All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945. Max Hastings

signing himself ‘The Rebel’ printed a leaflet that was found in the streets: ‘Citizens, down with the regime that lets us die of starvation! We are being robbed by scoundrels who deceive us, who stockpile food and leave us to go hungry. Let us go to the district authorities and demand more bread. Down with our leaders!’ The NKVD devoted immense effort to identifying ‘The Rebel’, and in December 1942 extracted a confession from a fifty-year-old factory worker named Sergei Luzhkov, who was dispatched to his inevitable fate before a firing squad.

      At the end of 1941, the freezing of Lake Ladoga opened a more resilient link to the outside world: the legendary six-lane ice highway created by 30,000 civilian workers. Four thousand lorries were soon shuttling along this ‘Road of Life’, but few of the incoming supplies – initially seven hundred tons a day – reached ordinary citizens. On Stalin’s orders, a renewed attack was launched to break the German encirclement, which failed with the usual heavy losses. A radio operator on the Volkhov front east of the city, Nikolai Nikulin, wrote: ‘I learned what war was really like. One quiet night I was sitting in my icy hole, unable to sleep because of the cold, scratching my lice-infested body, crying from weakness and misery…In an empty German dugout I found some potatoes, frozen hard as stones, made a fire and boiled them in my helmet. With food in my stomach, I gained spirit. I started to change after that night, developing defence mechanisms, an instinct for self-preservation, staying power. I learned how to find grub…Once a horse that was pulling a sledge near us was killed by a shell. Twenty minutes later, little was left of it save the mane and guts, because smart guys like me dismembered it. The driver hadn’t even recovered from the shock – he just sat on his sledge clutching the reins.’ Twenty Soviet divisions were destroyed in attempts to relieve Leningrad; their only significant success was recapture of the north-eastern junction at Tikhvin on 9 December, which made it possible to move supplies to a railhead within distant reach of the city.

      Extreme hunger persisted: on 13 January, after hours of queuing in the snow Elena Kochina had just collected her pitiful ration when a man behind her seized the bread, thrust it into his mouth and sought to gobble it down. In blind fury, the desperate mother turned and threw herself upon him: ‘He fell to the ground – I fell with him. Lying on his back, he tried to cram the whole piece of bread into his mouth at once. With one hand I grabbed him by the nose, turning it aside. With the other I tried to tear the roll out of his mouth. The man resisted, but more and more weakly. Finally, I succeeded in retrieving everything he hadn’t managed to swallow. People watched our struggle in silence.’

      Lidiya Okhapkina had her ration cards stolen, a misfortune that threatened her little family with imminent death, so narrow was the margin of survival. That night, for the first time in her life the despairing woman fell on her knees and prayed to the deity whose existence Stalin’s regime denied: ‘Have mercy O God on my innocent children.’ Next morning came a knock on her door. She opened it to find a Red Army soldier she had never seen, bearing a parcel from her husband, fighting hundreds of miles away, containing a kilo of semolina, a kilo of rice and two packets of biscuits. These proved to represent the difference between life and death for her family. Others were less fortunate. In the first ten days of January, the NKVD reported forty-two cases of cannibalism: corpses were found with thighs and breasts hacked off. Worse, the weak became vulnerable to murder not for their meaningless property, but for their flesh. On 4 February a man visiting a militia office reported seeing twelve women arrested for cannibalism, which they did not deny. ‘One woman, utterly worn out and desperate, said that when her husband fainted through exhaustion and lack of food, she hacked off part of his leg to feed herself and her children.’ The prisoners sobbed, knowing that they faced execution.

      In February, by far the worst month of the siege, 20,000 people a day were reported to be dying; amid the weakened population, dysentery became a killer. There were queues at street taps for water, and fires burned unchecked for lack of means to put them out. The Musical Comedy Theatre closed, and supplies of coffins ran out. Many of those with energy to read turned to War and Peace, the only book that seemed capable of explaining their agony. Those who survived had not merely exceptional will, but also commitment to a routine: washing themselves, eating off plates, even continuing academic studies. The authorities considered transporting civilians to safety on trucks returning empty across Lake Ladoga. Some mothers and babies indeed travelled, and often died en route; but Stalin rejected a wholesale evacuation, for prestige reasons. Leningrad’s ordeal became a display of fortitude such as only a tyranny could have enforced, and probably only Russians could have endured.

      The British and Americans continued to fear Soviet defeat until the end of 1942: they were slow to comprehend the losses and miseries of the invaders. As 1941 drew to a close, two million German soldiers, their tunics lined with newspaper and straw to compensate for the clothing they lacked, were in straits almost as dire as those of Russia’s people. Hans-Jürgen Hartmann wrote from Kharkov: ‘I have often wondered what this Christmas might be like. I always cast out the war from my imaginary picture, or at least push it to the very edges. I conjured up special words for the occasion. Christmas, homeland, longing, joy and hope. Yet these words, always sincere and heartfelt, became increasingly strange and precious to me. They evoked something timeless, precious – and yet, in the conditions of the Eastern Front, seemed scarcely believable any more…How brutal this war is becoming. It is now a total war, a war against women, children and old people – and that is the greatest horror.’