Military history

41 ♦ A New Kind of Crime

IT BEGAN AS WINTER SET IN, AND WITH EACH WEEK IT grew—what the pedantic clerks of the Leningrad militia or police department called “a new kind of crime,” a kind which none of the many branches of the Soviet police had encountered before.

It was, in simplest terms, murder for food. It happened every day. A blow from behind and an old woman in a food queue fell dead, while a pale youth ran off with her sumka, or purse, and her ration card. The quick flash of a knife and a man walking away from a bakery fell in the snow as a dark figure vanished with the loaf of bread he had been carrying.

The Leningrad police, like all of Stalin’s police, were well organized, well staffed even in these difficult days. But the new crimes were not, for the most part, being committed by hardened criminals (among whom the police had an efficient network of stool pigeons). The crimes were the acts of ordinary Soviet citizens, driven to murder and robbery by starvation, bombardment, cold, suffering. Some had wives or children at home, dying of dystrophy.

“It was characteristic,” Militia Major A. T. Skilyagin wrote, “that many of these crimes were committed not by inveterate criminals, not by elements alien to our society, but simply by persons driven to desperation by hunger, bombing and shelling, persons whose psyches had been broken by the weight of their experiences.”

As the winter wore on, roving gangs of murderers appeared on the streets of Leningrad. Sometimes they included deserters from the front, ex-Red Army men, desperate elements of every kind. They preyed on persons standing in queues, seizing their ration cards or their food; they descended on lone pedestrians, either by day or night; they carried out bold attacks on the bread shops and even commandeered trucks and sleds, bringing supplies to the bread shops. They entered flats, rifled them of valuables, and if an occupant raised a voice (often there was no one but the dead in the apartments), they hit him on the head and set fire to the flat to cover the traces.

Not all the criminals were Soviet citizens. There were German agents in Leningrad—it was no trick to slip them through the lines in the suburbs of the city. Sometimes the agents spread rumors, stirred up trouble in the bread queues, engaged in agitation, sometimes in sabotage.

The danger from within the city had been strongly in the minds of the Leningrad leadership since the outbreak of war. It had always been a preoccupation of Stalin and his police chief, Beria. It played a significant role in the political maneuvering which handicapped Leningrad’s defense in August and September. By winter Leningrad was crisscrossed with internal defense organizations, “destroyer” battalions of workers, special public order brigades of Young Communists. But as the blockade tightened, as starvation began to set in, as the “new kind of crime” appeared, none of this seemed to be enough.

On November 15 after the fall of Tikhvin confronted Zhdanov and his associates with the realization that the blockade might not quickly be lifted, that the suffering of the city might well carry beyond any parameters thus far conceived, that the spirit of Leningrad might break under the impact of these crushing blows, new steps were taken to defend the internal security of the city.

The Military Council of the Leningrad front established a special Administration for Internal Defense. This took a different form from the ill-fated effort by Zhdanov and Marshal Voroshilov to set up a Leningrad Council for Defense in August.

The new internal defense organization was to be independent and self-sufficient. It was designed to cope with any threat which might arise within Leningrad. It was comprised of workers battalions (often badly under-strength), several brigades of Baltic Fleet sailors, the city police department, such NKVD troops as were still available within Leningrad, the fire brigades, and odds and ends of artillery and machine-gun regiments. Five workers battalions were finally organized, numbering about 16,000 men. The total command as listed on paper by December, 1941, comprised about 37,000 men. The city was divided into six sectors, with fire points in many apartment houses.

Many workers detachments continued to stand duty in the great factories of the city, although by December they were frigid morgues in which hand-fuls of people tried to keep alive, huddled about tiny temporary stoves. The troops were available for any emergency, including, of course, internal disturbances or uprisings. They had one other task—to guard the approaches to the city over the ice, particularly from the direction of Peterhof. There were many small engagements fought on the ice, sometimes between iceboat patrols, scudding along at sixty miles an hour, but for the most part these were just scouting skirmishes.

The precautions were by no means unjustified. The regular police had been brutally weakened by forced drafts which had sent most of the NKVD units to the front. Many functions had been taken over by women. The regular police, like everyone in Leningrad, suffered from starvation, cold and physical weakness. Some reports suggest that the police, both regular and secret, almost ceased to function in late fall and winter, because of physical debilitation. Also, some Leningrad residents assert, the police were intimidated by the plight of the city and preferred not to show themselves too readily to the civilian population.

In the dangerous days of September the police had panicked. Some commandeered planes and got out of Leningrad. Day after day they burned their files, destroying Party lists, secret documents and even house registers, lest they be used by Nazi occupation authorities for compiling execution lists. The panic was not quite so compelling as in Moscow, where, in October, the sky was clouded for days by smoke from the burning files of the secret police, and citizens sometimes found their half-burned dossiers fluttering down from the NKVD furnace chimneys into the streets. But from September onward more and more Leningraders had demonstrated less and less fear of the police. They spoke more openly among themselves, heedless of who might hear or what might be reported about them.

Official accounts lay great stress on the physical weakness of the police. In December most units had only eight or ten men on duty, and these men had to work shifts of fourteen to sixteen or even eighteen to twenty hours daily. In January 166 police in Leningrad died of starvation and 1,600 were on sick call. In February the death toll rose to 212.1

The criminals with whom the police had to deal were far better armed than in peacetime. Often they had military rifles, sometimes submachine guns and almost always revolvers.

As the ration was cut and then cut again and again, not all Leningraders, as one Soviet source puts it tactfully, “received the news with bravery.”

One January evening with the temperature at 20 below zero Maria Razina and Peter Yakushin, political workers in a large Leningrad apartment house, went to apartment No. 5 where an evacuated family was living. The mother was dead and three small children huddled about her. No ration cards could be found. Soon the owner of the flat, a man named Mark Schacht, returned and said he was making arrangements to take the youngsters to a children’s home.

On a hunch Yakushin demanded that Schacht return the family’s ration cards. He denied having them. Yakushin grabbed him by the throat and shouted, “Give me the cards, you bandit, or I’ll kill you on the spot!”

Schacht suddenly produced the missing ration cards. Before Yakushin could summon a military tribunal (a squad of Red Army soldiers) to execute him, the landlord vanished.

Not all workers in the food distribution system could resist temptation. A grocery store director named Lokshina stole nearly 400 pounds of butter and 200 pounds of flour. She was shot. This was the fate of food criminals whenever they were uncovered. The chief of a Smolny region bread store named Akkonen and his assistant, a woman called Sredneva, cheated their customers of four or five grams of bread per ration. They sold the surplus, taking furs, objects of art and gold jewelry in exchange. They were summarily tried and shot.

As Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov put it bluntly in the spring of 1942, “I will tell you plainly that we shot people for stealing a loaf of bread.”

In November Leningradskaya Pravda began to carry brief items, almost invariably on its back page, reporting the actions of military tribunals in cases of food crimes: three men shot for stealing food from a warehouse; two women shot for profiteering on the black market; five men shot for the theft of flour from a truck; six men shot for conspiring to divert food from the state system. Sometimes the defendants got twenty-five years in a labor camp. But not often. The usual penalty was shooting.

It was a rare day when Leningradskay a Pravda did not publish at least one such item, along with a theater listing or two (these vanished after January 10), a few notices of dissertations being defended, the daily communiqué of the Soviet Information Bureau, the press conferences of Solomon Lozovsky, the official government spokesman in Moscow, and an occasional dispatch by Vsevolod Kochetov, Nikolai Tikhonov or Vsevolod Rozhdest-vensky.

The ordinary Leningrad city court was transformed, by order of the Leningrad Military Council, into a military court and the city procurator was made a military procurator. This put all persons accused of food crimes under military law. In practice it meant they went almost directly before the firing squad, with a minimum of formality and only the vaguest nod toward judicial process. A total of 3,500 Young Communists were directed into the stores and the rationing system, instructed by Party Secretary Zhdanov not to permit “even a suspicion” of dishonesty in food handling. The Young Communists carried out sudden raids on every link in food distribution and repeatedly uncovered irregularities. In one action in the Vyborg region twenty-three Young Communist units participated and exposed a whole network of food criminals. All were shot summarily.

The worst disaster which could befall a Leningrader was loss of his ration card. On June 22 Ivan Krutikov had been rowing on the lake at Pushkin when the war news broke. On December 15 he was in Leningrad, where his factory had been removed from Pushkin. He had suffered a concussion in a bombing raid and was weakened by scanty rations. On December 15 worse misfortune befell him. As he stood in a queue, a thief grabbed his ration card and fled. Krutikov gave chase but was able to run only a short distance. He saw the robber disappear and burst into tears at his helplessness. He didn’t even have the breath to shout, “Stop thief!”

It was virtually impossible under the rigid rules established by Food Director D. V. Pavlov to get a substitute ration card. Prior to December a person who lost his card could apply to a regional bureau and get a new one. In October 4,800 substitute cards were issued. In November 13,000 persons got replacements. These figures seem to have been regarded as normal. But in December long lines began to form at the rationing bureaus. Before the alarmed Pavlov could halt the practice 24,000 cards had been given out. The people invariably claimed that they had lost their card during a bombardment or shelling or when their house burned down. Pavlov knew that many claims were legitimate. But he knew also that many persons must be claiming fraudulent losses in order to get a second ration. The power to issue substitute cards was withdrawn from regional offices. Hereafter new cards could be obtained only from the central office and only with irrefutable proof—testimony of eyewitnesses, supporting evidence from the building superintendent, the local Party worker, the police. For a time Zhdanov himself was the only man who was empowered to replace a lost ration card. It was impossible for the ordinary citizen to assemble the data required for issuance of a new card. Applications quickly dropped to zero for, in fact, if you lost your card you could not get another. The problem was solved, but at the cost of almost certain death for thousands of unfortunates who actually did lose their cards.

Thus Krutikov faced sixteen days without food—in other words, death. He had one hope. His factory was no longer operating due to lack of electric power, and he had applied for front-line duty in the army. On December 17 he got a notice to appear for induction and reported for medical examination. But the doctor rejected him, saying, “You have dystrophy in the full meaning of the word. We can’t admit you until you have fed up a bit. Sorry not to be able to help you.” At that time Krutikov weighed about eighty-four pounds, half his prewar weight. For four days he did not eat. Finally, his factory director suggested that he try to get readmission to a workers battalion in which he had formerly served.

It took Krutikov sixteen hours to walk four or five miles from his factory to the Narva Gates, where the workers battalion had its headquarters in the Gorky House of Culture. The temperature was 25 degrees below zero. He was so weak he had to rest every fifteen or twenty paces. Krutikov’s old commander put him back on the rolls, with a ration of 250 grams of bread a day plus 100 to 120 grams of cereal and a bowl of hot water for breakfast. His life was saved.

Most were by no means so fortunate.

One night a mother, a pensioner, and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Lulya, appeared at Erisman Hospital. The daughter wore a cape and carried a fur muff. Both were in a state of hysteria. A confidence woman had made the daughter’s acquaintance in a bread line and promised to get her a job with good meals in Military Hospital No. 21. At the beginning of February, she got the mother to lend her 45 rubles (all she had), took the pair’s ration cards and led them through the blackout to Erisman Hospital for an “interview.” In the complete darkness the mother and daughter heard their benefactor cry, “Follow me!” Then she vanished.

The two wept. The mother kept saying, “Lulya, you have put me into my grave—still living.” The girl looked into space and mumbled, “What a night! What a night!” Vera Inber and her husband helped them to make out a report to the police. But what good it would do no one knew. They had no ration cards and it was only February 3. Four weeks without food: a death sentence.

Vsevolod Kochetov also lost his ration card but in a different way. He had gone with his wife Vera across Lake Ladoga to the Fifty-fourth Army front in late December. About January 12 he returned to Tikhvin to find that an urgent telegram from his editor, Zolotukhin, had been waiting several days for him, ordering him back to Leningrad. A whole week passed between the arrival of the telegram and Kochetov’s return to Leningrad. He got back to find that Zolotukhin—with whom he had never hit it off—had put him up on chargés of violation of military discipline. He was summarily dischargéd from Leningradskaya Pravda and expelled from the Communist Party. By coincidence (or possibly not by coincidence) Kochetov’s best friend and wartime companion, Mikhalev, was given similar treatment for a slightly different offense—for using the newspaper car to transport a sick colleague across Lake Ladoga.

Kochetov eventually got his expulsion from the Party reversed. But he didn’t get his job back, and he didn’t get his ration card back. The ration card went with the job. Regardless of cause (and the only source for what happened is Kochetov, who never paints himself in anything but heroic colors), it was no snap being caught in Leningrad in midwinter of the blockade without a ration card. At one point he was reduced to buying 900 grams of lard at one ruble a gram—900 rubles—in the black market. Finally, the radio committee gave him a job, but it was several weeks before he got a ration card. He tramped five or ten miles a day in search of food, usually going to the front, to commanders whom he knew. Sometimes they let him share a bowl of soup. Sometimes they gave him a tin of canned meat, a half-loaf of black bread or a bit of sausage. Here and there around the city he stopped to look at bulletin boards and read the announcements posted there, handwritten on bits of yellow, white or blue paper: “Will remove corpses— for bread"; “Will buy or exchange valuables for records of Vertinsky and Leshchenko"; “For Sale: Complete works of Leonid Andreyev, Edgar Poe, Knut Hamsun"; “Lost: Little girl, seven years old, in red dress and fur hood. Anyone who has seen or met her . . .”

What could have happened to the little girl in the red dress and fur hood? Had she been on the way to the food store when an air raid struck and fallen victim to a random bomb? Was she a victim of the casual shelling of German long-range guns which went on day after day at any hour, sometimes in one street, sometimes another? Had she simply collapsed of hunger and died in the street as thousands did every day? Or was there a more sinister explanation? Anything could and did happen on the streets of starving Leningrad. The possibilities of tragedy were endless. More than one child had been killed for a ration card, even though theirs were of the lowest category. As early as November mothers and fathers had begun to keep their children off the streets because of rumors of cannibalism.

Both adults and children were turned into beasts by the privations. Yeliz-aveta Sharypina went to a store one day on Borodinsky Street. She saw an excited woman swearing at a youngster about ten years old and hitting him again and again. The child sat on the floor, oblivious of the blows, and greedily chewed a hunk of black bread, stuffing it into his mouth as rapidly as he could work his jaws. Around the woman and the child stood a circle of silent spectators.

Sharypina grabbed the woman and tried to make her halt.

“But he’s a thief, a thief, a thief,” the woman cried.

She had received her day’s bread ration from the clerk and had let it sit for one moment on the counter. The youngster snatched the loaf, sat down on the floor and proceeded to devour it, heedless of blows, heedless of shouts, heedless of anything that went on around him.

When Sharypina tried to calm the woman, she broke into tears and sobbed that she had taken her only child to the morgue a few weeks before. Finally, Sharypina got the people in the bread store to contribute bits of their ration to the woman who had lost hers. She then questioned the ten-year-old. His father, he thought, was at the front. His mother had died of hunger. Two children remained, he and a younger brother. They were living in the cellar of a house which had been destroyed by a bomb. She asked why they hadn’t gone to a children’s home. He said they had to wait for their father. If they went to a home, they would be sent out of Leningrad and never see him again.

Even the stoutest heart began to wonder whether Leningrad could survive such a plight. Vera Inber, a woman of flaming courage who had deliberately come to Leningrad to share its fate with her physician husband, wrote in her diary for January 4:

It seems to me that if in the course of ten days the blockade is not lifted the city will not hold out. Leningrad has taken the full brunt of this war. What is needed is that the Germans on the Leningrad front receive their due. ... If only someone knew how Leningrad is suffering. The winter is still long. The cold is ferocious.

Three days later she wrote that everyone in Leningrad was saying that General Meretskov’s troops would be in Leningrad by the tenth. “Well,” she commented, “whether it is the tenth, the fifteenth or the twentieth or even the end of January, just let it happen.”

The wildest rumors coursed through Leningrad. One was the legend of the “noble bandit.” A young girl was attacked by a bandit gang on her way home late at night. She was compelled to hand over her fur coat, her wool dress, her new shoes. The bandits were about to leave her naked and freezing in the bitter night when one took off his leather jacket and threw it over her shoulders. The girl ran to her apartment and there, plunging her hand into the pocket of the jacket, pulled out a packet of money—5,000 rubles. Or, in another version, obviously influenced by the blockade, she put her hand in the pocket and drew out a loaf of bread and a large package of butter.

On January 122 Mayor Peter Popkov called a press conference at Smolny. The reporters thought he looked tired. His eyes were red and deeply shadowed, his face pale but freshly shaven. He did not rise to greet them, simply motioning to chairs at a long table covered with green baize. Without preliminaries he began to speak of the city’s difficulties. His voice was hoarse, and he talked slowly without intonation. The city had been under siege for five months. There had been terrible problems with food. Now, he thought, the Ladoga road was solving them. “The enemy planned to stifle the city by hunger,” he said. “This aim will be thwarted.” But two things must be done. The food must be gotten into the city, and within the city a merciless struggle must be fought against robbers and “marauders,” or pillagers as the officials called the organized gangs preying on Leningrad. “Robbers, speculators and marauders will be mercilessly punished by the laws of war,” Popkov said.

The suffering grew worse.

On January 25 Party Secretary Kuznetsov got an urgent telephone call at Smolny from Power Station No. 5, the only plant still operating. The station had been limping along on daily shipments of 500 cubic meters of wood, delivered by the October Railroad. That day the last fuel had been exhausted. None came in by rail.

“Try to hold out a few hours,” Kuznetsov begged. But there was no more fuel. The turbines turned slower and slower and finally halted. That deprived Leningrad’s remaining water-pumping station of power. The pumps halted. No more water for the bread bakeries. Without water the bakers could not bake bread.

It may have been on this day that the City Soviet telephoned Power Station No. 2 and asked for 100 kilowatts of power. “We can’t,” came the answer. “We’re sitting here by an oil lamp ourselves.”

Leningrad was left with a total power production of 3,000 kilowatts, turned out by a small emergency turbine at Station No. 1.

At the Frunze regional bakery, one of eight still operating in the city, two fire department pumpers were brought in and kept the bakery going. In the Petrograd region the pipes quickly froze. A call was sent to the Young Communist headquarters:

“We must have 4,000 pails of water by evening for the bakery or there will be no bread tomorrow. We must have a minimum of 2,000 Young Communists because none of them can carry more than two pails; they don’t have the strength.”

The youngsters were somehow mobilized and formed a chain from the frozen banks of the Neva to the nearest bakery. They managed to provide enough water and then, on children’s sleds, distributed the bread to the food shops.

By chance Vsevolod Vishnevsky made a speech before a thousand police workers the day after the power was cut off. He spoke in a large room at police headquarters and noted that it was in good order. There was light, although it was being “economized.” He was told that the principal problem lay with the railroad, which was working so badly that 70,000 t6ns of food had piled up at Osinovets because it was impossible to bring it into Leningrad. If Vishnevsky found anything curious in the fact that with Leningrad bereft of light and heat the police force still was able to assemble in lighted, heated quarters, he made no notation of the fact. He did, however, make an oblique comment on the comparatively well-fed appearance of the NKVD.

When Vera Inber heard the news about cessation of power, she noted in her diary for January 25:

7 P.M. The situation is catastrophic. People now have fallen on the wooden fence around the hospital and are smashing it up for kindling. There is no water. If tomorrow the bakeries halt for even one day, what will happen? Today we hadn’t even any soup—only cereal. There was coffee this morning, but there will be no more liquids. Our water supply: half a teakettle (we keep it on the warm stove), half a pan for washing and a quarter-bottle for tomorrow. That’s all.

The next day she wrote:

I cried for the first time from grief and bitterness. I upset the cereal in the stove. Ilya swallowed a few spoonfuls mixed with ashes. No bread yet...

On the twenty-seventh she learned of the bucket brigade at the Neva which had been mustered to help the bakeries. There were enormous lines at the bread shops, but bread did appear toward evening and was slowly passed out. For practical purposes, however, Leningrad’s bakeries in the depth of the famine winter were closed down for about forty-eight hours.

The fuel famine worsened despite every effort of Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and the others.

Leningrad had entered the blockade in no better shape for fuel than for food. On September 1 Leningrad had gasoline and oil reserves of 18 to 20 days, coal for 75 to 80 days. The Power Trust had 18 days’ supply of wood, the bread bakeries 60 days’. By September 30 fuel oil was virtually exhausted and most factories were down to their last coal. The October 1 stock of wood was 118,851 cubic meters—about two weeks’ supply. It had been 370,000 cubic meters a month earlier.

By mid-October power production had fallen to one-third prewar level. Young Communist battalions were beginning to be sent out to the suburban forests to chop wood.

The city in peacetime got 120 trainloads of fuel a day. Now it had three or four trains of firewood at best.3

The heating of buildings virtually ceased, although it was officially supposed to be maintained at 54 degrees Fahrenheit in apartments, 50 degrees in offices and 47 degrees in factories, as of November 17. In fact, by December there was no central heating whatever. The use of electricity for lighting was limited to Smolny, the General Staff building, police stations, Party offices, AA commands, post and telegraph offices, the fire department, courts and apartment house offices. Even the military were running out of fuel. By the end of November they were down to ten to eleven days of aviation gas and seven days’ supply for the trucks.

By December 15 the director of Power Station No. 1 reported he was receiving only 150 to 350 tons of coal a day against a minimum use of 700 to 800. He was compelled to exhaust his emergency supplies and closed down. In the course of December most hospitals lost all their electricity, and in the forty which were dependent on electricity for heating, temperatures fell to 35 to 45 degrees. Laundries ceased to operate. So did public baths.

On December 10, 2,850 persons were sent out to cut wood. On December 12 another 1,400 were mobilized, mostly Young Communists. On December 24 it was decided to demolish wooden structures for fuel. Even so, only 20 percent of the December wood quota of 130,000 cubic meters was met. The bakeries got 18,000 cubic meters of wood from the demolition of 279 houses in January. In February they got another 17,000 cubic meters.

On January 1 the city authorities estimated fuel reserves at 73,000 tons of coal, a little more than a month’s supply at minimum use. There were less than 2,000 tons of anthracite left in the city. The only sources of fuel now were the small forests around the city, a little peat that lay under frozen snow and ice along the north bank of the Neva and the wooden houses and buildings of Leningrad. Andrei Zhdanov authorized the demolition of almost any structure made of wood. He promised that after the war Leningrad would be rebuilt in new grandeur. Youngsters even tore away some wooden planks around the Bronze Horseman, the heroic statue of Peter the Great. On those that remained they scrawled, “He is not cold and we will be warmed.”

The principal means of heating were the burzhuiki set up in apartments with a chimney that went out through the fortockka, the small ventilating window.

The result .was inevitable: hundreds upon hundreds of fires, caused by the cranky, poorly installed, poorly attended makeshift stoves. From January 1 to March 10 there were 1,578 fires in Leningrad, caused by the estimated 135,000 burzhuiki in the city.

When the fuel supplies ran out at Power Station No. 5, the main water-pumping station got no power for thirty-six hours, the Southern and Petro-grad stations got none for four days. The temperature was 30 degrees below zero. By the time the pumps came back, Leningrad’s water system had been fatally frozen. So had the sewer system.

The city began to burn down. In January there were more than 250 serious fires and an average of nearly thirty a day of all kinds. Some were caused by German bombardment but most of them by the burzhuiki. They burned day after day. On January 12 there was a very bad series of fires, twenty in all. One of the worst was on the Nevsky, where the Gostiny Dvor, badly battered in the September bombing, burned again.

With his usual suspiciousness Vsevolod Vishnevsky thought that Nazi diversionists must be at work, although he conceded that the fires might be due to carelessness with the burzhuiki.

The sight of the Leningrad fires was chilling even to an insensitive observer like Vsevolod Kochetov. It terrified him to see a fire burn in a big building and return a day or two later to find it still burning, slowly eating away apartment after apartment, often with no one making any effort to extinguish it. The pipes were frozen, there was no fuel for the fire trucks, and most of the fire fighters were too sick or too weak to answer a call even if anyone had bothered to put one in. By December only 7 percent of the fire engines were still operative. In January in a typical fire command only eight of eighty fire fighters were able to report for duty.

One night Aleksandr Chakovsky was walking back to the Astoria Hotel from Smolny. A great fire was burning in the heart of the city, the sky was ablaze and rosy shadows played on the snow. As he approached, he found a large stone apartment house afire. There were no firemen about. But several women had formed a chain and were handing possessions out of the house— a baby in a perambulator, a samovar, a kerosene stove, a couch on which a figure lay wrapped in a blanket, possibly the mother of the baby.

Fedor Grachev, a doctor in chargé of a large hospital on Vasilevsky Island, was walking through Theater Square, across from the Mariinsky Theater, one evening when he saw the glow of a huge fire on Decembrists Street. He turned into the street, soot falling in his face. The flames had attacked the three upper stories of a tall building at the corner of Decembrists Street and Maklin Prospekt, a building decorated with figures and scenes from Russian fairy tales. “The House of Fairy Tales” was what the Leningraders called it.

Tongues of fire licked out of the windows, casting a lurid light over the scene, and underfoot there was a carpet of broken glass. The heat of the fire was melting snow and ice, and this had attracted a crowd of people who patiently filled their pails and buckets with the precious water. No one made any attempt to put out the fire. In fact, no one paid any heed to it, except to take advantage of the rare source of easily obtainable water.

“Has it burned a long time?” Grachev asked a woman.

“Since morning,” she said.

Grachev stopped long enough to warm himself and then went on.

In an effort to prevent soldiers passing through Leningrad from deserting to the ranks of the food bandits, heavy security detachments were thrown around the suburban railroad stations. Even so, a few men managed to slip away from almost every detachment.

It was at this point that the Leningrad Military Council, the City Party Committee and the City Council began to receive letters proposing that Leningrad be declared an “open city"—that is, as the Soviet historians note, that the front be opened and the Germans be permitted to occupy the city.

There are few references to the “open city” proposal in Soviet historical works. And in each case they draw upon the same documents in the Leningrad State Archives.

The Soviet historians seem convinced that the “open city” proposals came from resident Nazi agents within Leningrad. The “open city” proposal was first advanced, they contend, at the time of the September battles. They quote a Nazi agent as saying that the German plan was to stir up a revolt within Leningrad, simultaneous with the final attack on the city. Later on, the plan was changed and the Germans decided to provoke an uprising within the city, carry out a pogrom against Jews and Party commissars, and then invite the Germans into the city to restore order.4

Another Nazi agent (or perhaps the same one) is quoted as having said that with the deepening of the blockade the Germans hoped to touch off a “hunger revolt” in which bread shops and food stores would be attacked and women would then march out to the front lines and demand that the troops give up the siege and let the Germans enter the city.

The “agent’s report” bears a striking resemblance to the events of February, 1917, when women in Petrograd, tired, angry and cold from standing day after day in the lengthening bread lines, began to demonstrate, touching off the revolution which brought down Czar Nicholas II.

The efforts of the German agents (if any) to produce in the leaden streets of Leningrad in January of 1942 a re-enactment of the events of 1917 did not succeed. But Andrei Zhdanov and the Leningrad leadership took the threat with grim seriousness despite their knowledge that Leningraders by this time hated the Germans with passion. (Desertions had long since ceased because the Russians had learned too much concerning Nazi treatment of prisoners and the occupied villages.)

The “open city” agitation obviously went a good deal further than letters to the Soviet authorities. It was a subject of conversation, if nothing more, among Soviet citizens. Special propaganda detachments were sent into many regions of the city to counteract this and other threatening or hostile moods of the populace.5

The city became quieter as its suffering grew. There were no Nazi bombing raids, less frequent shelling.

“The Hitlerites are confident,” Yelizaveta Sharypina wrote, “that hunger will break the resistance of the Leningraders. Why waste bombs and shells?”

There came to her mind a line from a poem by Nekrasov:

In the world there is a czar
And that czar is without mercy—
Hunger is what they call him.


1 The size of the Leningrad police force can only be guessed at. In the summer of 1941 the police street patrol force (exclusive of traffic police and men in stationhouses) numbered 1,200. (Skilyagin, Dela i Lyudi, p. 247.)

2 The date is given incorrectly as January 17 by Chakovsky (pp. 62-63). The text of Popkov’s remarks was published in Leningradskaya Pravda January 13.

3 Pavlov, op. cit., 2nd edition, p. 147. The figure is given as 36 trainloads by N. A. Manakov. (Voprosy Istorii, No. 5, May, 1967, p. 17.)

4 Kochetov heard of something like this in September.

5 There is some reason to believe that the “open city” proposals did not, as the Soviet historians insist, originate with German agents. The basic account presented by A. V. Karasev in his authoritative Leningradtsy v Gody Blokady is followed almost word for word in the official war history of Leningrad, a sign that security considerations are involved. Karasev cites a Leningrad propaganda work, published in 1942, to explain the “open city” agitation, another source of doubt. There is no indication from German sources that such an “open city” maneuver was undertaken in January, 1942. The Nazi line then was to starve Leningrad into oblivion and to reject any “open city” proposal that might emanate from the Soviet side. (Karasev, pp. 120, 204, 205; Leningrad v VOV, p. 214.) The flat assertion by D. V. Pavlov that not one of the thousands of letters received by the Party committee during the blockade expressed any despondency, bitterness or opinions differing from those of the majority of the city’s defenders is obviously inexact. (Pavlov, op. cit., 2nd edition, p. 142.) A letter written by a professor from his deathbed at the Astoria Hotel in late January, 1942, to Andrei Zhdanov clearly indicates that many Leningraders blamed him and the Party for the city’s plight. The professor went out of his way to exempt Zhdanov for responsibility for the Leningrad tragedy. The implication was clear that others, in contrast, did hold Zhdanov responsible. (P. L. Korzinkin, V Redaktsiyu Ne Vernulsya, Moscow, 1964, p. 264.)

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