Famine in Leningrad

In the second half of December 1941 hunger in besieged Leningrad turned into mass death. For more than a month workers had been receiving 250 grams of bread a day, and the rest of the population, children included, 125 grams of adulterated bread that barely resembled bread at all. Other rationed foods were issued ever more rarely, and from the last ten days of December hardly at all. On 6 December central heating in homes was switched off; on 8 December the power stations cut off electricity to most consumers and the trams began to stop, while the frost reached twenty-odd degrees below zero. People died in unheated flats, in bread queues, on the way to work and in the streets, and exhausted relatives hauled the bodies to the cemeteries on children’s sledges or left them in gateways. According to Soviet figures, 52,881 people died in Leningrad in December 1941 – more than in the whole of the pre-war year 1940.

One finds the statement under 21 December that “about 3,000 a day” were dying of hunger and disease in Leningrad. For that day it is an exaggeration. The December death toll works out at an average of about 1,700 a day, although there were more in the last days of the month, when mortality was rising sharply. Three thousand or more deaths a day came only in January and February 1942: in those two months, according to the same figures, 199,187 people died, an average of about 3,400 a day. All these figures cover only registered deaths, and many of the dead were never reported, so the real losses were higher.

Bread of 125 grams

Food rationing had been in force in Leningrad since July, and since the beginning of the blockade on 8 September the rations had been cut several times. From 20 November the city was using only about 510 tonnes of flour a day to bake bread for the population and the army, a quarter of what it had used before the blockade. The bread was baked with admixtures of oilcake, bran, malt, oat flour and substitute flour, and even of edible cellulose, produced at six plants in the city. Meat coupons were honoured with gelatine made from intestines or other substitutes, and fat coupons were not honoured at all in November and December. From 1 December every resident was assigned to a single shop. On the black market, where barter predominated, a kilogram of bread cost about 500 roubles at the end of December, against a ration price of under two roubles.

People ate everything that could be eaten: carpenter’s glue boiled down from hides, belts and sheepskin coats, cats, dogs and birds, soup made from wallpaper with flour paste left on it, and sugar-soaked earth from beneath the Badayev warehouses, which had burned down in October. The body, deprived of food, consumed itself. Doctors called this alimentary dystrophy. Men, who had smaller reserves of fat, died first; according to Leningrad statistics, of every hundred who died that winter, 63 were men and 37 women. With an average December temperature of −12.5°C, seven degrees below the long-term average, people in flats without heating or window panes burned furniture, books and parquet floors in small iron stoves known as burzhuikas.

The girl who became a symbol of that winter, eleven-year-old Tanya Savicheva, wrote the first date in a small notebook on 28 December: “Zhenya died on 28 December at 12.00 in the morning 1941.” By May 1942 she had added her grandmother, her brother, two uncles and her mother, and finally: “The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.” Evacuated in the summer of 1942, she died in 1944 in a hospital in the village of Shatki near Gorky. Her sister Nina and her brother Mikhail survived the war.

Hunger also destroyed social bonds. Reports at the end of December from the head of the Leningrad NKVD, Pyotr Kubatkin (PL), to Andrei Zhdanov contained the first mentions of cases of cannibalism. According to NKVD documents published years later, 26 people were charged with eating human flesh, or murder for that purpose, in December 1941, 366 in January 1942 and 494 in the first half of February. In the overwhelming majority of cases this involved eating the bodies of the dead rather than murder; most of those detained were illiterate or poorly educated women, often single mothers, with no criminal past. Murders and robberies for ration cards were far more common. Historians such as the American Lisa Kirschenbaum point out that, in such conditions, what is astonishing is rather how far the great majority of the inhabitants retained their human impulses.

The road across the ice and Tikhvin

Since the end of August, when the Germans cut the last railway line at Mga, the city’s survival had depended on Lake Ladoga. From 22 November columns of lorries had been driving across the young ice from Osinovets on the western shore to Kobona on the eastern shore. This route, later called the Road of Life, at first worked very poorly, however. In November it carried on average just over a hundred tonnes of cargo a day, at the beginning of December about three hundred, and at the end of the month about a thousand, once the ice had thickened and the drivers had learned to drive at night without lights. Lorries fell through holes in the ice, and the German air force bombed the route.

The Road of Life alone was not enough, because since 8 November, when the Germans had taken Tikhvin, goods from the interior could not reach Ladoga by rail. On the eastern shore of the lake a military road more than three hundred kilometres long was hastily built through forests and swamps, from Zaborye station to Novaya Ladoga and Kobona, and convoys took many days to cover it. Everything was changed by the Tikhvin offensive operation. On 9 December 1941 troops of General Kirill Meretskov’s 4th Army recaptured Tikhvin, and that same day Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb issued an order to “straighten the front”, which in practice meant a retreat towards the Volkhov river. On 17 December the Volkhov Front was formed from the 4th and 52nd Armies under Meretskov’s command. By 30 December the Germans had withdrawn behind the Volkhov, to the positions from which they had set out in October. The Germans had not closed a second ring east of Ladoga, had not linked up with the Finns on the Svir, and the railway from the interior was once again approaching the lake. On 20 December the Leningrad Front command moved its transhipment base to Tikhvin, and from the end of December cargo travelled by rail to Voibokalo and Zhikharevo stations and from there by the road across the ice.

According to the findings of Russian historians, on 23 December deliveries across Ladoga exceeded the city’s daily consumption of flour for the first time. They were supplemented by food from the evacuated base at Hanko, from which the fleet brought about 12,000 tonnes of supplies.

The first increase

On 25 December 1941 Leningrad received its first ration increase since the start of the blockade. Workers would now receive 350 grams of bread a day, and office workers, children and dependants 200 grams. Front-line troops were issued 600 grams, those in the rear 400. The news was greeted in the city like a holiday: people wept in the queues and embraced in the streets. Flour consumption rose to 560 tonnes a day.

The increase did not, however, stop the dying. Bodies ravaged by two months of extreme hunger could no longer recover on a few dozen grams more bread, and other rationed foods hardly arrived at all until mid-January. In January 1942 almost twice as many people died in the city as in December. The authorities had planned to start taking residents out across the ice from 10 December, as many as five thousand a day, but on 12 December the front’s military council postponed the evacuation, because the road could barely keep up with food deliveries. By 22 January 1942 about 36,000 people had crossed the lake on foot or in whatever lorries they could find. The mass evacuation, which by April took out more than half a million Leningraders, was ordered by the State Defence Committee only on 22 January.

Authority in a starving city

The city was run by Andrei Zhdanov, member of the front’s military council and head of the Leningrad party organisation, his deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov and the chairman of the city council, Pyotr Popkov. In December warming centres and hospitals for the emaciated were opened, the production of food substitutes was organised, canteens were set up in factories, and on 26 December the city council granted academicians and corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences one-off rations of butter, flour, tinned food and chocolate. On the radio, which went on playing even when the flats were in darkness, the poet Olga Berggolts read her verse. At the same time the inequalities were striking. Diaries and party documents published since the 1990s show that the party apparatus and some officials were clearly better supplied than the rest of the population, and the NKVD made arrests for “defeatism” and “anti-Soviet talk” in the queues. How badly the city had been prepared for a siege and how slowly it had been evacuated in the summer of 1941 were subjects that could not be written about in the USSR for decades.

On the other side of the front the German command acted in accordance with the decision taken in September: not to capture the city, but to encircle it, shell it and starve it out, and not to accept any surrender. This was in keeping with the Hunger Plan, which assumed that millions of inhabitants of Soviet cities would die so that food from the occupied lands could go to the Wehrmacht and the Reich. In December Army Group North was busy retreating from Tikhvin, while at Moscow the Red Army had since the beginning of December been driving the Germans back from the capital. On 19 December Hitler took personal command of the Army and forbade further withdrawals, and Leeb, at odds with him over the retreat behind the Volkhov, asked to be relieved in mid-January 1942.

Place in the war

December was only the prelude to the most terrible months of the blockade. In January and February 1942, with frosts reaching thirty-odd degrees below zero and without water, electricity or fuel, Leningrad lost almost two hundred thousand inhabitants. Only when the Road of Life began working at full capacity, the rations were raised several more times from February onwards and hundreds of thousands of people had been taken out of the city did the death rate begin to fall. According to some recent research, about 780,000 people died in the city in the first and hardest year of the blockade. For the whole period of the siege the Soviet side gave a figure of 632,253 victims at Nuremberg, while modern estimates usually range from about 700,000 to more than a million civilian dead. Most of them lie in mass graves in the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery.

The Leningrad famine was the most terrible example of the war waged against the civilian population on the Eastern Front, but also an example of extraordinary endurance. The city that Hitler wanted to wipe off the face of the earth survived the winter of 1941–1942, and its factories went on producing weapons. The testimonies of that winter – from Tanya Savicheva’s notes to the blockade notes of Lidiya Ginzburg and the collection of accounts Blokadnaya kniga (“The Blockade Book”) by Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich, published in the USSR with the censor’s interventions – are among the most important documents of the Second World War.