Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 27, 1994 TAG: 9401270097
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA LENGTH: Medium
"Mother turned deadly pale and forbid me to eat it. I couldn't stop crying," said Sukhanova, now 64.
It wasn't until after the war she learned it was human flesh.
"Mother went to the police and they arrested the man who sold her the meat. I don't know who he was or what happened to him, but that sweet taste is still in my mouth."
This week, the city, which took back its czarist name of St. Petersburg in 1991, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the end of the siege. A $5 million celebration of concerts, fireworks and parades is planned for today, to be attended by President Boris Yeltsin.
German troops encircled Leningrad in August 1941. After failing to take it with bombing raids and heavy shelling, the Nazis decided to starve the city into submission.
They thought it would take a couple of weeks; it lasted nearly three years.
Historians say at least half of Leningrad's prewar population of 3 million died, mainly of hunger and cold.
"They haven't yet released the real death toll," said Dmitry Likhachev, 88, a prominent historian and siege survivor.
He said a colleague who worked for the city told him 1.2 million people starved, but that figure included only official residents of the city, which was packed with refugees from the Nazi invasion in nearby regions.
Likhachev believes more than 3 million people died.
Stories of cannibalism and other atrocities were suppressed for decades, coming to light only in Mikhail Gorbachev's era of glasnost.
In recent years, however, historians have focused on the siege's grimmer episodes.
"Only then did we learn there was a special police unit to fight cannibals," said Yuri Kolosov, chairman of the Association of Historians of the Leningrad Siege. He said 260 people were arrested for cannibalism.
During the first months of the siege, city residents received a daily ration of about a quarter pound of bread. Before long, all the city's cats and dogs were eaten, then rats and crows, and then people started to scrape off wallpaper to eat the paste. They boiled leather coats and ate them. And then, cannibalism.
Meanwhile, the city was hammered by German bombs and shells, which destroyed nearly one-third of the buildings.
Some historians now argue that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin should have surrendered the city to ease the suffering.
Harrison Salisbury, the New York Times correspondent whose landmark account of the siege was recently published in Russian, believed the city suffered partly because Stalin feared it. In the late 1920s, Leningrad was a center of anti-Stalin opposition, and after the war many heroes of the siege died in purges.
Still, historians such as Kolosov say the suffering wasn't in vain.
"Leningrad diverted up to 30 percent of the German troops on the Eastern Front," Kolosov said. He said the Leningrad-based Baltic Fleet kept raw materials from reaching Germany from Scandinavia.
Of St. Petersburg's 5 million residents today, about 400,000 are siege survivors. Many are going hungry again, struggling to get by on meager state pensions as Russia moves toward a market economy.
Natalia Voloshina, 81, said that in some ways things were easier back then.
"The times were hard and many people died, but they knew it wasn't in vain and that we would win," she said while standing in a line of some 500 siege survivors to collect a one-time payment of 10,000 to 15,000 rubles ($6.50 to $10) to mark the anniversary.
"Relations between people were better than now, and people helped each other," she said. "Now they live like wolves, not caring about others. They remember veterans and the siege survivors only on the anniversary."
by CNB