Leningrad

samovar. . Fedor, our host, is the archetypal Russian muzhik. His wife is unbelievably dirty and seems to be the source of all the unpleasant smells in the place. It’s difficult to tell the children’s ages, so it’s hard to say whether the blonde girl with red cheeks, who reminds me of a little piglet with her round body and dirty feet, is their daughter or grand-daughter. A small runny-nosed boy called Kolya completes the family. .

We don’t talk a lot. We sit at the table or lie on the floor, smoking and drinking tea. From time to time Fedor comes out from behind the stove and picks cigarette butts out of the herring tin that serves as an ashtray. If there’s nothing in it he takes a piece of newspaper, comes to the table, clicks his heels together and smiles, holding out the empty paper. Willynilly I then have to reach into my tobacco and give him a few strands, whereupon he makes a deep bow and retires behind the stove again.

The poverty of these people surpasses all our previous conceptions of the peasants’ and workers’ paradise. Fedor hasn’t seen tea or sugar for years, and tobacco and paraffin are luxuries. Sitting in the embers of the fire is a pot filled with potatoes and some sort of unidentifiable broth, on which the family live from day to day. They drink hot water out of the samovar in old tin cans. When I gave little Kolya a roll of boiled sweets the old woman grabbed it from him and put one in each can, adding hot water.

Life now began to be frightening as well as uncomfortable. On the very evening of his arrival in Rakhmysha, Hockenjos was sent to deal with the first of what was to be a long series of Soviet guerrilla attacks:

Darkness falls at four, and in the gloomy light of the paraffin lamp the hours are long. So we all go to bed at eight — the Russians climb onto the stove, and we bed down on straw. . At ten o’clock someone knocks on the door and shouts ‘Alarm! A field-ambulance is on fire on the road to Glad. Shots have been fired. Bicycle unit, go and investigate immediately!’

Arriving at the scene, the unit found the ambulance burned out and its driver badly injured. ‘We can’t find any tracks through the forest. A long-distance patrol? Partisans? By two in the morning we are back lying on our straw.’ Over the next five days three more trucks ran over mines.

When not picking up casualties, the Radfahrzug’s job was to patrol the gaps between German-held villages along the straggling front line. On the evening of 7 December, Hockenjos and his men were ordered to pick up reinforcements from a neighbouring battalion. In the pitch-black darkness and forty- one degrees of frost at six o’clock the following morning, they discovered that their lorry, despite having been kept running most of the night, would not start. Instead they set off on foot, the frost scorching lungs and icing up eyelashes and nostrils. At nine the sun rose out of the woods in a red haze, lighting up tiny ice crystals that hung suspended in the motionless air. At ten they reached a command post, by which time two men had already been disabled by frostbite. ‘In five hours’, wrote Hockenjos,

it will be dark again. We creep out and dive once more into no-man’s-land — a long row of dark figures in a bright aspen wood, clumsy in the knee-deep snow and a frighteningly good target against the white. We have neither snow-capes nor snow-shoes.

For a good hour we stumble through the tall, silent, snow-filled forest. Here and there shells have made little clearings amongst the spruce and pines. A larger clearing opens up, with a half-ruined cabin. We think we see movement so I set up a machine gun at the edge of the trees and send a group over. They find two shaggy horses, who have been feeding off the cabin’s thatched roof. They gallop away, manes and tails flying.

Further on the woods thinned out and the snow reached the men’s hips. They crossed the tracks of what they guessed were wolf and elk. From the south came the sound of heavy fighting, and they pressed themselves against the trees when Russian fighters flew overhead. At seven in the evening, four hours after the sun had set, they came to a road, a neat stack of corpses and a line of huts — the village of Gorneshno. ‘Schnapps, tea, and army bread. . Twenty of my men have frostbite, mostly of the worst degree. The feet of some have turned black, and they crawl to their quarters on hands and knees.’ The next morning Hockenjos was told that during the night a field kitchen had driven over a mine, leaving only one survivor. ‘We wait for our truck but it doesn’t come. Instead a patrol comes

out of the forest with the bodies of the seven scouts we met yesterday. Their heads have been crushed and their noses and ears cut off.’ Hockenjos also heard the news, two days late, of Japan’s attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. ‘If that’s not a world war’, he wrote with uncharacteristic acerbity in his diary, ‘I don’t know what is. It seems that I might make captain after all.’

Hockenjos was in the rear of the second battle for Tikhvin, a town 175 kilometres to the south-east of Leningrad and the easternmost point of the German salient over the River Volkhov. It was important because of its location, on the railway line along which supplies were delivered for transport across Lake Ladoga to Leningrad. The Wehrmacht’s hold on Ladoga’s southern shore, established when it took Shlisselburg on 8 September, was tenacious but only thirty kilometres wide. Passing through Tikhvin, trains were able to unload at Volkhov, twenty kilometres from the small port of Novaya Ladoga, whence barges sailed, braving German air attack, to Osinovets, on the lake’s Soviet-held western shore. A small suburban railway line covered the final forty-five kilometres into Leningrad. Twenty days’ worth of rations had thus run the blockade during the autumn.

On 8 November — at the height of the Battle of Moscow — Tikhvin fell to the Germans, together with 20,000 troops, 96 tanks, 179 guns and an armoured train.2 Its loss cut Leningrad’s lifeline in two. The closest supply trains could now get to Novaya Ladoga was Zaborye, 170 kilometres to its east. Leningrad’s Military Council immediately ordered the construction, through almost virgin forest and using conscripted peasant labour, of a new 200-kilometre road, to be completed within a fortnight. The Council also ordered that front-line troops’ bread rations be cut for the first time, from 800 grams per day down to 600 grams. The allocation for rear units fell from 600 to 400 grams. Another three ration cuts — one more for the military, two for civilians — quickly followed. At the same time, ice brought navigation across Ladoga to a close, the last barges reaching Osinovets on 15 November. Until the new road was completed and the lake ice grew thick enough to carry trucks, no food could now reach Leningrad except by air. Though sixty-four planes, at Zhdanov’s angry insistence, were eventually assigned to the route, only a third or fewer were operational at any one time, and they daily delivered only forty to fifty tonnes, mostly blocks of pressed and frozen meat.3

Watched with desperate attention by hydrologists, the ice thickened agonisingly slowly. (To estimate its likely rate of spread, one man consulted medieval records kept by the monks of Valaam, who each winter recorded the date on which pilgrims were first able to reach their island monastery on foot.) Ten centimetres of ice, it was calculated, was needed for a horse and rider, eighteen centimetres for a horse pulling a sled, twenty for a loaded two-ton truck. A road from Osinovets to the village of Kobona, on the nearest stretch of Soviet-held ‘mainland’ lake shore, would need a minimum of twenty centimetres of ice along the whole of its thirty-kilometre length.

On 17 November, when the ice was only ten centimetres thick, the first scouts ventured on to the lake, wearing life belts and carrying long poles. The following day the wind began to blow from the north, the temperature dropped and work began on clearing the route of snow, marking it and building bridges over crevasses. By the 20th the ice was eighteen centimetres thick, and the first transports — 300 horse-drawn sledges — set off, followed two days later by the first trucks, widely spaced. On the return journey, though carrying only a few sacks of grain each, several went through the ice. To spread weight, the next convoy towed sleds. To no avail: by 1 December only about 800 tons of flour — less than two days’ requirements — had been delivered, and forty trucks had got stuck or broken down. The rough and narrow new overland road to Zaborye was even worse: the first convoy to set out along it, on 6 December, took fourteen days to make the round trip, and more than 350 trucks had to be towed or abandoned. Vasili Churkin, the artilleryman caught up in the chaotic flight from Volosovo back in August, was ordered to march across the ice on the windy, pitch-black night of 7 December. Slowed by frostbitten feet, he fell behind his unit and would have become completely lost if it had not been for red flashes from a lighthouse on the ‘mainland’ shore. He reached Kobona at 1 p.m. the next day, having passed ten flour- laden lorries with their back axles sunk through the ice, and a young soldier dying of exposure.4