The blockade of Leningrad by German, Finnish and Spanish (Blue Division) troops during the Great Patriotic War began on September 8, 1941 and lasted until January 27, 1944 (the blockade ring was broken on January 18, 1943) - 872 days.
The seizure of Leningrad was an integral part of the plan of war against the USSR developed by Nazi Germany - the "Barbarossa" plan. It provided that the Soviet Union should be completely defeated within 3-4 months of the summer and autumn of 1941, that is, during a lightning war ("blitzkrieg"). By November 1941, the Nazis planned to capture the entire European part of the USSR. According to the "Ost" ("East") plan, it was planned to exterminate a significant part of the population of the Soviet Union, primarily Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, as well as all Jews and Gypsies - a total of at least 30 million people. None of the peoples inhabiting the USSR should have had the right to their statehood or even autonomy.
Already on June 23, the commander of the Leningrad Military District, Lieutenant General M. M. Popov, was ordered to begin work on the creation of an additional defense line in the Pskov direction in the Luga area. On July 4, this decision was confirmed by the Headquarters Directive of the main command, signed by G. K. Zhukov.
On July 19, by the time the advanced German units left, the Luga defensive line was well prepared in engineering terms: defensive structures were built 175 kilometers long, with a depth of 10-15 kilometers. The defensive structures were built by the hands of Leningraders, for the most part women and teenagers (men went into the army and the militia). In total, over half a million civilians took part in the construction.
The German offensive was suspended for several weeks. The fascists failed to capture the city on the move. This delay infuriated Hitler, who made a special trip to Army Group North to prepare a plan for the capture of Leningrad no later than September 1941. In conversations with the military leaders, the Fuhrer, in addition to purely military arguments, gave many political arguments. He believed that the capture of Leningrad would give not only a military gain (control over all the Baltic coasts and the destruction of the Baltic fleet), but also bring huge political dividends. The Soviet Union will lose the city, which, being the cradle of the October Revolution, has a special symbolic meaning for the Soviet state. Besides,Hitler considered it very important not to give the Soviet command the opportunity to withdraw troops from the Leningrad region and use them in other sectors of the front. He hoped to destroy the troops defending the city.
At the end of August 1941, the German offensive resumed. German units broke through the Luga defensive line and rushed to Leningrad. On September 8, 1941, the enemy reached Lake Ladoga, captured Shlisselburg and blockaded Leningrad from land. This day is considered the day of the beginning of the blockade. All rail and road communications were severed. Communication with Leningrad was now supported only by air and Lake Ladoga. From the north, the city was blocked by Finnish troops, which were stopped at the turn of the state border in 1939, that is, the border that existed between the USSR and Finland on the eve of the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. On 11 September 1941, Finnish President Risto Ryti told the German envoy in Helsinki:
If St. Petersburg no longer exists as a large city, then the Neva would be the best border on the Karelian Isthmus … Leningrad must be liquidated as a large city.
The total area of Leningrad and its suburbs taken into the ring was about 5,000 square kilometers.
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Before the war, air defense exercises were often held. We are already accustomed to the fact that people carry bags with gas masks and were only afraid to get on a stretcher during these exercises - as injured or wounded - it was fraught with a loss of time until the end of the exercise.
June 22, 1941 began with sunny, warm weather. My father and older brother and I went to the city for another excursion. Father used to take us around the city and show us interesting corners.
We listened to Molotov's message at the beginning of Bolshoy Prospekt VO. Everyone who stood nearby had some concern; most were shocked.
I remember for the rest of my life how my father sadly said: "What an interesting time we live in!"
Starting from July, they began to collect non-ferrous metals and shovels. This was done in our house management and we - boys and teenagers - were in the wings.
A quad anti-aircraft machine gun was installed on the roof of our house. The calculation was based on the elderly (from our point of view, the elderly). They allowed us to help and we enthusiastically dragged boxes with cartridges into the attic. Well, they didn't quite carry them - the boxes were small, but very heavy, so two or three of us had to turn the boxes from step to step.
I can only imagine how hard it was for the soldiers to drag the quad maximum onto the roof, and even with a heavy pedestal. Our house was seven-story, pre-revolutionary construction - "Pertsevsky House" - it still stands on Ligovsky Prospekt near the Moscow railway station. Actually, this is not even a house - it is a whole quarter built by the Pertsev brothers in 1917, and there were planned shops, hotels, a theater and different categories of apartments for rent in it. A hefty apartment building complex. It was run by the Oktyabrskaya and Kirovskaya Railway Administrations and the families of railway workers lived there, and after a wave of repressions at the end of the 30s - and the NKVD officers, who entered the rooms vacated after the arrest. Their life was evidently also interesting - at the very beginning of the war, one of them shot himself with a hunting rifle right on his balcony - so that he could be seen from our kitchen. So much blood flowed out of it - I have not seen this even after the shelling.
Judge for yourself the size of the house, if in 1941 there were about 5,000 people living in the house. The apartments were naturally communal. 3-4 families each settled in the rooms calculated for the construction of a house for 1 family of average income. The high ceilings then played a role - it was very difficult to carry everything up the stairs - with large flights.
Then we carried the sand to the attic. There, they later saw how all the wooden parts were smeared with some kind of liquid. They said it was from the fires.
The sand was easier to carry than cartridges, but not so interesting. We did all this voluntarily. The danger in the air encouraged us to help adults.
Every day it became more and more alarming. Many refugees appeared in the city, some with cows. They looked dumbfounded.
Foods disappeared instantly, cards appeared.
The bombing began. The Badayev warehouses were burned down, and the Germans were also aiming at those places where there were markets. There was a flea market not far from us - it also got hit.
I remember it was getting dark, the sun was shining, and in half the sky there was a giant plume of black smoke from the burning Badayev warehouses. A terrible and wild sight. From this sight it became creepy.
The rapid advance of the Germans was very alarming. The Soviet Information Bureau was laconic, but the anxiety grew more and more. It seems that there was no power to stop this avalanche.
My father was sent to the construction of defensive structures.
From time to time he stopped by home and brought with him either millet or lentils.
(It's funny to see lentils sold at a high price in the store now - at that time lentils were considered fodder for horses and the fact that we began to eat them was also a sign of trouble.) Father did not expand on what he had seen, but felt that our situation is awful.
Father somehow dried up, turned black, was all in himself. The visits were very short-lived, sometimes my father slept for a couple of hours and left.
At the end of June, our school was evacuated to the village of Zamosc, 10 kilometers from the Verebe station. Oct Railway
As much as my mother opposed it, I had to go. Mom asked a neighbor, who had gone with her twin sons, to look after me as well.
It seems to me that I spent at least 3 weeks in this evacuation, or even less. I am not saying that the household side was poorly prepared. We slept on straw in huts. The food was also poor and hungry.
The neighbor settled down better, and bought food for her children, and cooked for them herself.
One fine evening, when we returned from work on weeding the beds from the rape, a remarkable event happened - along the main village street, a German plane quickly flew very low, on a low level flight. They saw him perfectly. I immediately wrote about this in a letter home.
A few days later my brother came to pick me up and we, together with a neighbor and her twins, went home. The school administration, who was there in the village, did not particularly oppose this.
They went to the station at night - during the day, German aviation was already shooting with might and main everything that moved along the roads. Through certain sections of the path, patrols stopped - they checked documents.
A neighbor settled down with the children on wagons with hay, which also went to the station, and my brother and I went and sang a comic song about 10 little indians who went to swim in the sea and for some reason drowned one after another.
The next day we were on the train to Leningrad. At the Malaya Vishera station, they saw from the window a German plane sprawled on an embankment. Falling, he knocked over a dozen telegraph poles.
It was a joy to be back home. During the evacuation, I never bathed in the bathhouse, and the food was bad, I was hungry all the time. We worked on weeding the rape. A powerful flower - the size of us. She is so beautiful, but on the weeding beds there was nothing but this colt …
Miraculously, the Germans captured on August 21. So, my brother and I slipped by a couple of weeks before. What happened to the rest of the children who were under the German - I don't know. But hardly many of them survived.
My father was in defense work, my mother was also at work, my brother was carrying out some assignments for the house administration. And I played with the guys in the yard, next to my mother's work. (When the bomb hit this house, fortunately we weren't there.)
Father returned for a while. He said that there were a lot of broken equipment on the road, the German aviation was raging, literally walking over the heads, chasing even lonely people and without mercy shoots refugees, although from a low-level flight it is perfectly clear that these are not military men. On the road along the side of the road, there were many corpses - women, children, he especially remembered the students of "crafts" - teenage boys from vocational schools huddled together - their corpses lay literally in heaps. For some reason it especially shocked him.
My father was depressed, we had never seen him like that, he was a very reserved person.
However, he did not have to rest for a long time - defensive structures continued to be built - already on the near approaches, but as a specialist he was valued (he did not have a higher education, but he had a wealth of experience in engineering positions, before the war he worked in the department for eliminating the consequences of accidents on the Kirov road, just before the war, he switched to another quieter job, because many were imprisoned in the department, and he was already aged - he was 55 years old.)
At this time, regular shelling had already begun … Basically, the area of Labor Square was subjected to strikes, and the boys and I ran there to collect fragments. Why the hell did we need them - it’s not clear, but silly collectors were proud of the collected ragged iron. Then it quickly passed, the novelty ended very soon.
One evening (late August - early September) I was at the corner of Gogol and Gorokhovaya. The traffic was regulated by a short, plump girl in military uniform and some kind of flat helmet. As soon as the air raid signal sounded, something squeaked out - I still had time to notice how something flashed obliquely in the air. The bomb hit the mansion of the famous countess next to the wall of the neighboring house (there was then a huge gap). I also managed to notice how the traffic controller ducked comically.
Interestingly, a trolleybus was passing by this place during the explosion, and it remained there. I quickly got away to the nearest bomb shelter, and after the release of the VT at the site of the explosion, a large cloud of smoke and dust swirled in place. They said that the Germans were dropping some kind of combined bombs. This bomb howled disgustingly.
It's funny that now they say that this building was not damaged during the blockade - I recently read it in a book - and before my eyes a bomb hit it … By the way, the NKVD medical unit was there …
At this time, there were continuous bombings at night. We several times went down the dark stairs to the basement, where those who lived there let us stand in the corridor. So we went down several times during the night. And then we climbed back down the dark stairs to our 4th floor (the height corresponds to the 6th floor of modern buildings - to make it clearer.)
Then we gave up such pleasure, deciding that it was destined - it will be. And my father rated the protective properties of our basement very low.
They did not respond to alarms, both slept and continued to sleep.
The raids were carried out by a large number of aircraft. If there was any resistance, I did not see it. Several times I went out into the courtyard during air raids - these were moonlit clear nights and the characteristic sounds of the engines of German bombers sounded at the height - at the same time some boring and alarming.
Something I did not hear or see our fighters. Anti-aircraft guns - those rattled and sometimes "our" machine gun fired …
Rumors at that time were very different, and the fact that there were many wounded also aggravated the situation. It was difficult to hide such quantities. Many schools were urgently engaged in hospitals. There was no question of studying - there was a center for refugees in our school, and in the next one a hospital was also deployed, and there were a lot of our wounded. It is true that several schools - obviously unsuitable for such purposes and in the blockade worked as schools.
There were also many refugees, and in connection with the blockade, they had nowhere to go. Most of them were from rural areas, and in the city they had hard times. I believe that most of them died in the blockade - on non-working rations, without the support of neighbors and relatives in frozen schools, it was almost impossible for them to survive.
Another category of almost completely dead were boys from the "crafts". Basically they were from other cities, lived in boarding schools and by and large were not interesting to anyone - for work - dropouts, and no longer children by age. And the minds are still childish. Yes, and their leadership also excelled - I heard that there were several trials with execution results, because the leadership of the “craftsmen” was engaged in fraudulent activities with products intended for students. One of the typical characters of the blockade is a crazed teenager artisan.
Even our family faced this …
Every day brought new - and bad news all the time. And I went to work with my mother and was looking forward to the time when we go to the dining room (corner of Gorokhovaya and Moika) - there is the so-called yeast soup. A liquid cloudy stew with hard particles of unknown origin.
I still remember with pleasure. When we stood in line - mostly on the street - we were certainly in danger of being hit by shelling, but we were lucky, the shells fell at that time in another area.
On the way to work, more houses destroyed by bombs were added every day. Destroyed Engelhardt's house. A direct hit destroyed a house opposite the Beloselsky-Belozersky palace … The destroyed building at the corner of Gogol and Kirpichny lane made a very depressing impression on me. The entire building collapsed, except for one wall.
Due to the fact that it was very unstable, it was piled up right in front of me, hooked with a hand winch. The winch was at the entrance of the Bank. There was a building - and no. There was no question of any rescue work - there, behind a liquid wooden fence, a half dozen girls from the Ministry of Defense Industry worked on dismantling. And they worked for several days. And upstairs - on some kind of stub of the ceiling, the bed remained.
In the evening we returned home. By this time, my brother was already buying something on the cards. The three of us already had dinner.
The state was such that the German would inevitably seize the city.
I had two steel balls from a ball mill, diameters 60-70 mm. I figured out, as soon as the Germans appeared in the yard - I would throw these balls at them …
Still, at 10 years old boys are silly …
And at my mother's work, I was engaged in solving arithmetic problems for grade 3 - using an adding machine. It was really fun! I read something. I didn’t remember anything, probably because all my thoughts were about a piece of bread.
It is interesting that when a person is simply hungry, he dreams of something tasty, some complicated dishes, but when he is already seriously starving - all thoughts are about bread - he was convinced by many blockades. My neighbor, Borka, dreamed to hunger of how they would buy him a "togtik" after the war (he was a lardy one), and then - like a stinker - and until his death in December - he dreamed only about "bread".
And in the wife's family it was the same.
There is still no information about the situation at the front. The Soviet Information Bureau sparingly reported on the surrender of the cities. And what was happening near Leningrad was completely unknown. Although the roar of cannonade sounded all the time and it was clear that this city was being shelled (which rumbled louder) and a terrible thresher was going under the city.
Messages like “On the Leningrad front, the Nsk unit carried out a successful operation. Killed 500 soldiers and officers of the fascist invaders, destroyed 1 tank. did not give any clarity.
Everything in the city was whispered from mouth to mouth. There was both truth and fiction, but no matter how hard our leadership tried, it was clear to everyone that the situation was very difficult, maybe even catastrophic.
At home, new problems began - from November it suddenly became very cold. Father took care in advance, bringing us a potbelly stove - a tin stove and pipes. We were one of the first to install this stove and could heat up and boil the kettle and heat the food. The fact is that before the war, food was cooked on kerosene stoves and primus. For this, kerosene was used. But in the fall, the kerosene ran out.
The question arose - where to get firewood? My brother armed himself with a crowbar - a short crowbar - and during his campaigns he got some kind of tree - most often he brought boards torn off from somewhere. On the shoulders of my brother - he was five years older than me - the main burden fell. Now I think with a shudder how hard it was for him, he literally pulled out his family, getting firewood, buying bread and food. How did he have the strength? With me he was stern and demanding. He was generally exemplary. And I was a slob.
The water supply system was up in November. Naturally, there was no heating either …
Here we are convinced - the more benefits of civilization, the harder it is to refuse them. We quickly slipped literally into the cave level of life.
It should be noted that the more primitive people lived before the war, the easier it was for them during the blockade. Recently I saw the memoirs of actor Krasko - his family lived on the outskirts in a village house on the side of the Finnish part of the blockade. So they entered the blockade with a toilet, a well, a supply of firewood, their normal stove, a vegetable garden and a supply of food from this garden. At first they even had milk.
Well, the German long-range fighters and aviation did not gouge them.
It was also a little easier for those who lived in houses with stove heating. There are still many of them in the center. And our house was advanced - with central heating. Plumbing. Electricity. Sewerage.
And it was all over.
The only good thing is that the bombing is almost over. From the fall of bombs, our domina swayed like a ship on the waves (I never would have thought that this was possible and it would not fall apart). Three 200 bombs fell in front of our house. The first one smashed the beer stall. The second flew into the six-story building opposite. The third is through the house. They said that they were allegedly thrown by a German pilot, she was shot down and taken prisoner. But the shelling became more frequent and lasted longer.