Siege Leningrad - terrible memories of that time. Life of Leningraders during the siege

On initial stages war, the German leadership had every chance to capture Leningrad. And yet this did not happen. The fate of the city, in addition to the courage of its inhabitants, was decided by many factors.

Siege or assault?

Initially, the Barbarossa plan envisaged the quick capture of the city on the Neva by Army Group North, but there was no unity among the German command: some Wehrmacht generals believed that the city needed to be captured, while others, including the chief General Staff, Franz Halder, suggested that a blockade could be done.

At the beginning of July 1941, Halder made the following entry in his diary: “The 4th Panzer Group must set up barriers to the north and south of Lake Peipus and cordon off Leningrad.” This entry does not yet allow us to say that Halder decided to limit himself to blockading the city, but the mention of the word “cordon” already tells us that he did not plan to take the city right away.

Hitler himself advocated the capture of the city, guided in this case by economic rather than political aspects. The German army needed the possibility of unhindered navigation in the Baltic Gulf.

Luga failure of the Leningrad blitzkrieg

The Soviet command understood the importance of the defense of Leningrad; after Moscow, it was the most important political and economic center of the USSR. The city was home to the Kirov Machine-Building Plant, which produced the latest heavy tanks of the KV type, which played an important role in the defense of Leningrad. And the name itself - “City of Lenin” - did not allow it to be surrendered to the enemy.

So, both sides understood the importance of capturing Northern capital. The Soviet side began construction of fortified areas in places of possible attacks by German troops. The most powerful, in the Luzhek area, included more than six hundred bunkers and bunkers. In the second week of July, the German fourth tank group reached this line of defense and could not immediately overcome it, and here the German plan for the Leningrad blitzkrieg collapsed.

Hitler, unhappy with the delay offensive operation and constant requests for reinforcements from Army Group North, he personally visited the front, making it clear to the generals that the city must be taken as soon as possible.

Dizzy with success

As a result of the Fuhrer's visit, the Germans regrouped their forces and in early August broke through the Luga defense line, quickly capturing Novgorod, Shiimsk, and Chudovo. By the end of the summer, the Wehrmacht achieved maximum success on this section of the front and blocked the last railway going to Leningrad.

By the beginning of autumn, it seemed that Leningrad was about to be taken, but Hitler, who focused on the plan to capture Moscow and believed that with the capture of the capital, the war against the USSR would be practically won, ordered the transfer of the most combat-ready tank and infantry units from Army Group North near Moscow. The nature of the battles near Leningrad immediately changed: if earlier German units sought to break through the defenses and capture the city, now the first priority was to destroy industry and infrastructure.

"Third option"

The withdrawal of troops turned out to be a fatal mistake for Hitler's plans. The remaining troops were not enough for the offensive, and the encircled Soviet units, having learned about the enemy’s confusion, tried with all their might to break the blockade. As a result, the Germans had no choice but to go on the defensive, limiting themselves to indiscriminate shelling of the city from distant positions. There could be no talk of a further offensive; the main task was to maintain the siege ring around the city. In this situation, the German command was left with three options:

1. Capture of the city after completion of the encirclement;
2. Destruction of the city with the help of artillery and aviation;
3. An attempt to deplete the resources of Leningrad and force it to capitulate.

Hitler initially pinned the most on the first option. big hopes, but he underestimated the importance of Leningrad to the Soviets, as well as the resilience and courage of its inhabitants.
The second option, according to experts, was a failure in itself - the density of air defense systems in some areas of Leningrad was 5-8 times higher than the density of air defense systems in Berlin and London, and the number of guns involved did not allow fatal damage to the city’s infrastructure.

Thus, the third option remained Hitler's last hope for taking the city. It resulted in two years and five months of fierce confrontation.

Environment and hunger

By mid-September 1941 german army completely surrounded the city. The bombing did not stop: civilian targets became targets: food warehouses, large food processing plants.

From June 1941 to October 1942, many city residents were evacuated from Leningrad. At first, however, very reluctantly, since no one believed in a protracted war, and certainly could not imagine how terrible the blockade and battles for the city on the Neva would be. The children were evacuated to Leningrad region, however, not for long - most of these territories were soon captured by the Germans and many children were returned back.

Now the main enemy of the USSR in Leningrad was hunger. It was he, according to Hitler’s plans, who was to play a decisive role in the surrender of the city. In an attempt to establish food supplies, the Red Army repeatedly attempted to break the blockade; “partisan convoys” were organized to deliver food to the city directly across the front line.

The leadership of Leningrad also made every effort to combat hunger. In November and December 1941, which were terrible for the population, active construction of enterprises producing food substitutes began. For the first time in history, bread began to be baked from cellulose and sunflower cake; in the production of semi-finished meat products, they began to actively use by-products that no one would have thought of using in food production before.

In the winter of 1941, food rations reached a record low: 125 grams of bread per person. There was practically no distribution of other products. The city was on the verge of extinction. The cold was also a severe challenge, with temperatures dropping to -32 Celsius. And the negative temperature remained in Leningrad for 6 months. A quarter of a million people died in the winter of 1941-1942.

The role of saboteurs

During the first months of the siege, the Germans bombarded Leningrad with artillery almost unhindered. They transferred to the city the heaviest guns they had, mounted on railway platforms; these guns were capable of firing at a distance of up to 28 km, with 800-900 kilogram shells. In response to this, the Soviet command began to launch a counter-battery fight; detachments of reconnaissance and saboteurs were formed, which discovered the location of the Wehrmacht's long-range artillery. Significant assistance in organizing counter-battery warfare was provided by the Baltic Fleet, whose naval artillery fired from the flanks and rear of German artillery formations.

Interethnic factor

His “allies” played a significant role in the failure of Hitler’s plans. In addition to the Germans, Finns, Swedes, Italian and Spanish units took part in the siege. Spain did not officially participate in the war against Soviet Union, with the exception of the volunteer "Blue Division". There are different opinions about her. Some note the tenacity of its soldiers, others note the complete lack of discipline and mass desertion; soldiers often went over to the side of the Red Army. Italy provided torpedo boats, but their ground actions did not bring success.

"Victory Road"

The final collapse of the plan to capture Leningrad came on January 12, 1943, precisely at that moment Soviet command Operation Iskra began and after 6 days of fierce fighting, on January 18, the blockade was broken. Immediately after this it was laid Railway to the besieged city, later called the “Victory Road” and also known as the “Death Corridor”. The road ran so close to military operations that German units often fired cannons at the trains. However, a flood of supplies and food poured into the city. Enterprises began to produce products according to peacetime plans, and sweets and chocolate appeared on store shelves.

In fact, the ring around the city lasted for another whole year, but the encirclement was no longer so dense, the city was successfully supplied with resources, and the general situation on the fronts did not allow more to Hitler make such ambitious plans.

The BLOCKADE of Leningrad lasted 872 days - from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944. And on January 23, 1930, the most famous Leningrad schoolgirl, Tanya Savicheva, the author of the siege diary, was born. In the girl’s nine entries about the deaths of people close to her, the last one: “Everyone died. Tanya is the only one left." Today there are fewer and fewer eyewitnesses of those terrible days, especially documentary evidence. However, Eleonora Khatkevich from Molodechno keeps unique photographs saved by her mother from a bombed-out house overlooking the Peter and Paul Fortress.

In the book “The Unknown Blockade” by Nikita LOMAGIN, Eleonora KHATKEVICH found a photo of her brother

“I even had to eat the earth”

The routes of her life are amazing: German roots can be traced on her mother’s side, she survived besieged Leningrad at the age of six, worked in Karelia and Kazakhstan, and her husband was a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Ozarichi...

When I was born, the midwife said as she looked into the water: a difficult fate was in store for the girl. And so it happened,” Eleonora Khatkevich begins the story. My interlocutor lives alone, her daughter and son-in-law live in Vileika, a social worker helps her. He practically doesn’t leave the house - age and problems with his legs take a toll. He remembers what happened more than 70 years ago in detail.

Her maternal grandfather, Philip, was a native of the Volga Germans. When famine began there in the 1930s, he emigrated to Germany, and his grandmother Natalya Petrovna with her sons and daughter Henrietta, Eleanor’s mother, moved to Leningrad. She didn't live long - she was hit by a tram.

Eleanor's father, Vasily Kazansky, was the chief engineer of the plant. Mother worked in the human resources department of the institute. On the eve of the war, her 11-year-old brother Rudolf was sent to a pioneer camp in Velikiye Luki, but he returned before the blockade began. On Sunday, June 22, the family was getting ready to go out of town. My father came with terrible news (he went down to the store to buy a loaf of bread: “Zhinka, we’re not going anywhere, the war has begun.” And although Vasily Vasilyevich had a reservation, he immediately went to the military registration and enlistment office.

I remember: before joining the militia, my father brought us a two-kilogram bag of lentils,” says Eleonora Vasilievna. - This is how these lentils stand out in the eyes, similar to valerian pills... Then we lived modestly, there was no abundance of products, as in our days.

Henrietta-Alexandra and Vasily KAZANSKY, parents of a siege survivor

The siege survivor has a habit: flour, cereals, vegetable oil - everything should be in stock at home. When my husband was alive, the cellars were always stocked with preserves and pickles. And when he died, he distributed it all to the homeless. Today, if he doesn’t eat bread, he feeds the neighbors’ dogs. Remembers:

During the hungry days of the siege, we even had to eat earth - my brother brought it from the burnt Badayevsky warehouses.

She carefully keeps the funeral memorial for her father - he was killed in 1942...

In the center - Rudolf KAZANSKY

But that was later, and the war brought losses to the family already in August 1941. On the sixth there was heavy shelling of Leningrad; my mother’s brother Alexander was sick at home that day. It was just his birthday, and Elya and her mother came to congratulate him. Before their eyes, the patient was thrown against the wall by the blast wave and died. There were many victims then. The girl remembered that it was on that day that an elephant in the zoo was killed during shelling. Her brother was saved either by a miracle or a happy accident. It turned out that the day before Rudik brought a helmet he found somewhere. His mother scolded him, saying, why are you bringing all this junk into the house? But he hid it. And he put it on in time, when Junkers with a deadly load appeared over the city... Around the same time, the family of another mother’s brother, Philip, tried to escape. They had a house near St. Petersburg and three children: Valentina graduated from the third year of the shipbuilding institute, Volodya was just about to enter college, Seryozha was an eighth-grader. When the war began, the family tried to evacuate with other Leningraders on a barge. However, the boat was sunk and they all died. The only photograph left as a keepsake was of his brother and his wife.

“Crumbs - only for Elechka”

When their own home was completely bombed, Eleanor's family found themselves living in a former student dormitory. Henrietta Filippovna, who was called Alexandra in her family, managed to find only a few old photographs at the site of her apartment after the bombing. At first, after the blockade began, she went to remove corpses from the streets - they were put in piles. The mother gave most of her meager rations to her children, so she fell ill first. Only her son went out for water and bread. Eleonora Vasilyevna remembered that in those days he was especially affectionate:

Mommy, I only sniffed the pieces twice, but I collected all the crumbs and brought them to you...

Eleanor Vasilievna collected many books about the siege, in one of them she came across a photograph of her brother collecting water in a half-frozen stream.

Along the Road of Life

In April 1942, the Kazanskys were wrapped in someone else's rags and taken along the Road of Life. There was water on the ice, the truck driving behind them fell through, and the adults covered the children’s eyes so they wouldn’t see this horror. On the shore they were already waiting in large tents and given millet porridge, the siege survivor recalls. At the station they gave out two loaves of bread.

Elya KAZANSKAYA in a pre-war photo

“The children had an x-ray, and the doctor told the mother: “Your girl probably drank a lot of tea, her ventricle is large,” the interlocutor cries. - The mother replied: “Neva water, it was the only way to escape when you wanted to eat.”

Many Leningraders who arrived with them died with a piece of bread in their mouths: after the famine it was impossible to eat much. And my brother, who never asked for food in Leningrad, begged that day: “Mommy, some bread!” She broke off small pieces so that he wouldn’t get sick. Later, in peacetime, Alexandra Filippovna told her daughter: “There is nothing worse in life than when your child asks for food, and not for treats, but for bread, but there is none…”

Having escaped from the besieged city, the family ended up in the hospital and learned to walk “on the walls” again. Later, the evacuees ended up in Kirov region. Akulina Ivanovna, the owner of the house where they lived, had a husband and daughter at the front:

Sometimes she bakes round bread, cuts it with a half-sickle knife, pours goat milk, and she looks at us and cries, we are so thin.

There was a case when it was only by a miracle that Rudolf did not die - he was pulled into the mechanism of an agricultural machine. Over the years, Eleonora Vasilievna does not remember its exact name. But the name of the horse she helped care for when the family moved to Karelia for logging remains in her memory - Tractor. At the age of 12-13, she was already helping her mother, who worked on the collective farm. And at the age of 17 she got married and gave birth to a daughter. But marriage turned out to be a big disaster, which her mother also sensed in advance. After suffering for several years, Eleanor got divorced. A friend called her to Molodechno, and she and her little daughter Sveta left. Her future husband, Anatoly Petrovich Khatkevich, then worked as a garage manager, met at work.

At the age of eleven, he ended up in a concentration camp near Ozarichi with his mother and sister, continues Eleonora Vasilyevna. - The camp was a bare space fenced with wire. The husband said: “There’s a dead horse lying, there’s water in a puddle nearby, and they’re drinking from it...” On the day of liberation, the Germans were retreating on one side, and ours were coming on the other. One mother recognized her son among those approaching Soviet soldiers, shouted: “Son!..” And before his eyes, a bullet knocked her down.

Anatoly and Eleanor did not get along right away - for some time the former Leningrad woman went to her brother in the virgin lands. But she returned, and New Year the couple signed. A difficult test lay ahead - my beloved daughter Lenochka died of brain cancer at the age of 16.

Saying goodbye, Eleonora Vasilyevna hugged me like family - we are the same age as her granddaughter:

On the second day after my husband’s funeral, two pigeons flew to our balcony. The neighbor says: “Tolya and Lenochka.” I crumbled some bread for them. Since then, 40 pieces have been arriving every day. And I feed. I buy pearl barley and oatmeal. I have to wash the balcony every day. Once I tried to stop, I was drinking tea, they were knocking on the window. I couldn't stand it. I felt hungry - how can I leave them?..

January 27, 2017, 12:36 pm

I could write how they lived, I could write how we lived. The besieged city was nearby; from the trenches, without binoculars, the silhouette of the city was visible, spread out on the horizon. When it was bombed, the earth shook a little in Shushary. We saw black pillars of fires rising every day. Above us, softly rustling, shells rushed into the city, and then the bombers sailed. Life in the trenches was not easy for us either; life there was on average measured in a week or two. I was hungry. The frost was also common, both here and in the city – 30-35 C, and yet it was a shame to compare it with the Leningrad disaster. Residents of besieged Leningrad on the street. In the background on the wall of the house is a poster “Death to child killers.” Presumably winter 1941-1942.

The blockade consisted not only of hunger. I was able to truly understand the life of the siege much later, when Adamovich and I were working on the “Siege Book.” We wrote down story after story, 200 stories, approximately 6,000 pages. Then we began to select what was suitable for the book and what was not suitable. Most of it, of course, did not fit, these were details Everyday life which seemed obvious to us. Much later, I began to understand that not everything came down to hunger or shelling. In fact, the blockade consisted of many hardships. Life did not fall apart immediately, but irreparably; we have little idea of ​​the size and growing horror of that catastrophe.

She was gone. The water pumps still worked for some time, and there was water in the laundries. Then everything froze - the taps in the kitchen and bathroom didn’t even wheeze anymore, they turned into a memory. We went to get snow, there was a lot of snow, but it had to be melted, but how? On your stomach? There is no heating anymore. On a potbelly stove? We need to get it.

In some apartments, stoves and even stoves were preserved. But how to drown them? Where's the firewood? Those that were there were quickly stolen and burned. The authorities allocated in the areas wooden houses, allowed them to be disassembled for firewood. It’s easy to say “disassemble”: with crowbars, saws - the work is too much for hungry, rapidly weakening people. It was easier to tear out the parquet in your rooms (where it was), and it was even more convenient to heat potbelly stoves with furniture. Chairs, tables, books for kindling were used.

The potbelly stove quickly appeared on the black market; one had to buy it for a lot of money, and then for bread. What can you do, you'll give everything away. The winter of 1941-1942, as luck would have it, was fierce: –30-35╟ C. At the front, potbelly stoves were also burning in our dugouts, firewood was also being mined, but warmth came from another five or six soldiers who were crowded on the bunks; and in a city room you can’t gain any heat from two or three dystrophics.

A potbelly stove is not everything; it requires, excuse me, a chimney, that is, pipes; they need to be taken outside, into a window, which must be somehow adapted so that the heated water does not escape into it.

Peter was a European city; when all his privileges collapsed during the blockade, it became clear that it would be much better to transfer the blockade to the old times, and even better - to the caves; Primitive life suddenly appeared comfortable.
At Chernyshev Bridge. Air raid warning. 1941
Blockade Nevsky Prospekt. Photo Kudoyarov B.P.

At the end of March 1942, I received my leave and decided to visit our apartment. On the way, I broke off several icicles from the pillboxes and enjoyed them clean water. Near the Neva, women extracted water from an ice hole. They took it out with ladle, it was impossible to reach it with your hand, you couldn’t scoop it up; Coastal residents went to the Neva, to the Fontanka, to Karpovka, and chiseled ice. They chop up the ice and take it home. “The problem is to climb up the icy stairs, to reach the bucket and not slip,” Polya, the only one left alive in our large communal apartment, complained to me. I myself could barely climb up this filthy staircase; I remember it in every detail, in the yellow icy growths from urine, and mountains of garbage, and mountains of frozen feces everywhere. This was a discovery for me, the toilets didn’t work, everyone was dumped on the stairs, down the flight of stairs.

The fields have already frozen this winter most furniture from the entire apartment. From my room - a wooden bed, bookshelves, a chair; I didn’t reproach her in any way.

“Civilization,” she said, “damn it.”
At the water stand installed on the corner of Dzerzhinsky Street and Zagorodny Prospekt. 02/05/1942

But once upon a time the electricity was on, the lamps remained in the lampshades in the corridor, I flicked the switches, they did not respond. During the first bombings, they began to cover the windows with paper crosses. To save glass. Then for some reason these crosses did not protect well from bombing; gradually the windows became blackened with empty frames. The shock wave of shells and bombs eventually broke out the glass; they began to cover the windows with blankets and carpets in order to somehow protect themselves from the snow and wind. The rooms became completely dark. There was no morning, no day, constant darkness. They began to produce light using smokehouses, they were made from tin cans, bought at markets, and kerosene was poured into them; he was gone - they extracted oil: lamp oil, machine oil, transformer oil, I don’t know what else... From threads - they were pulled out of clothes, the wick was twisted. The light somehow lit, smoked, and you could warm your frozen hands over it; they managed to beg oil from churches, from artillerymen, and also, I found out after the war, from Lenenergo fitters, they took it from oil switches, from transformers. And they sold it.

In retrospect, all these spoils look different; they didn’t steal, but begged, bartered; getting light was as difficult as in the Stone Age.

The radio was silent, the metronome beat, and at some hours the latest news was broadcast.

The rooms were smoky, the people were smoky. There were smokehouses in bakeries, smokehouses in police stations, and smokehouses in offices. They are smokers, blinkers - whatever they call them! At the front they also shone,
Our wicks were clamped into shell casings, oil was stolen from drivers, there wasn’t enough smoker to read the light, but you could warm up the porridge and somehow write a letter in its flickering light. This ancient device still gave comfort to the cave siege environment, a small tongue of flame was burning, which meant that life was warm, during the day you could open the curtain, pull back the blanket, let in the light if it was not frosty.

Still, try to imagine what life without a toilet means, how to relieve yourself? I don’t have the strength to drag a pan outside every time and wash it with something. Mountains of garbage grew quickly, blocking the exit from the house; Sorry, it’s not comme il faut to describe all this in detail, but the list of decency in the besieged city has been greatly reduced; a year passed, another six months, how people managed without toilets, I don’t know anymore; What’s more surprising is how a huge city avoided epidemics in the spring of 1942. There were unburied dead people in the houses, victims of hunger and frost, victims of shelling, lay in the apartments, and lay in the doorways; I saw the dead in a snow-covered tram, I went there myself to shelter from the wind. Opposite me sat completely white old man without a hat - someone must have taken it.

With incredible efforts, the resurrected people in the spring cleared the city of corpses and sewage; Bombed houses and broken trams remained untouched.

At the end of May, beds appeared on the Champ de Mars.

My personal memories faded, became clouded, mixed with other people's memoirs.

A dead man being carried on a sled is the most common photograph of the siege. Everyone remembered this. But they died not only from hunger - shells, bombing, frost... The cause of death was the same: the blockade. But it was known how many shells fell, how many bombs, there were approximate numbers of fires; There are no such reasons as despair, death of loved ones, hopelessness, despondency.

Try to imagine an apartment, the most ordinary, but well-appointed, where the cupboard contains dishes, plates, forks, knives; There are pots and pans in the kitchen - and all this is useless, because there is not a crumb of food anywhere. People live in the familiar environment of a comfortable life, where there is a telephone hanging, a samovar, in the closets there are blouses, trousers, an iron, sheets, a meat grinder - there are food items everywhere - and everything is useless. Life froze and passed away in an atmosphere of living prosperity; sometimes it seemed to people that death in a prison cell, on camp bunks, was more natural than the death of a family in their apartment.

Hunger drove him crazy, the man gradually lost all ideas about what was possible and what was not. He is ready to chew the leather of a belt, boil glue from wallpaper, and boil dried flowers.

I used to be horrified by cannibalism. During the war, I realized that it is not love, but “war and famine” that rule the world. There were days at the front when we were left without food for a day, or two, or three, and we were ready to chew even our foot wraps, whatever we needed to fill our stomachs with. It was harder for the siege survivors; it seemed to them that their hunger was indefinite. The frying pan smelled of something fried, there was still a faint smell in the bread bin...

125 grams of bread - the established norm for employees, dependents and children in November 1941.

The conversation with Grigory Romanov was short: The Leningrad blockade is a heroic epic, and you depicted not the feat of the people, but the suffering and horrors of hunger, you reduced everything to this; it turns out that you are debunking the story of the great merit and resilience of the people, how they managed to defend the city; you are interested in how people suffered. This is an ideology alien to us.
For the latest newspaper. 1942-1943 Photo by Kudoyarov B.P.

We received approximately the same rebuke in the regional party committee when the publication of the “Siege Book” was prohibited. The second time Joseph Efimovich Kheifits, a famous film director and winner of various awards, heard the same thing, when he was forbidden to make a film about the blockade based on our book.

Meanwhile, in his script there were wonderful characters besides our Yura Ryabinkin, there was a young girl who put up posters in the city; she appeared on the street, posted posters, appeals to residents with calls to hold on, to help each other, posted announcements about organizing funerals, about distributing boiling water; neither shells nor bombings could kill her; she embodied the soul of this city, its resilience.

MPVO soldiers evacuate victims after a German air raid on Leningrad. 1943
For the “Siege Book,” Adamovich and I first of all looked for the diaries of the siege survivors - they were more expensive than personal testimonies. The siege survivors we recorded recalled their lives more than thirty years later. The peculiarity of any diary is authenticity; Usually the author does not present the past, but the present; he does not so much remember as share his memories, report the news, tell what happened today.

The Great Terror and repressions weaned St. Petersburg residents from keeping diaries. The occupation became too dangerous. During the blockade, this natural need returned with unexpected force, people felt themselves not so much as events, but as participants in history, they wanted to preserve and record the uniqueness of what was happening. But there was one more circumstance - an intimate feeling of spiritual food appeared; Surprisingly, the diary helped me survive. A strange, ghostly feeling; mental work, spiritual comprehension supported. After the publication of The Siege Book, they began to bring us diaries, and more and more; suddenly it turned out that, despite all the horrors and suffering, people recorded themselves. Details of your life, details of food.

Here is the diary of the chief engineer of the Fifth Hydroelectric Power Plant, Lev Abramovich Khodorkov - a priceless diary precisely for its details.

December 26th, the most Hard times blockade, and meanwhile: “Zhdanov said that the worst for Leningrad is behind<...>there are turbines, four boilers out of five are standing, there is no fuel in the city, out of 95 people on the list, 25 went to work, the rest are sick, weakened or died.”

January 5, 1942: “Bread factories without energy, the station operates with one boiler per boiler room<...>there is no firewood, the population is breaking the plank covering of shop windows.”

January 9, 1942: “Hospitals, hospitals, houses were left without fuel, everything was taken to power plants, where by rail, where by tram, where by car, coal became blood for Leningrad, and this blood is becoming less and less. There is barely enough power for bakeries and some food processing plants.”

January 14: “The installation of the anthracite boiler has been completed; manual casting is required. No healthy person suitable for this work."

I quote only a few lines from this wonderful diary, which was also a feat to keep.

Sometimes I read details unknown to me. In June, the corpses of Red Army soldiers floated down the Neva, day and night, one after another, one after another.

A diary of a musician from the Philharmonic appeared, as well as a diary of a high school student, which contains the story of her evacuation. Dozens and dozens of them have survived; Now some of them have begun to be published. They showed me the ones they keep
in family archives.

Each diary interprets the tragedy of the city in its own way. Each diary contains a talent for observation, an understanding of how precious the details of this incredible life besieged people.

http://magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2014/1/7g.html

A lively discussion on the seemingly purely historical question of whether the first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Belarus, Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, ate cakes and other delicacies during the blockade, unfolded between the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation Vladimir Medinsky and liberal public in the person of, first of all, the deputy of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly Boris Vishnevsky.

It must be admitted that although Mr. Minister is an ignoramus and does not know history (details are in our article “The Crocodile of Ensign Medinsky”), in this case he correctly called all this “a lie.” The myth was analyzed in detail by historian Alexey Volynets in his biography of A.A. Zhdanov, published in the ZhZL series. With the permission of the author, APN-SZ publishes the corresponding excerpt from the book.

In December 1941, unprecedented very coldy actually destroyed the water supply of the city left without heating. Bread factories were left without water - for one day the already meager blockade ration turned into a handful of flour.

Recalls Alexey Bezzubov, at that time the head of the chemical-technological department of the All-Union Research Institute of the Vitamin Industry located in Leningrad and a consultant to the sanitary department of the Leningrad Front, a developer of the production of vitamins to combat scurvy in besieged Leningrad:

“The winter of 1941-1942 was especially difficult. Unprecedentedly severe frosts struck, all water pipes froze, and bakeries were left without water. On the very first day, when flour was given out instead of bread, the head of the baking industry N.A. Smirnov and I were called to Smolny... A.A. Zhdanov, having learned about the flour, asked to come to him immediately. There was a machine gun on the windowsill in his office. Zhdanov pointed at him: “If there are no hands that can firmly hold this perfect machine gun, it is useless. Bread is needed at all costs.”

Suddenly the admiral suggested a way out Baltic Fleet V.F. Tributs, who was in the office. There were submarines frozen in the ice on the Neva. But the river did not freeze to the bottom. They made ice holes and began pumping water through the sleeves using submarine pumps to bakeries located on the banks of the Neva. Five hours after our conversation, four factories produced bread. At other factories they dug wells to get to artesian water...”

How shining example organizational activities of the city leadership during the blockade, it is necessary to recall such a specific body created by the Leningrad City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) as the “Commission for the consideration and implementation of defense proposals and inventions” - the entire intellect of Leningraders was mobilized for the needs of defense and all sorts of proposals that could bring even the slightest benefit to the besieged city.

Academician Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, “the father of Soviet physics” (teacher of P. Kapitsa, I. Kurchatov, L. Landau, Yu. Khariton) wrote: “Nowhere, never have I seen such a rapid pace of transition scientific ideas into practice, as in Leningrad in the first months of the war.”

Almost everything was invented and immediately created from scrap materials - from vitamins from pine needles to clay-based explosives. And in December 1942, Zhdanov was introduced prototypes Sudaev's submachine gun, modified in Leningrad, PPS - in the besieged city at the Sestroretsk plant, for the first time in the USSR, production of this best submachine gun of World War II began.

In addition to military tasks, food supply issues and war economy, the city authorities, led by Zhdanov, had to solve a lot of the most different problems, vital for the salvation of the city and its population. So, to protect against bombing and constant artillery shelling, over 4,000 bomb shelters were built in Leningrad, capable of accommodating 800 thousand people (it’s worth assessing these scales).

Along with the supply of food during the blockade, there was also the non-trivial task of preventing epidemics, these eternal and inevitable companions of famine and urban sieges. It was on Zhdanov’s initiative that special “household detachments” were created in the city. Thanks to the efforts of the Leningrad authorities, even with significant destruction of public utilities, outbreaks of epidemics were prevented - but in a besieged city with non-functioning water supply and sewage systems, this could become a danger no less terrible and deadly than famine. Now this threat, nipped in the bud, i.e. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives saved from epidemics are practically not remembered when it comes to the blockade.

But alternatively gifted people of all stripes love to “remember” how Zhdanov “gobbled up” in a city that was dying of hunger. Here the most enchanting tales are used, which were produced in large numbers during the “perestroika” frenzy. And for the third decade now, the spreading cranberry has been habitually repeated: about how Zhdanov, in order to save himself from obesity in besieged Leningrad, played “lawn tennis” (apparently, sofa whistleblowers really like the imported word “lawn”), how he ate from crystal vases of “bouche” cakes (another beautiful word) and how he ate up on peaches specially delivered by plane from the partisan regions. Of course, all the partisan regions of the USSR were simply buried in spreading peaches...

However, peaches have an equally sweet alternative - so Evgeny Vodolazkin in “ Novaya Gazeta“On the eve of Victory Day, May 8, 2009, publishes another ritual phrase about the city “with Andrei Zhdanov at the head, who received pineapples on special flights.” It is significant that Doctor of Philology Vodolazkin more than once repeats with obvious passion and gusto about these “pineapples” in a number of his publications (For example: E. Vodolazkin “My grandmother and Queen Elizabeth. Portrait against the background of history” / Ukrainian newspaper “Zerkalo Nedeli” No. 44, November 17, 2007) He repeats, of course, without bothering to provide the slightest evidence, so - in passing, for the sake of a catchphrase and a successful turn of phrase - almost ritually.

Since the thickets of pineapples in the warring USSR are not visible, we can only assume that, according to Mr. Vodolazkin, this fruit was delivered especially for Zhdanov under Lend-Lease... But in order to be fair to the doctor of philological sciences wounded by pineapples, we note that he is far from the only one , but just a typical distributor of such revelations. There is no need to provide links to them - numerous examples of such journalism can be easily found on the modern Russian-language Internet.

Unfortunately, all these tales, repeated year after year by lightweight “journalists” and belated fighters against Stalinism, are exposed only in specialized historical publications. They were first considered and refuted back in the mid-90s. in a number of documentary collections on the history of the siege. Alas, the circulation of historical and documentary research does not have to compete with the yellow press...

This is what the writer and historian V.I. Demidov says in the collection “The Blockade Declassified”, published in St. Petersburg in 1995: “It is known that in Smolny during the blockade no one seemed to die of hunger, although dystrophy and hungry fainting happened there too . On the other hand, according to the testimony of service employees who knew the life of the upper classes well (I interviewed a waitress, two nurses, several assistant members of the military council, adjutants, etc.), Zhdanov was distinguished by his unpretentiousness: “buckwheat porridge and sour cabbage soup are the height of pleasure.” As for “press reports,” although we agreed not to get involved in polemics with my colleagues, a week is not enough. They all fall apart at the slightest contact with facts.

“Orange peels” were allegedly found in the trash heap of an apartment building where Zhdanov allegedly lived (this is a “fact” - from the Finnish film “Zhdanov - Stalin’s protégé”). But you know, Zhdanov lived in Leningrad in a mansion fenced with a solid fence - along with a "garbage dump" - during the siege, he spent his five or six hours of sleep, like everyone else, in a small rest room behind the office, extremely rarely - in an outbuilding in the courtyard Smolny. And his personal driver (another “fact” from the press, from “Ogonyok”) could not carry “pancakes”: Zhdanov’s personal cook, “received” by him from S.M., also lived in the outbuilding. Kirov, "Uncle Kolya" Shchennikov. They wrote about the “peaches” delivered to Zhdanov “from the partisan region”, but without specifying whether in the winter of 1941-1942 there was a harvest for these same “peaches” in the Pskov-Novgorod forests and where the guards responsible for the life of the secretary of the Central Committee looked with their heads, allowing him to products of dubious origin are on his table...”

The operator of the central communications center located in Smolny during the war, Mikhail Neishtadt, recalled: “To be honest, I didn’t see any banquets. Once, with me, as with other signalmen, the top team celebrated November 7 all night long. There were artillery commander-in-chief Voronov and city committee secretary Kuznetsov, who was later shot. They carried plates of sandwiches past us into their room. Nobody gave the Soldiers any treats, and we weren’t offended... But I don’t remember any excesses there. When Zhdanov arrived, the first thing he did was check the food consumption. Accounting was strict. Therefore, all this talk about “belly holidays” is more speculation than truth... Zhdanov was the first secretary of the regional and city party committees, who exercised all political leadership. I remembered him as a person who was quite scrupulous in everything that related to material matters.”

Daniil Natanovich Alshits (Al), a native St. Petersburger, Doctor of Historical Sciences, graduate, and then professor of the history department of Leningrad State University, a private in the Leningrad people’s militia in 1941, writes in a recently published book: “...At the very least, the constantly repeated reproaches against leaders of the defense of Leningrad: the Leningraders were starving, or even dying of hunger, and the commanders in Smolny ate their fill, “gobble up.” Exercises in creating sensational “revelations” on this topic sometimes reach the point of complete absurdity. For example, they claim that Zhdanov ate himself on buns. This couldn't happen. Zhdanov had diabetes and no buns he didn’t eat... I also had to read such a crazy statement - that during the hungry winter in Smolny six cooks were shot for serving cold buns to the authorities. The mediocrity of this invention is quite obvious. First of all, the chefs don't serve buns. Secondly, why are as many as six cooks to blame for the fact that the buns had time to cool down? All this is clearly the delirium of an imagination inflamed by the corresponding trend.”

As one of the two waitresses on duty at the Military Council of the Leningrad Front, Anna Strakhova, recalled, in the second ten days of November 1941, Zhdanov called her and established a strictly fixed, reduced food consumption rate for all members of the Military Council of the Leningrad Front (commander M.S. Khozin, himself, A.A. Kuznetsov, T.F. Shtykov, N.V. Solovyov). Participant in the battles on Nevsky Piglet, commander of the 86th rifle division(former 4th Leningrad People's Militia Division) Colonel Andrei Matveevich Andreev, mentions in his memoirs how in the fall of 1941, after a meeting in Smolny, he saw in the hands of Zhdanov a small black pouch with a ribbon, in which was a member of the Politburo and the First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee and City Committee The All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) carried the bread ration that was due to him - the bread ration was given to the leadership several times a week for two or three days in advance.

Of course, this was not the 125 grams that a dependent was entitled to during the most critical period of the blockade supply, but, as we see, there is no smell of lawn tennis cakes here.

Indeed, during the blockade, the highest state and military leadership Leningrad was supplied much better than the majority of the urban population, but without the “peaches” beloved by the whistleblowers - here the gentlemen whistleblowers are clearly extrapolating their own morals at that time... Making claims to the leadership of besieged Leningrad for better supplies means making such claims to the Lenfront soldiers who were fed the townspeople are better in the trenches, or blame the pilots and submariners for feeding better than ordinary infantrymen during the blockade. In the besieged city, everything without exception, including this hierarchy of supply standards, was subordinated to the goals of defense and survival, since the city simply had no reasonable alternatives to resisting and not surrendering...

A revealing story about Zhdanov in wartime Leningrad was left by Harrison Salisbury, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times. In February 1944, this tenacious and meticulous American journalist arrived in Leningrad, which had just been liberated from the siege. As a representative of an ally in the anti-Hitler coalition, he visited Smolny and other city sites. Salisbury wrote his work on the blockade already in the 60s. in the USA, and his book certainly cannot be suspected of Soviet censorship and agitprop.

According to American journalist, most of the time Zhdanov worked in his office in Smolny on the third floor: “Here he worked hour after hour, day after day. From endless smoking, a long-standing illness worsened - asthma, he wheezed, coughed... His deeply sunken, coal-dark eyes burned; tension dotted his face with wrinkles, which became sharper when he worked all night long. He rarely went beyond Smolny, even to take a walk nearby...

There was a kitchen and a dining room in Smolny, but Zhdanov almost always ate only in his office. They brought him food on a tray, he hurriedly swallowed it, without looking up from work, or occasionally at three in the morning he ate as usual with one or two of his main assistants... The tension often affected Zhdanov and other leaders. These people, both civilian and military, usually worked 18, 20 and 22 hours a day; most of them managed to sleep in fits and starts, laying their heads on the table or taking a quick nap in the office. They ate somewhat better than the rest of the population. Zhdanov and his associates, as well as front-line commanders, received military rations: 400, no more, grams of bread, a bowl of meat or fish soup and, if possible, a little porridge. One or two lumps of sugar were given with tea. ...None of the senior military or party leaders fell victim to dystrophy. But their physical strength was exhausted. Nerves frayed, most of them suffered chronic diseases heart or vascular system. Zhdanov, like others, soon showed signs of fatigue, exhaustion, and nervous exhaustion.”

Indeed, during the three years of the blockade, Zhdanov, without stopping his grueling work, suffered two heart attacks “on his feet.” His puffy face of a sick man, decades later, will give well-fed whistleblowers a reason to joke and lie from the comfort of their warm sofas about the gluttony of the leader of Leningrad during the siege.

Valery Kuznetsov, the son of Alexei Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov, second secretary of the Leningrad regional committee and city committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Zhdanov’s closest assistant during the war, in 1941, a five-year-old boy, answered a correspondent’s question about the nutrition of the Leningrad elite and the Smolny canteen during the siege:

“I dined in that canteen and remember well the food there. The first one relied on lean, thin cabbage soup. For the second course - buckwheat or millet porridge and even stewed meat. But the real delicacy was jelly. When my dad and I went to the front, we were given army rations. It was almost no different from the diet in Smolny. The same stew, the same porridge.

They wrote that while the townspeople were starving, the smell of pies came from the Kuznetsovs’ apartment on Kronverkskaya Street, and fruit was delivered to Zhdanov by plane...

I have already told you how we ate. During the entire blockade, my dad and I only came to Kronverkskaya Street a couple of times. To take wooden children's toys, use them to light the stove and at least somehow warm up, and pick up children's things. And about the pies... It will probably be enough to say that I, like other residents of the city, was diagnosed with dystrophy.

Zhdanov... You see, dad often took me with him to Zhdanov’s house, on Stone Island. And if he had fruit or candy, he would probably treat me. But I don’t remember this.”

actress, 78 years old

At the beginning of the blockade, Lida Fedoseeva was two years old, her family shared a communal apartment with forty residents! Her mother, along with her two children - daughter Lida and son German - spent the entire blockade in besieged Leningrad. The next year after the end of the war, Lida Fedoseeva went to school.

Alisa Freindlich

actress, 82 years old

That September, Alisa Freindlich went to first grade, and a week later the blockade began. According to the actress, her family was “saved” by pre-war supplies of mustard, which made the notorious siege jelly from wood glue edible. From the actress’s memoirs: “They drowned us mostly with furniture, they burned everything except what we needed to sleep and sit on. The complete works of Tolstoy, his lifetime edition, burned in a potbelly stove. But here it is: either death, or books on fire...” The actress’s condition was also aggravated by her origin - her German surname aroused the hatred of those around her.

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The actress’s father managed to evacuate and did not return to the family, and in the winter of 1941, a shell hit Freundlich’s house:
“We returned home and saw broken windows and doors, a poor piano, covered in plaster, everything scattered...”

At the same time, Freundlich continued to go to school, but the hours spent in the classroom could hardly be called studying: “I remember how intensely I looked at the clock: when will the hand finally reach the desired division and it will be possible to eat a tiny slice from the ration of bread? Our grandmother gave us such a harsh regime - and that’s why we survived.”

Galina Vishnevskaya

opera singer, 1926−2012

The future artist met the beginning of the blockade as a 15-year-old schoolgirl, an orphan. Galina's mother abandoned her almost immediately after birth into the care of her grandmother, and her father had new family. The artist’s grandmother did not survive the blockade. “Until now, no one has described the horror that was during the blockade,” said the artist. At the age of 16, Vishnevskaya served in air defense units, and also performed songs on ships, in Kronstadt forts and dugouts.

“It’s difficult to describe the state of a person under siege,” recalls Vishnevskaya. “I didn’t even suffer from hunger, I just quietly grew weaker and slept more and more. She lived in some kind of half-asleep. Swollen from hunger, she sat alone, wrapped in blankets, in an empty apartment and dreamed... Not about food. Castles, knights, kings floated before me. Here I am walking through the park beautiful dress with crinolines, the Duke appears, falls in love with me, marries me... I was tormented only by the eternal feeling of cold, when nothing can be done to warm myself..."

Ilya Reznik

poet, 79 years old

The future poet was abandoned by his mother as a child, who later remarried and gave birth to triplets. The father of the future poet fought and died at the front in 1944. Reznik survived the blockade together with his paternal grandparents, who later adopted the boy. In 1943, the family was evacuated to the Urals, but by the end of the war they returned to Leningrad.

Ilya Glazunov

artist, 1930−2017

Valentin Mastyukov/TASS

During the blockade, Glazunov lost his parents, uncle, aunt and grandmother... 12-year-old Ilya was taken out of the city across Lake Ladoga along the famous “Road of Life”, but after the blockade was lifted in 1944, Glazunov returned to his native Leningrad.

Elena Obraztsova

opera singer, 75 years old

Shadrin Victor/TASS

The artist was only 2 years old at the start of the blockade, but she remembered a lot from her childhood: “Air raids, bomb shelters, lines for bread in 40-degree frost, a hospital under the window where corpses were taken, terrible hunger, when they cooked and ate everything that It was made from genuine leather." In 1943, the Obraztsov family was evacuated to the Vologda region.

Valentina Leontyeva

announcer and TV presenter, 1923−2007

The war found Leontyeva a 17-year-old graduate... Instead of college, Valentina Mikhailovna and her sister signed up to become sanitary workers, helped the wounded and sick, but Leontyeva failed to save her own father... The man donated blood for the needs of the front in order to get additional rations for the family, and once, while dismantling furniture for firewood, injured his hand, and blood poisoning began. He died in the hospital. After his death, the family managed to evacuate: “In 1942, the Road of Life was opened, we managed to leave. Me, my mother and my sister Lucy got out. Mom saved us by forcing us to smoke so that we would eat less, but Lyusya’s son, whom she gave birth to at the beginning of the war, died on the road, and his sister was not allowed to bury him. She buried the body in a nearby snowdrift.”