Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (31 page)

At the Academy of Sciences Georgi Knyazev, confined more than ever to his ‘small radius’ because the cold had seized up his wheelchair, watched helplessly as his subordinates – to whom he had so recently given pep talks – died around him. ‘Shakhmatova Kaplan and her sixteen-year-old son Alyosha’, he wrote on 5 January, ‘have died of dystrophy. The boy was extremely gifted and loved astronomy. He would undoubtedly have made a name for himself, perhaps even have become an Academician. The news greatly affected me and all our staff.’ The following day a Commission on the History of the Academy of Sciences went ahead with a scheduled meeting, at which Knyazev presented a report (‘perhaps my last’) titled ‘The History of the Heads of the Academy’s Departments Throughout its Existence (1925–1941)’. As he read a ‘poor wretch’ lay outside in the courtyard, already stripped of his boots. Keeping up a confident façade, Knyazev admitted to his diary, was now almost impossible:

I try to smile when I’m with other people, to sound cheerful and optimistic, to raise their spirits . . . Only here, on these pages, do I permit myself to relax my self-restraint. Here I am as I really am. I saw Svikul, who has just lost her fifteen-year-old son Volodya, a modest youngster. Inconsolable grief, despair – these are pitiful words in comparison with what is expressed in her eyes, her sunken cheeks and quivering chin. I put my arms around her, hugged her, and that was all I could do.
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At the Hermitage, staff and their families – about two thousand people altogether – had moved permanently into twelve air-raid shelters in the palace vaults, where they slept on plank beds incongruously mixed with ancient Turkmen rugs and gilded palace furniture. Area-level windows having been bricked up, the rooms were almost pitch-black even in daytime. One, the office of museum director Iosif Orbeli, was supplied with electricity via a cable led in from Tsar Nicholas’s old pleasure yacht the
Polar Star
, moored outside on the Neva. Otherwise, the only light came from icon lamps and ‘bats’ – fuelled, one memoir claims, with seal oil from the zoo. Several female members of staff, Boldyrev noted, bashfully produced long-hidden wedding candles – the tall, ribboned beeswax tapers held by bride and groom during the traditional Orthodox marriage service.

One of the most famous blockade-defying events of the winter was a symposium held by the Hermitage in mid-December, to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Timurid poet Alisher Navai. A display was put together of porcelain decorated with scenes from Navai’s verse (an artist from the old Imperial porcelain works, Mikhail Mokh, painted a small bowl in the style of a Mogul miniature); Boldyrev gave a paper and his fellow Persianist Nikolai Lebedev (so weak that he had to remain seated) read his own new Navai translation. The audience included Boldyrev’s elderly mother, who insisted on contributing a small piece of bread with pork fat to the official lunch. It didn’t matter, one attendee remembered, that there was not a single Uzbek amongst them – the event was ‘a challenge to the enemy. Light was fighting darkness.’
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Boldyrev, ever the realist, thought his old friend Lebedev’s presentation ‘bad and disorganised’, but the translation itself ‘wonderful – the bright clear language of Pushkin’s fairy tales’. His own paper had been worth the effort too: ‘In work lies the only happiness and satisfaction of our days. The worse the situation physically – up to a point – the brighter and fresher the workings of our minds.’
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Two months later Boldyrev heard of Lebedev’s death, from starvation combined with dysentery. He had last seen him a fortnight earlier, in the Hermitage cellars:

He and his wife were lying in cold and complete darkness, in the underground hell of the basement (shelter no. 3). He recognised me by my voice, and grabbed me like a drowning man clutching at a straw. They gave me 250 roubles, imploring me to buy bread and candles for them in the market . . . His last words to me were ‘How I want to live, Sandrik, how I want to live!’ He spoke with that amazing, melodious voice of his, with which he so inimitably read his marvellous, musical translations . . . At that point I was too squeezed myself to give real help, and couldn’t buy him anything. Rather Galya, who did occasionally go to the market, didn’t make it, not having the strength. And bread was hardly being sold for money anyway.
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Also celebrated as a manifestation of the defiant Leningrad spirit is the fact that some of its dozens of theatres and concert halls continued to function. The Musical Comedy Theatre – the
Muzkomediya
– stayed open almost throughout the winter, and concerts continued to be held under the crystal-less chandeliers of the Philharmonia into December. (Of the string players, an audience member noted, only the double bassists could wear sheepskin coats. The rest wore padded cotton jackets, which allowed freer movement of the arms.) It is claimed that altogether, Leningraders enjoyed over twenty-five thousand public performances of different kinds in the course of the blockade, and the image of artists flinging themselves into war work – Shostakovich on the roof of the Conservatoire, Akhmatova standing guard duty outside the Sheremetyev Palace, prima ballerinas sewing camouflage nets – is one of the key tropes of the siege.

At the time, however, many Leningraders were cynical. As one diarist noted of a concert given by the great violinist David Oistrakh (flown in from Moscow for the occasion), the audience were not the usual intelligentsia types, and appeared unusually healthy. He and his wife were by far the most ‘dystrophic-looking’ present.
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Even a fervent Stalinist, watching crowds jostle for tickets to an operetta (
A Sailor’s Love
) in March 1942, was reminded of bread and circuses.
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One of the bitterest siege diary entries must be the following, written by Vera Kostrovitskaya, the dance teacher at the Mariinsky ballet school:

Since in April it became necessary to portray the rebirth of the city at the hands of the half-dead, L.S.T. [the school’s director] got the vain idea that our school – or to be more accurate, what was left of it – would give the first [springtime] public performance at the Philharmonia.

Some of the girls had stayed relatively healthy, thanks to fortunate conditions at home, but they all had scurvy. The most talented of them, Lyusa Alekseyeva, couldn’t dance the classics – her legs, covered with blue blotches, gave way and wouldn’t obey.

I informed L.S.T. of the situation.

In reply there came a furious shout and threats to deny those who refused to dance their ration coupons for the next month . . .

The performance took place. We even had the ‘dying swan’ and other balletic nonsense. Petya, made up by me to look like a living person, ‘danced’ two numbers. To keep him going, the girls had brought him bread and
kasha
. I led him on stage and tried not to watch as he ‘danced’. During the break he collapsed into my arms and vomited the
kasha
he had eaten.

There was no public audience at the concert, for there was none in the city. The first two rows were taken by arts administrators and representatives from the Smolniy and Party organisations. With her hair dyed red and dressed up like a model, L.S.T. shone during the
entr’acte
, accepting greetings and unnaturally loudly recounting her love for the children, whose lives she had been busy saving all through the winter.

Petya died soon afterwards, in an orphanage, and L.S.T. – one Lidiya Semenovna Tager – continued to flaunt a succession of new hats and fur coats, bought with food that she was able to obtain in her position as wife of the Leningrad Front’s head of provisioning.
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Oddest, viewed from a utilitarian perspective, of the institutional stories is perhaps that of the Leningrad Zoo, a small and charming establishment, dating back to the 1860s, located behind the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Petrograd Side. The zoo had evacuated fifty-eight of its more valuable animals to Kazan before the siege ring closed, and others had been killed in the early air raids. The city soviet, instead of ordering the slaughter and consumption of the remainder, then allocated the zoo a special ration of hay and root vegetables, with which, by dint of extraordinary dedication and ingenuity, staff kept eighty-five animals alive through the winter. Foxes, ermines, raccoons and vultures, they discovered, could be persuaded to eat a ‘vegetable mince’ of bran,
duranda
and potatoes if it was first soaked in a little blood or bone broth, but for fussier tigers, owls and eagles it had to be sewn into the skins of rabbits or guinea pigs. When the zoo reopened the following summer the survivors – Verochka the black vulture, Sailor the Nilgai antelope and Grishka the bear – turned into celebrities. Undisputed star was the hippopotamus Krasavitsa, or ‘Beauty’. The only hippo in the Soviet Union, she had been nursed through the winter by her devoted keeper Yevdokiya Dashina, who daily washed her with forty buckets of warm water hauled by hand from the Neva, and rubbed her baggy grey skin with camphor oil to stop it cracking.
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A photograph from 1943 shows Krasavitsa and Dashina standing together in a muddy enclosure. Dashina holds out a piece of greenery; the hippo rests with her chin on the ground, squinting at the camera with a small, lashed eye. Behind the massive animal, on a railing, sit a row of large-kneed, shaven-headed children.

Achievements such as these, though, were specks of light in a vast darkness. More indicative of the state of the city as a whole were the activities of the Burial Trust, the agency in charge of morgues and cemeteries.
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For the first few months of the war its 250-odd staff, twelve motor vehicles and thirty-four horses had coped with their increased workload fairly well. Some 3,688 burials – not much above the pre-war number – took place in July 1941, 5,090 in August, 7,820 in September, 9,355 in October and 11,401 in November. Though two out of eight designated new burial sites – pre-prepared in expectation of mass air-raid casualties – ended up on the wrong side of the front line, 80 to 85 per cent of bodies delivered to morgues were positively identified by family members and buried individually in the usual way. The rest were registered and photographed by the police.

From December, however, procedures broke down completely, as ‘mummy’-laden sleds began to fill the main streets leading to the big suburban cemeteries. Inside the cemetery gates, Trust staff (forty-six of whom died during the winter) were overwhelmed, leaving an opening for ‘cemetery wolves’ who brought their own crowbars and offered to dig individual graves in exchange for bread or money. Coffins could be had for temporary hire, as could actual graves, in which corpses were briefly deposited before being slung into trenches with the rest. One woman, depositing her dead father at the Serafimovskoye cemetery in March, could not afford an individual burial, but agreed with workers that for twenty-five roubles they would place him on the edge rather than in the middle of a mass grave, having first removed him from his coffin. On her way out she noticed a grotesque piece of graveyard humour: a corpse propped vertically with a cigarette in its mouth, pointing trenchwards with an outstretched, frozen arm.
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Increasingly, relatives only made it as far as the new temporary morgues, opened in each of the fifteen city districts in part so as to shorten the funeral caravans on the streets, which as the Trust remarked made ‘a bad impression on the population’. One such morgue is graphically described by the optical engineer Dmitri Lazarev, disposing of his dead father-in-law in late January:

The building manager wrote down the address on a scrap paper – Glukhaya Zelenina [‘Lonely Green’] Street. He gave us a sled, and warned us that unless they are in coffins corpses can now only be transported through the streets after 8 p.m. Even for the time of year it was unusually cold – 35 degrees below zero. Nina, Nika and I tied Vladimir Aleksandrovich  to a board with towels, and with great difficulty lowered him down the dark stairs. Nina stayed at home to put the children to bed; Nika and I dragged the sled to Glukhaya Zelenina . . . We pulled together at first, then took turns, so that the other person could turn his back to the wind and warm up his face and hands a little. The trip – in reality a fairly short distance – seemed never-ending. Finally we reached the gates of the morgue, previously a woodstore. The woman on the door, also half-dead from cold, was getting ready to go home, and in a martyred voice told us to hurry. We dragged the sled along a narrow cleared path through the yard to a big shed. Opening its door wide, in the moonlight we saw a mountain of corpses, half-dressed or sewn into sheets, and dumped in a heap like firewood. Impatiently, the woman indicated that the new delivery should be thrown on top of the mountain . . . There was nobody else there and she stood on the sidelines, clearly not intending to help. We untied the body from the boards and tried to lift it, but without success – our wasted muscles didn’t have the strength. There was nothing for it except to try and drag it up the pile. The easiest way, it turned out, was to take it by the legs. Stumbling we began to climb, treading on slippery, frozen-solid stomachs, backs and heads. Despite the cold there was a suffocating stench. When, exhausted, we came to a halt, the head and shoulders of poor Vladimir Aleksandrovich still lay outside. The woman pushed at his head with the shed door, seeing if it would close. We needed to climb higher but couldn’t. At last, in desperation, we gave a jerk and the body moved sideways, its head swinging to one side. At the same time the door closed, and something rattled. It was the woman fussing with the door latch, seeing if it would hold shut. For several minutes we stood in complete darkness, afraid to move . . . The door opened. Carefully, holding each other by the hand, we descended into the open, and all three of us sighed with relief. The woman (could she have been the morgue manager?) carelessly stuffed the paperwork into her pocket and the funeral was over.
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