Leningrad полностью

While the battle of Stalingrad was still at its height, Stalin ordered another push to liberate Leningrad. Code-named Operation Iskra, or ‘Spark’, it was essentially a better planned, better equipped repeat of the previous August’s Sinyavino offensive. The Leningrad armies would force the Neva at three points along the river south of Shlisselburg; the Volkhov armies would thrust westwards, meeting up with them south of Ladoga. A preliminary attempt to drive tanks across the Neva failed, the ice proving not yet thick enough to bear their weight, and the operation was put off to 12 January, by which time the temperature had fallen to -15 °C. Overseen by Zhukov, it began at first light, with a two-hour barrage from more than 4,500 guns. This time the tanks got across, on ingeniously designed pontoons that had been moved into place under cover of darkness and frozen into position with water sucked from under the ice. By the end of the day a bridgehead five kilometres long and one kilometre deep had been established on the Neva’s southern bank. By the 14th the two Soviet fronts were only three miles apart, and at 9.30 in the morning of the 18th they finally met, at peatworks that have gone down in history as ‘Workers’ Settlements nos 1 and 5’, but which were in reality outposts of the Gulag. Later the same day the Red Army liberated Shlisselburg. It was almost empty, all but a few hundred of its inhabitants having died of starvation, been sent away as slave labourers or fled together with the Germans.

In Leningrad, crowds gathered round the street-corner loudspeakers. ‘An extraordinary day’, wote Vera Inber on the 16th:

The entire city is waiting. . Any moment now! People are saying that our fronts — the Leningrad and the Volkhov — have joined up. Officially nothing is known. .

Somewhere guns are booming. The all-clear has just sounded. Ordinary siege life goes on, but everyone is waiting. Nobody says anything — nobody dares to, in case a wrong word gets to wherever our fate is being decided, and changes it all. I’m perplexed and bewildered. I can’t find a place for myself. I try to write and can’t.7

The official announcement came two days later, pasted up in massive lettering on posters all over the city. ‘The blockade is broken! The blockade is broken!’ exulted Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva. ‘What happiness, what joy! All night nobody slept. Some wept for joy, some celebrated, some just shouted. . We’re no longer cut off from the Motherland! We share a pulse!’8 ‘Everybody congratulates each other’, wrote Dmitri Lazarev, ‘recounts how and from whom they heard the news — how women ran out of the building managers’ offices, who kissed who, who crossed themselves. . Never mind the raids and the bombardments, however hard or frequent. The blockade is broken — it’s the beginning of the end!’9

It was the beginning of the end, but only that. The victory was cheap by Soviet standards (34,000 killed, missing or captured) but far from complete.10 The Red Army had broken the German hold on Lake Ladoga, but had cleared only a fragile corridor to the ‘mainland’, just five miles wide at its narrowest point. South and west of Leningrad, the German armies still crouched in the outer suburbs. (Fritz Hockenjos, peering from his new observation post — another monastery bell tower — on the Gulf of Finland, could see cars and pedestrians moving along the streets, and count the windows in a government building.11) In February 1943 a second operation, ‘Polar Star’, aimed to lift the siege completely by encircling Germany’s Eighteenth Army to the west, cutting its railway connection to the rear at Pskov. It failed thanks to rain, Hitler’s belated caution after Stalingrad, and to the Spanish Blue Division, which successfully defended its positions in vicious hand-to-hand trench fighting. (Hockenjos, who had earlier dismissed the Spaniards as ‘a great bunch of caballeros, dagger-wielders and operetta tenors’, presumably had to eat his words.)

The corridor did, however, allow the construction of a new thirty-four-kilometre temporary railway line into Leningrad, via a pontoon bridge over the Neva. The first train direct from the ‘mainland’ rolled into Finland Station on 7 February, to speeches, bunting and a brass band. Decorated with oak-leaf-wreathed portraits of Stalin and Molotov and a banner proclaiming ‘Death to the Fascist German Usurpers!’, it is said to have carried butter (‘for Leningrad’s children’) and kittens, the latter in great demand thanks to a plague of rats. Vulnerable to shelling until the Germans were finally pushed off the Sinyavino ridge in September, the line supplemented what were now well-organised ice and barge routes over Lake Ladoga.