Russia at war 1941-1945

"However, our most highly skilled workers, who were badly needed in Siberia and the Urals, were evacuated by air, together with their families. They were flown to Tikhvin, but after the Germans had taken Tikhvin, we had to fly them to other airfields, and from there the people had to walk to the nearest railway station, walk through the snow, in the middle of a bitter winter, often dozens and dozens of kilometres... Already in the early part of the winter a lot of equipment from Kharkov, Kiev and other places, and also some from Moscow, had reached the Urals, and our skilled people were badly needed to handle the stuff and to organise production. Chelia-binsk, for example, had never made tanks before, and our people were needed for starting this large-scale production of tanks in the shortest possible time... We were then in the middle of that most critical transition period when industry in the west had ceased to function, and had not yet started up in the east...

The people who left here in October were already working at full speed in their new

place, 2,000 kilometres away, by December! ... And in what conditions all this was done!

Trains carrying the equipment were attacked from the air, and so were the transport

planes taking the skilled Leningrad workers and their families from Leningrad.

Fortunately the percentage of transport planes shot down was not high. But the flying had to be done mostly at night, in very difficult conditions..."

Puzyrev's story of the Kirov Plant during the worst months of the famine was much the same as the story told me by Semyonov, the director of the optical instruments plant:

"Those were terrible days," he said. "On December 15 everything came to a standstill.

There was no fuel, no electric current, no food, no tram-cars, no water, nothing.

Production in Leningrad practically ceased. We were to remain in this terrible condition till the 1st of April. It is true that food began to come in in February across the Ladoga Ice Road. But we needed another month before we could start any kind of regular output at the Kirov Works. But even during the worst hungry period we did what we could... We repaired guns, and our foundry was kept going, though only in a small way. It felt as if the mighty Kirov Works had been turned into a village smithy. People were terribly cold and terribly hungry. Many of our people died during those days, and it was chiefly our best people who died— highly skilled workers who had reached a certain age when the

body can no longer resist such hardships...

"As I said before, there was no water and no electric current. All we had was a small pump which was connected with the sea down there; that was all the water supply we

had. Throughout the winter —from December to March—the whole of Leningrad used

snow for putting out incendiaries... The only very large fire was that of the Gostiny Dvor.

[The famous shopping arcade in the Nevsky Prospect.]

Here, at the Kirov Works, not a single workshop was destroyed by fire.

"People were so faint with hunger that we had to organise hostels, so that they could live right here. We authorised others who lived at home to come only twice a week... At the end of November, we had to call a meeting to announce the reduction of the bread ration from 400 to 250 grams for workers, and to 125 grams for the others —and very little else.

They took it calmly, though to many it was like a death sentence... "

And Puzyrev then said that the soldiers on the Leningrad Front asked that their own

rations be reduced, so that so drastic a reduction in the rations of the Leningrad citizens could be avoided; but the High Command decided that the soldiers were receiving just a bare minimum for carrying on—which, at that time, was 350 grams of bread, and not

much else.

"We tried to keep people going by making a sort of yeast soup, with a little soya added. It wasn't much better, really than drinking hot water, but it gave people the illusion of having 'eaten' something. .. A very large number of our people died. So many died, and transport was so difficult, that we decided to have our own graveyard right here... And yet, although people were dying of hunger, there was not a single serious incident...

Frankly, I find it hard to this day to understand how people resisted the temptation of attacking bread vans or looting bakeries. But they didn't... sometimes people came to me to say good-bye... They knew they were going to die almost at once. Later, in the summer of 1942, a lot of people who had survived the famine were sent east to supplement their comrades from Kiev, Kharkov and other places... "

By 1943, food was no longer a major problem in Leningrad; nevertheless, with the city under constant shellfire, and the German lines only two miles away, the Kirov Works

continued to live through a hell that was only different in degree.