The 900 Days (60 page)

Hunger and cold had begun their harsh regime. Bombs and shells rained down. On only two days between September 12 and November 30 did the Nazis refrain from shelling Leningrad. The bombardment was continuous: in September 5,364 shells, 991 explosive bombs, 31,398 incendiaries; in October 7,590 shells, 801 explosive bombs, 59,926 incendiaries; in November 11,230 shells, 1,244 explosive bombs, 6,544 incendiaries; in December 5,970 shells, 259 bombs, 1,849 incendiaries. There were fires without number—more than 700 in October alone.

In these dreary fall months occurred 79 percent of the air raids which were to strike Leningrad during the whole of the war and 88 percent of the air-raid casualties.

The reports piled up in the City Records Office. One for October read:

The Germans had charted the city for artillery. Firing point No. 736 was a school in Baburin Pereulok, No. 708 the Institute for Maternal Care, No. 192 the Pioneer Palace, No. 89 the Erisman Hospital, No. 295 the Gostiny Dvor, No. 9 the Hermitage, No. 757 an apartment house on Bol-shaya Zelena Ulitsa, No. 99 the Nechayev Hospital, No. 187 the Red Fleet library. Smolny Institute, the NKVD headquarters on the Liteiny and the Admiralty were favorite targets. The Germans had the biggest guns in Europe trained on Leningrad—cannon from Skoda, from Krupp, from Schneider; railroad guns of calibers as high as 400 mm and 420 mm, firing shells of 800 and 900 kilos, over distances of 15,000, 28,000 and even 31,000 yards from six great artillery investments, circled about the city.

But life went on. Vera Ketlinskaya broadcast over Leningrad radio on October 19, marking the seventeenth week of war:

The Philharmonic put on a concert in the big hall on October 25. Alek-sandr Kamensky played Tchaikovsky. He did the Prater Waltz for an encore. The concert was given during the afternoon, and deep shadows filled the unheated hall. Spectators sat in their greatcoats. Many were military men.

Most of the famous old secondhand bookstores were still open. Ilya Glazunov
³
and his father visited their favorite, from time to time, at the corner of Bolshoi Prospekt and Vvedensky streets. Not much had changed since the war. Old men in overcoats, with chapped hands and gold-rimmed spectacles huddled together and peered at calf-bound volumes. There were stacks of a new edition of Dickens’
Great Expectations
. It had come off the press just before the blockade. Now all the copies were penned up in Leningrad. On the cover there was a drawing of a little boy, his hand held by a middle-aged man, looking at a ship vanishing into the distance, far, far into the distance. It made a small boy dream.

The astronomer A. N. Deich undertook to rescue from the Pulkovo observatory whatever remained of the telescopic lenses, the scientific equipment, the valuable charts of the stars, the catalogues of the heavens, the remarkable library and archives. Battle had raged in and around the observatory buildings for weeks. The great dome of the main telescope site had been badly smashed, but Deich discovered that the central vaults in which most of the materials had been stored were still in Russian hands and apparently undamaged. He led an expedition to the observatory late in the night of October 13. The German lines were only a few hundred feet distant. Under cover of darkness the most valued observatory possessions, the incunabula among them, were removed. They had to be carried by hand for a quarter of a mile because the trucks could not mount the observatory hill.

Three nights later Professor N. N. Pavlov and a convoy of five trucks started for the observatory, also at night. They were spotted about a mile from the observatory and had to halt as the Germans brought them under fire. They took refuge in a ditch but finally were able to remove a full load of records and equipment. On their way out they again came under German fire.

One October night when the bombardment was particularly heavy Nikolai Tikhonov, the poet who was now a war correspondent, encountered a familiar figure in one of the lower corridors of Smolny —a stocky, handsome man, fiery, a great charmer of the ladies, with hair like King Lear and a beard like Jove—Professor Iosif Orbeli, director of the Hermitage.

Orbeli greeted Tikhonov with enthusiasm.

“You haven’t, of course, forgotten the Nizami anniversary?” Orbeli said eagerly. Nizami was the national poet of Azerbaijan. His eight hundredth anniversary was October 19. Long before the war the Hermitage had made plans to mark the occasion. As Orbeli talked, Tikhonov could hear the crash of bombs, the bark of guns.

“Dear Iosif Abramovich,” Tikhonov said. “You hear what’s going on all around us. In these circumstances a celebration might not be very triumphant.”

Bombs or no bombs, war or no war, Orbeli was determined to stage his meeting. He persuaded Tikhonov to speak. He persuaded the military authorities to release “for one day only” half a dozen leading Orientologists, serving on the Pulkovo or Kolpino lines. He promised that they would be back in the trenches before dawn.

Precisely as scheduled, the meeting was held at 2
P.M.
on October 19 in the Hermitage and completed a few minutes before the customary late-afternoon alert. It was, Tikhonov later discovered, the only celebration in all Russia of the great poet’s anniversary. Neither in Moscow nor in Baku was the day marked.

“People of light”—that was what Tikhonov called the people of Leningrad in these times.

But the light was flickering out for some—for a group of sailors who knifed a captain at the naval docks, stole a boat and tried to make their way to a Finnish port. They were caught. A cutter brought them back. The command was mustered out and the five men were lined up before an open ditch. One dropped to his knees, crying for his life. The order was given, a volley rang out and the five slowly fell into the ditch.

The light was dim for another group of sailors. They bought some
samogon
, moonshine, from a peasant and got drunk on duty. They were sent into a penalty battalion, where death would be their companion on mission after mission of the kind from which few return.

It was dim, too, for a buxom Russian girl with a strong face and rough hands. She wore a sailor’s jacket and a short skirt. An ersatz sailor, the men at Kronstadt called her. They joked with her, tough sailor’s jokes. She answered them back in kind. Jolly, tough, witless—so she seemed. One day she asked for the keys to the gun room. She said she’d forgotten to clean one of the guns. She unlocked the locker, took out a rifle, went to her bunk, kicked the boot off her right foot, hooked the trigger with her big toe and shot herself.

She could not go on longer. This was her second war. The first had begun in the late thirties when the “black crow” of the police had swept up to the jewelry store where she worked. All the clerks had been arrested. The manager, it seemed, had been stealing. What happened to him did not matter. What happened to Vera brought an end to her life. She was sent to an island, a prison where the men were on one side of a wall, the women on the other. Sometimes they beat the wall down. The men were like beasts. So were the women. Somehow, she had survived that. Now she wanted love, a home, children. And the man she loved did not love her. All around were war and death and suffering. It was too much. Why go on? She killed herself.

Hunger . . . cold . . . bullets . . . bombs . . . the allies of the Germans were hard at work in Leningrad.

Deus Conservat Omnia
. . .

¹
The Moscow situation was so critical that Stalin put the city in a state of siege—that is, under strict martial law. The action was taken between 10 and n
P.M.
on the evening of October 19 at a meeting in Stalin’s Kremlin office attended by most of the State Defense Council members and A. S. Shcherbakov, the Moscow Party leader. Stalin called in the Moscow commandant, Lieutenant General Pavel A. Artemev, and his commissar, K. F. Telegin. For days Moscow had been disorganized by a wild flight of broken units and refugees. Stalin asked Artemev what the situation was. Artemev said that it was still alarming. He had taken steps to restore order. They had not been sufficient, and he proposed proclamation of a state of siege. Stalin ordered Georgi Malenkov to write out the decree. Then, irritated by Malenkov’s slowness and wordiness, he snapped angrily at him, tore the paper from his hands, and dictated to Shcherbakov a new proclamation, which was promptly posted on the Moscow walls and broadcast over the radio. (K. F. Telegin,
Voprosy Istorii KPSS
, No. 9, September, 1965, p. 104.) On October 16 the High Command had been divided into two groups, a first echelon, the operational group, headed by Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky, and a second, headed by Marshal B. M. Shaposh-nikov. The second echelon was moved out of Moscow to an unnamed location from which it could continue to direct the troops, even if Moscow fell or was encircled. Both the Defense and Naval Commissariats were removed to Kuibyshev. General S. M. Shtemenko directed the loading of the special headquarters train on the morning of October 17. The train left Moscow at 7
P.M.
and arrived at the new headquarters the next morning. Shtemenko returned to Moscow by car on the night of October 18. The High Command was working during evenings in the Byelorussian subway station because of the persistence and severity of German air attacks. It has been widely rumored that Stalin left Moscow briefly at this time, but there is no confirmation in the memoirs. The Shaposhnikov group returned to Moscow in late December, but a communications center was continued in the emergency locale for some time. (Shtemenko,
op. cit
., pp. 40-45; A. M. Vasilevsky,
Bitva Za Moskvu
, 2nd edition, Moscow, 1968, p. 20.) In his famous “secret speech” Khrushchev claimed that Stalin summoned the Communist Party Central Committee to Moscow for a plenary session during October, 1941. The members came to Moscow and waited several days, but the meeting was never called. Whether the meeting and its postponement or cancellation were related to the critical October days on the Moscow front Khrushchev never made clear.

²
In fact, in Pavlov’s opinion, no forged ration cards were introduced by the Germans. (Personal communication, April 30, 1968.)

³
Glazunov is now a well-known Soviet painter of modernist tendencies.

THE FIRST DAY OR TWO OR THREE WERE THE WORST. SO Nikolai Chukovsky found. If a man had nothing but a slice of bread to eat, he suffered terrible hunger pangs the first day. And the second. But gradually the pain faded into quiet despondency, a gloom that had no ending, a weakness that advanced with frightening rapidity. What you did yesterday you could not do today. You found yourself surrounded by obstacles too difficult to overcome. The stairs were too steep to climb. The wood was too hard to chop, the shelf too high to reach, the toilet too difficult to clean. Each day the weakness grew. But awareness did not decline. You saw yourself from a distance. You knew what was happening, but you could not halt it. You saw your body changing, the legs wasting to toothpicks, the arms vanishing, the breasts turning into empty bags. Skirts slipped from the hips, trousers would not stay up. Strange bones appeared. Or the opposite—you puffed up. You could no longer wear your shoes. Your neighbor had to help you to your feet. Your cheeks looked as though they were bursting. Your neck was too thick for your collar. But it was nothing except wind and water. There was no strength in you. Some said it came from drinking too much. Half of Leningrad was wasting away, the other half was swelling from the water drunk to fill empty stomachs.

It was not true, Chukovsky felt, that you feared most your own death. What was most terrible was to see the people around you dying. What you feared was the inevitable process, the weakness that seized you, the terror of dying alone by degrees in darkness, in cold and in hunger.

As Maria Razina, a Party worker, noted: “Leningraders live so badly it is not possible to imagine anything worse—hunger, cold, and darkness in every house with the fall of night.”

October had been hungry, and it was stormy after the fourteenth and snowy. The bombs and shells took their toll. In November the deaths began. Not only the deaths from hunger. The elderly slipped quietly away of many diseases. Younger people died of galloping consumption, of grippe. Any disease finished you quickly. An ulcer was fatal. Half the food you ate was inedible. People began to stuff their stomachs with substitutes. They tore the wallpaper from the walls and scraped off the paste, which was supposed to have been made with potato flour. Some ate the paper. It had some nourishment, they thought, because it was made from wood. Later they chewed the plaster—just to fill their stomachs. Vera Inber visited her friend, Marietta, a pharmacologist at the Erisman Hospital where her husband worked. She noticed that the cages for the guinea pigs and rabbits that lined the corridor were all empty now. Only the smell remained. Outside the bomb shelter she saw a watchdog, Dinka. The dog, like most of those in Leningrad, was trained to go to the shelter when the air-raid siren sounded. But already dogs were becoming rare in the besieged city. You noticed those that remained. You thought about them.

Dystrophy and diarrhea appeared—the result of the inedible elements in the diet, the chaff in the bread, the sweepings, the plaster, the paste and the other indigestibles. A man’s strength flowed right through him. Within a few hours he was dead. A certain order of starvation emerged. It was not the old who went first. It was the young, especially those fourteen to eighteen, who lived on the smallest rations. Men died before women. Healthy, strong people sank before chronic invalids. This was the direct result of the inequity in the rations. Young people twelve to fourteen received a dependent’s ration, which was identical with the ration for children up to the age of twelve. As of October 1 this was only 200 grams, about a third of a loaf of bread a day—just half the ration of a worker. But vigorous, growing children needed as much food as a worker. This was why they died so swiftly. The ration for men and women was the same—400 grams of bread for workers, 200 for all other categories. But men led more vigorous lives. They needed more food. Without it they died more rapidly than the women. The monthly meat ration for children and young people was 400 grams, hardly a third of that for workers (1,500 grams). Young people got half the fats, a little more than half the cereals and three-quarters the sweets. Troops at the front received twice the worker’s ration—800 grams of bread a day beginning October 1, 150 grams of meat a day, 80 grams of fish, 140 grams of cereal, 500 grams of potatoes and vegetables, 50 grams of fat and 35 grams of sugar.

“Today it is so simple to die,” Yelena Skryabina noted in her diary. “You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on the bed and you never again get up.”

She was concerned about her sixteen-year-old son, Dima. In August and September he chased from one end of the city to another in search of groceries, watching the war bulletin boards, playing with his friends. Now he was like an old man. He sat all day in his slippers beside the stove, pale-blue circles under his eyes. Unless he could be shaken from apathy he would die. Yelena Skryabina could find little to feed him. He got only a child’s ration of 200 grams a day—a couple of slices of bread. Nothing for a growing boy. She tried to tempt him with such delicacies as she could contrive—a jellied pâté made by boiling old leather, soup thickened with cellulose.

It was no longer uncommon to see people collapse of hunger. Yelena Skryabina noticed a man walking slowly ahead of her in the street. As she overtook him, she glanced at his face, frighteningly blue. Death, she felt, must be hovering over him. She had not taken more than a few paces when she looked back. He tottered and dropped slowly to the sidewalk. When she reached him, he was dead.

There were wild rumors of plague and cholera—fortunately not true.
But
rats became bolder. They, too, were hungry. A sailor awoke with the feeling someone was staring at him. It was the yellow eyes of a great rat on the foot of his bed. The rise in dystrophy and scurvy astonished the doctors. Before November came to an end 18 percent of the hospital case load was starvation-related diseases. On November 20 the clinic at the Kirov factory issued twenty-eight sick reports for dystrophy. The next day the total was fifty. The Vyborg region registry bureau was unable to keep up with the demand for death certificates. By the end of November at least 11,085 Lenin-graders had died of starvation.
¹

Already the whispers had begun: In the markets some of the sausage was made not of pork but of human flesh. The militia, it was said, had evidence of this in their possession. Who could tell whether or not it was true? Better to take no chances. Yelena Skryabina’s husband warned her not to let five-year-old Yuri play far from the house, even if he was with his nurse. Children, it was said, had disappeared. . . .

A whole new standard of values was arising. Women would trade a diamond ring for a few pounds of black bread so coarse it seemed to be baked of straw. When Luknitsky returned from the front, women waited outside the railroad station. They tugged at his shoulder, saying, “Soldier, wouldn’t you like some wine?” They had a bottle or two of spirits to trade for bread, which was in better supply with the troops. Sometimes at the Writers’ House there would be a bit of meat in the soup—horse meat.

Hunger brought other changes. Sex virtually disappeared. It was not only that physical sex traits vanished—menstruation halted, women’s breasts shriveled, their faces sagged. The sex drive evaporated. Women made no effort to beautify themselves. Lipsticks were eaten as food in December and January. The grease was used for frying ersatz bread. Face powder was mixed into ersatz flour. The births dropped catastrophically in 1942 to only one-third the 1941 figure. In 1943 they dropped another 25 percent. The birth rate in 1940 was 25.1 per 1,000. In 1941 it was 18.3, in 1942 only
6.2
.
²
The wife of a friend of Pavel Luknitsky, Edik Orlova, gave birth to a child at a lying-in home on Vasilevsky Island, February 12. She was brought from her home at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal in a sled. She gave birth in darkness, lighted only by the flickering flames from a tin stove. Despite every effort the child died on the eleventh day.

Nikolai Chukovsky believed that hungry bodies conserved strength by eliminating the sex drive. Among starving people it was hard to tell men from women. They slept together for warmth, but their bodies aroused no sexual stimulation.

In late winter he took some workers from the fleet newspaper to a bath— a rare treat. The Leningrad baths closed in December and did not work for two or three months. Few workers had even had their clothes off for weeks, living and working in buildings where the temperature was near zero. As they prepared to go to the bath, clean clothing in hand, a question arose about Zoya, one of the typesetters. She appeared, ready to join her comrades at the bath. Chukovsky was embarrassed. Zoya certainly had every right to a bath, but what to do with her among a crowd of men? Nonetheless, they started off together. At the bathhouse there was a surprise. It was ladies’ day! Zoya was the only one permitted to bathe. Now the shoe was on the other foot. Finally, Chukovsky appealed to the director and got permission for his sailors to bathe, too. The little band of men undressed and took their bath amid a crowd of women. There was not the slightest embarrassment. Chukovsky could not help thinking how his sailors would have reacted a few months before, surrounded by naked women. But here they were, all skin and bones, the women even more than the men. Neither men nor women gave it a thought. Zoya, instead of going into a corner by herself, joined the men. It seemed perfectly natural. They passed the soap back and forth, gossiped, soaked themselves, enjoyed the water and the warmth. There was no sign of sexual feeling on either side.

When rations began to increase, when starvation moderated, sex began to return to normal. The war gave rise to new forms of relations between men and women. “Front love” was what it was called in Leningrad—the love which sprang up between men and women, girls and boys, fighting in the lines together, serving in the AA crews, the love between the nurses and the men they cared for. Many of them had wives or husbands from whom they had long been separated. They did not know whether they would survive the war—or even the week. Chukovsky felt that “front love” commanded respect as a warm and necessary human relationship, one which was only natural in the unnatural conditions of the war and the siege.

Not everyone’s nerves held up. One evening Luknitsky sat in the Writers’ House at the table with Ernst Gollerbach, who began to explain that Hitler was bombing Leningrad in order to kill Gollerbach. He begged his companions not to blame him for the raids. “I would kill myself if it would stop the raids,” he said, “but I am a Christian and it is not possible.” After a few moments his companions realized that Gollerbach had gone out of his mind. What to do with the poor man? Could his wife care for him? To put him in an insane asylum was a death sentence. By this time the Writers’ House had begun to give meals only in exchange for coupons. This meant a 50 percent cut in the ration of writers who had been eating there. When Luknitsky went home after such a miserable meal, he drank a glass or two of ersatz coffee without sugar or bread to try to quench his hunger.

Captain Ivan V. Travkin was a submarine commander. His submarine was stationed in the Neva and his family was in Leningrad. He got leave to visit them and found his wife, her body badly swollen, her eyes sunken in their sockets, hardly able to move. His daughter with puffy eyes—the first sign of dystrophy—sat on the bed muffled in bedclothes, eating soup made from library paste. His mother-in-law wandered about the dark, cold room mumbling, laughing and crying—she had lost her reason. The windows had been broken by bomb blasts and replaced by plywood. The walls were black with smoke from the little iron stove. There was a flickering kerosene lamp. Outside shells could be heard bursting. It was a typical Leningrad family on a typical Leningrad day.

Prices rose steadily on the black market. In early November a small loaf of black bread (if you could find one) sold for 60 rubles ($10), a sack of potatoes for 300 and a kilo of meat for 1,200.

The truth, as none knew better than Pavlov, was that time was running out for Leningrad. The Lake Ladoga shipping route had been less than a brilliant success. The little overladen boats left for Osinovets usually at night. The crossing took sixteen hours. German bombers watched like hawks. The boats often sank, either with the load of food being brought to Leningrad or with refugees being taken out.

The route had worked badly almost from the start. A military man, Major General Afanasy M. Shilov, had been put in chargé. He ordered barges, overladen with grain and munitions, out onto the storm-tossed waters against the advice of their sailors. There were hideous losses. Shilov was called in by Andrei Zhdanov and warned that he would go before a military court (and face the firing squad) if he sent more ships out onto the lake against the will of the skippers.

Admiral A. T. Karavayev, who was present at the stormy meeting, thought Zhdanov looked seriously ill, pale and tired. He coughed and wheezed but never stopped smoking.

The pressure to get supplies into Leningrad was crushing. Two or three days later Zhdanov sent a telegram to Ladoga saying: “Bread is vanishing in Leningrad. Each 24 hours without shipments dooms the lives of thousands of Leningraders.”

Leningrad in October had been using about 1,100 tons of flour a day. But in the first thirty days the Ladoga route brought in only 9,800 tons of food. Mountains of supplies piled up around Volkhov and Gostinopolye. More and more barges and ships were being sunk by Nazi planes, despite appeals to Zhdanov for better fighter cover.

The situation grew so critical that Mayor Popkov was sent to Novaya Ladoga October 13 to try and straighten out the mess. He arrived coincident with a savage German bombing of the docks and storage area. A meeting of those working on the shipping route was summoned and Popkov spoke in solemn terms: