About how the daughter of Peter the Great, Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, was feasting when the Russians fought in the Seven Years' War and entered Berlin for the first time. This time we will talk about the famine that raged in besieged Leningrad. At the same time, representatives of the authorities managed to absorb not only ordinary products in abundance, but also treat themselves to delicacies.

American look

“Imagine that you live in a city where there is no heat, and meanwhile it’s minus 20 outside the window. You can only warm up a little if you start breaking your furniture, tearing your books, or you can find the chips left from the next door, which had just been bombed. And you yourself at the same time live on a piece of bread a day. Bread made from sawdust, glue and something else little edible. And you don't have light. When the sun goes down, it gets quite dark. At the same time, the sun rises somewhere at 11, and already at one in the afternoon it begins to set. And it's cold everywhere. People cannot live at such a temperature, they have nothing to eat, there is no transport.

Cars stopped driving at the end of October 1941. Only trucks full of weapons move around the city. You can only get anywhere on foot. There is no water in the city. How could people live in such conditions? I dont know. All I know is that I couldn't. I can hardly name one of my friends who could do it, but the inhabitants of Leningrad could, ”said Harrison Salisbury, author of the book“ 900 Days of the Siege of Leningrad ”, on the air of one of the American television programs in 1982. He arrived in the city in January 1944, immediately after the lifting of the siege. At that time he worked as the Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times.

He wrote a book about life in military Leningrad in the 1960s. In it, the author describes in detail how a member of the Military Council of the Leningrad Front lived. “He rarely went beyond the Smolny. There was a kitchen and a dining room, but he almost always ate in his office. Food was brought to him on a tray, he hurriedly swallowed it, without being distracted from work (...). They [members of the nomenklatura] ate somewhat better than the rest of the population. Zhdanov and people from his entourage, like front-line commanders, received military rations: no more than 400 grams of bread, a bowl of meat or fish soup, and, if possible, a little porridge. They gave one or two pieces of sugar for tea, ”the journalist wrote. He explained that none of the top party leaders "fell a victim of dystrophy, but they were morally exhausted."

In addition to civilian positions, Andrei Zhdanov during the years of the blockade was a member of the Military Council of the North-Western Direction and the Military Council of the Leningrad Front.

However, a completely different picture emerges from the pages of the book of the writer Igor Atamanenko, the grandson of personal cardiologist Zhdanov: “While ordinary Leningraders received 128 grams of bread a day, Zhdanov and his comrades did not deny themselves anything during the blockade. Doctors knew this especially well, who sometimes had to save the highest party elite from the consequences of immoderate gluttony and libations. She said that on his table there were always delicacies and pickles in abundance. Grandmother herself saw how, during the blockade, fresh vegetables, live lambs, and live birds were brought to Smolny.

Plates with sandwiches and rations

Once, when the guards were dragging up a basket filled to the top with food, a live chicken fell out, but the men did not notice this. Then the cardiologist Atamanenko, together with his girlfriend, a radiologist, hid the bird in the medical office. The hen has started laying eggs. And the delighted woman began to bring them home to feed her little daughter. However, this did not last long. One of the patients stepped on a bird in the dark, the chicken was so frightened that it stopped laying eggs, “it had to be slaughtered with a scalpel and eaten.”

Many wrote that representatives of the Soviet government, despite the famine that prevailed in besieged Leningrad, arranged feasts. This information has repeatedly caused heated debate. So, the operator of the central communication center, located during the war in Smolny, wrote that he had not seen banquets. However, he recalls how high-ranking officials celebrated the holiday on November 7 all night long: “Plates with sandwiches were brought to their room past us. Nobody treated the soldiers, and we were not offended. But I don’t remember any excesses there. ”

During the blockade, the highest state and military leadership of Leningrad received much better rations than the majority of the urban population. Just like the soldiers, who in the trenches ate better than the townspeople, and the pilots and submariners fed better than the foot soldiers.

From the diaries of the instructor of the personnel department of the district committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Nikolai Ribkovsky, published in February 2016, it follows that, despite the current military situation, he did not experience problems with food. For breakfast, I ate pasta or noodles, porridge with butter and drank two glasses of tea with sugar. In the afternoon, I ate cabbage soup or soup for the first, meat for the second.

In March 1942, Ribkovsky described his meals in the hospital of the city party committee, which was located in one of the pavilions of the closed rest house of the party activists of the Leningrad organization: “Food here is like in peacetime in a good rest house. Meat every day: lamb, ham, chicken, goose, turkey, sausage. Or fish: bream, herring, smelt, and fried, and boiled, and aspic. Caviar, balyk, cheese, pies, cocoa, coffee, tea, three hundred grams of white and the same amount of black bread a day, thirty grams of butter and, in addition to all this, fifty grams of grape wine, good port wine for lunch and dinner ...

Yes. Such a rest, in the conditions of the front, a long blockade of the city, is possible only among the Bolsheviks, only under Soviet power ... What is even better? We eat, drink, walk, sleep, or just sit back and listen to the gramophone, exchanging jokes, having fun playing dominoes or playing cards. And in total, having paid 50 rubles for vouchers!

In addition, not a single document was found in the archives, which would speak of cases of starvation among officials. In December 1941, the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council ordered that the Lenglavrestoran give dinner to the secretaries of the district committees of the Communist Party, the chairmen of the executive committees of the district councils, as well as their deputies and secretaries, without requiring ration cards.

Rumors about how they ate in Smolny have long been mixed with real stories. But there are those who can be treated with confidence.

Products for the elite

A wide public outcry was caused by an interview with a resident of Leningrad, Nina Spirova, who worked through the entire blockade in the Eliseevsky grocery store. The woman spoke about who and how received food in the besieged city, when other residents were dying of hunger.

According to Spirova, at the age of 16, she got a job at the Eliseevsky secret special distribution center, where there were fruits, sausages, coffee and many other products that other Leningraders could not even dream of. In the documents of the Food Commission of the Military Front of the Lenfront, he was called "Gastronom", sometimes "Gastronom No. 1".

“We had a different life. Apples, pears, plums, grapes. Everything is fresh. And so - the whole war. Opposite me was the meat department. Several varieties of sausage, ham, sausages. Near the confectionery - sweets, chocolate. A little further away, at the other end of the hall - alcoholic products: wines, vodka, cognacs (...). People came calm, well-dressed, not exhausted by hunger. They showed some special books at the checkout, punched checks, politely thanked for the purchase. We also had a department of orders “for academicians and artists”, I also had to work a little there, ”the blockade woman said.

Several hundred people were served in the special store (great scientists, military men, prominent figures of culture and art, representatives of the party nomenclature, as well as members of their families), they visited it at a strictly allotted time so as not to create queues. Ordinary citizens did not even know about the existence of the special distributor.

In addition to Eliseevsky, there were special canteens and restaurants for a very narrow circle of people. “The city had a stock of food that existed before the war and was in special refrigerators: smoked meats, sausage, cheese, frozen meat, as well as chocolate, sugar, coffee, tea and other durable foodstuffs (...). There was a small farm, where there were both cows and pigs, where milk was produced, and hens laid eggs (...). In addition, products were delivered by air.

In the materials of the food commission there are reports - when, where and how much. Products were brought to a special NKVD base, which operated before the war, during the blockade, and after the war, ”said Lomagin in an interview.

The truth, which Nina Spirova told, was not liked by many. According to Lomagin, in the same Smolny, they actually ate well. However, otherwise the situation would have been even worse: "In this case, Leningrad would have been left without leadership at all, and then chaos would have ensued."

The blockade of Leningrad is a siege of one of the largest Russian cities that lasted more than two and a half years, which was conducted by the German Army Group North with the help of Finnish troops on the Eastern Front of World War II. The blockade began on September 8, 1941, when the last road to Leningrad was blocked by the Germans. Although on January 18, 1943, Soviet troops managed to open a narrow corridor of communication with the city by land, the blockade was finally lifted only on January 27, 1944, 872 days after it began. It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history, and perhaps the most costly in terms of casualties.

Prerequisites

The capture of Leningrad was one of the three strategic goals of the German operation "Barbarossa" - and the main one for the Army Group "North". Such importance was due to the political status of Leningrad as the former capital of Russia and the Russian Revolution, its military importance as the main base of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, the industrial power of the city, where there were many factories producing military equipment. By 1939, Leningrad produced 11% of all Soviet industrial output. It is said that Adolf Hitler was so confident in the capture of the city that, on his orders, invitations to the celebration of this event at the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad were already printed.

There are various assumptions about Germany's plans for Leningrad after its capture. The Soviet journalist Lev Bezymensky claimed that his city was supposed to be renamed Adolfsburg and turned into the capital of the new Ingermanland province of the Reich. Others claim that Hitler intended to completely destroy both Leningrad and its population. According to a directive sent to Army Group North on September 29, 1941, “after the defeat of Soviet Russia, there is no interest in the continued existence of this large urban center. [...] Following the encirclement of the city, requests for surrender negotiations should be rejected, since the problem of moving and feeding the population cannot and should not be decided by us. In this war for our existence, we cannot have an interest in preserving even a part of this very large urban population. It follows that Hitler's ultimate plan was to raze Leningrad to the ground and hand over the areas north of the Neva to the Finns.

872 days of Leningrad. In a hungry loop

Blockade preparation

Army Group North was moving towards Leningrad, its main objective (see the Baltic operation of 1941 and the Leningrad operation of 1941). Its commander, Field Marshal von Leeb, at first thought to take the city outright. But due to Hitler's withdrawal of the 4th Panzer Group (head of the General Staff Halder persuaded to transfer it to the south, to throw Fyodor von Bock to Moscow), von Leeb had to start a siege. He reached the shore of Lake Ladoga, trying to complete the encirclement of the city and connect with the Finnish army of Marshal Mannerheim waiting for him on the Svir River.

Finnish troops were located north of Leningrad, while the Germans approached the city from the south. Both of them had the goal of cutting off all communications to the defenders of the city, although Finland's participation in the blockade mainly consisted of re-capturing lands lost in the recent Soviet-Finnish war. The Germans hoped that hunger would be their main weapon.

Already on June 27, 1941, the Leningrad Soviet organized armed detachments from civilian militias. In the coming days, the entire population of Leningrad was informed of the danger. Over a million people were mobilized to build fortifications. Several lines of defense were created along the perimeter of the city, from the north and south, defended mainly by civilians. In the south, one of the fortified lines ran from the mouth of the Luga River to Chudov, Gatchina, Uritsk, Pulkovo, and then across the Neva River. Another line passed through Peterhof to Gatchina, Pulkovo, Kolpino and Koltushi. The line of defense against the Finns in the north (the Karelian fortified area) had been maintained in the northern suburbs of Leningrad since the 1930s and has now been renewed.

As R. Colli writes in his book The Siege of Leningrad:

... By order of June 27, 1941, all men from 16 to 50 years old and women from 16 to 45 years old were involved in the construction of fortifications, except for the sick, pregnant women and caring for babies. The mobilized had to work for seven days, followed by four days of "rest", during which they had to return to their usual workplace or continue their studies. In August, the age limits were extended to 55 for men and 50 for women. The duration of work shifts has also increased - seven days of work and one day of rest.

In reality, however, these norms were never observed. One 57-year-old woman wrote that for eighteen days in a row, twelve hours a day, she pounded the earth “hard as stone” ... Teenage girls with delicate hands, who came in summer sundresses and sandals, had to dig the earth and drag heavy concrete blocks , having only scrap ... The civilian population erecting fortifications often found itself in the bombing zone or they were shot at strafing flight by German fighters.

It was a titanic work, but some considered it in vain, confident that the Germans would easily overcome all these defensive lines ...

A total of 306 km of wooden barricades, 635 km of barbed wire, 700 km of anti-tank ditches, 5,000 earth and wooden and reinforced concrete bunkers and 25,000 km of open trenches were erected by the civilian population. Even the guns from the cruiser Aurora were transferred to the Pulkovo Heights, south of Leningrad.

G. Zhukov claims that in the first three months of the war, 10 voluntary militia divisions were formed in Leningrad, as well as 16 separate artillery and machine-gun battalions of the militia.

... [City Party Head] Zhdanov announced the creation of a "people's militia" in Leningrad ... Neither age nor health was an obstacle. By the end of August 1941, over 160,000 Leningraders, 32,000 of them women, signed up for the militia [voluntarily or under duress].

The militias were poorly trained, they were given old rifles and grenades, and were also taught how to make incendiary bombs, which later became known as the “Molotov cocktail”. The first division of the militia was formed on July 10 and already on July 14, almost without preparation, sent to the front to help the regular units of the Red Army. Almost all the militiamen were killed. Women and children were warned that if the Germans broke into the city, it would be necessary to throw stones at them and pour boiling water on their heads.

... Loudspeakers continuously informed about the successes of the Red Army, holding back the onslaught of the Nazis, but kept silent about the huge losses of poorly trained, poorly armed troops ...

On July 18, food distribution was introduced. People were given ration cards that expired in a month. In total, four categories of cards were installed, the highest category corresponded to the largest ration. It was possible to maintain the highest category only at the expense of hard work.

The 18th Army of the Wehrmacht accelerated the throw to Ostrov and Pskov, and the Soviet troops of the North-Western Front retreated to Leningrad. On July 10, 1941, Ostrov and Pskov were taken, and the 18th Army reached Narva and Kingisepp, from where it continued to move towards Leningrad from the line of the Luga River. The German 4th Panzer Group of General Göpner, attacking from East Prussia, by August 16, after a rapid advance, reached Novgorod and, having taken it, also rushed to Leningrad. Soon the Germans created a solid front from the Gulf of Finland to Lake Ladoga, expecting the Finnish army to meet them along the eastern shore of Ladoga.

On August 6, Hitler repeated his order: "Leningrad should be taken first, Donbass second, Moscow third." From August 1941 to January 1944, everything that happened in the military theater between the Arctic Ocean and Lake Ilmen related in one way or another to the operation near Leningrad. Arctic convoys carried American Lend-Lease and British supplies along the Northern Sea Route to the Murmansk railway station (although its railway connection to Leningrad was cut off by Finnish troops) and to several other places in Lapland.

Troops involved in the operation

Germany

Army Group North (Field Marshal von Leeb). It included:

18th Army (von Küchler): XXXXII Corps (2 infantry divisions) and XXVI Corps (3 infantry divisions).

16th Army (Busch): XXVIII Corps (von Wiktorin) (2 Infantry, 1 Panzer Division 1), I Corps (2 Infantry Divisions), X Corps (3 Infantry Divisions), II Corps (3 Infantry Divisions), (L Corps - from the 9th Army) (2 infantry divisions).

4th Panzer Group (Hoepner): XXXVIII Corps (von Chappius) (1st Infantry Division), XXXXI Motorized Corps (Reinhardt) (1 Infantry, 1 Motorized, 1 Panzer Division), LVI Motorized Corps (von Manstein) (1 infantry, 1 motorized, 1 tank, 1 tank-grenadier divisions).

Finland

Finnish Defense Forces HQ (Marshal Mannerheim). They included: I Corps (2 infantry divisions), II Corps (2 infantry divisions), IV Corps (3 infantry divisions).

Northern Front (Lieutenant General Popov). It included:

7th Army (2 rifle divisions, 1 militia division, 1 marine brigade, 3 motorized rifle and 1 tank regiment).

8th Army: X Rifle Corps (2 rifle divisions), XI Rifle Corps (3 rifle divisions), separate units (3 rifle divisions).

14th Army: XXXXII Rifle Corps (2 rifle divisions), separate units (2 rifle divisions, 1 fortified area, 1 motorized rifle regiment).

23rd Army: XIXth Rifle Corps (3 rifle divisions), separate units (2 rifle, 1 motorized division, 2 fortified areas, 1 rifle regiment).

Luga task force: XXXXI rifle corps (3 rifle divisions); separate units (1 tank brigade, 1 rifle regiment).

Kingisepp operational group: separate units (2 rifle, 1 tank division, 2 militia divisions, 1 fortified area).

Separate units (3 rifle divisions, 4 guard divisions of the militia, 3 fortified areas, 1 rifle brigade).

Of these, the 14th Army defended Murmansk, and the 7th Army defended the areas of Karelia near Lake Ladoga. Thus, they did not take part in the initial stages of the siege. The 8th Army was originally part of the Northwestern Front. Retreating from the Germans through the Baltic, she was transferred to the Northern Front on July 14, 1941.

On August 23, 1941, the Northern Front was divided into the Leningrad and Karelian fronts, since the front headquarters could no longer control all operations between Murmansk and Leningrad.

Encirclement of Leningrad

Finnish intelligence broke some of the Soviet military codes and was able to read a number of enemy messages. This was especially helpful to Hitler, who was constantly asking for intelligence information about Leningrad. Hitler's "Directive 21" designated the role of Finland in Operation Barbarossa as follows: "The mass of the Finnish army will be tasked, along with the advance of the northern wing of the German armies, to connect the maximum Russian forces with an attack from the west or from both sides of Lake Ladoga."

The last railway connection with Leningrad was cut off on August 30, 1941, when the Germans reached the Neva. On September 8, the Germans reached Lake Ladoga near Shlisselburg and interrupted the last land road to the besieged city, stopping only 11 km from the city limits. The Axis troops did not occupy only the land corridor between Lake Ladoga and Leningrad. Shelling on September 8, 1941 caused 178 fires in the city.

The line of greatest advance of the German and Finnish troops near Leningrad

On September 21, the German command considered options for the destruction of Leningrad. The idea to take the city was rejected with the indication: "we would then have to supply food to the inhabitants." The Germans decided to keep the city under siege and bombard it, leaving the population to famine. “Early next year we will enter the city (if the Finns do this first we will not mind), sending those who are still alive to inner Russia or into captivity, wipe Leningrad off the face of the earth, and transfer the area north of the Neva to the Finns ". On October 7, 1941, Hitler sent another directive, reminding that Army Group North should not accept surrender from Leningraders.

Participation of Finland in the blockade of Leningrad

In August 1941, the Finns approached 20 km to the northern suburbs of Leningrad, reaching the Finnish-Soviet border of 1939. Threatening the city from the north, they advanced along Karelia to the east of Lake Ladoga, creating a danger to the city from the east. Finnish troops crossed the border on the Karelian Isthmus that existed before the Winter War, "cutting off" the Soviet ledges on Beloostrov and Kiryasalo and straightening the front line. Soviet historiography claimed that the movement of the Finns stopped in September due to the resistance of the Karelian fortified area. However, already at the beginning of August 1941, the Finnish troops received an order to stop the offensive after reaching its goals, some of which lay beyond the pre-war border of 1939.

Over the next three years, the Finns contributed to the battle for Leningrad by holding their lines. Their command rejected German persuasions to launch air attacks on Leningrad. The Finns did not go south of the Svir River in Eastern Karelia (160 km northeast of Leningrad), which they reached on September 7, 1941. In the southeast, the Germans captured Tikhvin on November 8, 1941, but could not complete the final encirclement of Leningrad by throwing further north , to connect with the Finns on the Svir. On December 9, a counterattack by the Volkhov Front forced the Wehrmacht to retreat from its positions at Tikhvin to the line of the Volkhov River. Thanks to this, the line of communication with Leningrad along Lake Ladoga was preserved.

September 6, 1941 Chief of Operations of the Wehrmacht Headquarters Alfred Jodl visited Helsinki in order to convince Field Marshal Mannerheim to continue the offensive. Finnish President Ryti, meanwhile, told his parliament that the aim of the war was to regain the areas lost during the "Winter War" of 1939-1940 and gain even more territories in the east, which would allow the creation of a "Greater Finland". After the war, Ryti claimed: “On August 24, 1941, I visited the headquarters of Field Marshal Mannerheim. The Germans urged us to cross the old border and continue the attack on Leningrad. I said that the capture of Leningrad was not part of our plans and that we would not take part in it. Mannerheim and War Minister Walden agreed with me and rejected the German proposals. As a result, a paradoxical situation developed: the Germans could not approach Leningrad from the north...”.

Trying to whitewash himself in the eyes of the winners, Ryti, thus, assured that the Finns almost prevented the complete encirclement of the city by the Germans. In fact, the German and Finnish troops held the siege together until January 1944, but there was very little systematic shelling and bombing of Leningrad by the Finns. However, the proximity of the Finnish positions - 33-35 km from the center of Leningrad - and the threat of a possible attack from their side complicated the defense of the city. Until Mannerheim stopped (August 31, 1941) his offensive, the commander of the Soviet Northern Front, Popov, could not release the reserves that stood against the Finnish troops on the Karelian Isthmus in order to turn them on the Germans. Popov managed to redeploy two divisions to the German sector only on September 5, 1941.

The borders of the advance of the Finnish army in Karelia. Map. The gray line marks the Soviet-Finnish border in 1939.

Soon, Finnish troops cut off the ledges at Beloostrov and Kiryasalo, which threatened their positions on the seashore and south of the Vuoksa River. Lieutenant General Paavo Talvela and Colonel Järvinen, commander of the Finnish coastal brigade in charge of the Ladoga sector, proposed to the German headquarters to block the Soviet convoys on Lake Ladoga. The German command formed an "international" detachment of sailors under the Finnish command (this included the Italian XII Squadriglia MAS) and the naval unit Einsatzstab Fähre Ost under the German command. These water forces in the summer and autumn of 1942 interfered with communications with the besieged Leningraders along Ladoga. The appearance of ice forced the removal of these lightly armed units. Later they were never restored due to changes in the front line.

City defense

The command of the Leningrad Front, formed after the division of the Northern Front in two, was entrusted to Marshal Voroshilov. The front included the 23rd Army (in the north, between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga) and the 48th Army (in the west, between the Gulf of Finland and the Slutsk-Mga position). It also included the Leningrad fortified area, the Leningrad garrison, the forces of the Baltic Fleet and the operational groups Koporye, Yuzhnaya (at the Pulkovo Heights) and Slutsk-Kolpino.

... By order of Voroshilov, parts of the people's militia were sent to the front line just three days after the formation, untrained, without military uniforms and weapons. Due to the lack of weapons, Voroshilov ordered that the militia be armed with "hunting rifles, homemade grenades, sabers and daggers from Leningrad museums."

The shortage of uniforms was so acute that Voroshilov addressed the population with an appeal, and teenagers went from house to house, collecting donations in money or clothing ...

The shortsightedness of Voroshilov and Zhdanov had tragic consequences. They were repeatedly advised to disperse the main food supplies stored in the Badaev warehouses. These warehouses, located in the south of the city, spread over an area of ​​one and a half hectares. Wooden buildings closely adjoined each other, they stored almost all the city's food supplies. Despite the vulnerability of the old wooden buildings, neither Voroshilov nor Zhdanov heeded the advice. On September 8, incendiary bombs were dropped on the warehouses. 3,000 tons of flour burned, thousands of tons of grain turned to ash, meat was charred, butter melted, melted chocolate flowed into the cellars. “That night, molten burnt sugar flowed through the streets,” said one of the eyewitnesses. Thick smoke was visible for many kilometers, and with it the hopes of the city disappeared.

(R. Colli. "Siege of Leningrad".)

By September 8, German troops had almost completely surrounded the city. Dissatisfied with Voroshilov's inability, Stalin removed him and temporarily replaced G. Zhukov. Zhukov only managed to prevent the capture of Leningrad by the Germans, but they were not driven back from the city and laid siege to it for "900 days and nights." As A.I. Solzhenitsyn writes in the story "On the Edge":

Voroshilov failed the Finnish war, was removed for a while, but already during Hitler’s attack he received the entire North-West, he immediately failed both him and Leningrad - and removed, but again - a prosperous marshal and in the closest trusted environment, like two Seeds - Tymoshenko and the hopeless Budyonny, who failed both the South-West and the Reserve Front, and all of them were still members of the Headquarters, where Stalin had not yet included a single Vasilevsky, nor Vatutin, - and of course they all remained marshals. Zhukov - he did not give a marshal either for saving Leningrad, or for saving Moscow, or for the Stalingrad victory. And what then is the meaning of the title, if Zhukov turned affairs above all the marshals? Only after the lifting of the Leningrad blockade - suddenly gave.

Rupert Colley reports:

... Stalin was fed up with Voroshilov's incompetence. He sent to Leningrad to save the situation ... Georgy Zhukov ... Zhukov flew to Leningrad from Moscow under the cover of clouds, but as soon as the clouds cleared, two Messerschmites rushed in pursuit of his plane. Zhukov landed safely and was immediately taken to Smolny. First of all, Zhukov handed Voroshilov an envelope. It contained an order addressed to Voroshilov to immediately return to Moscow ...

On September 11, the German 4th Panzer Army was transferred from near Leningrad to the south in order to increase the pressure on Moscow. Zhukov, in desperation, nevertheless made several attempts to attack the German positions, but the Germans had already managed to build defensive structures and received reinforcements, so all attacks were repulsed. When Stalin called Zhukov on October 5 for the latest news, he proudly reported that the German offensive had stopped. Stalin recalled Zhukov back to Moscow to lead the defense of the capital. After Zhukov's departure, the command of the troops in the city was entrusted to Major General Ivan Fedyuninsky.

(R. Colli. "Siege of Leningrad".)

Bombing and shelling of Leningrad

... On September 4, the first shell fell on Leningrad, and two days later it was followed by the first bomb. The shelling of the city began ... The most striking example of devastating destruction was the destruction on September 8 of the Badaevsky warehouses and a dairy. The carefully camouflaged Smolny did not receive a single scratch during the entire blockade, despite the fact that all neighboring buildings suffered from hits ...

Leningraders had to be on duty on rooftops and stairwells, holding buckets of water and sand ready to put out incendiary bombs. Fires raged throughout the city, caused by incendiary bombs dropped by German aircraft. Street barricades, designed to block the way for German tanks and armored vehicles if they break into the city, only interfered with the passage of fire trucks and ambulances. It often happened that no one extinguished the burning building and it completely burned out, because the fire trucks did not have enough water to put out the fire, or there was no fuel to get to the place.

(R. Colli. "Siege of Leningrad".)

The air attack on September 19, 1941 was the worst air raid that Leningrad endured during the war. 1,000 people were killed by 276 German bombers hitting the city. Many of those killed were fighters treated for wounds in hospitals. During the six air raids of that day, five hospitals and the city's largest market were hit.

The intensity of artillery shelling in Leningrad increased in 1942 with the delivery of new equipment to the Germans. They intensified further in 1943, when several times larger shells and bombs were used than a year earlier. During the blockade, 5,723 civilians were killed and 20,507 were injured from German shelling and bombing. Aviation of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, for its part, made more than 100,000 sorties against the besiegers.

Evacuation of residents from besieged Leningrad

According to G. Zhukov, “before the war, Leningrad had a population of 3,103,000 people, and with the suburbs - 3,385,000. Of these, 1,743,129, including 414,148 children, were evacuated from June 29, 1941 to March 31, 1943. They were transported to the regions of the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan.”

By September 1941, the connection between Leningrad and the Volkhov Front (commander - K. Meretskov) was cut off. The defensive sectors were held by four armies: the 23rd Army in the north, the 42nd Army in the west, the 55th Army in the south and the 67th Army in the east. The 8th Army of the Volkhov Front and the Ladoga Flotilla were responsible for maintaining the route of communication with the city along Ladoga. Leningrad was defended from air attacks by the air defense forces of the Leningrad Military District and the naval aviation of the Baltic Fleet.

The evacuation of residents was led by Zhdanov, Voroshilov and A. Kuznetsov. Additional military operations were carried out in coordination with the forces of the Baltic Fleet under the overall command of Admiral V. Tributs. The Ladoga flotilla under the command of V. Baranovsky, S. Zemlyanichenko, P. Trainin and B. Khoroshikhin also played an important role in the evacuation of the civilian population.

... After the first few days, the city authorities decided that too many women were leaving the city, while their labor was needed here - and the children began to be sent alone. Mandatory evacuation was declared for all children under the age of fourteen. Many children arrived at the station or at the collection point, and then, due to confusion, waited for four days for dispatch. Food, carefully collected by caring mothers, was eaten in the very first hours. Of particular concern were rumors that German planes were shooting trains with evacuees. The authorities denied these rumors, calling them "hostile and provocative", but confirmation soon came. The worst tragedy occurred on August 18 at Lychkovo station. A German bomber dropped bombs on a train with evacuated children. The panic began. An eyewitness said that a scream arose and through the smoke he saw severed limbs and dying children ...

By the end of August, over 630,000 civilians had been evacuated from Leningrad. However, the population of the city did not decrease due to refugees fleeing the German offensive in the west. The authorities were going to continue the evacuation, sending 30,000 people a day from the city, however, when the city of Mga, located 50 kilometers from Leningrad, fell on August 30, the encirclement was almost completed. The evacuation has stopped. Due to the unknown number of refugees who were in the city, estimates differ, but approximately 3,500,000 [people] turned out to be in the blockade ring. There was only three weeks of food left.

(R. Colli. "Siege of Leningrad".)

Famine in besieged Leningrad

The two and a half years of the German siege of Leningrad caused the most destruction and the greatest loss of life in the history of modern cities. By order of Hitler, most of the royal palaces (Ekaterininsky, Peterhof, Ropsha, Strelna, Gatchina) and other historical sites located outside the city's defenses were looted and destroyed, many art collections were transported to Germany. A number of factories, schools, hospitals and other civilian structures were destroyed by air raids and shelling.

872 days of the siege caused severe famine in the Leningrad region due to the destruction of engineering structures, water, energy and food. It resulted in the death of up to 1,500,000 people, not counting those who died during the evacuation. Half a million victims of the siege are buried at the Piskarevsky Memorial Cemetery in Leningrad alone. Human losses in Leningrad on both sides exceeded those suffered in the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow and in atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The blockade of Leningrad was the deadliest siege in world history. Some historians consider it necessary to say that in its course genocide was carried out - "racially motivated famine" - an integral part of the German war of extermination against the population of the Soviet Union.

Diary of a Leningrad girl Tanya Savicheva with records of the death of all members of her family. Tanya herself also died of progressive dystrophy shortly after the blockade. Her diary of a girl was shown at the Nuremberg Trials

The civilians of the city especially suffered from hunger in the winter of 1941/42. From November 1941 to February 1942, only 125 grams of bread were distributed per person per day, which consisted of 50-60% of sawdust and other non-food impurities. For about two weeks at the beginning of January 1942, even this food was available only to workers and soldiers. Mortality peaked in January-February 1942 - 100 thousand people a month, mainly from starvation.

...After several months, there were almost no dogs, cats and birds in cages left in the city. Suddenly, one of the last sources of fat, castor oil, was in demand. His supplies soon ran out.

Bread baked from flour swept off the floor along with garbage, nicknamed the “blockade loaf”, turned out black as coal and had almost the same composition. The broth was nothing more than boiled water with a pinch of salt and, if you were lucky, a cabbage leaf. Money lost all value, like any non-food items and jewelry - it was impossible to buy a crust of bread with family silver. Even birds and rodents suffered without food, until they all disappeared: they either died of hunger or were eaten by desperate people ... People, while they still had strength, stood in long lines for food, sometimes for whole days in the piercing cold, and often returned home empty-handed, overwhelmed with despair - if they remained alive. The Germans, seeing long queues of Leningraders, dropped shells on the unfortunate inhabitants of the city. And yet people stood in lines: death from a shell was possible, while death from starvation was inevitable.

Everyone had to decide for themselves how to dispose of a tiny daily ration - eat it in one sitting ... or stretch it out for a whole day. Relatives and friends helped each other, but the next day they were desperately quarreling among themselves about who got how much. When all alternative sources of food ran out, people in desperation turned to inedibles - livestock feed, linseed oil and leather belts. Soon, belts, which at first people ate out of desperation, were already considered a luxury. Wood glue and paste containing animal fat were scraped off furniture and walls and boiled. People ate the earth collected in the vicinity of the Badaev warehouses for the sake of the particles of melted sugar contained in it.

The city ran out of water as water pipes froze and pumping stations were bombed. The taps dried up without water, the sewerage system stopped working... The inhabitants of the city punched holes in the frozen Neva and scooped up water in buckets. Without water, bakeries could not bake bread. In January 1942, when water shortages became particularly acute, 8,000 men with sufficient strength left to form a human chain, passing hundreds of pails of water from hand to hand, just to get the bakeries up and running again.

Numerous stories have been preserved about the unfortunate who stood in line for many hours for a piece of bread only to have it snatched from their hands and greedily devoured by a man who was distraught with hunger. The theft of bread cards became widespread; the desperate robbed people in broad daylight or ransacked the pockets of corpses and those who had been wounded during German shelling. Obtaining a duplicate turned into such a long and painful process that many died without waiting for the new ration card to end its wanderings in the jungle of the bureaucratic system ...

Hunger turned people into living skeletons. Ration sizes reached a minimum in November 1941. The ration of manual laborers was 700 calories per day, while the minimum norm is approximately 3000 calories. Employees were entitled to 473 calories per day, while the norm is 2000-2500 calories, and children received 423 calories per day - less than a quarter of what a newborn needs.

The limbs swelled, the bellies swelled, the skin tightened around the face, the eyes sunk, the gums bled, the teeth grew from malnutrition, the skin became covered with ulcers.

The fingers stiffened and refused to straighten. Children with shriveled faces looked like old people, and old people looked like the living dead... Children, left overnight orphans, wandered the streets like lifeless shadows in search of food... Any movement hurt. Even the process of chewing food became unbearable ...

By the end of September, kerosene for home stoves had run out. Coal and fuel oil were not enough to provide fuel for residential buildings. Electricity supply was carried out irregularly, for an hour or two a day ... The apartments became cold, frost appeared on the walls, the clock stopped working, because their hands froze. Winters in Leningrad are often severe, but the winter of 1941/42 was especially severe. Wooden fences were dismantled for firewood, wooden crosses were stolen from cemeteries. After the supply of firewood on the street had completely dried up, people began to burn furniture and books in stoves - today a chair leg, tomorrow a floorboard, the next day the first volume of Anna Karenina, and the whole family huddled around the only source of heat ... Soon desperate people found another use for books: torn pages were soaked in water and eaten.

The sight of a man carrying a body wrapped in a blanket, tablecloth or curtain to the cemetery on a sled became commonplace ... The dead were laid in rows, but the gravediggers could not dig graves: the ground was frozen through, and they, just as hungry, did not have enough strength for exhausting work . There were no coffins: all the wood was used as fuel.

The courtyards of the hospitals were “littered with mountains of corpses, blue, haggard, creepy” ... Finally, excavators began to dig deep ditches for the mass burial of the dead. Soon, these excavators were the only machines that could be seen on the streets of the city. There were no more cars, no trams, no buses, which were all requisitioned for the "Road of Life" ...

The corpses lay everywhere, and every day their number grew ... No one had the strength left to remove the corpses. The fatigue was so overwhelming that I wanted to stop, despite the cold, sit down and rest. But the crouched person could no longer rise without outside help and froze to death. At the first stage of the blockade, compassion and a desire to help were common, but as the weeks went on, food became scarce, the body and mind weakened, and people withdrew into themselves, as if walking in a dream ... Accustomed to the sight of death, becoming almost indifferent to him, people increasingly lost the ability to help others ...

And against the backdrop of all this despair, beyond the scope of human understanding, German shells and bombs continued to fall on the city.

(R. Colli. "Siege of Leningrad".)

Cannibalism during the blockade

The documents NKVD about cannibalism during the siege of Leningrad were not published until 2004. Most of the evidence of cannibalism that had surfaced up to that time was tried to be presented as untrustworthy anecdotes.

NKVD records report the first eating of human flesh on December 13, 1941. The report describes thirteen cases - from a mother who strangled an 18-month-old child to feed three others, older, to a plumber who killed his wife in order to feed her sons and nephews.

By December 1942, the NKVD had arrested 2,105 cannibals, dividing them into two categories: "corpse eaters" and "cannibals." The latter (those who killed and ate living people) were usually shot, and the former were imprisoned. There was no clause on cannibalism in the Soviet Criminal Code, so all sentences were passed under Article 59 (“a special case of banditry”).

There were significantly fewer cannibals than corpse-eaters; of the 300 people arrested in April 1942 for cannibalism, only 44 were murderers. 64% of the cannibals were women, 44% were unemployed, 90% illiterate, and only 2% had a previous criminal record. Cannibals often became women deprived of male support with young children, without a criminal record, which gave the courts a reason for some leniency.

Given the gigantic scale of the famine, the extent of cannibalism in besieged Leningrad can be considered relatively insignificant. No less common were murders over bread cards. In the first six months of 1942, 1,216 of them occurred in Leningrad. Many historians believe that the small number of cases of cannibalism "only emphasized that the majority of Leningraders retained their cultural norms in the most unimaginable circumstances."

Connection with besieged Leningrad

It was vital to establish a permanent supply route to Leningrad. It passed along the southern part of Lake Ladoga and the land corridor to the city west of Ladoga, which remained unoccupied by the Germans. Transportation through Lake Ladoga was carried out by water in the warm season and by cars on ice in winter. The security of the supply route was provided by the Ladoga Flotilla, the Leningrad Air Defense Corps and the road security troops. Food supplies were delivered to the village of Osinovets, from where they were taken 45 km to a small suburban railway to Leningrad. This route was also used to evacuate civilians from the besieged city.

In the chaos of the first war winter, an evacuation plan was not worked out. Until November 20, 1941, the ice road through Lake Ladoga did not work, Leningrad was completely isolated.

The path along Ladoga was called the "Road of Life". She was very dangerous. Cars often got stuck in the snow and fell through the ice, on which the Germans dropped bombs. Due to the large number of people who died in winter, this route was also called the "Road of Death". Nevertheless, he made it possible to bring ammunition and food, to take civilians and wounded soldiers from the city.

... The road was laid in terrible conditions - among snow storms, under the incessant barrage of German shells and bombs. When the construction was finally completed, the movement along it also turned out to be fraught with great risk. Trucks fell through huge cracks that suddenly appeared in the ice. To avoid such cracks, the trucks were driven with their headlights on, making them perfect targets for German aircraft... Trucks skidded, bumped into each other, engines froze at temperatures below 20 °C. Throughout its length, the Road of Life was littered with broken cars, abandoned right on the ice of the lake. During the first crossing alone, in early December, over 150 trucks were lost.

By the end of December 1941, 700 tons of food and fuel were delivered to Leningrad daily along the Road of Life. This was not enough, but the thin ice forced the cars to only be loaded halfway. By the end of January, the lake was frozen by almost a meter, which made it possible to increase the daily volume of supplies to 2,000 tons. And this was still not enough, but the Road of Life gave the people of Leningrad the most important thing - hope. Vera Inber in her diary on January 13, 1942 wrote about the Road of Life as follows: “... perhaps our salvation will begin from here.” Truck drivers, loaders, mechanics, orderlies worked around the clock. They only went to rest when they were already exhausted. By March, the city had received so much food that it was possible to create a small supply.

Plans to resume the evacuation of the civilian population were initially rejected by Stalin, who feared an unfavorable political response, but in the end he gave permission for the most defenseless to leave the city along the Road of Life. By April, 5,000 people were taken out of Leningrad every day ...

The evacuation process itself was a big shock. The thirty-kilometer journey across the ice of the lake took up to twelve hours in an unheated truck bed, covered only with a tarpaulin. There were so many crowds that people had to grab onto the sides, mothers often held their children in their arms. For these unfortunate evacuees, the Road of Life became the "road of death." One of the eyewitnesses tells how a mother, exhausted after several hours of driving in a back in a snowstorm, dropped her wrapped child. The driver could not stop the truck on the ice, and the child was left to die from the cold ... If the car broke down, as happened often, those who rode in it had to wait for several hours on the ice, in the cold, under the snow, under the bullets and bombs of German aircraft . Trucks traveled in columns, but they could not stop if one of them broke down or fell through the ice. One woman watched in horror as the car in front fell through the ice. She was carrying her two children.

The spring of 1942 brought a thaw that made it impossible to continue using the Ice Road of Life. Warming has brought about a new problem: disease. Piles of corpses and mountains of excrement, which had remained frozen until now, began to decompose with the advent of heat. Due to the lack of normal water supply and sewerage, dysentery, smallpox and typhus quickly spread in the city, affecting the already weakened people ...

It seemed that the spread of epidemics would finally wipe out the population of Leningrad, which had already become thinner without it, but in March 1942 people gathered and jointly began a grandiose operation to clear the city. Weakened by malnutrition, Leningraders made inhuman efforts ... Since they had to use tools hastily made from improvised materials, the work progressed very slowly, however ... the cleaning work of the city, which ended in victory, marked the beginning of a collective spiritual awakening.

The coming spring brought a new source of food - pine needles and oak bark. These plant components provided people with the vitamins they needed, protecting them from scurvy and epidemics. By mid-April, the ice on Lake Ladoga had become too thin to withstand the Road of Life, but the rations were still significantly better than they were on the darkest days of December and January, not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively: the bread now tasted like real bread. To everyone's joy, the first grass appeared and vegetable gardens were planted everywhere ...

On April 15, 1942… the power generators, which had been inactive for so long, were repaired and, as a result, the tram lines began to function again.

One nurse describes how the sick and wounded, who were dying, crawled up to the windows of the hospital to see with their own eyes the trams passing by, which had not run for so long ... People began to trust each other again, they washed, changed clothes, women began to use cosmetics, again theaters and museums opened.

(R. Colli. "Siege of Leningrad".)

Death near Leningrad of the Second Shock Army

In the winter of 1941-1942, after the Nazis were repulsed from near Moscow, Stalin gave the order to go on the offensive along the entire front. About this broad but failed offensive (which included the famous, disastrous for Zhukov Rzhev meat grinder) was little reported in former Soviet textbooks. During it, an attempt was made to break the blockade of Leningrad. The hastily formed Second Shock Army was thrown to the city. The Nazis cut it off. In March 1942, the deputy commander of the Volkhov Front (Meretskova), a well-known fighter against communism, General Andrey Vlasov. A. I. Solzhenitsyn reports in The Gulag Archipelago:

... The last winter paths were still held, but Stalin forbade the retreat, on the contrary, he drove the dangerously deepened army to advance further - along the swampy swampy terrain, without food, without weapons, without air help. After a two-month starvation and exhaustion of the army (soldiers from there later told me in the Butyrka cells that they cut hooves, cooked shavings and ate from dead rotting horses), the German concentric offensive began on May 14, 1942 against the encircled army (and, of course, only German aircraft were in the air ). And only then, in mockery, was Stalin's permission received to return beyond the Volkhov. And there were those hopeless attempts to break through! until the beginning of July.

The Second Shock Army perished almost entirely. Vlasov, who was captured, ended up in Vinnitsa in a special camp for senior captured officers, which was formed by Count Stauffenberg, the future conspirator against Hitler. There, from the Soviet commanders, who deservedly hated Stalin, with the help of the German military circles opposed to the Fuhrer, began to form Russian Liberation Army.

Performance in blockaded Leningrad of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony

... However, the event that was destined to make the greatest contribution to the spiritual revival of Leningrad was yet to come. This event proved to the whole country and the whole world that Leningraders survived the most terrible times and their beloved city will live on. This miracle was created by a native Leningrader who loved his city and was a great composer.

On September 17, 1942, Dmitri Shostakovich, speaking on the radio, said: "An hour ago I finished the score of the second part of my new large symphonic work." This work was the Seventh Symphony, later called the Leningrad Symphony.

Evacuated to Kuibyshev (now Samara)... Shostakovich continued to work hard on the symphony... The premiere of this symphony, dedicated to "our struggle against fascism, our coming victory and my native Leningrad", took place in Kuibyshev on March 5, 1942...

... The most prominent conductors began to argue for the right to perform this work. First it was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sir Henry Wood, and on July 19 it sounded in New York, conductor was Arthur Toscanini ...

Then it was decided to perform the Seventh Symphony in Leningrad itself. According to Zhdanov, this was supposed to raise the morale of the city ... The main orchestra of Leningrad, the Leningrad Philharmonic, was evacuated, but the orchestra of the Leningrad Radio Committee remained in the city. Its conductor, forty-two-year-old Carl Eliasberg, was assigned to assemble the musicians. But out of a hundred orchestra players in the city, only fourteen people remained, the rest were drafted into the army, killed or starved to death ... A call was distributed throughout the troops: all those who knew how to play any musical instrument had to report to their superiors ... Knowing how weakened musicians who gathered in March 1942 for the first rehearsal, Eliasberg understood what a difficult task was before him. “Dear friends,” he said, “we are weak, but we must force ourselves to start working.” And this work was difficult: despite the additional rations, many musicians, primarily wind players, lost consciousness from the strain required by playing their instruments ... Only once during all the rehearsals did the orchestra have the strength to perform the entire symphony in its entirety - three days before public speaking.

The concert was scheduled for August 9, 1942 - a few months ago, the Nazis had chosen this date for a magnificent celebration in the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad of the expected capture of the city. Invitations were even printed, and remained unsent.

The Philharmonic Concert Hall was filled to capacity. People came in the best clothes… The musicians, despite the warm August weather, were wearing coats and gloves with cut off fingers – the starving body was constantly experiencing cold. All over the city, people gathered in the streets around loudspeakers. Lieutenant General Leonid Govorov, who had led the defense of Leningrad since April 1942, ordered a barrage of artillery shells to rain down on German positions a few hours before the start of the concert in order to ensure silence, at least for the duration of the symphony. The loudspeakers turned on at full power were directed towards the Germans - the city wanted the enemy to listen too.

“The very performance of the Seventh Symphony in besieged Leningrad,” the announcer announced, “is evidence of the indestructible patriotic spirit of the Leningraders, their steadfastness, their faith in victory. Listen, comrades! And the city listened. The Germans approached him, listening. Listened to the whole world...

Many years after the war, Eliasberg met with German soldiers who were sitting in the trenches on the outskirts of the city. They told the conductor that when they heard the music, they cried:

Then, on August 9, 1942, we realized that we would lose the war. We felt your strength, able to overcome hunger, fear and even death. "Who are we shooting at? we asked ourselves. “We will never be able to take Leningrad, because its inhabitants are so selfless.”

(R. Colli. "Siege of Leningrad".)

The offensive at Sinyavino

A few days later, the Soviet offensive began at Sinyavino. It was an attempt to break the blockade of the city by early autumn. The Volkhov and Leningrad fronts were tasked with uniting. At the same time, the Germans, having pulled up the troops liberated after capture of Sevastopol, were preparing for an offensive (Operation Northern Light) with the aim of capturing Leningrad. Neither side was aware of the other's plans until fighting began.

The offensive at Sinyavino was ahead of the "Northern Light" by several weeks. It was undertaken on August 27, 1942 (the Leningrad Front opened small attacks on the 19th). The successful start of the operation forced the Germans to redirect the troops intended for the "Northern Light" to counterattack. In this counteroffensive of theirs, for the first time (and with a rather weak result) tanks "Tiger". Parts of the 2nd shock army were surrounded and destroyed, and the Soviet offensive stopped. However, the German troops also had to abandon the attack on Leningrad.

Operation Spark

On the morning of January 12, 1943, Soviet troops launched Operation Iskra, a powerful offensive on the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts. After stubborn fighting, units of the Red Army overcame the German fortifications south of Lake Ladoga. On January 18, 1943, the 372nd Rifle Division of the Volkhov Front met with the troops of the 123rd Rifle Brigade of the Leningrad Front, opening a land corridor of 10-12 km, which gave some relief to the besieged population of Leningrad.

... January 12, 1943 ... Soviet troops under the command of Govorov launched Operation Iskra. A two-hour artillery barrage fell upon the German positions, after which masses of infantry, covered from the air by aircraft, moved across the ice of the frozen Neva. They were followed by tanks crossing the river on special wooden decks. Three days later, the second wave of the offensive crossed the frozen Lake Ladoga from the east, hitting the Germans in Shlisselburg ... The next day, the Red Army liberated Shlisselburg, and on January 18 at 23.00 a message was broadcast on the radio: "The blockade of Leningrad has been broken!" That evening there was a general feast in the city.

Yes, the blockade was broken, but Leningrad still remained under siege. Under continuous enemy fire, the Russians built a 35-kilometer-long railway line to bring food to the city. The first train, eluding the German bombers, arrived in Leningrad on February 6, 1943. It brought flour, meat, cigarettes and vodka.

A second rail line, completed in May, has allowed even more food to be delivered while simultaneously evacuating civilians. By September, the supply by rail became so efficient that it was no longer necessary to use the route through Lake Ladoga ... Rations increased significantly ... The Germans continued artillery shelling of Leningrad, causing significant losses. But the city was returning to life, and food and fuel were, if not in abundance, then enough ... The city was still under siege, but no longer shuddered in its death throes.

(R. Colli. "Siege of Leningrad".)

Lifting the blockade of Leningrad

The blockade continued until January 27, 1944, when the Soviet "Leningrad-Novgorod strategic offensive" of the Leningrad, Volkhov, 1st and 2nd Baltic fronts expelled German troops from the southern outskirts of the city. The Baltic Fleet provided 30% of the aviation power for the final blow against the enemy.

... On January 15, 1944, the most powerful shelling of the war began - half a million shells fell on German positions within an hour and a half, after which the Soviet troops launched a decisive offensive. One by one, the cities that had been in the hands of the Germans for so long were liberated, and the German troops, under the onslaught of twice the number of units of the Red Army, irresistibly rolled back. It took twelve days, and at eight o'clock in the evening on January 27, 1944, Govorov was finally able to report: "The city of Leningrad has been completely liberated!"

That evening, shells were exploding in the night sky over the city - but it was not German artillery, but a festive salute from 324 guns!

It lasted 872 days, or 29 months, and finally this moment came - the blockade of Leningrad ended. It took another five weeks to completely drive the Germans out of the Leningrad region ...

In the autumn of 1944, Leningraders silently looked at the columns of German prisoners of war who entered the city in order to restore what they themselves had destroyed. Looking at them, the Leningraders felt neither joy, nor anger, nor a thirst for revenge: it was a process of purification, they just needed to look into the eyes of those who had caused them unbearable suffering for so long.

(R. Colli. "Siege of Leningrad".)

In the summer of 1944, Finnish troops were pushed back behind the Vyborg Bay and the Vuoksa River.

Museum of Defense and Siege of Leningrad

Even during the blockade itself, military artifacts were collected and shown to the public by the city authorities - like a German plane that was shot down and fell to the ground in the Tauride Garden. Such objects were assembled in a specially designated building (in the Salt Town). The exhibition soon turned into a full-scale Museum of the Defense of Leningrad (now the State Memorial Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stalin exterminated many Leningrad leaders during the so-called Leningrad case. It was like that before the war, after assassination in 1934 of Sergei Kirov, and now another generation of local state and party functionaries has been destroyed for allegedly publicly overestimating the importance of the city as an independent fighting unit and their own role in defeating the enemy. Their offspring, the Leningrad Defense Museum, was destroyed, and many valuable exhibits were destroyed.

The museum was revived in the late 1980s with the then wave of "glasnost", when new shocking facts were published that showed the heroism of the city during the war. The exhibition opened in its former building, but has not yet restored its original size and area. Most of its former premises had already managed to pass to various military and government institutions. Plans for a new state-of-the-art museum building have been put on hold due to the financial crisis, but the current Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu promised to expand the museum.

Green belt of Glory and monuments in memory of the blockade

The commemoration of the siege received a second wind in the 1960s. Leningrad artists dedicated their works to the Victory and the memory of the war, which they themselves witnessed. The leading local poet and participant in the war, Mikhail Dudin, proposed erecting a ring of monuments on the battlefields of the most difficult period of the blockade and linking them with green spaces around the entire city. This was the beginning of the "Green Belt of Glory".

On October 29, 1966, on the 40th km of the Road of Life, on the shore of Lake Ladoga, near the village of Kokorevo, the Broken Ring monument was erected. Designed by Konstantin Simun, it was dedicated both to those who escaped through the frozen Ladoga and those who died during the blockade.

On May 9, 1975, a monument to the heroic defenders of the city was erected on Leningrad's Victory Square. This monument is a huge bronze ring with a gap, which indicates the place where the Soviet troops eventually broke through the German encirclement. In the center, a Russian mother cradles her dying soldier son. The inscription is inscribed on the monument: "900 days and 900 nights." The exhibition below the monument contains visual evidence of this period.

Today Russia is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Leningrad from the fascist blockade. More terrible than the bombing and shelling at that time was the famine, which mowed down thousands of people. You can read all the horror of those terrible days under the cut.

In front of me was a boy, maybe nine years old. He was covered with some kind of handkerchief, then he was covered with a wadded blanket, the boy stood frozen. Cold. Some of the people left, some were replaced by others, but the boy did not leave. I ask this boy: “Why don’t you go warm up?” And he: “It’s cold at home anyway.” I say: “What do you live alone?” - “No, with your mother.” - “So, mom can't go?” - “No, she can't. She is dead." I say: “How dead?!” - “Mother died, it’s a pity for her. Now I figured it out. Now I only put her to bed for the day, and put her to the stove at night. She's still dead. And it’s cold from her.”

Blockade book Ales Adamovich, Daniil Granin

Blockade book by Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin. I bought it once in the best St. Petersburg second-hand bookstore on Liteiny. The book is not desktop, but always in sight. A modest gray cover with black letters keeps under itself a living, terrible, great document that has collected the memories of eyewitnesses who survived the siege of Leningrad, and the authors themselves, who became participants in those events. It is hard to read it, but I would like everyone to do it ...

From an interview with Danil Granin:

“- During the blockade, marauders were shot on the spot, but also, I know, cannibals were allowed to go to waste without trial or investigation. Is it possible to condemn these unfortunate people, distraught from hunger, who have lost their human appearance, whom the tongue does not dare to call people, and how frequent were the cases when, for lack of other food, they ate their own kind?

Hunger, I'll tell you, deprives the restraining barriers: morality disappears, moral prohibitions go away. Hunger is an incredible feeling that does not let go for a moment, but, to the surprise of me and Adamovich, while working on this book, we realized: Leningrad has not dehumanized, and this is a miracle! Yes, there was cannibalism...

- … eating children?

There were worse things too.

Hmm, what could be worse? Well, for example?

I don't even want to talk... (Pause). Imagine that one of your own children was fed to another, and there was something that we never wrote about. No one forbade anything, but ... We could not ...

Was there some amazing case of survival in the blockade that shook you to the core?

Yes, the mother fed her children with her blood, cutting her veins.

“... In each apartment, the dead lay. And we were not afraid of anything. Will you go earlier? After all, it’s unpleasant when the dead ... So our family died out, that’s how they lay. And when they put it in the barn!” (M.Ya. Babich)

“Dystrophics have no fear. At the Academy of Arts, on the descent to the Neva, they dumped corpses. I calmly climbed over this mountain of corpses ... It would seem that the weaker the person, the more scared he is, but no, the fear disappeared. What would happen to me if it were in peacetime - I would die of horror. And now, after all: there is no light on the stairs - I'm afraid. As soon as people ate, fear appeared ”(Nina Ilyinichna Laksha).

Pavel Filippovich Gubchevsky, researcher at the Hermitage:

- What did the halls look like?

— Empty frames! It was Orbeli's wise order: leave all the frames in place. Thanks to this, the Hermitage restored its exposition eighteen days after the return of the paintings from the evacuation! And during the war they hung like that, empty eye sockets-frames, through which I spent several excursions.

- Through empty frames?

- On empty frames.

The Unknown Walker is an example of blockade mass altruism.

He was naked in extreme days, in extreme circumstances, but his nature is all the more authentic.

How many of them were - unknown passers-by! They disappeared, returning life to a person; dragged away from the deadly edge, they disappeared without a trace, even their appearance did not have time to be imprinted in the dimmed consciousness. It seemed that to them, unknown passers-by, they had no obligations, no kindred feelings, they did not expect either fame or pay. Compassion? But all around was death, and they walked past the corpses indifferently, marveling at their callousness.

Most say to themselves: the death of the closest, dearest people did not reach the heart, some kind of protective system in the body worked, nothing was perceived, there was no strength to respond to grief.

A besieged apartment cannot be depicted in any museum, in any layout or panorama, just as frost, longing, hunger cannot be depicted ...

The blockade survivors themselves, remembering, note broken windows, furniture sawn into firewood - the most sharp, unusual. But at that time, only children and visitors who came from the front were really struck by the view of the apartment. As it was, for example, with Vladimir Yakovlevich Alexandrov:

“- You knock for a long, long time - nothing is heard. And you already have the complete impression that everyone died there. Then some shuffling begins, the door opens. In an apartment where the temperature is equal to the temperature of the environment, a creature wrapped up in god knows what appears. You hand him a bag of some crackers, biscuits or something else. And what struck? Lack of emotional outburst.

And even if the products?

Even products. After all, many starving people already had an atrophy of appetite.

Hospital doctor:

- I remember they brought twin boys ... So their parents sent them a small package: three cookies and three sweets. Sonechka and Serezhenka - that was the name of these children. The boy gave himself and her a cookie, then the cookies were divided in half.

There are crumbs left, he gives the crumbs to his sister. And the sister throws him the following phrase: “Seryozhenka, it’s hard for men to endure the war, you will eat these crumbs.” They were three years old.

Three years?!

They barely spoke, yes, three years, such crumbs! Moreover, the girl was then taken away, but the boy remained. I don’t know if they survived or not…”

During the blockade, the amplitude of human passions increased enormously - from the most painful falls to the highest manifestations of consciousness, love, and devotion.

“... Among the children with whom I left was the boy of our employee - Igor, a charming boy, handsome. His mother took care of him very tenderly, with terrible love. Even in the first evacuation, she said: “Maria Vasilievna, you also give your children goat's milk. I take goat milk to Igor. And my children were even placed in another barracks, and I tried not to give them anything, not a single gram in excess of what was supposed to be. And then this Igor lost his cards. And now, in the month of April, I somehow walk past the Eliseevsky store (here dystrophics have already begun to crawl out into the sun) and I see a boy sitting, a terrible, edematous skeleton. "Igor? What happened to you?" - I say. “Maria Vasilievna, my mother kicked me out. My mother told me that she would not give me another piece of bread.” - "How so? It can't be!" He was in critical condition. We barely climbed with him to my fifth floor, I barely dragged him. By this time, my children were already going to kindergarten and were still holding on. He was so terrible, so pathetic! And all the time he said: “I don’t blame my mother. She is doing the right thing. It's my fault, I lost my card." - “I, I say, I will arrange a school” (which was supposed to open). And my son whispers: "Mom, give him what I brought from kindergarten."

I fed him and went with him to Chekhov Street. We enter. The room is terribly dirty. This dystrophic, disheveled woman lies. Seeing her son, she immediately shouted: “Igor, I won’t give you a single piece of bread. Get out!” The room is stench, dirt, darkness. I say: “What are you doing?! After all, there are only some three or four days left - he will go to school, get better. - "Nothing! Here you are standing on your feet, but I am not standing. I won't give him anything! I’m lying down, I’m hungry…” What a transformation from a tender mother into such a beast! But Igor did not leave. He stayed with her, and then I found out that he died.

A few years later I met her. She was blooming, already healthy. She saw me, rushed to me, shouted: “What have I done!” I told her: “Well, now what to talk about it!” “No, I can't take it anymore. All thoughts are about him. After a while, she committed suicide."

The fate of the animals of besieged Leningrad is also part of the tragedy of the city. human tragedy. Otherwise, you cannot explain why not one or two, but almost every tenth blockade survivor remembers, tells about the death of an elephant in a zoo by a bomb.

Many, many people remember besieged Leningrad through this state: it is especially uncomfortable, terrifying for a person, and he is closer to death, disappearance because cats, dogs, even birds have disappeared! ..

“Down below us, in the apartment of the late president, four women are stubbornly fighting for their lives - his three daughters and granddaughter,” notes G.A. Knyazev. - Still alive and their cat, which they pulled out to rescue in every alarm.

The other day a friend, a student, came to see them. I saw a cat and begged to give it to him. He stuck straight: "Give it back, give it back." Barely got rid of him. And his eyes lit up. The poor women were even frightened. Now they are worried that he will sneak in and steal their cat.

O loving woman's heart! Destiny deprived the student Nehorosheva of natural motherhood, and she rushes about like with a child, with a cat, Loseva rushes with her dog. Here are two specimens of these rocks in my radius. All the rest have long since been eaten!”

Residents of besieged Leningrad with their pets

“The following incident occurred in one of the orphanages in the Kuibyshev region. On March 12, all the staff gathered in the boys' room to watch a fight between two children. As it turned out later, it was started by them on a "principled boyish question." And before that there were "fights", but only verbal and because of the bread.

The head of the house, comrade Vasilyeva says: “This is the most encouraging fact in the last six months. At first the children lay, then they began to argue, then they got out of bed, and now - an unprecedented thing - they are fighting. Previously, I would have been fired from work for such a case, but now we, the educators, stood looking at the fight and rejoiced. It means that our little nation has come to life.”

In the surgical department of the City Children's Hospital named after Dr. Rauchfus, New Year 1941/42

An interesting study of the unknown side of life in besieged Leningrad. They didn’t talk about it, they didn’t advertise it - but the survivors knew and remembered ....

There were markets in the besieged Leningrad, although the supply of products to them practically ceased. Spontaneous, free trade in the city not only did not disappear, but uncontrollably increased in scale, reacting to the colossal shortage of products with a fantastic rise in prices. However, the blockade market became the only addition to the meager diet, and often a source of survival. Almost two-thirds of the city's population sought salvation in the market, in the flea market, as well as in familiar and unfamiliar "merchants". What was the market like in the besieged city? The market itself is closed. Trade goes along Kuznechny Lane from Marat to Vladimirskaya Square and further along Bolshaya Moskovskaya. Human skeletons walk back and forth, wrapped in nothing, with assorted clothes hanging from them. They brought here everything they could, with one desire - to exchange for food. The market itself was closed, and people walked up and down Kuznechny Lane in front of the market building and looked over each other's shoulders. (In the photo - Blacksmith's market).

Most of the participants in the blockade market trade were ordinary citizens who sought to purchase some kind of food for money or exchange it for their own things. These were Leningraders who received dependent cards, the norms for issuing products for which they did not give a chance for life. However, there were not only dependents here, but also workers, soldiers, with high food standards, but nevertheless in dire need of additional food or seeking to exchange in a variety of, sometimes unthinkable combinations.

Those wishing to buy or exchange their belongings for food in the market were much more owners of coveted products. Therefore, speculators were important characters in market trading. They felt that they were the masters of the position in the market and not only. Leningraders were shocked. “Ordinary people suddenly discovered that they had little in common with the merchants who suddenly appeared at the Hay Market. Some characters straight from the pages of the works of Dostoevsky or Kuprin. Robbers, thieves, murderers, members of bandit gangs roamed the streets of Leningrad and seemed to acquire great power when night fell. Cannibals and their accomplices. Thick, slippery, with an inexorably steely look, prudent. The creepiest personalities of these days, men and women."

In behavior, organization of their "business" these people showed great caution. “The market usually sold bread, sometimes whole loaves. But the sellers took it out with care, held the loaf tightly and hid it under their coats. They were not afraid of the police, they were desperately afraid of thieves and hungry bandits who could at any moment take out a Finnish knife or simply hit them on the head, take away bread and run away.

In diaries and memoirs, blockade survivors often write about the social contrasts that shocked them on the streets of besieged Leningrad. “Yesterday Tatiana was brought a pound of millet for 250 rubles. Even I was amazed at the impudence of the speculators, but still took it, because the situation remains critical, - testifies on March 20, 1942, an employee of the Public Library, M. V. Mashkova. - ... Life is amazing, you might think that all this is a bad dream.

Another type of seller-buyer is a military man, who was highly desirable as a trading partner for most blockade survivors, especially for women, who made up the majority of the queues in stores and most of the visitors to the Leningrad markets. “On the streets,” war correspondent P.N. Luknitsky writes in his diary in November 1941, “more and more often women touch my shoulder:“ Comrade military man, do you need wine? And in short: “No!” - a timid excuse: “I thought about exchanging bread for bread, at least two hundred grams, three hundred ...” ”.

Among the participants in the blockade bargaining there were special, terrible characters. We are talking about the sellers of human meat. “In the Hay market, people walked through the crowd, as if in a dream. Pale as ghosts, thin as shadows... Only occasionally did a man or woman suddenly appear with a full, ruddy face, somehow loose and at the same time hard. The crowd trembled in disgust. They said they were cannibals."
The fact that in the markets of the city they offered to buy human flesh, the blockade survivors often recall, in particular, the jelly sold at the flea market on Svetlanovskaya Square. “On Sennaya Square (there was a market) they sold cutlets,” recalls E. K. Khudoba, a war invalid. The sellers said it was horse meat. But for a long time I had not seen not only horses, but also cats in the city. Birds have not flown over the city for a long time.
Blockade survivor I. A. Fisenko recalls how she remained hungry when her father poured out a pot of broth that had a specific smell and a sweetish taste, cooked from human meat received by her mother in exchange for an engagement ring.
True, during the entire blockade, only 8 arrested citizens said that they killed people in order to sell human meat. The accused S. told how he and his father repeatedly killed people sleeping with them, then butchered the corpses, salted the meat, boiled it and, under the guise of horse meat, exchanged for things, vodka, tobacco.

In a besieged city, “... you can get rich quickly by being a skinner,” testifies the worker A.F. Evdokimov. “And there have been a lot of skin makers lately, and handicraft is flourishing not only in the markets, but at every store.”21 “Having a bag of cereals or flour, you can become a wealthy person. And such a bastard has bred in abundance in a dying city.
“Many are leaving,” S. K. Ostrovskaya writes in her diary on February 20, 1942. - Evacuation is also a refuge for speculators: for export by car - 3000 rubles. from the head, by plane - 6000 r. Undertakers earn, jackals earn. Speculators and blattmeisters seem to me nothing but corpse flies. What an abomination!

“People walk like shadows, some are swollen from hunger, others are fat from stealing from other people’s stomachs,” a front-line soldier, secretary of the VLKSM committee of the plant named after A.I. Stalin B. A. Belov. “Some have eyes, skin and bones, and a few days of life, others have whole furnished apartments, and wardrobes full of clothes. To whom is war - to whom is profit. This saying is in vogue today. Some go to the market to buy two hundred grams of bread or exchange food for the last tights, others visit commission shops, from there they come out with porcelain vases, sets, with furs - they think they will live long. ... who dared to eat it. Some are frayed, worn out, dilapidated, both in dress and body, others are shiny with fat and flaunt silk rags.

“Today there was “Maritsa”. The theater was packed to capacity, writes teacher A. I. Vinokurov in his diary in March 1942. “The military, waitresses from canteens, grocery store saleswomen, etc. predominate among the visitors - people who are provided in these terrible days not only with a piece of bread, but with quite a lot.”
“I was on “Silva” in Aleksandrinka. It is strange to watch the artists sing and dance. Looking at the gold and velvet of the tiers, at the colorful scenery, you can forget about the war and have a good laugh. But the chorus girls under makeup have traces of dystrophy. In the hall there are many military men in creaking sword belts and curled girls of the Narpit type ”(July 23, 1942).
M. V. Mashkova evokes the same emotions in a significant part of the theatrical audience: “To escape from the captivity of hunger and forget about the stench of death, today we trudged with Vera Petrovna to Alexandrinka, where the Musical Comedy staged performances. ... The people visiting the theater are somehow unpleasant, suspicious. Lively pink girls, clickers, well-fed military men, somewhat reminiscent of the NEP. Against the backdrop of sallow, emaciated Leningrad faces, this audience makes a repulsive impression.

A sharply negative attitude was evoked among Leningraders by those who not only did not starve, but profited from this tragic situation. First of all, we are talking about those whom the blockade runners saw most often - about shop assistants, canteen workers, etc. they have bread and groceries,” A. G. Berman, a blockade survivor, writes in her diary on September 20, 1942. “This is done simply: “by mistake” they cut out more than it should be, and a hungry person discovers this only at home, when nothing can be proved to anyone.”

“With whomever you talk, you hear from everyone that the last piece of bread, and you won’t get it completely,” B. A. Belov writes in his diary on June 6, 1942. “They steal from children, from cripples, from the sick, from workers, from residents. Those who work in the canteen, in shops, or at the bakery - today are a kind of bourgeois. Some dishwasher lives better than an engineer. Not only is she full herself, she also buys clothes and things. Now the chef's cap has the same magical effect as the crown during tsarism.

The open dissatisfaction of Leningraders with the work and employees of shops, canteens, the extremely negative attitude of the townspeople towards speculation and speculators is evidenced by the documents of law enforcement agencies that monitored the mood of the population of the besieged city. According to the report of the NKVD Directorate for the Leningrad Region and Leningrad dated September 5, 1942, the number of statements expressing dissatisfaction with the work of canteens and shops increased among the population of the city. The townspeople said that trade and supply workers plunder food, speculate on it, and exchange it for valuables. In letters from Leningrad, the townspeople wrote: “We are supposed to have a good ration, but the fact is that a lot is stolen in the dining room”; “There are people who did not feel hunger and now they are mad with fat. Look at the saleswoman of any store, she has a gold watch on her hand. On another bracelet, gold rings. Every cook who works in the dining room now has gold”; “Those who work in canteens, shops, and bakeries live well, but we have to spend a lot of time to get a meager amount of food. And when you see the arrogance of the well-fed canteen staff, it becomes very difficult.” Over the past ten days, the NKVD Directorate states in a statement, 10,820 such messages have been registered, which is 1 message per 70 people of the population of Leningrad.

The speculators that the blockade survivors encountered in city markets and flea markets also visited the homes of Leningrad residents, causing even more disgust and hatred.
“Once a certain speculator appeared in our apartment - rosy-cheeked, with magnificent wide-set blue eyes,” recalls literary critic D. Moldavsky. - He took some mother's things and gave four glasses of flour, a pound of dry jelly and something else. I met him already descending the stairs. For some reason I remember his face. I well remember his well-groomed cheeks and bright eyes. This was probably the only person I wanted to kill. And I regret that I was too weak to do it…”

Attempts to stop theft, as a rule, were not successful, and truth-seekers were expelled from the system. The artist N. V. Lazareva, who worked in a children's hospital, recalls: “Milk appeared in the children's hospital - a very necessary product for babies. In the dispenser, through which the sister receives food for the sick, the weight of all dishes and products is indicated. Milk relied on a serving of 75 grams, but each time it was underfilled by 30 grams. I was outraged by this, and I have stated this more than once. Soon the barmaid told me: “Talk again and fly out!” And indeed, I flew into laborers, in the then labor army.

A Leningrader who came from the front to the besieged city recalls: “... I met on Malaya Sadovaya ... my desk neighbor Irina Sh. cheerful, lively, even elegant, and somehow not for her age - in a fur coat. I was so unspeakably delighted with her, so hoping to learn from her at least something about our guys, that at first I did not pay attention to how Irina stood out sharply against the background of the surrounding city. I, a visitor from the "mainland", fit into the blockade situation and even better.
- What are you doing yourself? I seized the moment and interrupted her chatter.
- Yes ... I work in a bakery ... - my interlocutor casually dropped ... ... a strange answer.
Calmly, not at all embarrassed, a young woman who had finished school two years before the start of the war told me that she worked in a bakery - and this also blatantly contradicted the fact that we were standing in the center of a tormented city that had barely begun to revive and recover from wounds. . However, for Irina the situation was clearly normal, but for me? Could this coat and this bakery be the norm for me, who had long forgotten about peaceful life and perceived my current stay in St. Petersburg as a dream while awake? In the thirties, young women with a secondary education did not work as saleswomen. We didn’t finish school with that potential then ... with the wrong charge ... "

E. Scriabina during the evacuation with her sick and hungry children, in addition to the usual inconvenience in such an extreme situation, felt "torments of a different order." The woman and her children were psychologically traumatized when, after boarding the carriage, the wife of the head of the hospital and her girls “got fried chicken, chocolate, condensed milk. At the sight of this abundance of long-unseen food, Yurik felt sick. My throat spasmed, but not from hunger. By lunchtime, this family showed “delicacy”: they curtained their corner, and we no longer saw how people ate chickens, pies and butter. It is difficult to remain calm from indignation, from resentment, but who can tell? We must be silent. However, we have become accustomed to this for many years.”

The realities of everyday blockade, coming into conflict with the traditional ideas of truth and justice, with political attitudes, prompted the Leningrader to ask painful moral questions: “Why does the rear foreman flaunts in a carpet coat and is shiny with fat, and gray, like his own overcoat, a Red Army soldier, on is the front man going to eat grass near his bunker? Why does a designer, a bright head, a creator of wonderful machines, stand in front of a stupid girl and humbly beg for a cake: “Rayechka, Rayechka”? And she herself, having cut out extra coupons for him by mistake, turns up her nose and says: “Here’s a nasty dystrophic!”

Most blockade survivors had an extremely negative attitude towards speculators who profited from hunger, the hopeless situation of fellow citizens. At the same time, the attitude of Leningraders towards semi-criminal and criminal blockade commerce was ambivalent. The controversy was generated by the role that speculators played in the fate of so many blockade survivors. Just as during the civil war, when thanks to the bagmen persecuted by the Soviet authorities, many Petrograd residents managed to survive the famine, so during the blockade, a significant part of the city’s residents not only expected to meet at the market, but sought to establish relations (if there were things to exchange) with those who had food.

Teacher K.V. Polzikova-Rubets considers it exceptional luck that in the most difficult time - in January 1942, a random person sold two and a half kilograms of frozen swede to her family, and the next day there was a new success - the purchase of a kilogram of horsemeat.
The joy of the head of the Department of Road Construction of the October Railway, I. I. Zhilinsky, who acquired bread with the help of an intermediary, is obvious and enormous: “Hurrah! M. I. brought 3 kilos of bread for a crepe de chine dress ”(February 10, 1942)

The "business" of the blockade speculators was based primarily on the theft of food from state sources. "Kommersants" profited from malnutrition, hunger, disease and even death of fellow citizens. This was nothing new. This has happened more than once in the history of Russia, especially during social cataclysms. The period of the Leningrad blockade was no exception. Most clearly, the desire to survive some and the desire to profit others manifested itself in the spontaneous markets of the besieged city. Therefore, the blockade for the first became an apocalypse, for the second - a time of enrichment.

Yes, and at the present time fellow citizens are cashing in on the misfortunes of their compatriots. Remember "sanctions". The price tag for many goods has jumped two or more times not because of the restrictions imposed by Western countries, but as a result of the greed of modern Russian hucksters who used sanctions to justify their greed, inflated prices to the point of impossibility...

@ Veselov A.P. // National history. 2002. № 3
Many memoirs, research and literary works have been written about the heroic and at the same time tragic events associated with the defense and blockade of Leningrad. But years go by, new memoirs of participants in the events, previously classified archival documents are published. They provide an opportunity to fill in the “blank spots” that existed until recently, to study more thoroughly the factors that allowed the besieged Leningraders to frustrate the enemy’s plans to take over the city with the help of hunger. The statements of Field Marshal Keitel dated September 10, 1941 testify to the calculations of the Nazi command: “ Leningrad must be quickly cut off and starved out. This is of great political, military and economic importance."1 .

During the war years, the leaders of the defense of Leningrad did not want to talk about the facts of mass famine, and prevented the appearance of information about it on the pages of the press. After the end of the war, writings about the Leningrad blockade dealt mainly with the tragic aspects of the problem, but paid little attention to the measures (with the exception of evacuation) that were taken by the government and the military leadership to overcome the famine. Recently published collections of documents extracted from the Leningrad archives contain valuable information that allows us to shed more light on this issue. 2 .

In the collection of documents "Leningrad under siege" 3 Of particular interest is the "Information note on the work of the city office of the All-Union Association" Tsentrzagotzerno "for the II half of 1941 - on the grain resources of Leningrad." This document gives a complete picture of the state of the city's grain resources on the eve of the war, at the beginning of the blockade and on January 1, 1942. It turns out that on July 1, 1941 the situation with grain reserves was extremely tense: there was flour and grain in the warehouses of Zagotzern and small factories 7 307 tons. This provided Leningrad with flour for 2, oats for 3 weeks, cereals for 2.5 months 4 . The military situation required the adoption of urgent measures to increase grain reserves. From the beginning of the war, the export of grain through the Leningrad port elevators was stopped. As of July 1, its balance increased the grain reserves of Leningrad by 40,625 tons. At the same time, measures were taken to return to the Leningrad port steamships with export grain bound for the ports of Germany and Finland. In total, since the beginning of the war, 13 steamships have been unloaded in Leningrad with 21,922 tons of grain and 1,327 tons of flour.

Measures were also taken to accelerate the movement of trains with grain to the city by rail. For operational monitoring of the movement of grain trains in the Yaroslavl and Kalinin regions, employees of the Leningrad City Executive Committee were sent as authorized employees. As a result, before the blockade was established, 62,000 tons of grain, flour and cereals were delivered to Leningrad by rail. This made it possible until November 1941 to ensure the uninterrupted operation of the baking industry.

The lack of information about the real state of affairs with food gave rise to myths during the years of the blockade that continue to live today. One of them concerns a fire at the Badaevsky warehouses, which allegedly caused a famine. This was told by the director of the Leningrad Museum of Bread M.I. Glazaminsky. In a fire on September 8, 1941, about 3 thousand tons of flour burned down. Assuming that it was rye flour, and taking into account the practiced baking rate, we can calculate the amount of baked bread - about 5 thousand tons. 8 days 5 .

The authors are also wrong, who see the cause of the famine in the fact that the city leadership did not disperse the available stocks of grain products in a timely manner. According to documents published today, by order of the executive committee of the Lensoviet, the dispersal was carried out by increasing the balances in the distribution network, at bakeries and exporting flour to specially designated warehouses, empty stores and other premises assigned to bakeries in different parts of the city. Base No. 7, located on the Moscow Highway, was completely liberated even before the enemy could begin shelling the area. In total, 5,205 tons of flour were taken out and 33 storage places were loaded, in addition to the warehouses of bakeries and trading organizations 6 .

With the establishment of the blockade, when the railway communication between the city and the country ceased, commodity resources decreased so much that they did not provide the population with the main types of food according to the established norms. In this regard, in September 1941, tough measures were taken to save food products, in particular, the norms for issuing bread to workers and engineering and technical workers were reduced from 800 in September to 250 in November 1941, employees - respectively from 600 to 125 g, dependents - from 400 to 125 g, children under 12 years old - from 400 to 125 tons 7 .

The same maximum decrease in the issuance rates in the indicated months occurred for cereals, meat, and confectionery. And since December, due to the lack of resources for fish, the norm of its issuance has not been announced for any of the population groups. In addition, in December 1941, the residents of the city did not receive enough sugar and confectionery compared to the norm. The threat of mass starvation grew. The increase in mortality in Leningrad due to a sharp reduction in food is reflected in the certificate of the UNKVD of the Leningrad Region. as of December 25, 1941 8 . If in the pre-war period up to 3,500 people died in the city on average every month, then in the last months of 1941 the death rate was: in October - 6,199 people, in November - 9,183, in 25 days of December - 39,073 people. For 5 days, from December 20 to 24, 656 people died on the streets of the city. Among those who died from December 1 to December 10, there were 6,686 men (71.1%), women - 2,755 (28.9%). In October-December 1941, especially high mortality was observed among infants and persons over 40 years of age.

The reasons for the sharp reduction in food supplies in the city in late 1941 - early 1942 are, along with the establishment of a blockade, the sudden capture by the Germans in early November of the Tikhvin railway junction, which excluded the supply of food to the eastern shore of Ladoga. Tikhvin was liberated only on December 9, 1941, and the Tikhvin-Volkhov railway was restored and opened for traffic only from January 2, 1942.

(On December 12, the head of the Osinovetsky port on the western bank of Ladoga, Captain Evgrafov, said: “ Due to ice formation, the Osinovetsky military port cannot carry out cargo operations until the opening of spring navigation.9 . The ice road was almost non-existent. Since November 14, only about three dozen transport aircraft have been used to deliver food, transferring small-sized food cargoes from the Khvoynoye station to Leningrad: oil, canned food, concentrates, crackers. November 16 A.A. Zhdanov was informed that the population and the front were provided with flour until November 26, pasta and sugar - 23 each, rye breadcrumbs - until December 13, 1941.

On the critical days of December, when food supplies dropped to the limit, two unexpected orders came from Moscow on the night of December 24-25. The first one read: by December 31, five motor transport battalions should be formed and sent to the disposal of the Supreme High Command. Two - from the 54th army, one - from the 23rd and two - " from the head of the front line"(i.e. from Ladoga) with a full gas station and with the best drivers.

The second order came from the head of the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet B.C. Molokov. Referring to the order of a member of the State Defense Committee V.M. Molotov, he reported that from December 27, the Douglas aircraft supplying Leningrad with food from the Khvoinoye airfield were transferred to Moscow and would not serve the Leningrad Front.

In mid-December, the secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks T.F. Shtykov was sent to the mainland to "knock out" food for the besieged city. In a letter to a member of the Military Council of the Leningrad Front N.V. Solovyov wrote:

« Nikolai Vasilyevich, I am sending you this note after returning from Yaroslavl. I must say, wonderful comrades there, not in words, but in deeds, who wanted to help Leningrad. We agreed on all issues related to the supply of Leningrad at the expense of the Yaroslavl region ... The Yaroslavl comrades prepared three echelons of meat for the Leningraders. But ... two were redirected to some other place and one to Moscow.

The writer Viktor Demidov, who reported these previously unknown facts, noted at a round table meeting of the “Inhabitants of besieged Leningrad” society:

« It seems to me that for several days, from December 27 to about January 4, catastrophically little food arrived in the city. And since bakeries have long been supplied "from the wheels", it seems that the vast majority of Leningraders did not receive anything these days. And wasn’t it during these tragic days that the remnants of the physiological defense against the deadly starvation disease were finally broken in a huge mass of them?10 .

Indeed, we heard from many blockade survivors that at the end of December - beginning of January there were days when no bread was delivered to the shops of the city.

Only after A.A. Zhdanov visited Moscow and was received by Stalin, the flow of food supplies to besieged Leningrad resumed. January 10, 1942 signed by A.I. Mikoyan "Order of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on assistance to Leningrad with food." In it, the relevant people's commissariats were obliged to ship to the besieged city in January 18,000 tons of flour and 10,000 tons of cereals (in excess of 48,000 tons of flour and 4,122 tons of cereals shipped as of January 5, 1942). Leningrad also received from different regions of the Union additionally, in excess of the previously established limits, meat, vegetable and animal oil, sugar, fish, concentrates and other products. 11 .

The supply of the city with food largely depended on the work of the October railway. In a conversation with a correspondent of Leningradskaya Pravda on January 13, 1942, P.S. Popkov noted:

« It must be admitted that the Oktyabrskaya road is not working well, it turned out to be unprepared to fulfill its sacred duty in ensuring the uninterrupted transportation of food supplies. Unfortunately, there were a lot of limp, forgetting about their responsibility among the railway workers, especially in the management of the road and in its branches.12 .

Often, trains with cargo for Leningrad were delayed for a long time on the way. According to the reports of the grain-producing enterprises of Leningrad for 1941, theft of goods was revealed. In each of the railway cars, there was much less flour than indicated in the accompanying documents. 13 .

In a difficult situation of lack of food resources, the food industry of Leningrad was looking for the possibility of creating food substitutes, organizing new enterprises to develop them. Substitutes were used in the bread, meat, dairy, confectionery, canning industries, as well as in public catering, as mentioned in the certificate of the Secretary of the City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks Ya.F. Kapustin in the name of A.A. Zhdanov.

In the baking industry, food cellulose as an admixture to bread was used in the USSR for the first time. The production of food pulp was organized at six enterprises. One of the indicators of the mobilization of internal resources in the baking industry was the increase in bread baking up to 71%. Due to the increase in baking, additional products of 2,230 tons were obtained. Guts, soy flour, technical albumin were used as components in the production of meat products (it was obtained from egg white, animal blood plasma, whey). As a result, an additional 1360 tons of meat products were produced, including 730 tons of jelly, 380 tons of table sausage, 170 tons of albumin sausage and 80 tons of vegetable-blood bread. The dairy industry processed 320 tons of soybeans and 25 tons of cotton cake, which gave an additional 2,617 tons of products, including: soy milk 1,360 tons, soy milk products (yogurt, cottage cheese, cheesecakes, etc.) - 942 tons.

In public catering, jelly made from vegetable milk, juices, glycerin and gelatin was widely used. In November, 380 tons of such products were sold. Waste after grinding oats was used to make oatmeal jelly, berry puree was obtained from cranberry waste. A group of scientists from the Forest Engineering Academy and the All-Russian Research Institute of the Sulphite-Alcohol Industry under the leadership of M.Ya. Kalyuzhny developed a technology for the production of nutritional yeast from wood. About 250 kg of yeast were obtained from 1 ton of dry wood. They were sent to the front, some were used in the city in kitchen factories. On November 23, 1941, the city executive committee decided to organize the production of yeast in all districts of the city. The production of vitamin C in the form of an infusion of pine needles was widely organized. Until mid-December, 2 million human doses of vitamin C were prepared and sold 14 . In addition, the food industry of the city mastered and produced food concentrates (cereals, soups), medical glucose, oxalic acid, tannin, carotene.

As already noted, the importation of the basic essential products in December 1941 - early 1942 was minimal. According to rough estimates, Doctor of Biological Sciences Yu.E. Moskalenko, while one resident of the city received no more than 1300 kcal per day. With this diet, a person could live for about a month. The period of maximum malnutrition lasted 3–4 months in the besieged city. The population of Leningrad during this time should have died completely. Why didn't this happen?

The first reason is biological and physiological. In peacetime, with malnutrition, the body's resistance drops, it is susceptible to infections and other diseases. This was not observed in besieged Leningrad. Due to the stressful state, despite malnutrition, the resistance of the human body has increased dramatically. The number of patients with diabetes, gastritis, gastric ulcer, cholecystitis has decreased to a minimum in the city. Even childhood diseases - measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria - have almost disappeared.

The widespread use of food substitutes has played a role in improving human survival. 15 . It is impossible not to take into account the small stocks of products that remained with some part of the population and the possibility of using the market, where even at that time everything was sold and bought.

In the second half of January 1942, in connection with the complete restoration of the Tikhvin-Voibokalo railway section and the improvement of the work of the Ladoga ice route, the delivery of food to Leningrad increased, and the norms for bread for all groups of the population were increased. Compared with January 1942, in February the norms increased by 100 for workers, engineers and employees and by 50 for dependents and children under 12 years old 16 . Since January, the previous supply norm for fats has been restored: workers and engineers - 800 g, employees - 400, dependents - 200 and children under 12 years old - 400. Since February, the same norms for cereals and pasta were also introduced: workers and engineers - 2 kg, employees - 1.5 kg, dependents - 1 kg. In the second half of February and early March, the established norms for all types of foodstuffs began to be fully merchandised.

By decision of the bureau of the city committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Leningrad City Executive Committee, medical nutrition was organized at increased rates in special hospitals created at factories and factories, as well as in 105 city canteens. The hospitals functioned from January 1 to May 1, 1942, and served 60,000 people. Since the end of April 1942, by the decision of the Leningrad City Executive Committee, the network of canteens for enhanced nutrition has been expanding. Instead of hospitals, 89 of them were created on the territory of factories, plants and institutions. 64 canteens were organized outside the enterprises. Food in these canteens was produced according to specially approved increased standards. From April 25 to July 1, 1942, 234 thousand people used them, of which 69% were workers, 18.5% were employees and 12.5% ​​were dependents. In the first half of 1942, hospitals, and then canteens for enhanced nutrition, played an invaluable role in the fight against hunger, restoring the strength and health of a significant number of patients, which saved thousands of Leningraders from death. This is evidenced by the numerous reviews of the blockade themselves and the data of polyclinics. 17 .

Before the war, 5600 specialist scientists worked in 146 Leningrad scientific institutions, and more than 85 thousand students studied in 62 universities and thousands of teachers worked 18 . With the establishment of a blockade and the threat of famine, the Leningrad leadership faced the problem of saving scientific and creative teams, which, however, was not always solved in a timely manner and not in full. On March 2, 1942, Deputy Chairman of the Committee for Higher Education, Academician N.G. Brusevich wrote to A.N. Kosygin:

« The evacuation of Leningrad universities is carried out on an insufficiently large scale. There is a fear that by the time the movement on the ice of Lake Ladoga stops (approximately March 20), a significant part of the students, the majority of the teaching staff will remain in Leningrad ... It is necessary to evacuate at least two thousand students, teachers and administrative staff of universities every day. First of all, complete the evacuation of the universities of the defense industry, transport, communications, medicine, as well as the Polytechnic Institute and the State University.”

Kosygin ordered: " Include universities in the evacuation plan from March 11, with the exception of medical institutes. Doctors were left for the needs of the front, as well as in case of epidemics in Leningrad.

The belated decision to evacuate universities exacerbated the tragedy. More than 100 professors and associate professors died of starvation and disease at Leningrad University. The Polytechnic Institute lost 46 doctors and candidates of sciences. Construction Institute - 38. Academic institutions buried 450 employees (33%) during the first blockade winter 19 . Some, very limited, measures were nevertheless taken to alleviate the plight of this part of the townspeople. In January 1942, a hospital for scientists and creative workers began to operate at the Astoria Hotel. In the dining room of the House of Scientists in the winter months, 200 to 300 people ate 20 . On December 26, 1941, the city executive committee instructed the Gastronom office to organize a one-time sale without food cards for home delivery to academicians and corresponding members of the USSR Academy of Sciences: animal butter - 0.5 kg, canned meat or fish - 2 boxes, eggs - 3 dozen, sugar 0.5 kg, cookies - 0.5 kg, chocolate - 0.3 kg, wheat flour - 3 kg and grape wine - 2 bottles 21 .

Higher education institutions opened their own hospitals, where scientists and other university workers could rest for 7–14 days and receive enhanced nutrition, which consisted of 20 g of coffee, 60 g of fat, 40 g of sugar or confectionery, 100 g of sugar. meat, 200 g of cereals, 0.5 eggs, 350 g of bread, 50 g of wine per day, and the products were issued with cutting coupons from food cards 22 .

With the onset of the winter of 1941-1942. and the increase in mortality from exhaustion in Leningrad every day began to increase the number of children who lost their parents. Often, adults - mothers, grandmothers - gave their meager ration of bread to babies in order to support their strength at the cost of their own lives. Party and Komsomol organizations of the city launched a great work to identify orphaned children and place them in orphanages. The besieged newspaper "Change" in the section "Komsomol Chronicle" reported in March 1942:

« The Smolninsky RK Komsomol allocated several brigades to identify street children in the area. Within 5 days, 160 Komsomol activists visited 4,000 apartments in households in the district, identified children who need to be placed in orphanages.23 .

Komsomol girls not only arranged for neglected children in orphanages, but also nursed them. Thus, the girls of orphanage No. 5 appealed through the press to all those working in orphanages with an appeal to raise healthy children, to replace their families. Komsomol members Gordeeva, Teterina, Trofer came to the 5th orphanage when there was nothing but empty, cold and dirty rooms. It was necessary to wash the room, heat it, bring beds, sew mattresses, pillows, linen. Time was running out. Komsomol educators, and there were 9 of them, worked 18 hours a day. In a short time the house was ready to receive little pupils 24 .

By decision of the city executive committee, from January 1942, new orphanages were opened one after another. For 5 months, 85 orphanages were organized in Leningrad, sheltering 30 thousand orphaned children 25 . The leadership of the city and the command of the Leningrad Front sought to provide orphanages with the necessary food. By a resolution of the Military Council of the Front of February 7, 1942, the following monthly norms for supplying orphanages per child were approved: meat - 1.5 kg, fats - 1 kg, eggs - 15 pieces, sugar - 1.5 kg, tea - 10 g, coffee - 30 g , cereals and pasta - 2.2 kg, wheat bread - 9 kg, wheat flour - 0.5 kg, dried fruits - 0.2 kg, potato flour -0.15 kg 26 .

A.N. Kosygin in January - July 1942 was engaged in organizing the supply of the besieged city and the evacuation of its population. In connection with the mass mortality of students of vocational schools, he personally checked the situation with food in one of them. A letter from A.N. Kosygina A.A. Zhdanov on the results of the inspection of the vocational school No. 33 dated February 16, 1942. 27 . The students complained that in the canteen instead of soup liquid burda was given out, cutlets weighed 35 instead of the prescribed 50, sugar was stolen, and fats were not dispensed at all for 4 days. There was no control of the school administration over the dining room, which opened up the possibility of unlimited theft of products. As a result, the students ended up on a starvation diet, their condition worsened.

A.N. Kosygin demanded to establish mandatory control over the nutrition of artisans by the school administration, and to lay food in the boiler with the obligatory presence of the school administration and a representative of the students. The materials for checking school No. 33 were sent to A.N. Kosygin to the city prosecutor. By a court decision, the director of the canteen of the school was sentenced to one year of corrective labor, the cook - to two years in prison.

During the first hungry winter in Leningrad, more than a dozen vocational and factory schools functioned. Radical measures taken to improve nutrition and put things in order at School No. 33 had a positive effect on food, consumer services for students and in other educational institutions.

The evacuation of the population played an important role in solving the food problem. The city evacuation commission began its work on June 29, 1941. Before the blockade was established, mainly children were taken out of the city, as well as workers and employees who were evacuated along with enterprises. From June 29 to August 27, 488,703 people left the city. From September, from the time the blockade was established, until the onset of freeze-up, 33,479 people were taken out by water along Ladoga 28 . On November 22, the ice road across the lake began to work. However, it has not yet been sufficiently equipped and mastered. There were no required number of cars, there was not enough fuel. The weak thin ice often could not withstand the weight of the cars and broke, and by December 6, 126 cars sank on Ladoga. On the way, points of reception and heating of evacuees were not equipped. Therefore, on December 12, 1941, the Military Council of the Leningrad Front suspended the export of the population through Ladoga until further notice. 29 .

Only in the last ten days of January, after the victory over the Nazis near Moscow, did the situation change. The fate of Leningrad was taken up by the government and the State Defense Committee. On January 21, 1942, the Military Council of the Leningrad Front decided to resume the evacuation of the population. It was carried out from the Leningrad station - Finland Station to the Borisova Griva station (on the western coast of Ladoga) by rail and from the Borisova Griva station across the lake to the Zhikharevo station by road. Most of the evacuees walked to Finland Station on foot, carrying their belongings on sleds. 62,500 people (orphanages, vocational schools, university professors, art workers, etc.) were delivered by motor transport to the Finland Station.

Each evacuee received bread in Leningrad on a card for the day ahead, and at the evacuation center at the Finland Station - a lunch containing meat - 75 g, cereals - 70, fats - 40, flour - 20, dry vegetables - 20 and bread - 150. If the train was delayed on the way to Borisova Griva station for more than 1.5 days, the evacuation center of this station fed the evacuees with the same lunch. After crossing Ladoga, at the evacuation centers of Kobona, Lavrovo and Zhikharevo, they also had lunch, in addition, they received 1 kg of bread for the road, 250 g of cookies, 200 g of meat products, and children under 16 years old - a chocolate bar 30 .

According to the city evacuation commission, from January 22 to April 15, 1942, 554,186 people were evacuated along the ice road, including 92,419 students of vocational schools, 12,639 orphans, students, professors, teachers and scientists with families - 37 877 people 31 . The real picture of the evacuation is reflected in the story of the professor of the Leningrad Institute of Railway Engineers D.I. Kargin, who was evacuated in February 1942:

« As we moved towards Vologda, food at the evacuation centers gradually improved, but often took place in conditions far from culture. Only some evacuation centers were well equipped, and there the food turned out to be the best. Usually, the longest row of people in line, in the open, lined up with their own dishes for soup and porridge. We were given 400 grams of bread a day. In addition, dry rations were given at some evacuation centers, which included various products, such as: bread, white rolls, gingerbread, butter, granulated sugar, sausage, etc. There was no need to talk about hunger. He stayed behind."32 .

But not everyone managed to escape the consequences of malnutrition. Among the evacuees were many seriously ill and weakened. Only at the Finland Station, in Borisova Griva, Kobon, Lavrovo and Zhikharevo, 2,394 people died 33 . They died along the way. It is believed that at least 30 thousand Leningraders are buried on one Vologda land 34 .

In their new places of residence, the evacuated Leningraders, especially children, were surrounded by special attention and care, regardless of which city, people or republic they were sheltered. Leningrad teacher Vera Ivanovna Chernukha tells about the evacuation in the spring of 1942 of 150 children from the 41st orphanage:

« In the village of Rodnikovskaya, Krasnodar Territory, our echelon arrived early in the morning. But residents met Leningraders: there were local teachers and medical workers on the platform. Rooms have already been prepared for the children in the schools of the village, food has been stocked. And what more! Fresh milk, honey, nuts, radishes…”35 .

For the hungry winter of 1941-1942. and three months of the spring of 1942 account for the largest number of deaths from starvation. If in January 1942 96,751 people died, in February - 96,015, in March - 81,507, in April - 74,792, in May - 49,744, then from the summer of 1942 the mortality curve goes down sharply: in June they died 33,716 people, in July - 17,729, in August - 8,967 36 . The decrease in mortality by the middle of 1942 was ensured by the successful operation of the Ice Road of Life, and then the Ladoga military flotilla, and the creation of significant food supplies in the city. In addition, more than a million sick old people, orphans, women with children were evacuated, which made it possible to increase the level of food supply for the residents who remained in the city.

Leningraders in the gardens Postcard. Hood. G.P. Fittingof. Ed. "Art", Leningrad, 1944

In the spring of 1942, the Leningrad City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the executive committee of the Leningrad City Council set the task for the population of the city to provide themselves with their own vegetables. Empty lands were identified, gardens, parks, squares were taken into account for their use as vegetable gardens. As a result of the organizational work carried out in May, 633 organized subsidiary plots of enterprises and institutions and over 276 thousand individual gardeners began plowing and sowing vegetables. In the spring of 1942, 1,784 hectares were plowed by individual gardeners, 5,833 by subsidiary farms, and 2,220 by state farms of city trusts (9,838 hectares in total), including 3,253 hectares, or 33% of the crops, dug up with shovels. 6,854 ha (69.7%) were sown with vegetables, 1,869 ha (19.0%) with potatoes, 1,115 ha (11.3%) with legumes.

Approximately 25 thousand tons of vegetables were harvested from individual gardens 37 . The vast majority of Leningraders who have individual gardens provided themselves with greenery in the summer and stockpiled vegetables for the winter. The summer garden campaign strengthened and restored the health of hundreds of thousands of people, and this, in turn, contributed to strengthening the defense of the city and the complete defeat of the enemy near Leningrad.

Summer navigation on Ladoga turned out to be more successful than in 1941 in 1942. Extensive dredging, clearing and construction work was carried out in the area of ​​bays and marinas on both sides of the lake, dozens of barges and tugboats were repaired, 44 wooden and metal barges were built , 118 tenders, 2 metal ferries. All this made it possible to multiply the transportation of goods, including food. In July 1942 Ladoga transport workers sent up to 7 thousand tons of cargo per day. A total of 21,700 vessels passed through the lake during navigation. They transported 780 thousand tons of various cargoes to Leningrad, including 350 thousand tons of food, almost 12 thousand head of livestock 38 . The problem of hunger in the besieged city was removed. Leningrad residents began to receive rationed products in the same volume as residents of all cities in the country.

To overcome the consequences of the famine (in October 1942, with the onset of cold weather, 12,699 patients were hospitalized, in November - 14,138), those in need received enhanced nutrition. As of January 1, 1943, before the blockade was broken, 270 thousand Leningraders received in one form or another an increased amount of food compared to the all-Union norms. In addition, 153 thousand people visited canteens with 3 meals a day, for which a significant part of the rationed products was additionally allocated 39 .

The incredible suffering and courage shown by the people of Leningrad during the years of the blockade had no analogue in world history. Fate prepared for Leningrad the fate of one of the main strategic centers, on the stability of which the course of the entire war largely depended. This was also understood in the West. London Radio admitted in 1945: “ The defenders of Leningrad wrote the most remarkable page in the history of the World War, for they, more than anyone else, helped the coming final victory over Germany.40 .

Considering the tragic experience of the Siege of Leningrad, the Soviet delegation, at the final stage of negotiations on the preparation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the autumn of 1948, made a proposal to ban the use of starvation as a method of warfare. Soviet representative to the Commission on Human Rights 3 August 1948

34 Blockade declassified. S. 230.

35 Dayev V. Decree. op. pp. 62–63.

36 Leningrad under siege. S. 591.

37 Ibid. pp. 250–251, 253.

38 On the Road of life. Memories of front-line Ladoga. M., 1980. S. 16, 44.

39 Leningrad under siege. pp. 248, 589.

40 Blockade declassified. S. 8.

41 Lomagin N. Decree. op. S. 274.