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Sergeant Lagun noticed that an army doctor, Captain Chepurniy, was digging in the snow in the yard. Covertly watching, the sergeant saw him cut a piece of flesh from an amputated leg, put it in his pocket, re-bury the leg in the snow and walk away. Half an hour later Lagun walked into Chepurniy’s room as if he had something to ask him, and saw that he was eating meat out of a frying pan. The sergeant was convinced that it was human flesh. . So he raised the alarm and in the course of the ensuing investigation it became clear that not only were the hospital’s sick and wounded eating human flesh, but so too were about twenty medical personnel, from doctors and nurses to outdoor workers — systematically feeding on dead bodies and amputated legs. They were all shot on a special order of the Military Council.

Their executioner was a jolly, vulgar Captain Borisov of the Special Department, the army wing of the NKVD, to whom Yershov issued the special vodka ration handed out to firing squads (600 grams, a third before and two-thirds afterwards). ‘I have to point out’, Yershov adds, ‘that Captain Borisov shot 50–60 per cent of people personally. . He couldn’t live without alcohol every day and so tried to carry out as many executions as possible himself.’11

Yershov also recorded the murder, by starving soldiers, of the carriers who twice daily toted insulated canisters of soup, strapped on to their backs with leather harnesses, from the field kitchens up to the front line:

In early January 1942 the divisional commander started getting urgent calls from regimental and battalion commanders, saying that this or that group of soldiers hadn’t been fed, that the carrier hadn’t appeared with his canteen, having apparently been killed by German snipers. Thorough checks revealed that something unbelievable was happening: soldiers were leaving their trenches early in the morning to meet the carriers, stabbing them to death, and taking the food. They would eat as much as they could, then bury the murdered carrier in the snow and hide the canteen before returning to their trenches. The murderer would go back to the place twice a day, first finishing off the contents of the canteen and then cutting off pieces of human flesh and eating those too. To give you some idea of the numbers I can tell you that in my division in the winter of 1941–2, on the front line alone — taking no account of units in the rear — there were about twenty such cases.12

Despite his Leningrad armies’ dreadful state, Stalin included them in a general late winter offensive, planned while still in the midst of November and December’s battle for Moscow. Vastly overambitious, it was designed to recapture Smolensk, the Ukrainian Donbass and the Crimea as well as to liberate Leningrad, and more broadly to deny the Germans breathing space in which to prepare for new assaults in the spring.13

Responsibility for breaking the German lines around Leningrad was to lie chiefly with General Meretskov’s Volkhov Front, which faced Army Group North’s Eighteenth Army along a line running south-east from Lake Ladoga, then south along the Volkhov River to Novgorod. While the armies within the siege ring did what they could to push south and east, those of the Volkhov front were to break westwards across the river, cutting off the German forces around Lyuban, Tosno and Mga. Altogether, 326,000 troops were initially to be committed to the operation, giving a theoretical 50 per cent advantage in manpower, 60 per cent in guns and mortars and 30 per cent in aircraft.

Ignoring Meretskov’s pleas for more artillery, reserves and time in which to concentrate his troops and arrange his logistics, Stalin insisted that the offensive be launched in the first week of January. To keep (presumably terrified) Meretskov up to the mark, he despatched to Leningrad the loathsome Lev Mekhlis, head of the Red Army’s Political Directorate and one of the organisers of the 1937–8 army purges.14 Things went badly from the outset: on the 4th and 5th forty-eight hours of heavy fighting near Kirishi won a mere five kilometres of ground; on the 6th an assault across the Volkhov ice in the face of machine guns lost over three thousand men in its first thirty minutes. ‘Continued enemy attacks’, General Halder wrote dismissively in his diary, ‘but nothing on a major scale.’15 Uncoordinated and intermittent, the offensive continued in piecemeal fashion on into February. Hockenjos, returning to Zvanka on the twentieth, found the monastery half destroyed by shelling from the opposite bank of the Volkhov — the cloister full of craters, the chapel vaulting stove in, and the pines and oaks on the slopes leading down to the river reduced to ‘miserable broomsticks’. A week later a second Soviet attack was beaten off with ease: