,’ he said. ‘From what I’ve seen of Leningrad – and it isn’t much – ‘ I said, ‘there isn’t as much damage as I thought. Kharkov certainly looks ten times worse.’ ‘Oh!’ he said, sounding very sceptical, ‘you’ll see plenty of damage tomorrow.’

At last the dark door between the two sentries opened, letting out a faint ray of light and Colonel Studyonov came out, together with another officer. With a salute, and in very good English, he introduced himself formally, in Red Army style: ‘Major Lozak, representative of the Command of the Leningrad Front.’ And, turning to the driver, he said: ‘To the Astoria.’ We drove up the Nevsky and took the first turning to the right. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘Gogol Street.’ ‘Quite correct,’ said the major. ‘Wonderful,’ said little Dangulov, with the tone of an impresario showing off an infant prodigy. Of course I remembered Gogol Street; it had a wonderful shop for sweets and chocolates which belonged to a Frenchman or a Swiss called Berrin. The sweets were wrapped in paper with Berrin, Confiseur, rue Gogol, Saint-Pétersbourg printed on them. On Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve there used to be crowds of cars and smart horse sleighs outside Berrin’s, and luscious displays of sweets and fruits confits and chocolates in his brightly lit-up windows. Now Gogol Street was completely dark. Then the car turned a corner and we got out. We were at the Astoria. Turning round, I could see the enormous black outline of the dome of St. Isaac’s. The weather had improved; there were a few stars in the sky. Major Lozak said something to a shadowy shape in the doorway and we entered the large marble-lined hall of the hotel. Oh, irony! The first thing I saw was a large notice-board: ‘Ausflúge: Leningrad und seine Umgebung,’ with a whole long list of excursions to Pushkin, with ‘Tsarskoie Selo’ added in brackets, Peterhof, Pavlovsk, etc. On the other side of the square marble pillar was a similar notice-board in English: ‘Leningrad – this week’s entertainments.’ But opposite the names of the theatres there were now only blanks. In the far end of the hall, half-lit by green-shaded lamps, came the friendly click of billiard balls. There were some officers there, playing and commenting loudly on the shots. We were escorted by a woman up the stairs to the third floor. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but we haven’t got the lift working yet.’ The corridors were white and beautifully clean. It was a thoroughly modern hotel, built around 1912 by Lidvall, I think, the most fashionable architect of his day, whom the Petersburg of the ‘capitalist’ period had to thank for many useful, well-proportioned and never displeasing innovations. To build a modern hotel in one of St. Petersburg’s most famous squares, almost beside St. Isaac’s Cathedral, required great tact, and Lidvall had it – infinitely more than the Hun who built opposite it the factory-like red sandstone building of the German Embassy – that very German Embass...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Bookreview
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Moscow to Leningrad
• 2. First Contact
• 3. St. Petersburg – Leningrad
• 4. The Observation Tower
• 5. Sightseeing
• 6. Kamenny Island
• 7. Leningrad Airmen
• 8. A Factory in the Famine
• 9. Sunday Evening in Leningrad
• 10. Children in the Famine and Now
• 11. The Bristles of the Hedgehog
• 12. Endurance: The Kirov Works
• 13. At the Writers’ Union
• 14. All-Day Shelling
• 15. The Mayor of Leningrad Speaks
• 16. The Last Day
• 17. Leningrad’s Liberation: The Second Visit
• Notes