The 900 Days (80 page)

To be sure, he had only three or four days’ supply of flour actually in Leningrad. But he could see daylight ahead. On January 24 he raised the rations for the second time—to 400 grams of bread daily for workers, 300 for ordinary employees, and 250 for dependents and children. On February 11 he raised rations again—to 500 grams for workers, 400 for employees and 300 for dependents and children.

These steps were taken against the background of a major decision by Zhdanov and the State Defense Committee: to evacuate from Leningrad over the ice road at least one-quarter of the remaining population—500,000 persons. The official order was issued January 22, and Aleksei Kosygin, the future Premier of the Soviet Union, was placed in chargé of the task.
⁴

Actually, the Leningrad front had ordered the evacuation of residents via the ice road as early as December 6 and had set a quota of 5,000 persons per day to be reached by December 20. But only 105,000 persons had been evacuated from Leningrad from August, 1941, to January 22, 1942, of which only 36,738 were native Leningraders—the others being refugees from the Baltic states.

Conditions on the ice road were so chaotic in December and early January that most persons who left the city had to make it on their own. Thousands died on the ice. From Kobona to Syasstroi throughout December and early January could be seen wrecked and abandoned cars and trucks in which elderly weak persons and feeble infants had frozen to death. There were no facilities for housing or feeding evacuees. The evacuation commission was so badly organized that hundreds of persons waited at evacuation points for days and then returned home. The evacuees often perished. The director of the Second Manual Training School tried to take his youngsters out of the city. They were confined to a frigid barracks at Ladoga for ten days, and the director eventually returned the survivors to Leningrad.

Under these conditions it was estimated that 36,118 persons had been evacuated via the Ladoga ice road up to January 22.

Now, it was hoped, all this could be changed. An echelon of several hundred buses was brought up from Moscow and stationed at Voibokalo. Evacuees were taken first to the Finland Station. There they were to be given a hot meal and 500 grams of bread. They were supposed to receive a kilo of bread when they took their places in the unheated train for transport to the Ladoga base at Borisova Griva. There they were placed in buses or open trucks and driven across the lake to Zhikharevo, Lavrovo and Kobona for entrainment to rear evacuation points. It was not supposed to take more than a couple of hours to cross Ladoga. There were warming points and first-aid stations at frequent intervals.

In reality, of course, it was many winter weeks before minimum conditions were met. The evacuees were so weak that it took hours to load them. An echelon arriving at Borisova Griva on January 23 took a day and a half to load, the people were so feeble. Not many survived the ordeal. But they could not have survived in Leningrad either.
⁵

The death roll grew: the author of fantastic fiction, A. R. Belyayev, the poet A. P. Kraisky, the author of the novel
Hunger
(dealing with the Petrograd famine in the Civil War), S. A. Semenov, and the children’s writer Ye. Ya. Danko. In all, forty-five writers perished. The losses in the Academy of Science included the antiquities specialist, S. A. Zhebelev; the Semitics specialist, P. K. Kokovtsov; the historians, B. L. Bugayevsky and P. S. Sadikov; 36 members of the Mining Institute, 8 from the Chemical Technical Institute, 7 from the Railroad Transportation Institute; 136 architects;
⁶
the artists, A. I. Savinov, V. Z. Zverev, N. A. Tyrsa, A. A. Uspensky, I. Ya. Bilibin (in all, 83 of the 225 artists in Leningrad); the composers, V. K. Tomilin, N. P. Fomin, B. G. Golts, Professor P. N. Sheffer and many others; 9 artists of the Maly Opera Theater and 29 of the Mariinsky; 44 workers of the Russian Museum (to February 13); 130 of the 560 Hermitage workers who remained in the city; hundreds of physicians, teachers, engineers, professors and students.

The list of brilliant, able, scholarly and artistic men and women who died with their beloved city ran into the thousands. Many of them were men like the distinguished physiologist, Aieksei A. Ukhtomsky. Ukhtomsky was sixty-six years old when the war broke out. He had just completed editing his lectures on the nervous system for the University of Leningrad publishing house and was planning in the 1941–42 academic year to offer a new course in physiology. With the onset of war he put aside these occupations and began to organize special research on traumatic shock and other problems connected with the war. His laboratory and institute were packed up and shipped to Elabuga in the Tatar Republic and Saratov, but he himself refused to go. His lifelong associate, Nadezhda Ivanovna Bobrovskaya, was critically ill; she had suffered a brain hemorrhage on June 6 and he was caring for her in his apartment. Moreover, his own health was extremely bad. He was suffering from chronic hypertension and was developing slight gangrene in his feet. Also, although few knew it, the first signs of cancer of the esophagus had appeared.

Nonetheless, he refused to be evacuated with his laboratory. Nadezhda Bobrovskaya died September 25, but Ukhtomsky still refused to go. There is not a single notation in his notebooks of any of his physical problems, although by October he could hardly swallow.

An old friend, A. I. Kolotilov, asked him why he did not leave Leningrad.

“I remain in Leningrad,” he said, “in order to finish my work. I haven’t long to live. I will die here. It’s too late to leave.”

The university organized a meeting on December 2 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Lenin’s graduation. It was held in the assembly hall. The electricity was working. From somewhere flowers had been produced for the platform. But the windows were broken, icy winds filled the chamber, and there were snowdrifts on the floor. Air-raid sirens sounded during the meeting, and there were occasional explosions of German shells.

Although he was now suffering from emphysema, although his toes were gangrenous and his cancer much worse, Ukhtomsky spoke with such vigor that participants counted his address one of his most striking.

Somehow Ukhtomsky managed to survive the winter, frequently giving lectures in the icebound university halls. He told his friends, “It’s gloomy at home. It’s more cheerful with people.”

By the end of spring he was still alive and on June 27, despite his gangrene, his cancer, his emphysema and his hypertension, made his way on foot from his flat on the 16th Line of Vasilevsky Island to the Zoological Institute, where with half a dozen other academic colleagues he discussed the candidate dissertations of V. V. Kuznetsov and L. K. Mishchenko and acted as the official opponent of N. N. Malyshev, who was defending a doctoral thesis on the subject, “Materials on the Physics of Electrons.” The presentation and defense of doctoral dissertations had gone on without pause in Leningrad, all through the terrible winter, in air-raid shelters, in cellars. There had been 847 defenses of dissertations in the first months of the war. In December the Leningrad Party Committee warned the academic community “not to permit any liberalization in evaluating the work of students” just because of the war and its hardships.

So the intellectual life of Leningrad went on; so the intellectuals kept to their laboratories and their libraries, dying by the hundreds but making no concession to the terrible enemies which threatened their existence.

To the end Professor Ukhtomsky continued to make notes, continued to talk with his students. Not until August 31, 1942, did he, like so many of his brave contemporaries, succumb. He was buried in the Volkov Cemetery. By this time Leningrad again observed the amenities. He had a grave and headstone of his own.

¹
During most of the war Army General A. V. Khrulev, a responsible, able, energetic officer, was in chargé of Red Army rear services. But every session he had with Stalin was an ordeal in which front commanders and members of the State Defense Committee (Beria, Malenkov and others) sought to shift responsibility for errors, mistakes and deficiencies onto him. Stalin was well aware of Khrulev’s competence. This did not prevent him from telephoning one day and exploding, “You are worse than an enemy! You work for Hitler!” Then he slammed down the receiver. Soon Khrulev’s wife was arrested as a member of a “conspiratorial organization.” Stalin continued to invite Khrulev to his dacha. The General was present at a drunken New Year’s celebration at Blizhny (“The Near Place,” the nickname for Stalin’s villa on the Mozhaisk Chaussée) on New Year’s 1944. But he was soon dismissed, presumably on Beria’s provocation. (N. A. Antipenko,
Novy Mir
, No. 8, August, 1965, pp. 154–155.)

²
In the first half of 1942 the Leningrad Party lost 15 percent of its membership by starvation.
(Leningrad v VOV
, p. 202.)

³
The incidence of ordinary contagious diseases dropped dramatically. In December, 1941, there were only 114 cases of typhoid fever compared with 143 a year earlier; 42 of typhus compared with 118; 93 of scarlet fever compared with 1,056; 211 of diphtheria compared with 728; 818 of whooping cough compared with 1,844. (Pavlov,
op. cit.,
3rd edition, p. 145.)

⁴
Most of the evacuees were sent to the Urals or to Central Asian cities. Some, however, were sent to the Caucasus and fell into German hands when the Nazis broke through to Maikop in the summer of 1942.

⁵
Even in the winter of 1941–42 people continued to be evacuated into Leningrad from surrounding regions. It was estimated that 55,000 persons were brought into the city during the winter, most of them,ill-clothed, starving, with no place to live or means of survival. (Karasev,
op. cit
., p. 186.)

⁶
L. A. Ityin, who spoke to the meeting at the Academic Chapel January 9, was killed by a shell fragment while walking on Nevslcy Prospekt in December, 1942.

AT 3
A.M.
ON FEBRUARY 2 PAVEL LUKNITSKY SAT AT THE typewriter in his freezing apartment at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal and tapped away on his diary. He was afraid to go to sleep lest he miss the ring of the telephone or the knock at the door he was expecting. He was waiting for a man named L. S. Shulgin from the Leningrad Tass office who would take him across Lake Ladoga to General Fedyuninsky’s Fifty-fourth Army, to which he had just been assigned.

Luknitsky did not know it, but the assignment had been urgently arranged by his colleagues in the Writers Union who were fearful that unless he got out of Leningrad immediately he would die of starvation.
¹

For weeks Luknitsky had exhausted himself trying to help his fellow writers. Being a war correspondent, he was able to go in and out of Leningrad, and he had tried again and again to get permission to take a truck across Lake Ladoga on a foraging expedition to purchase provisions for the Leningrad writers. The difficulties were enormous. He had to get approval from half a dozen officials, and he needed someone to help buy the supplies. Unfortunately, he had become convinced that an honest man couldn’t do the job, and he had no desire to go into partnership with a crook.

He had also been trying to persuade Smolny to send out of Leningrad some of the starving writers. And he had been seeking to evacuate his friend Lyudmila Fedorovna, who was at the point of death.

Finally, on January 20 he learned at Smolny of the impending plans for mass evacuation and with great difficulty succeeded in having twelve writers included in the first party to be sent out on January 22. He even got Lyudmila Fedorovna included in the first group of twelve. By this time he was so ill with grippe, so starved, he could hardly walk. But he had to go back and forth between the Writers’ House, his own apartment and Smolny to arrange for the evacuation tickets. They were supposed to be issued January 21 at 6
P.M.
Some people had been waiting in line for them at Smolny since 2
A.M.
At 7
P.M.
the tickets still had not been issued because they had not been received from the printers. At 7:30
P.M.
it was announced that instead of fifty buses for evacuation there would be only twenty-five. Only half of the people would be taken.

Luknitsky made thirty to forty telephone calls to Mayor Popkov and other officials and finally got the writers included in the smaller evacuation party. He then walked home in 30-below-zero weather, six to eight miles, in order to pack fifty pounds of luggage for Lyudmila Fedorovna and, after two and a half hours’ sleep, brought her with the luggage on a sled to the embarkation point in the square opposite Smolny.

After hours of waiting in the cold the writers’ group got away at 4
P.M.
Luknitsky described eleven of those evacuated, including N. Vagner, S. Spassky and his wife, V. S. Valdman and her husband, as in “such condition that life hardly flickered in their bodies.” The husband of Madame Valdman died in the bus. The twelfth person showed up in the cab of a truck overloaded with his possessions. He was healthy, insolent and gnawed unem-barrassedly at a chicken bone. He pushed his way onto the bus, impudently stowing his bags and boxes over the heads of the feeble passengers.

As the convoy pulled out, 150 to 200 despairing persons watched. They had been promised places, but there was no room.

Luknitsky was so exhausted that he was hardly able to rise on January 23. But he had again to walk to the ends of the city, wait long hours at the military offices, obtain a new food order, stand in line in an unheated staff building where clerks worked without lights, and walk home skirting an enormous half-frozen lake (a water main had burst) which covered the squares opposite Dobrolyubov Prospekt and Dynamo Stadium, in which trucks were already being frozen for the remainder of winter. The next day he had a temperature of 102. He probably would have died that day had not an old friend, the chief of the regional air service, Korolev, taken him in hand, put him to bed in a warm room, given him a bath, 150 grams of vodka and a meal. He spent three days at the air base, and when he got back to the Writers’ House, his associates had obtained his assignment to the Fifty-fourth Army.

It was for this reason that he sat in his freezing fifth-floor apartment, keeping himself awake by typing. He sat and sat. No one came. At 8:30
A.M.
, deathly tired, he tried to telephone, but the apparatus was not working. He pinned a note on his door saying: “Knock loud.” Wrapping himself in his bedclothes, he sank back asleep. He had hardly closed his eyes when the Tass man, Shulgin, appeared. Hiding his typewriter behind the books in his study, and grabbing his knapsack, blanket roll, kettle, hand grenades and a candle stub, Luknitsky locked his apartment and hurried down the ice-treaded staircase to the street.

It was 9
A.M.
Across the canal stood a 3-ton AMO truck, covered with a canvas top, camouflaged with white paint. The body was filled with boxes and people. It appeared that Shulgin, under the guise of taking a correspondent to the front, was evacuating from Leningrad all his close —and distant—relatives, including three half-crazy old aunts. There were, in all, fourteen persons in the truck, among them only two or three who were relatives of Tass men other than Shulgin.

It developed that the truck belonged to a tobacco factory where the chauffeur, Aleksandr Yakovlevich, worked. Shulgin had provided himself with a box of cigarettes and vodka and counted on acquiring gasoline en route from drivers of tank trucks coming across the lake. He planned to get his relatives out of Leningrad and return with a truckload of goods for sale in the black market.

The expedition started at 9:30. First, they had to get water for the radiator. Griboyedov Canal was frozen to the bottom, so they went to the Fon-tanka. While the chauffeur filled the radiator, Shulgin raced to a nearby house and picked up another relative.

The truck made its way through the drifted streets of Leningrad, past the sleds, the corpses, the long bread lines, past women lugging heavy pots and pails of water, and crossed the Neva by the Okhta Bridge, moving out Vsevolozhsky, meeting more and more military traffic, passing dozens of burned-out and abandoned carcasses of trucks. All trucks heading for the lake carried passengers, most of them people who had bribed the drivers. There were heated buses with
burzhuiki
and tin chimneys through the roof, canvas-covered trucks, and open trucks filled with exhausted people trying to keep out of the wind. There were even people clinging to the outside of gasoline tank trucks or lying one atop the other in the open trucks, wrapped like mummies, with telltale red and white frost marks on their cheeks, already half dead. Many refugees would not live to reach Lake Ladoga. There were some people slugging along on foot, pulling sleds with household goods. Here and there Luknitsky saw a man or woman collapsed in a drift, dead or dying while the survivors of the party huddled helpless around. No one had the strength to bury these victims. They simply removed the heavy clothing and any valuables, covered the body with snow and went on. As they neared the lake, they had to avoid the patrols—evacuation on foot was not permitted. Or they bribed the guards with cigarettes and tobacco to look the other way while they persuaded a chauffeur to take them across the lake. Everything depended on the chauffeurs. They were the lords of the lake, gods. They brought the food and fuel to Leningrad. The law was stern. For any kind of speculation or swindling they could be shot. But they had no fear. They demanded from the starving evacuees cigarettes or bread or a handful of flour.

The road was narrow, with hardly room to pass, and if a car got off the ruts, it was likely to land upside down in a ditch and the passengers would be left to try to make their way forward on foot with failing strength. Luknitsky’s truck moved slowly and finally halted altogether when a tie-up brought the column to a halt. They started again and arrived at Borisova Griva, the railroad station. Everywhere lay abandoned and broken-down trucks. At the station there were thousands of boxes of flour and a chain of hundreds, possibly thousands, of trucks, like a conveyor belt, bringing new loads to the station, unloading and then turning about for the return trip across the Ladoga to Zhikharevo. To the right of the road was a sign:
^u
Bor. Griva from Leningrad—50 kilometers. From Lake 18.” Luknitsky’s truck halted for nearly two hours at Borisova Griva while the traffic was untangled. Luknitsky was fiercely hungry. A traffic officer took a quarter-loaf of bread from his pocket and held it ostentatiously in his hands, obviously wanting to trade it for a pack of cigarettes. Shulgin finally gave him twenty cigarettes and took the bread. He gave a piece to a three-year-old girl in the truck who was crying with hunger. Luknitsky got a morsel, and Shulgin ate the rest himself. Shulgin had a bottle of vodka, which he shared with the chauffeur and a friend. He did not offer a drink to Luknitsky. But Luknitsky had his own flask, so he took a slug without offering it to the others.

Finally, the column moved on, and Shulgin went to present a letter to the commissar of a truck company who was supposed to give them fuel and dinner. The commissar provided some cigarettes but refused to supply dinner. Instead, he offered four pieces of bread, about 350 grams. Shulgin took one piece and gave the others to Luknitsky, the chauffeur and his friend. One of Shulgin’s aunts traded twenty cigarettes for a half-kettle of hot cereal. The truck went on. They reached Ladoga and saw ahead endless columns of trucks. Beside the road were antiaircraft batteries in shelters made of ice blocks. At 5:12
P.M.
they started out on the ice, going full speed. The road was wide enough so that trucks could pass on either side. Everyone went full speed and the road extended into white infinity, a bit, thought Luknitsky, like the steppes of Kazakhstan. On either side there were high snow walls thrown up by the snow scrapers. At each kilometer stood a traffic officer in white camouflage cape with white and red traffic flags. The officers were protected from the wind by half-shelters made of ice blocks. Some had fires inside their ice blocks, stacks of wood and barrels of gasoline. At greater intervals there were repair shops, traffic centers and white-camouflaged antiaircraft posts. Here and there, half covered with ice and snow, lay the carcasses of broken or burned trucks.

As darkness fell, the traffic officers brought into play tiny green and white signal lights. Many trucks did not dim their lights, and the flash of headlights played over the snow and ice. Luknitsky’s truck ran swiftly without lights and within an hour and a half had reached the eastern shore. The radiator was steaming, and Shulgin’s friend got some water to fill it. The friend proudly showed Shulgin a small package. “Sweet butter!” he said. “I got it for five cigarettes.” But it turned out to be a bar of household soap.

They had arrived at Lavrovo, but their goal was Zhikharevo. This took another hour and a half by moonlight. At Zhikharevo they expected a warm room, food and rest. They found chaos. There were thousands of persons wandering about the tiny war-beaten village. No one knew where there was a lunchroom, where documents could be obtained for the evacuation trains, when the train might be leaving, where you could stay overnight or even where to get warm.

Luknitsky finally located the evacuation office in a broken-down barracks. A long line waited while three men checked documents and issued coupons for the dining room.

Luknitsky discovered, however, that the coupons were only for those being officially evacuated. No provision for persons on military orders like himself or for Shulgin or the chauffeur or Shulgin’s relatives. Somehow Shulgin got a meal ticket and then took his relatives to the station. A train was being loaded, but there was no room for the relatives, who became hysterical. They had no place to stay the night. The moon shone down and the thermometer stood at 20 below zero. Luknitsky eventually met the military commandant and got some dry rations for two days—750 grams of hardtack, 70 grams of granulated sugar and a packet of concentrated pea soup. But he needed hot food. Eventually, he stumbled on a kitchen where he could trade some dry rations for a bowl of hot wheat cereal. But there was no place to eat. The cereal was ladled out in an outdoor booth. So he sat down on the icy step of a barn and, half frozen, ate his cereal, holding his spoon with numb ringers, and downed the hot kasha with gulps of the icy wind. If only there had been some tea!

Somehow Shulgin got food for his relatives and, using the food coupons of two persons who had died, he got bread and dinner for himself. It was now almost 1
A.M.
, and Luknitsky had no place to sleep and had yet to find a place to get warm. There were hundreds like himself, wandering the wet, slippery, icy, rutted streets of the village—women and children, weak, collapsing, frozen.

There were, Luknitsky discovered, two persons in chargé of the refugees —the commandant of the evacuation center, Semenov, and the chief of transfer, Streltsov. Both had been sent out by the Leningrad City Party, and they lived in room No. 6 of one of the barracks. Luknitsky spent the night on the floor of room No. 6, sleeping on a piece of plywood. The two men were working themselves to the bone. They slept two or three hours a night, on a wooden bench in their clothes, never undressing, trying to cope with the torrent of people who poured from the trucks day and night. They had no means of looking after the refugees. There was no hot water for tea, no plank beds, no mattresses, no lights, nothing but bare barracks with dirty floors. No doctors, no cleaning women, no personnel of any kind. All that was being done was to put people into trucks and deliver them to Zhikharevo.