Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (47 page)

The March–April clean-up campaign is one of the set pieces of the siege, quoted as a turning point in almost every survivor interview, and credited with miraculously preventing epidemics of the three classic famine diseases – dysentery, typhoid fever and typhus. In reality, this was not quite true. Though the overall death rate fell from March onwards, in April numbers of dysentery and typhoid cases per thousand head of population were five to six times higher than a year earlier, and of typhus, twenty-five times higher. Quoting these numbers in a private letter to Zhdanov in mid-May, the head of the Leningrad garrison angrily blamed inadequate medical services and washing facilities. Half the city’s public bathhouses, he pointed out, still weren’t working; only 7 per cent of flats had running water and 9 per cent sewerage, and up to a third of households still suffered serious lice infection. Many courtyards were still covered in human waste. Typhus ‘hotspots’ included recuperation clinics, children’s homes, railway stations and evacuation points, and unless urgent measures were taken, would soon include army barracks.
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Dysentery – known as ‘hunger diarrhoea’ – also figures frequently in diarists’ accounts; it was often what finished off the already starving. Boldyrev managed to joke about it. Forced, on his way to a meeting with Hermitage administrators, to ‘do the unmentionable’ in an empty gallery – the one that normally housed Raphael’s
Madonna Conestabile
– he was delighted to find it conveniently provided with a spade and large pile of fire-fighting sand.

As spring turned to summer and hopes that the siege would be lifted faded, attention turned to avoiding a repeat of the mass-death winter. Riding a tram again for the first time in months, Dmitri Lazarev noticed that the previous year’s public notices – ‘Expose whisperers and spies!’ ‘Death to provocateurs!’ – had now been replaced by more practical exhortations:

Fifteen hundredths of a hectare will produce 800kg of cabbage, 700kg of beets, 120kg of cucumbers, 130kg of carrots, 340kg of swedes, 50kg of tomatoes and 200kg of other vegetables! This is more than enough for an entire family for the whole year. Save ashes from the stove for your vegetable patch!
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The gardening drive was enthusiastically taken up by Leningraders, who with the help of government-organised distributions of seeds and equipment – hoes and wheelbarrows were specially manufactured – created thousands of vegetable patches in parks, squares and on waste ground. At the Hermitage, staff grubbed up the lilacs and honeysuckle of Catherine the Great’s rooftop ‘hanging garden’ in favour of carrots, beets, dill and spinach. The Boldyrevs planted onions in a window box (‘Oh I long for onion!’); the Likhachevs grew radishes in an upturned kitchen table. Altogether, according to
Pravda
, 25,000 tonnes of vegetables were grown on individual allotments in 1942, and 60,000 tonnes the year after. This made them twice as productive, in terms of weight per acre, as 633 new ‘auxiliary farms’ attached to institutes, schools and factories.
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The city also continued to requisition large quantities of food from collective farms within the siege ring. As well as making their usual deliveries, via their collectives, to the state, peasants were obliged to provide animals and seed corn to refugees in their areas, to subscribe funds to a tank column (dubbed the ‘Leningrad Collective Farmer’) and to ‘donate’ grain from their personal stores to the Red Army. District Party committees were instructed to rely on the Statistics Department rather than the farms themselves for harvest forecasts, and committees that failed to come up with their allotted quotas were accused of giving comfort to ‘anti-collective
elements’. In a rare concession to market forces, it was decided to offer underclothes, soap, thread, tobacco and vodka in exchange for deliveries of wild mushrooms and berries.
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An NKVD report on the public mood in villages around the town of Borovichi, east of Novgorod, illustrates the resentment these measures provoked. A series of public meetings had been held to raise funds for the ‘Collective Farmer’ tank column, duly raising three million roubles amidst patriotic speeches. ‘We should help the Red Army chase these two-legged beasts from our land’, a loyal
traktoristka
declared. ‘My three sons have gone to the front. One has been killed, but our money will give the others the weapons they need to defeat the enemy.’ Many, however, openly refused to donate – at least initially. ‘I don’t have any money so I’m not going to sign up’, one forty-year-old woman said. ‘There’s nobody for me to borrow from, and if there were, they wouldn’t have any money to lend me.’ By the end of the meeting, however, she had been swayed, going home to fetch a subscription of 300 roubles. At the ‘Red Ploughman’ collective a rash Estonian, having initially refused to subscribe, ‘seeing the high spirits of the other members, signed up for 1,000 roubles and donated the sum in cash’.

Elsewhere villagers were more outspoken, emboldened by the sound of German guns actually to threaten their bosses. Scolded for bad work by the chairman of her village soviet, one woman spat back

I can’t wait for Soviet rule to end. It has bankrupted the peasants, left us hungry and barefoot, and now you’re stripping us naked. But I’m not going to bow down before you fine gentlemen. Your reign’s coming to an end. You sent all the good people out of the village, but just you wait, it’ll be your turn next.

A fifty-year-old member of the ‘Unity’ collective
was equally bold: ‘Our time’s coming, and we’ll take what’s ours. I may not be able to read or write but I’ll be the first to turn the bosses in. I’ll be believed. Then we’ll repay you. And we won’t just take a lamb from each of you; we’ll flay a pair of belts off each of your backs.’ (This ‘counter-revolutionary activity’, the report noted, had been documented in preparation for arrest.) There was also a widespread rumour that America and Britain, in exchange for opening a second front, were demanding that the collectives be broken up and the land given back to its peasant owners.
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In the city, new drives were launched against food theft and black-market trading. But although hundreds of food shop and food distribution agency staff were arrested (520 in July, 494 in August), and substantial amounts of ill-gotten property confiscated (sixty-two gold watches in September), both continued to flourish.
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The outdoor markets, when shut down in one part of town, simply reappeared in another, and factory workers continued to complain that bosses and kitchen staff colluded to skim their rations. At the Sudomekh shipyard, the crackdown sparked a showdown between the factory’s management and its Party organisation. ‘The senior and junior managers are all drinking spirits’, Party member Vasili Chekrizov confided to his diary.

You see the bastards tipsy more and more often. If they’re going to get drunk, I wish that at least they’d do it behind doors. They stuff their faces, give cover to all the thieving in the canteens, and have eliminated workers’ control, since it gets in their way. There are lots of bosses like that – not just here, but everywhere . . . At meetings they declare their support for the gardening drive, and at weekends sometimes even go and inspect the allotments. But in private all they talk about is how to grab whatever they can for themselves. The inventory managers have got twenty ration cards each. Where are the NKVD? Can they really not catch them?

At a Party meeting at the end of August he (fruitlessly) stood up and made a public complaint: ‘I was pleased with what I said, though I know that Kalinovsky [Sudomekh’s director], Derevyanko and others will not forgive me. They can go to the devil. I said out loud what everyone in the hall was thinking . . . I won’t sell myself for lentil soup, though I’m hungry every day.’

As well as trying to fulfil what was turning into a deluge of near-impossible production orders, Chekrizov was also put in charge of demolishing fourteen wooden buildings south of the Alexander Nevsky monastery, part of a government campaign to lay in supplies of firewood. Some were taken apart by hand, with saws and axes; others were slung round with a hawser attached to a tractor and pulled to the ground. Though Chekrizov accepted that the work was necessary he found it depressing, because the buildings were well constructed (with traditional cinders under the floorboards for insulation) and because their inhabitants had not yet been rehoused. To force one family to leave, he had to order his team to strip off their roof. Most, though, were resigned. ‘We’re wrecking their homes, which they’ve lived in for decades. They’re not angry, they realise that the city needs firewood. They just sit there on their bundles and suitcases, waiting for transport.’
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An engineer to whom Vera Inber chatted on her way home from giving a talk at a factory told her that he had just been to see his family in Novaya Derevnya (the old working-class suburb, just north of Yelagin Island, where the Zhilinskys had lived). When he arrived his house had disappeared, nothing left of it except rubble and bits of broken furniture. Picking over the debris he found some family photographs. ‘Now’, he ruefully told Inber, ‘my whole home fits in my pocket. I can carry it about with me.’
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Olga Grechina, standing guard over a newly demolished house until a truck arrived, was timidly approached by an old woman who presented her with a small turnip and asked permission to drag away a plank. After an hour of standing watch Grechina had traded herself ‘a whole dinner – several turnips and carrots’.
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The demolition campaign, which continued all through the autumn, transformed the appearance of the city’s village-like northern and eastern outskirts – doing more damage, Leningraders observed, than all the Germans’ shelling and bombing.

The summer’s gardening, food requisitioning, anti-corruption and demolition drives were accompanied by another mass evacuation over Lake Ladoga. Designed to remove all non-working Leningraders from the city, it was theoretically obligatory, though many – like Boldyrev and the painter Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva – managed to evade it: Boldyrev because he calculated he was better off where he was, Ostroumova-Lebedeva (offered a flight out and lodgings with the sister of a friend) because she wanted to stay where she belonged:

To live and suffer in Leningrad for such a long time, and now, just before liberation, to leave! . . . I pictured myself in Kazan, in a warm room, safe from bombs and hunger – and I pictured myself in the role – not of sponger, but also not of tenant: an old woman who nobody needs. And I made the decision not to go anywhere. Nowhere!
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The classicist Olga Fridenberg tried to leave with her blind, eighty-year-old mother, but gave up when their overcrowded train stopped without explanation for four days on the way to Osinovets. Bribing a guard with her last loaf of bread, she managed to disembark mother and luggage and get them back to their emptied, disordered flat, where they remained for the rest of the war.

Forced hastily to convert as many of their belongings as possible into cash or food, evacuees set up bric-a-brac tables on the pavements and inside the windows of ground-floor flats (it was astonishing, thought Grechina, how many old and beautiful things people had left to sell). Dmitri Likhachev, stripped of his residence permit and given three days’ notice to depart following interrogation at the Big House, watched a stream of prospective purchasers go over the contents of his family flat: ‘At bargain prices they bought chandeliers, carpets, the bronze writing set, malachite boxes, leather armchairs, the sofa, the standard lamp with the onyx base, books, postcards of town views – every single thing that my father and mother had gathered together before the Revolution.’ Altogether the sale raised only 10,000 roubles, 2,000 of which went on six sacks of potatoes.
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The departures reduced Leningrad’s civilian population to that of a small provincial city. Three and a half million before the war, it had fallen to about a million by April 1942, to 776,000 by the end of August and 637,000 by the end of the year.
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Air raids and shelling fell off over the summer, leaving the atmosphere quiet and domestic, almost rural. In the parks, women in headscarves hoed rows of floppy-leaved cabbages. Boys fished along the embankments, sailors bicycled wildly down the middle of the streets, upturned iron bedsteads fenced off bomb craters and allotments. At the Hermitage, staff carried silk-upholstered furniture outside into the sunshine, brushing it clean of furry layers of sulphur-green mildew. The portico of St Isaac’s, where Pavlovsk’s treasures were stored, looked ‘like a Naples backstreet’, tapestries and carpets hanging from washing lines slung between polished granite pillars. In the courtyard of the Yusupov Palace scurvy-blotched hospital patients sunbathed in their underwear, oblivious to sexuality or embarrassment. Some found the quiet comforting, a reminder of holidays in grandparents’ villages. Others, such as Vera Inber, newly returned from a trip to keyed-up Moscow, found it oppressive and desolate: ‘The city is quiet and deserted to an extent that is shattering . . . How can one write in such a city! Even during the bombing it was easier.’
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For Olga Fridenberg, writing to her cousin Boris Pasternak, it was ‘cleaner than any city has ever been’ – ‘sterilised’, ‘holy’ – but also ‘without a germ of life in it. No pregnant women, no children’s voices . . . A bell jar out of which all the air has been pumped.’
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