The story about the siege of Leningrad. Siege Leningrad - terrible memories of that time

St. Petersburg (Leningrad) is one of the largest spiritual, political, economic, scientific and cultural centers of the country. Then, in June 1941, few people suspected that what has to be endured city ​​over the next three years, laying hundreds of thousands of their sons and daughters on the altar of common Victory. My family had no idea about this. In the Red Army in those fateful days on Northwestern Front My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Nikolai Danilovich Poluyanchik, served as a career officer. (Three times holder of the Order of the Red Star, lieutenant colonel (04/26/1913-08/02/1999) was born in Petrograd into the family of a peasant in the Minsk province, Slutsk district, Lanskaya volost, the village of Yaskovichi, in the family of Daniil Iosifovich and his wife Evdokia Nikolaevna.)

The German offensive against the Soviet Union was to develop in three main directions. Army Group "South" advances from the Lublin region to Zhitomir and Kyiv, Army Group "Center" from the Warsaw region to Minsk, Smolensk, Moscow, Army Group "North" advances from East Prussia through the Baltic republics to Pskov and Leningrad. The North group included the 16th and 18th armies, the 1st air fleet and the 4th tank group, a total of 29 divisions, the total number of troops reached approximately 500 thousand people. The troops were well armed and equipped with advanced communications equipment. Hitler entrusted the command of the North group to Field Marshal von Leeb, who was tasked with destroying parts of the Soviet Army located in the Baltic states and developing an offensive through Dvinsk, Pskov, Luga, capturing all naval bases on the Baltic Sea and capturing Leningrad by July 21 .

From the memoirs of Nikolai Danilovich Poluyanchik’s great-grandfather: “By June 29, 1941, our 708th regiment. 115 s.d. was advanced to the state border in the area of ​​Lahtenpokhya, took up defense on the left flank of the 168th Rifle Division. 7 pages army. The enemy delivered the main blow at the junction of the 7th and 23rd armies, trying to break through to the northwestern coast of Lake Ladoga. On 07/04/1941, with the help of two rifle regiments, the enemy managed to break through the defenses in the Mensuvaari area and develop an offensive towards the city of Lakhdenpokhya. 08/10/1941, launching a new offensive with the main attack on in this direction. After stubborn fighting, the enemy broke through the defenses at the junction of the 462nd and 708th rifle regiments. We retreated to the defense zone of the 168th infantry division. On this day, the Finns captured the city of Lakhdenpohya and reached the coast of Lake Ladoga. At this time I received my first shrapnel wound on the right side of my face. In the hospital in Leningrad, the fragment was removed, and I was sent by the city’s transit point to my division, which, without the 708th regiment. fought a defensive battle in the area of ​​Vyborg. The troops of the 23rd Army received orders to retreat to the line of the former Manngerheim line. 08/26/1941 in a defensive battle at the headquarters of the 115th rifle division. I received a second shrapnel wound in the knee joint of my right leg and was evacuated to Leningrad. Then by plane to Moscow. Then on a sanitary train to Orenburg to evacuation hospital No. 3327.”

In July 1941, in heavy bloody battles, the troops of the Northwestern and Northern fronts, sailors of the Baltic Front, and the people's militia detained the enemy on the distant approaches to Leningrad, at the cost of heavy losses in early September, the Nazis managed to get directly to the city. Having failed to capture the city on the move, the enemy switched to a long siege.

From the memoirs of Galina Nikolaevna Ugarova: “My husband Dmitry Semenovich Ugarov was medically unfit for military service, but he considered it his duty to volunteer for the front. He is part of one of the divisions people's militia defended the suburbs of Leningrad - Pulkovo, Gatchina.” Dmitry Semenovich Ugarov will bear the brunt of the first battles on his shoulders, according to his memoirs: “The personnel of the militia divisions was extremely varied: young people who first picked up rifles in their hands, and mature people who had experience civil war. Volunteers were quickly trained and quickly sent to the front. Insufficient training of new formations and their weak armament resulted in many casualties. Only severe necessity forced such measures.”

All its inhabitants rose to defend Leningrad. In a short time it was turned into fortress city. Leningraders built 35 kilometers of barricades, 4,170 pillboxes, 22 thousand firing points, created detachments air defense, in factories and factories - security detachments, organized watches in houses, equipped first-aid posts.

More than 475 thousand people worked on the construction of defensive structures near Leningrad from July to December. 626 km of anti-tank ditches were dug, 50 thousand ditches were installed, 306 kilometers of forest debris, 635 km of wire fences, 935 km of communication passages, 15 thousand pillboxes and bunkers were built. In Leningrad itself, 110 defense centers built 25 km of barricades, 570 artillery pillboxes, about 3,600 machine-gun pillboxes, 17 thousand embrasures in buildings, about 12 thousand rifle cells and a large number of other buildings.

During the blockade, 2 thousand tanks, 1,500 aircraft, 225 thousand machine guns, 12 thousand mortars, about 10 million shells and mines were manufactured and repaired. At the very difficult period Unprecedented in the history of the blockade during September-November 1941, the norms for the distribution of bread to the population were reduced 5 times. From November 20, 1941, workers began to receive 250 grams of surrogate bread per day, employees and dependents - 125 grams. To help Leningrad and its defenders, by decision of the Central Committee of the Party and the Government, the “Road of Life” was created.

Winter. The driver of the truck, driving around the snowdrifts, was in a hurry to deliver freshly baked bread before the opening of the stores. At the corner of Rastannaya and Ligovka, a shell exploded near a truck. The front part of the body was cut off like a scythe, loaves of bread scattered on the pavement, the driver was killed by a shrapnel. The conditions for theft are favorable, there is no one and no one to ask. Passers-by, noticing that the bread was not guarded by anyone, raised the alarm, surrounded the scene of the disaster and did not leave until another car with a bakery forwarder arrived. The loaves were collected and delivered to stores. The hungry people guarding the car with bread felt an irresistible need for food, however, no one allowed themselves to take even a piece of bread. Who knows, maybe soon many of them died of hunger.

Despite all the suffering, Leningraders did not lose either honor or courage. I quote the story of Tatyana Nikolaevna Bushalova: “In January, I began to weaken from hunger, I spent a lot of time in bed. My husband Mikhail Kuzmich worked as an accountant in a construction trust. He was also bad, but still went to work every day. On the way, he stopped by to the store, received bread on his and my card and returned home late in the evening. I divided the bread into 3 parts and into. certain time We ate one piece at a time, drinking tea. The water was heated on a stove. They took turns burning chairs, a wardrobe, and books. I looked forward to the evening hour when my husband came home from work. Misha quietly told us who of our friends had died, who was sick, and whether it was possible to exchange things for bread. Unnoticed, I slipped him a larger piece of bread; if he noticed, he became very angry and refused to eat at all, believing that I was infringing on myself. We resisted the approaching death as best we could. But everything comes to an end. And it came. On November 11, Misha did not return home from work. Not finding a place for myself, I waited for him all night, and at dawn I asked my apartment neighbor Ekaterina Yakovlevna Malinina to help me find my husband.

Katya responded to help. We took the children's sled and followed my husband's route. We stopped, rested, and with each passing hour our strength left us. After long search we found Mikhail Kuzmich dead on the sidewalk. He had a watch on his hand and 200 rubles in his pocket. No cards were found." Hunger revealed the true essence of each person.

Many construction sites were in close proximity from the enemy and were subjected to artillery fire. People worked 12 - 14 hours a day, often in the rain, in soaking wet clothes. This required great physical endurance.

The population of the besieged city eagerly awaited news of the 54th Army advancing from the east. On January 13, 1942, the offensive of the troops of the Volokhov Front began. At the same time, the 54th Army also went on the offensive in the direction of Pogostya Leningrad Front under the command of Major General I. I. Fedyuninsky. The offensive of the troops developed slowly. The enemy himself attacked our positions, and the army was forced to conduct defensive battles instead of attacking. By the end of January 14 strike forces The 54th Army crossed the Volkhov River and captured a number of settlements on the opposite bank.

Under the blockade, the most difficult thing was to supply the population and troops with food and water, the front's military equipment with fuel, plants and factories with raw materials and fuel. Food supplies in the city were dwindling every day. The norms for food distribution were gradually reduced. From November 20 to December 25, 1941, they were the lowest, negligible: workers and engineers received only up to 250 grams of surrogate bread, and employees, dependents and children - only 125 grams per day! There was almost no flour in this bread. It was baked from chaff, bran, and cellulose. This was almost the only food for Leningraders. Those who had carpenter's glue and rawhide belts at home also ate them.

From the memoirs of my great-grandfather Nikolai Danilovich Poluyanchik: “My wife Poluyanchik\Shuvalova\Tamara Pavlovna lived in Leningrad with her parents Pavel Efimovich Shuvalov and Klavdia Ivanovna Shuvalova. This winter of 1941-1942 they had to cook jelly from glue. In those days, this was the only salvation for their lives.” The blockade brought other difficult trials to the Leningraders. In the winter of 1941-1942, the city was shackled by a severe cold. There was no fuel or electricity. Exhausted by hunger, exhausted and exhausted by continuous bombing and shelling, Leningraders lived in unheated rooms with windows covered with cardboard because the glass had been broken by the blast wave. The smokehouses were dimly lit. The water supply and sewer systems froze. To get water for drinking, one had to go to the Neva embankment, laboriously go down onto the ice, take water from quickly freezing ice holes, and then deliver it home under fire.

Trams, trolleybuses and buses stopped. Leningraders had to walk to work along snow-covered and uncleared streets. The main "transport" for city residents is children's sleds. They carried belongings from destroyed houses, furniture for heating, water from an ice hole in cans or saucepans, seriously ill and dead people wrapped in sheets (there was no wood for the coffins).

Death entered all houses. Exhausted people died right on the streets. Over 640 thousand Leningraders died from hunger. From the memoirs of my great-grandfather Poluyanchik Nikolai Danilovich: “My parents Poluyanchik Daniil Osipovich and Poluyanchik Evdokia Nikolaevna were in the besieged city. They lived in house No. 92 on the street. Embankment of the river Sinks. In the cold winter of 1942, my father died of hunger. My mother, on a children's sleigh, overcoming pain and suffering, according to Christian customs, took her husband to the church where they got married, where their children were baptized, for the funeral service.\photo24\ . (Metropolitan of Ladoga and St. Petersburg Alexy (Simansky) refused to leave the city, and, starving together with the population every day, despite the bombing, he celebrated the Liturgy. For consecration, instead of the prosphora required for the service, people carried small pieces of cellulose bread - the highest sacrifice. ) After that, I took my husband on a sled to St. Isaac's Cathedral, where special funeral services took dead people. My father was buried at the Piskarevskoye cemetery, but in what grave it is not known. My mother didn’t have the strength to get to the cemetery.”

My great-grandfather’s father is Poluyanchik Daniil Osipovich, born in Belarus in the Minsk province of Slutsk district, Lanskaya volost, village of Yaskovichi in 1885, nowBaranovichi district. He worked as a printer in three printing houses in Leningrad. Married in 1912. He was not called up for military service. He died in Leningrad from hunger during the blockade in March 1942. He was taken by his wife on a sled to the church and then by car to the cemetery. He was buried in a mass grave at the Piskarevskoye cemetery.

My great-grandfather lived with his parents, brother and sister in a house on the river embankment. Moiki, studied at school No. 42 in Leningrad.From the memoirs of Galina Nikolaevna Ugarova: “The father and mother of my husband Dmitry Semenovich Ugarov lived in besieged Leningrad. In the winter of 1943, they were severely exhausted. One winter day, the husband’s father, Semyon Ivanovich Ugarov, went to see his brother. A few hours later, his wife Vera Ivanovna Ugarova went in search of her missing husband with her sister Anna Ivanovna Kuracheva. She never found her husband.”

The enemies hoped that severe hardships would awaken base, animal instincts in Leningraders and drown out everything in them. human feelings. They thought that starving, freezing people would quarrel among themselves over a piece of bread, over a log of firewood, would stop defending the city and, in the end, would surrender it. On January 30, 1942, Hitler cynically declared: "We are not deliberately storming Leningrad. Leningrad will eat itself up" . The work of 39 schools in the besieged city was a challenge to the enemy. Even in the terrible conditions of besieged life, when there was not enough food, firewood, water, and warm clothes, many Leningrad children studied. Writer Alexander Fadeev said: “And the greatest feat of Leningrad schoolchildren was that they studied.”

At the time of the blockade, there were 2 million 544 thousand people in the city civilian population, including about 400 thousand children. In addition, 343 thousand people remained in suburban areas (in the blockade ring). In September, when systematic bombing, shelling and fires began, many thousands of families wanted to leave, but the routes were cut off. Mass evacuation of citizens began only in January 1942 along the ice road.

November came, Ladoga began to gradually become covered in ice. By November 17, the ice thickness reached 100 mm, which was not enough to open traffic. Everyone was waiting for frost.

On November 22, the long-awaited day came when the cars took to the ice. Observing intervals, at low speed, they followed the tracks of the horses to collect the cargo.

It seemed that the worst was now behind us, we could breathe more freely. But the harsh reality overturned all calculations and hopes for a quick improvement in the nutrition of the population.

But in the beginning, transportation across the lake provided negligible amounts compared to what was needed.

At first they carried two or three bags of flour on sleighs, then they sent cars with bodies half loaded. The drivers began to attach sleighs on cables to the cars, and the sleighs were also loaded with flour. Soon it was possible to take a full load, and the vehicles - first one-and-a-half-ton, then three-ton and even five-ton - went out onto the lake: the ice had strengthened.

On November 22, the convoy returned, leaving 33 tons of food in the city. The next day, only 19 tons were delivered. On November 25, only 70 tons were delivered, the next day - 150 tons. On November 30th the weather became warmer and only 62 tons were transported.

On December 22, 700 tons of food were delivered across the lake, and the next day 100 tons more. On December 25, the first increase in the standards for the distribution of bread occurred: to workers by 100 grams, to employees, dependents and children by 75 grams. Galina Ivanovna notes how much joy and tears people had because of these grams.

During the entire operation of the road, 361,419 tons of various cargo were delivered to Leningrad along it, of which 262,419 tons were food. This not only improved the supply of the heroic Leningraders, but also made it possible to create a certain supply of food by the time the ice road was completed, amounting to 66,930 tons.

The ice road also played a role important role in the evacuation of the city population. It was very difficult task. It was not the amateur part of the population that was subject to evacuation from Leningrad, but also the workers of evacuated factories, institutions, scientists and etc.

Mass evacuation began in the second half of January 1942, after the State Defense Committee on January 22, 1942. adopted a resolution to evacuate 500 thousand residents of Leningrad.

From the memoirs of my great-grandfather Nikolai Danilovich Poluyanchik: “My wife Tamara Pavlovna Poluyanchik, together with her parents P.E. Shuvalov, K.I. Shuvalova and her mother’s sister Anna Ivanovna Kuracheva, were taken out along the ice “Road of Life” in January 1942. My sister left Leningrad at the insistence of my mother Evdokia. Sister Nadezhda had two young children. They were evacuated to Kazakhstan.”

At the beginning of December 1942, Soviet troops surrounded, and in January - early February 1943 they defeated the main enemy group, broke through the German defenses and went on the offensive, throwing the enemy hundreds of kilometers to the west, taking advantage of the favorable situation, the troops of the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts, reinforced reserves attacked the enemy’s fortified positions south of Ladoga from both sides.

The sixteen-month blockade of Leningrad through the efforts Soviet soldiers On January 18, 1943 it was broken through.

The city's supply improved dramatically. Coal was brought in, industry received electricity, frozen plants and factories came to life. The city was regaining its strength.

The general situation on Soviet-German front remained tense and did not allow a complete defeat at this time German troops near Leningrad.

The situation by the end of 1943 had changed radically. Our troops were preparing for new decisive blows against the enemy.

The hour of reckoning has arrived. Lenfront troops, well trained and equipped with military equipment, under the command of Army General Govorov, went on the offensive from the Oranienbaum and Pulkovo areas in mid-January 1944. Forts and ships Baltic Fleet opened hurricane fire on the fortified positions of the Germans. At the same time, the Volkhov Front struck the enemy with all its might. 2nd Baltic Front before the start of the Leningrad offensive and Volkhov fronts by active actions he pinned down the enemy reserves and did not allow them to be transferred to Leningrad. As a result of carefully developed talented commanders plan, well-organized interaction between troops of three fronts and the Baltic Fleet, the strongest group of Germans was defeated, and Leningrad was completely freed from the blockade.

“From the memoirs of Galina Nikolaevna Ugarova: “The brother of my husband Dmitry Semenovich Ugarov-Ugarov Vladimir Semenovich survived the blockade. He worked at the Marty Admiralty Shipyards and received an increased ration card as an employee. He survived thanks to his mother Vera Ivanovna Ugarova, who herself did not live to see the victory for 1 year and died of exhaustion in 1944. Even when the food supply improved, exhausted, malnourished people continued to die."

1.5 million defenders of Leningrad were awarded the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad", including my relatives.

Chronological dates of some important events of the siege of Leningrad.

1941

4 September The beginning of the artillery shelling of Leningrad

8 September German capture of Shlisselburg. The beginning of the siege of Leningrad. The first massive enemy air raid on the city.

12-th of September Reducing the norms for issuing bread, meat, and cereals to the population. Arrival of the first ships with food from the eastern shore of Lake Ladoga in Osinovets.

September 29 Stabilization of the front line around Leningrad.

October 1 Reducing the norms for the distribution of bread to the population and the norms for rationing the troops.

the 13th of November Reduction in food distribution to the population

November 16 The beginning of the transfer of food cargo by plane to Leningrad.

20 November Reducing the norms for the distribution of bread and other food to the population

November 22 The beginning of vehicle traffic along the Ice Road across the lake

9th December Destruction German group near Tikhvin. Liberation of Tikhvin from the invaders.

December 25 The first increase in the norms for the distribution of bread to the population

1942

1943

1944

Eternal flames burn at Piskarevskoye and Serafimovskoye cemeteries .

Its monuments and monuments, the names of streets, squares, and embankments tell different stories. Many of them are like scars left over from severe trials and bloody battles. Time, however, does not extinguish the living feeling of human gratitude to those who with their lives blocked the path to the city of the fascist hordes. Cutting through the sky, a tetrahedral obelisk rose at the entrance to the city, in its southern front gate, on the sides of which, like our contemporaries, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, stood the bronze figures of the heroic participants in the legendary defense of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War; hundreds of thousands of Soviet people, with their labor or their own resources, took part in its construction. It turned into a 220-kilometer belt of Glory, dressed in granite and concrete of monuments, memorials, a fiery, incompressible blockade ring: at Pulkovo and Yam-Izhora, at Kolpin, at the Pulkovo Heights, in the area of ​​​​Ligov and the former Uritsk, along the borders of the Oranienbaum “patch”, on the Nevsky "patch" stood frozen, like immortal sentries, in a guard of honor, obelisks, steles, memorial signs, sculptures raised on pedestals of weapons and combat vehicles. Commemorative wayposts were lined along the Road of Life from Leningrad to the Ladoga shore. Eternal flames burn at Piskarevskoye and Serafimovskoye cemeteries

Bibliography

Literature:

Molchanov A.V. Heroic defense of Leningrad. St. Petersburg: “Madam”, 2007. 57 p.,

Survivors of the siege/Comp. S.A. Irkhin. Yaroslavl, “Upper Volga”, 2005. 156 p.

The feat of Leningrad//Ontology of works of art about the war in 12 volumes. T.3. M., Sovremennik., 1987, 564 p.

Pavlov D. S. Leningrad under siege. M.: “Young Guard”, 1989. 344 p.

Zhukov G.K. Memories and reflections.M. Press Agency "News", 1990.T.2.368 p.

Lisochkin I.I. With fire and blood in half. M. "Science", 312 p.

Ladoga Rodnaya. Leningrad. Lenizdat, 1969 487p.

Defense of Leningrad 1941-1944. M. "Science", 1968 675s.

Vinogradov I.V. Heroes and destinies. Leningrad. Lenizdat, 1988 312s.

Bezman E.S. Sentinels of partisan broadcast. M. Science, 1976 267p.

Tributs. V.F. The Baltic people go into battle. Leningrad. Lenizdat, 1973, 213 p.

Periodicals:

“Battle for Leningrad” // “Red Star” 09/04/1991.

On January 27th we celebrate the breakthrough Siege of Leningrad, which allowed in 1944 to complete one of the most tragic pages world history. In this review we have collected 10 ways that helped real people survive the siege years. Perhaps this information will be useful to someone in our time.

During the Siege of Leningrad it was incredibly difficult for families with children, especially the youngest. Indeed, in conditions of food shortages, many mothers in the city stopped producing breast milk. However, women found ways to save their baby. History knows several examples of how nursing mothers cut the nipples on their breasts so that the babies would receive at least some calories from the mother's blood.

By the way, in Leningrad after the war, two monuments were erected to cats from the so-called “meowing division”, which made it possible to cope with the invasion of rodents that were destroying the last food supplies.

***
The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944. According to the documents of the Nuremberg trials, during this time 632 thousand people out of 3 million pre-war population died from hunger, cold and bombing.

But the Siege of Leningrad is far from the only example of our military and civil valor in the twentieth century. On the site website you can also read about during Winter War 1939-1940, about why the fact of its breakthrough by Soviet troops became a turning point in military history.

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 the liberal public, primarily represented by 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 “Crocodile of Ensign Medinsky”), in 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.”

Unexpectedly, a way out was suggested by Admiral of the Baltic Fleet V.F. Tributs, who was in the office. They stood on the Neva submarines frozen in ice. 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 of 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, graduate of the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, “father Soviet physics"(teacher of P. Kapitsa, I. Kurchatov, L. Landau, Yu. Khariton) wrote: “Nowhere, never have I seen such a rapid pace of transition of 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 presented with prototypes of the Sudaev submachine gun, modified in Leningrad, the teaching staff - in the besieged city at the Sestroretsk plant, for the first time in the USSR, they began production of this best submachine gun of World War II.

In addition to military tasks, issues of food supply and the military 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. Through the efforts of the Leningrad authorities, even with significant destruction utilities, outbreaks of epidemics were prevented - but in a besieged city with non-functioning water supply and sewerage 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 carried out everything political leadership. I remembered him as a person who was quite scrupulous in everything that related to material matters.”

Daniil Natanovich Alshits (Al), native Petersburger, doctor historical sciences, a 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 the leaders of the defense of Leningrad sound funny: Leningraders were starving, and even dying from hunger, and the bosses in Smolny ate their fill, “gorged themselves.” 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 did not eat any buns... 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. 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, these were not 125 grams, which were due to the dependent at the very crisis period 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 the 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. Their nerves were shattered; most of them suffered from chronic diseases of the 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, my dad often took me with him to Zhdanov’s house, on Kamenny Island. And if he had fruit or candy, he would probably treat me. But I don’t remember this.”

A. Smolina: Two cousins ​​of my grandmother on my mother’s side died during the Leningrad blockade. There are all the relatives who left Leningrad during the famine years and dispersed throughout Leningrad region, part of which then territorially moved to the Novgorod region, they survived. And not those who left Leningrad... I don’t know how many of our relatives initially lived there, but after the death of two grandmother’s cousins ​​during the siege, it was believed that there were no relatives left in Leningrad on my mother’s side. There were some distant ones, but contact with them was long lost.

But I remember well the conversations about those very blockade days. Adults said that hunger was not for everyone; the city authorities, just as they were fat before the war, did not offend themselves even during the war years. The adults also said that the Germans allowed Leningraders to leave the city, but the Leningrad authorities reacted weakly and did not take any enhanced measures to remove the civilian population from the surrounded city.

Naturally, adults also remembered cannibals. These conversations were conducted between our own people, but we children didn’t really listen. So now we have to get information from outside sources, fortunately there is an opportunity to look into the secret archives.
True, this does not bring great joy, since with each new acquaintance comes another confirmation of the inhumanity of the communist regime (may its adherents forgive me). Maybe that’s why they plan to close the archives again? Or was it already closed?

Sergey Murashov:

Siege of Leningrad: who needed it?

During the blockade of the city by the troops of the Wehrmacht and German allies, from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944, up to two million people died in Leningrad (according to Wikipedia estimates: from 600,000 to 1,500,000), and these data do not take into account Leningraders who died after evacuation from the city, and there were also many of these: there were no methods for treating patients in a state of extreme exhaustion and the mortality rate turned out to be very high. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%..

Only about 3% of Leningraders died from shelling and bombing, the remaining 97% died of hunger, and there is nothing strange in this, since there were weeks when the daily ration of some categories of citizens was only 125 grams of bread - this is as much as many of us eat at breakfast, spreading bread with butter or jam, eating omelettes or cheesecakes...

But the siege bread was different from what we were used to: in its production they used edible cellulose, cotton cake, spruce needles... But even such bread was given out on cards that could be lost or stolen - and people were simply left alone with hunger: most of our contemporaries do not understand what it is - hunger, they have never experienced it, they confuse the habit of regular eating with hunger.

And hunger is when you eat rats, pigeons, cockroaches

Hunger is when you kill your own cat so you can eat it.

Hunger is when you lure a woman to you in order to kill her and devour her.

In December 1941, 26 cannibals were identified in Leningrad.

In January 1942 there were already 336 people.

And in the first two weeks of February, 494 cannibals were already arrested.

I have not looked for complete data on cannibalism in Leningrad, but there is no doubt that even these figures do not reflect the real state of affairs.

Report on cases of cannibalism in besieged Leningrad.
True, the text is difficult to read and therefore I will provide below printout

So, the history of the siege of Leningrad is one of the greatest crises of mankind, a history of unparalleled personal heroism of millions of Leningraders and millions of personal tragedies.

But the question is: was it possible to save the lives of Leningraders?

No, I’m not even talking about abandoning defense and surrendering the city to the Germans, although the terrible consequences for the townspeople in this case, put forward by Soviet propaganda as a reason for choosing defense even in conditions complete blockade, - are unlikely to be sufficiently substantiated.

I'm talking about something else. The fact that Leningrad did not just survive all the years of the siege. Leningrad produced industrial and military products, supplying them not only to the troops defending the city, but also “to the mainland” - beyond the blockade ring:

A. Smolina: Excellent material based on facts. If the city found the opportunity, as reports from Leningrad of that time are full of, to remove 60 tanks, 692 guns, more than 1,500 mortars, 2,692 heavy machine guns, 34,936 PPD machine guns, 620 PPS machine guns, 139 light machine guns, 3,000,000 shells and mines, 40,000 rockets rows , then only a child could believe that there was no way to supply the besieged city with food.

But besides personal memories and personal experience, there is irrefutable evidence:
"On Nuremberg trials the figure was announced - 632 thousand dead Leningraders. Only 3% of them died from bombing and shelling, the remaining 97% died from starvation."

In the encyclopedia compiled by St. Petersburg historian Igor Bogdanov “The Leningrad Siege from A to Z” in the chapter “Special Supply” we read:

"In archival documents there is not a single fact of starvation among representatives of the district committees, city committees, regional committees of the All-Union Communist Party of Belarus. On December 17, 1941, the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council allowed the Leningrad Restaurant to serve dinner without ration cards to district committee secretaries communist party, chairmen of executive committees of district councils, their deputies and secretaries of executive committees of district councils."

I wonder who the Leningrad Main Restaurant continued to function for?

Has anyone heard of those who died during the siege from hunger? Leningrad clergy? Not a single similar fact for post-war years didn't slip through. Children, women, old people, the sick died, but not a single party boss, not a single priest. After all, this can’t happen if everyone has the same conditions?

More interesting fact:105 pets of the Leningrad Zoo survived the blockade, including large predators, and experimental animals of the Pavlov Institute. And now estimate how much meat each predator needed per day.

Well, I’m posting the promised printout of “Report on cases of cannibalism in besieged Leningrad.” The number of cannibals is in the hundreds. Is this the 20th century?

About cases of cannibalism
FROM THE REPORT
notes from military prosecutor A.I. Panfilenko A.A. Kuznetsov
February 21, 1942

In the conditions of the special situation in Leningrad created by the war with Nazi Germany, arose the new kind crimes

All [murders] for the purpose of eating the meat of the dead, due to their special danger, were qualified as banditry (Article 59-3 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR).

At the same time, taking into account that the overwhelming majority of the above type of crimes concerned the eating of corpse meat, the Leningrad prosecutor's office, guided by the fact that by their nature these crimes are especially dangerous against the order of government, qualified them by analogy with banditry (under Art. 16- 59-3 CC).

Since the emergence of this type of crime in Leningrad, i.e. from the beginning of December 1941 to February 15, 1942, the investigation authorities brought criminal charges for committing crimes: in December 1941 - 26 people, in January 1942 - 366 people and in the first 15 days of February 1942 - 494 people.

Whole groups of people were involved in a number of murders for the purpose of eating human flesh, as well as crimes involving eating corpse meat.

In some cases, persons who committed such crimes not only ate corpse meat themselves, but also sold it to other citizens.

The social composition of persons put on trial for committing the above crimes is characterized by the following data:

1. By gender:
men - 332 people (36.5%)
women - 564 people (63.5%).

2. By age:
from 16 to 20 years old - 192 people (21.6%)
from 20 to 30 years old - 204 people (23.0%)
from 30 to 40 years old - 235 people (26.4%)
over 49 years old - 255 people (29.0%)

3. By party affiliation:
members and candidates of the CPSU(b) - 11 people (1.24%)
Komsomol members - 4 people (0.4%)
non-party members - 871 people (98.51%)

4. By occupation, those brought to criminal liability are distributed as follows:
workers - 363 people (41.0%)
employees - 40 people (4.5%)
peasants - 6 people (0.7%)
unemployed - 202 people (22.4%)
persons without certain occupations - 275 people (31.4%)

Among those brought to criminal responsibility for committing the above crimes there are specialists with higher education.

Of the total number of people prosecuted for this category of cases, there were 131 people (14.7%) who were native residents of the city of Leningrad. The remaining 755 people (85.3%) arrived in Leningrad in different times. Moreover, among them: natives of the Leningrad region - 169 people, Kalinin region - 163 people, Yaroslavl region - 38 people, and other regions - 516 people.

Of the 886 people prosecuted, only 18 people (2%) had previous convictions.

As of February 20, 1942, 311 people were convicted by the Military Tribunal for the crimes I mentioned above.

Military prosecutor of Leningrad, brigvoyurist A. PANFILENKO

TsGAIPD St. Petersburg. F.24 Op.26. D.1319. L.38-46. Script.

Historian Nikita Lomagin, who wrote the book “The Unknown Blockade” based on declassified archival documents Management federal service Security (NKVD), believes that only now can we speak objectively about the events of 70 years ago. Thanks to documents stored for many years in the archives of the special services and declassified only recently, contemporaries took a fresh look at the exploits of Leningraders in 1941-1944.

Entry dated December 9, 1941 from the diary of the instructor of the personnel department of the city committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Belarus Nikolai Ribkovsky:
“Now I don’t feel any particular need for food. In the morning, breakfast is pasta or noodles, or porridge with butter and two glasses of sweet tea. In the afternoon, lunch is the first cabbage soup or soup, the second meat every day. Yesterday, for example, for the first time I ate green cabbage soup with sour cream, the second cutlet with noodles, and today, for the first course, soup with noodles, for the second, pork with stewed cabbage."

And here is the entry in his diary dated March 5, 1942:
“It’s been three days since I’ve been in the hospital of the city party committee. In my opinion, this is simply a seven-day rest home and it is located in one of the pavilions of the now closed rest house of the party activists of the Leningrad organization in Melnichny Ruchey... My cheeks are burning from the evening frost.. And now, out of the cold, somewhat tired, with a buzz in your head from the forest aroma, you stumble into a house with warm, cozy rooms, sink into a soft chair, blissfully stretch your legs... Eating here is like in peacetime. good home recreation. Every day there is meat - lamb, ham, chicken, goose, turkey, sausage, fish - bream, herring, smelt, fried, boiled, and jellied. Caviar, balyk, cheese, pies, cocoa, coffee, tea, three hundred grams of white and the same amount of black bread per day, thirty grams of butter and to all this, fifty grams of grape wine, good port wine for lunch and dinner... Yes. Such rest in conditions of the front, a long blockade of the city, is possible only with the Bolsheviks, only with Soviet power...What's even better? We eat, drink, walk, sleep, or just sit back and listen to the gramophone, exchanging jokes, playing dominoes or playing cards. And in total I paid only 50 rubles for the vouchers!”
From here: https://regnum.ru/news/polit/1617782.html

Memoirs of Gennady Alekseevich Petrov:

"That the top leadership of besieged Leningrad did not suffer from hunger and cold, they preferred not to speak out loud. The few residents of well-fed besieged Leningrad were silent. But not all. For Gennady Alekseevich Petrov, Smolny is his home. There he was born in 1925 and lived with short breaks until 1943. During the war, he performed responsible work - he was on the kitchen team at Smolny.

My mother, Daria Petrovna, worked in the catering department of Smolny since 1918. She was a server, and a dishwasher, and worked in a government cafeteria, and in a pigsty - wherever necessary,” he says. - After the murder of Kirov, “purges” began among the service personnel, many were fired, but she was left behind. We occupied apartment No. 215 in the economic part of Smolny. In August 1941, the “private sector” - as we were called - was evicted, and the premises were occupied by a military garrison. We were given a room, but my mother remained in Smolny in a barracks position. In December 1941, she was wounded during shelling. During the month in the hospital she became terribly thin. Fortunately, we were helped by the family of Vasily Ilyich Tarakanshchikov, the driver of the commandant of Smolny, who remained to live in the economic section. They settled us with them, and thereby saved us. After some time, my mother again began working in the government canteen, and I was included in the kitchen team.

There were several canteens and buffets in Smolny. In the southern wing there was a dining room for the apparatus of the city committee, the city executive committee and the headquarters of the Leningrad Front. Before the revolution, Smolensk girls ate there. And in the northern, “secretary” wing, there was a government canteen for the party elite - secretaries of the city committee and city executive committee, heads of departments. In the past, it was a dining room for the heads of the Institute of Noble Maidens. The first secretary of the regional committee, Zhdanov, and the chairman of the Leningrad City Executive Committee, Popkov, also had buffets on the floors. In addition, Zhdanov had a personal chef who worked in the so-called “infection” - a former isolation ward for sick Smolensk residents. Zhdanov and Popkov had offices there. There was also a so-called “delegate” canteen for ordinary workers and guests, everything was simpler there. Each canteen was served by its own people who had a certain clearance. For example, I served the canteen for the apparatus - the one in the south wing. I had to light the stove, keep the fire going, supply food for distribution, and wash the pots.

Until mid-November 1941, bread lay freely on the tables there, without rationing. Then they started to take him away. Cards were introduced - for breakfast, lunch and dinner - in addition to those that all Leningraders had. A typical breakfast, for example, is millet or buckwheat porridge, sugar, tea, a bun or pie. Lunch was always three courses. If a person did not give his usual ration card to relatives, then he received a meat dish as a side dish. And so the usual food is dry potatoes, vermicelli, noodles, peas.

And in the government canteen where my mother worked, there was absolutely everything, without restrictions, like in the Kremlin. Fruits, vegetables, caviar, cakes. Milk, eggs and sour cream delivered from a subsidiary farm in the Vsevolozhsk region near Melnichny Ruchey. The bakery baked different cakes and buns. The baking was so soft - you bend the loaf, but it unbends on its own. Everything was stored in the pantry. The storekeeper Soloviev was in charge of this farm. He looked like Kalinin - he had a wedge-shaped beard.

Of course, we also received some from generosity. Before the war, we had everything at home - caviar, chocolate, and candy. During the war, of course, it got worse, but still my mother brought meat, fish, butter, and potatoes from the dining room. We, the service staff, lived like one family. We tried to support each other and helped whoever we could. For example, the boilers that I washed were steamed all day long, and a crust stuck to them. It had to be scraped off and thrown away. Naturally, I didn't do this. People lived here in Smolny, I gave to them. The soldiers guarding Smolny were hungry. Usually two Red Army soldiers and an officer were on duty in the kitchen. I gave them the rest of the soup, scraped together. And the kitchen men from the government canteen also fed whoever they could. We also tried to get people to work in Smolny. So, we hired our former neighbor Olya first as a cleaner and then as a manicurist. Some city leaders were getting manicures. Zhdanov, by the way, did. Then even a hairdresser opened there. In general, Smolny had everything - electricity, water, heating, and sewerage.

Mom worked in Smolny until 1943, then she was transferred to the canteen of the Leningrad City Executive Committee. It was a downgrade. The fact is that her relatives ended up in occupied territory. And in 1943 I turned 18, and I went to the front."

Memoirs of Daniil Granin (“The Man Isn’t From Here”):

"...they brought me photographs of a confectionery shop in 1941 (Leningrad). They assured me that this was the very end, December, famine was already in full swing in Leningrad. The photographs were clear, professional, they shocked me. I didn’t believe them, it seemed I’ve already seen so much, heard so much, learned so much about life under the siege, learned more than I did back then during the war, being in St. Petersburg. And here there are no horrors, just pastry chefs in white caps working on a large baking sheet, I don’t know how. They call it there. The entire baking tray is filled with rum women. The photo is undeniably authentic. But I didn’t believe it. Maybe it’s not 1941. blockade time? Rum women stood row after row, a whole division of rum women. Platoon. Two platoons. They assured me that the photo was from that time. Proof: a photograph of the same workshop, the same bakers, published in a newspaper in 1942, only there was a caption that there was bread on the baking sheets. That's why the photographs were published. But these rums didn’t get in and couldn’t get in, because photographers didn’t have the right to film such a production, it’s like giving away military secret, for such a photo, a direct route to SMERSH, every photographer understood this. There was one more piece of evidence. The photographs were published in Germany in 1992.

The signature in our archive is as follows: “The best shift foreman of the “Ensk” confectionery factory V.A. Abakumov, the head of a team that regularly exceeds the norm. In the photo: V.A. Abakumov checks the baking of “Viennese cakes.” 12/12/1941. Leningrad. Photo by A.A. Mikhailov.

Yuri Lebedev, studying history Leningrad blockade, I first discovered these photos not in our literature, but in the German book “Blokade Leningrad 1941-1944” (Rowolt publishing house, 1992). At first he perceived this as a falsification by bourgeois historians, then he established that the St. Petersburg archive of the TsGAKFFD contains the originals of these photographs. And even later we established that this photographer, A.A. Mikhailov, died in 1943.

And then one of the stories that Adamovich and I listened to surfaced in my memory: some TASS employee was sent to a confectionery factory where they make sweets and cakes for the bosses. He got there on assignment. Take photos of the products. The fact is that occasionally, instead of sugar, blockade survivors were given sweets on cards. In the workshop he saw pastries, cakes and other delights. She should have been photographed. For what? To whom? Yuri Lebedev could not establish. He suggested that the authorities wanted to show newspaper readers that “the situation in Leningrad is not so terrible.”

The order is quite cynical. But our propaganda had no moral prohibitions. It was December 1941, the most terrible month of the siege. The caption under the photo reads: 12/12/1941. Making "rum baba" at the 2nd confectionery factory. A. Mikhailov. TASS".

On my advice, Yu. Lebedev researched this story in detail. She turned out to be even more monstrous than we expected. The factory produced Viennese cakes and chocolate throughout the blockade. Delivered to Smolny. There were no deaths from starvation among factory workers. We ate in the workshops. It was forbidden to take it out under pain of execution. 700 workers prospered. I don’t know how much I enjoyed it in Smolny, in the Military Council.

Relatively recently, the diary of one of the party leaders of that time became known. Day after day, he happily wrote down what was given for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No worse than today in the same Smolny.

[...] So, at the height of the famine in Leningrad they baked rum baba and Viennese cakes. To whom? It would be even more forgivable if we limited ourselves to good bread for the command, with less cellulose and other impurities. But no - rum women! This is, according to the recipe: “For 1 kg of flour, 2 glasses of milk, 7 eggs, one and a half glasses of sugar, 300 g of butter, 200 g of raisins, then liqueur and rum essence to taste.
You need to carefully turn it on the plate so that the syrup is absorbed from all sides.”

The photo in the archive is signed as follows: “The best shift foreman of the Ensk confectionery factory V.A. Abakumov, the head of a team that regularly exceeds the norm. In the photo: V.A. Abakumov checks the baking of “Viennese cakes.” 12.12.1941 Leningrad. Photo by A.A. Mikhailov.

A. Smolina: Do we need to know these facts? My opinion is “necessary”. In such cases, I always draw an analogy with an abscess on the body: after all, until you open the abscess and remove the pus, after disinfecting and disinfecting the hole, healing on the body will not occur. Moreover, in my opinion: criminals and weak-willed cowards lie, and if the state wants to be civilized, then it is necessary to adhere to certain rules. Yes, there were unpleasant moments in the past, but we repent and improve. Otherwise, we will continue to stagnate in a quagmire with a complete exodus of smart and decent people to the West.

“Tanks are not afraid of the quagmire” is a popular slogan in Russia under Putin. Perhaps they are not afraid. But those are tanks. And people should live and die as human beings. But not so: the siege of Leningrad carried out the dead on themselves, and our contemporaries are doing the same:

Russia, our days...

On this topic- “Feeding trough” for the Soviet-communist nomenklatura during the Great Patriotic War.

Addition from here: M.R. talked about her close relative, who during the blockade worked in the staff/secretariat of Zhdanov. Every day a plane flew from Moscow to Leningrad with caviar, champagne, fresh fruit, fish, delicacies, etc. And if a plane was shot down, then a second such plane would take off on the same day.
Moscow Champagne Wine Factory: “On October 25, 1942, at the height of the Great Patriotic War, I.V. Stalin signs the Order of the Council people's commissars USSR No. 20347-r on the organization of champagne production in Moscow.”

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

“I even had to eat the earth”

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

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

“Crumbs - only for Elechka”

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

Elya KAZANSKAYA in a pre-war photo

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 he 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; they 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 the couple got married on New Year’s Day. A difficult test lay ahead - my beloved daughter Lenochka died of brain cancer at the age of 16.

Saying goodbye, Eleonora Vasilievna 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?..