Russia at war 1941-1945

satisfactorily right up to January 1943 when the land blockade was broken and trains began, soon afterwards, to run through the narrow "Schlüsselburg Gap".

With the population enormously reduced, first by famine, and then by evacuation,

feeding Leningrad no longer presented an insuperable problem. Indeed after March 1942, to make up for what the city had suffered, Leningrad rations were higher than in the rest of the country, and special canteens with extra-good food were set up, particularly for workers in poor health. Nevertheless, the winter famine had left a mark on very many people. During the summer months of 1942 a high proportion of workers were too ill to work— in one armaments plant mentioned by Karasev, thirty-five per cent of the workers were too ill to work in May, and thirty-one per cent in June. On May 23, 1942, the poet Vera Inber, whose husband worked in a Leningrad hospital, noted in her diary:

Our hospital compound has been cleared of rubble, and has become almost

unrecognisable—better even than before the war, I'm told. In place of heaps of

rubbish there are now new vegetable plots. In the students' hostel they have opened a "reinforced nutrition" dining room; there are several in every district. Weak, pale, exhausted people (second degree distrophy) slowly wander about, almost

surprised at the thought that they are still alive... Often they sit down for a rest, and expose their legs to the rays of the sun, which heals their scurvy ulcers... But among Leningraders there are also some who can no longer move or walk (third degree

distrophy). They lie quietly in their frozen winter houses, into which even the spring seems unable to penetrate. Such houses are visited by young doctors, medical

students and nurses; the worst cases are taken to hospital; we have put up 2,000 new beds in our hospital, including the maternity ward; so few children are born

nowadays, one might say none are born at all!

[Vera Inber, Pochti tri goda (Nearly Three Years), (Leningrad, 1947), pp. 118-19.]

A very high death-rate persisted at least until April; and although, by June, people stopped dying of hunger or its after-effects, the strain of what they had lived through, as well as of the constant bombing and shelling of the city, continued to make itself felt.

Karasev speaks of a widespread "psychic traumatisation", marked, in particular, by high blood-pressure; this condition was four or five times more frequent than before the war.

Nevertheless, with the population reduced to only 1,100,000 in April and to some

650,000 by November 1942, conditions of life became relatively more normal. 148

schools (out of some 500) were opened with 65,000 pupils, and the children were given three meals a day.

Although the front outside Leningrad seemed in 1942 to have been stabilised, the danger of another all-out German attempt to capture the city was ever-present, and there were several (more or less false) alarms. On the other hand, the attempts made by the Red Army to break the land blockade failed.

The news throughout the "black summer" of 1942 of the Germans crashing ahead into the Caucasus and towards Stalingrad, had a depressing effect. The fall of Sebastopol—which had so many points in common with Leningrad—seemed particularly ominous, and there

was also a feeling that if Stalingrad fell, the fate of Leningrad, too, would be sealed.

The Russian counter-offensive at Stalingrad not only created a tremendous feeling of optimism in Leningrad, as it did in the rest of the country, but it also enormously

improved the prospects of breaking the German blockade. This was now achieved as a

result of a week's heavy fighting in January 1943, when the troops of the Leningrad Front under General Govorov and those of the Volkhov Front under General Meretskov, joined forces, and so hacked a ten-mile corridor through the German salient south of Lake