The 900 Days (81 page)

That night the three-year-old girl who had come in Luknitsky’s truck died. The wails of her mother filled the barracks. Then an engineer died, and his wife, composed and quiet, came to room No. 6 to find out what the formalities were. None, Semenov said. The body should be taken out of the barracks and put on the street with the other bodies. The wife didn’t think she could move it. Perhaps, Semenov said, some of those in the barracks would help. If she wished, she could report the death to the police, giving them the name, the date and the address. The woman went back to the barracks, woke up some of those sleeping there and moved the corpse. Then another man died in the corridor. People just stepped over the body in the darkness.

Streltsov and Semenov had been sent out with the first evacuees January 22. The only word they had from Leningrad so far was that thirty cleaning women were being sent on foot. Why on foot and why from Leningrad there was no explanation. Nothing had been done to provide the evacuees with food for their trip.

Shulgin managed to get his relatives onto a warm, clean evacuation train, and the journey to take Luknitsky to the Fifty-fourth Army headquarters resumed. They drove through Voibokalo and Shum, only to find that General Fedyuninsky’s headquarters were at Gorokhovets, twenty-two miles distant. Shulgin refused to take Luknitsky any further. However, after much argument Luknitsky managed to get to the village of Vloya, within Fifty-fourth Army territory. There he parted with Shulgin, who was in a feverish hurry to go to Volkhov, where he had “business” to transact before going back to Leningrad.

He told Luknitsky that he had never gone hungry during the blockade, that he had always managed to feed his relatives and that he looked forward to a time at the end of the war when the government would “re-examine its attitude toward private property and private trade.” Never before or after, during the war did Luknitsky meet such a man.

There was little that was unusual about Luknitsky’s trip across Ladoga. Not even the presence of Shulgin. The road attracted profiteers and black market operators. Sometimes speculators from Leningrad offered as much as 25,000 rubles a box for flour. Usually, the drivers refused the offers angrily. Sometimes the speculators were arrested and shot. Other drivers, however, engaged in black market dealings. A driver named Sergei Loginov found a friend and fellow Young Communist chauffeur who had turned off the ice road and was burying boxes of provisions in the snow. After an argument Loginov shot and killed the man.

Madame Skryabina made the Ladoga trip four days after Luknitsky. She took her seventy-four-year-old mother, so weak it did not seem possible that she would survive; a sixty-year-old nurse, with swollen feet, hardly able to walk; her son Dima, sixteen years old and suffering from an advanced case of dysentery, and her youngest child, Yuri, five years old.

Madame Skryabina rose early on February 6. She went to the bakery, got the day’s rations, and when she got back to the communal flat, she found the former mistress of the apartment, Anastasiya Vladimirovna, had just died. There was nothing to do but to leave as planned. There were three trucks in the convoy and thirty people in the three cars. They waited three hours in the cold for one family, that of a hospital manager. Madame Skryabina was shocked at the appearance of this family—a wife, dressed as if for a ball, two healthy teen-age girls and another girl with a governess. Obviously, they had suffered little.

Finally, the caravan started out the Znamenskaya, past Kirochnaya, the Tauride Gardens, the Pedagogical Institute, Smolny, and through the suburban summer resort country toward Ladoga. Then the trouble started. Something went wrong with the truck. It halted on the ice, and dusk began to fall. The chauffeur worked for hours over the machine. Fortunately, there was a big drum of gasoline in the truck. They drew off some gas, lighted a fire and warmed themselves. But it was 10
P.M.
when they got to the opposite shore. No one knew where to go, where the train was, when it would leave. The night was one long torment. The chauffeur found lodging in a peasant hut, but the evacuees stayed in the truck. By this time Dima was so weak that Madame Skryabina had to leave him in the hospital at Voibokalo. She took her two elderly companions and Yuri and tried to find a place in the crowded evacuation train. There were no seats, and they had to sit on their suitcases. As they sat, weary and forlorn, the hospital manager’s wife brought out fried chicken, chocolate and powdered milk and fed her girls. Madame Skryabina had nothing but ersatz bread to give Yuri. She felt spasms in her throat, but not, she noted, “from hunger.”

The train moved slowly through the night, stopping occasionally. At each stop someone would come along, knocking on the door with a hammer: “Have you any dead? Throw them out here!” But there was food at some of the long station stops—soup and cereal. The evacuees developed stomach complaints, probably because they were not used to eating. This went on for four days. Madame Skryabina decided she could go no farther. She would have to take her group from the train. They got off at Cherepovets. Her mother had collapsed. Also, Madame Skryabina hoped that she might get word from here of Dima in the hospital at Voibokalo. They got off and found themselves surrounded by snowdrifts. The townsfolk expressed surprise they had gotten off the train. Cherepovets was suffering a terrible food shortage. Madame Skryabina finally found a dirty little room, but it was not easy. Everyone was frightened of Leningraders. They were so hungry and so ill. She put her mother and the old nurse in a cold, filthy hospital. The women grew worse and worse. One day they told Madame Skryabina of the death during the night of a young engineer and his wife. The same day four students who had been brought in late at night were found dead in the hospital corridors where they had been laid. There was no food in the local market except
klukva
(cranberries) picked in the local bogs. Madame Skrya-bina was able to obtain some potatoes from a peasant by trading a piece of wool. On February 27 she found her mother dead in the hospital. She could not get the body buried. No one bothered with that any more. They simply piled the corpses at the cemetery gates.

In mid-March by a stroke of sheer luck (a tearful conversation at the station with a soldier on a hospital train) she was reunited with her son Dima and managed to join him on the train with Yuri and the old nurse and leave Cherepovets. The family was saved. The train took them out beyond Vologda and eventually to Gorky.

Slowly the evacuation improved as February progressed. The elapsed time between Leningrad and Borisova Griva was cut to five or six hours, the transfer from train to trucks and buses to one and a half to two hours, the crossing of Ladoga to two to two and a half hours (although during snowstorms it sometimes took seven hours). From January 22 to April 15, a total of 554,186 persons were removed over Ladoga, including 35,713 wounded Red Army men.

Late in February Vera Inber made the trip over Ladoga to General Fedyuninsky’s headquarters with a delegation. They rode in a truck which had panel sides, a canvas top and an open end. They sat on wooden benches, very uncomfortable, very cold, very exhausting. She hardly had the strength to survive. A few days before in trying to walk across Leningrad to a poetry reading before a naval detachment she had collapsed.

It took them only an hour and a half to cross Ladoga, but the whole trip from Leningrad to Fedyuninsky’s headquarters at Gorokhovets took thirteen hours. On the eastern shore she saw goats, dogs and live chickens for the first time in months. It was like a miracle. And she heard people singing. No one in Leningrad had sung since the start of winter. People walked briskly, breathed the sharp air deeply and blew out their frosty breaths. Their cheeks were ruddy and glowing. Vera Inber and her companions looked like pale, slow, whispering shadows.

At Zhikharevo she saw a terrible fire. Nazi bombers were attacking the supply dumps and had hit a great kerosene tank and a train of coal cars. She had never seen such flames—purple, crimson, yellow, and smoke so black it weighted down the air.

To Vera Inber the Ladoga seemed a vast plain of ice, as covered with snow as the North Pole—ice fences, ice enclosures, circular ice Eskimo huts for the antiaircraft crews, ice bases on which the antiaircraft guns were installed. Everything was snow. Everything was white.

Along the route were the skeletons of dead cars, the wrecked trucks and machines sacrificed to the ceaseless flow of supplies. Day and night the movement never halted, swift, ordered, relentless, despite Nazi planes, despite the terrible
burya
_y
the Ladoga blizzards, despite the temperature which fell to 30 and 40 below zero.

The Ladoga route had been brought into order. It was in constant flow, food and fuel pouring into Leningrad, people pouring out.

In a dugout Vera Inber sat with a division commander. It was so warm near the little iron stove that two or three birch shoots had pushed through the earthen walls and begun to sprout a few tender leaves. They drank a toast to the liberation of Leningrad, and the commissar said, “To live or not live—that is not the question. Our life belongs to Leningrad.”

¹
Luknitsky’s assignment was arranged by Vera Ketlinskaya, secretary of the Writers Union, and N. D. Shumilov, a Party official at Smolny. Luknitsky learned the secret only eighteen years later when he found a notation to this effect in the unpublished papers of Vera Ketlinskaya. (Luknitsky,
op. cit.,
p. 700.)

PAVEL LUKNITSKY RETURNED TO LENINGRAD FROM THE Fifty-fourth Army on March 5, improved in health and spirits. He drove almost directly to his home. As he entered Cheboksarsky Pereulok, a woman walked toward him in the dusk, chanting a lament: “Death! Death! Death!”

As she came nearer, she stared at Luknitsky with unseeing eyes and continued her monologue. He heard her say, “Death by starvation will take us all. The soldiers will live a while longer. But we will die. We will die. We will die.”

The woman passed him like a terrified spirit.

It was hardly an auspicious welcome, but Luknitsky threw over his shoulders his two big knapsacks, filled with food and supplies brought back from the “mainland,” and climbed the five flights to his apartment. Everything was in order—except that the roof had been blasted off.

Death stalked Leningrad at winter’s end.

The city was filled with corpses. They lay by the thousands on the streets, in the ice, in the snowdrifts, in the courtyards and cellars of the great apartment houses. The city and Party authorities were preparing to launch an enormous spring clean-up. But V. N. Ivanov, secretary of the Young Communists, was afraid of the psychological effect on his young boys and girls when they confronted the mountains of frozen, decayed and disintegrating bodies.

On one March night a sanitary brigade drove up to the courtyard “morgue” at the Hermitage and carted off forty-six bodies to the Piskarev-sky Cemetery. There were corpses in the gardens of the Anichkov Palace, now the Palace of Pioneers, on the Fontanka and in the vaults of the Alexandrinsky Theater. There were twenty-four bodies in the Nikolsky Cathedral, awaiting delivery to a cemetery—one in a coffin, twenty-three wrapped in sheets and rags. Bodies had piled up in the hospitals. In many institutions the doctors and nursing personnel were too ill or weak to care for patients. There had been 6,500 doctors in Leningrad at the start of the war. By January 1 there were only 3,379 and by April 1 only 3,288. Leningrad lost 195 doctors from January 1 to March 15.

Illness was as widespread as death. In one big factory
55
percent of the workers were on sick call in January (mostly starving), 61 percent in February and 59 percent in March. On February 20 only 2,416 of 10,424 workers at the Kirov metallurgical works reported for duty—23 percent. The Kirov works lost 3,063 workers by death in 1942. Of 6,000 on the Kirov rolls in March and April, 2,300 died.

Scurvy was universal. Professor A. D. Bezzubov invented a process for extracting vitamin C from pine needles. Eight factories were put to work making pine-needle extract, and 16,200,000 doses were produced in 1942.

Even more critical threats appeared. Typhus broke out in a children’s home at the corner of Mozhaisky Street and Zagorodny Prospekt in late February. The house was cordoned off. Only persons with medical clearance were permitted in and out. Fortunately, the epidemic was contained. Another case of suspected typhus appeared in the student dormitory at Erisman Hospital.

A special epidemiology committee was set up under Mayor Peter S. Pop-kov, and mass inoculation of the population was undertaken. By mid-March half a million Leningraders had been inoculated against typhus, typhoid and plague. More than four hundred disinfecting points were at work by April 10 and two thousand beds for contagious diseases were provided in children’s homes.

The city was choked with filth. The lunchrooms and cafeterias where many Leningraders were fed were so dirty they defied imagination. Dishes and tableware had not been washed for weeks. Often food was served in tin cans. Dishes were shoved to the feeble customers without spoons or forks. They could eat with their fingers or lap it up like dogs. The City Party Committee, fearful of a general epidemic, ordered special measures to clean up all food dispensaries.

The people were as dirty as their eating halls. There had been no baths, showers or laundries in the city since the end of December. Now they began to reopen, and by the end of March twenty-five baths were operating—at least on paper. In the second quarter of 1942 thirty-two baths and a hundred laundries were reopened.

But the big task was to clean the city. Unless the corpses, filth and debris could be removed, Leningrad would perish in the epidemics of spring. The job started on March 8, International Women’s Day, a traditional holiday, a day when every woman in Russia expects to get a present from every man who is close or dear to her—husband, brother, son, lover, father or friend.

This year it was a different kind of March 8. Several thousand women, spades and picks in hand, tackled the ice-clad streets. Vsevolod Vishnevsky made a typical note in his diary: “The city had a clean-up day. Cleaning up snow, streetcar routes, courtyards. People worked with enthusiasm. Belief in victory stirs them!”

That wasn’t exactly how it seemed to Maria Razina. A concert had been arranged for the evening, but she and her friend Liza were so tired and weak they could hardly walk there. It was frigid in the meeting hall. There were speeches and reports. Through an open door they could see a table set for dinner. No one wanted to hear the concert. All they wanted was to eat. A shivering young woman in an evening dress sang “The Lark.” Then the audience shouted, “Enough! Get dressed!” They trooped in to dinner—a piece of black bread, about 150 grams, two slices of sausage, a white roll and two apples. Later there was hot tea. They walked home beside the Neva. The snow was as high as a mountain. The two women agreed that the city must be cleaned and rapidly.

The job really got under way March 15 when more than 100,000 Lenin-graders turned out. Then on March 26 the City Council ordered all able-bodied Leningraders into the streets. Posters went up. The radio blared an appeal. On the first day 143,000 feeble, tottering men and women (mostly women) went into the streets. The next day there were 244,000; by March 31, 304,000; and by April 4, 318,000. Between March 27 and April 15, 12,000 courtyards were cleaned up, 3,000,000 square yards of streets were cleared and 1,000,000 tons of filth were removed.

Everyone went into the streets—old women, men hardly able to hold a shovel, children.

One of them was Hilma Stepanovna Hannalainen. She had worked all winter in the great Leningrad Public Library. The library never closed. In the basement the main catalogue had been set up adjacent to a small public reading room. Almost every day one or two hundred persons could be found there, sitting in fur hats and overcoats, huddled over books, reading by the light of small oil lamps. The librarians sent books to the hospitals. They answered a thousand questions put to them by the military and civil authorities: How could Leningrad make matches? How could flint and steel lighters be manufactured? What materials were needed for candles? Was there any way of making yeast, edible wood, artificial vitamins? How do you make soap? The librarians found recipes for candles in old works of the eighteenth century.

The library lost its light and heat January 26 and had to close the one reading room which had remained open. However, readers were permitted to use the director’s room and one or two other small rooms where there were temporary stoves. In May a general reading room was opened again. The library lost 138 of its staff during the war, most of them in the winter of 1941–42.

One of those who worked day after day quietly and without complaint was Hilma Stepanovna. She was not alone. With her was her five-year-old son Edik. Edik was solemn, serious, strong, square-faced, silent, solid—very much like his mother. He came each day. While his mother was busy with the catalogue, moving between the aisles, Edik sat on a stool, swathed in heavy coat, felt boots, fur hat. He never spoke and his eyes never left his mother. If one wanted to know into which aisle Hilma had vanished, one had only to look at Edik. His eyes focused on the spot where she had disappeared and did not leave it until she reappeared.

When the call came to clean the streets, Hilma Stepanovna and the library workers answered it. They gathered in Stremyanny Lane. There was a mountainous heap of rubbish and at the bottom of it the very well-preserved body of a young man. It was frozen so hard that an iron crowbar hardly made a dent.

Standing to one side, his eyes on his mother, was Edik. He never moved despite the cold.

A few days after the mountain on Stremyanny Lane had been cleared away Hilma Stepanovna disappeared. So did Edik. At first it was said they had been evacuated to the rear. Then the truth slipped out.

They had been arrested as “enemies of the people"—this strong, solid woman and her strong, solid five-year-old. Despite the blockade, despite Leningrad’s hardships, the vigilant secret police had not been inactive. They managed to send the mother and boy out of the besieged city to distant exile in Siberia. The reason was a conventional one in Stalin’s Russia. Her husband had been an editor of a Karelo-Finnish paper who was executed at the time of the winter war with Finland, and his wife and son had been left behind in Leningrad. For reasons known only to themselves, the police at the end of the cruel winter of 1941–42 decided to send Hilma Stepanovna and the youngster into exile. Thus began a wandering life that lasted more than twenty years. In 1945 Hilma tried to return to Leningrad but was ordered out of the city on twenty-four hours’ notice. She was permitted to live for a while in Estonia and then in Petrozavodsk. Not until 1964, nearly twenty-five years after her husband had been executed, was he formally “rehabilitated” by the Soviet authorities. Once again Hilma Stepanovna tried to return to Leningrad and once again she was refused permission to live in the city. She had lost her hearing in a bomb explosion during the Leningrad blockade and was completely deaf. In these conditions she found life very difficult.
¹

It was not only filth that had accumulated in Leningrad’s streets. The life of the city had ground to a halt. It had been months since mail or telegrams had been delivered. Nikolai Mikhailovsky and Anatoly Tarasenkov went to the central post office one day to see if there was any mail for the fleet newspaper from the “mainland.” They were halted at the door by an armed guard.

“What do you want?” the guard said angrily.

“We are looking for our mail,” they said.

“What kind of mail?” the guard asked in surprise.

“Ordinary mail.”

“One of you can come along,” he said, “and you can find out.”

Tarasenkov came back shaken. The great hall of the main post office was filled with thousands of boxes of mail. There were post bags halfway to the ceiling—all in disorder, the building unheated, unlighted, no one at work.

By March the jam almost burst the building. There were 280,000 boxes of mail, unsorted, stacked in disorder in corridors and halls. Communist Youth brigades were sent to the post office to try to move the accumulation. The first mail and telegrams in months were delivered March 8—about sixty thousand pieces—but it was a year before the backlog was cleared up. Sometimes the youngsters who tried to deliver the mail were badly shaken. One young Komsomol girl took a letter to deliver. She found everyone dead in the apartment of the addressee. She went back to the post office. It was locked, and there was no one to tell her what to do.

A woman who had gotten no letters for a year came home one night to find her mailbox full. She started to read, beginning with the first letter from her husband. She read the letters, one by one. Then she opened the last letter and fainted. It was from her husband’s commander, and it told of his death.

On April 11 Mayor Popkov signed an order directing the Streetcar Administration to establish normal operations on trolley routes No. 3, No. 7, No. 9, No. 10 and No. 12 at 6:30
A.M.
, April 15. (Routes No. 3 and No. 9 took you to the front.) The Streetcar Administration was not certain it could meet the directive, but by strenuous efforts 116 cars were sent out of the barns at 6
A.M.
April 15. The sound of streetcar bells, the clatter of the cars over the rails, the sharp burst of sparks at the crossings, sent Leningrad wild. People cried on the Nevsky at the sight. “Really!” one exclaimed. “I rode the streetcar! I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like I hadn’t been on a tram for ten years.”

A German prisoner, Corporal Falkenhorst, told his captors he had lost faith in Hitler when he heard the sound of streetcars in the Leningrad streets on the morning of April 15.

“The city again is lively,” Vishnevsky wrote. “A Red Army unit, probably convalescents, came by with a band. So surprising, so strange, after Leningrad’s quiet. Streetcars are moving, jammed with passengers. On Bol-shoi Prospekt there is trade and exchange. Money will buy more than in winter. Many are selling clothing—of the dead.”

Actually, black market prices had risen a little. A packet of cigarettes would buy 150 grams of bread—against 200 grams a bit earlier. Bread sold at 60 rubles for 100 grams. The speculators were calculating that soon the ice on Lake Ladoga would go out and that supplies would be short, at least for a time. People still posted notices on walls that they would trade mahogany beds and Bekker pianos for bread.

The tensions in Leningrad had not lightened. Vishnevsky felt the strain, heightened by what he called “intrigues and lack of understanding.” He did not spell out what he meant, but he was having difficulty getting approval of a script for the
Leningrad in Battle
film, and Ivan (the Terrible) Rogov, the Navy Political Commissar, had come to town. Vishnevsky noted that “evidently there are deep nervous marks left from the literary dramas and wounds of 1930–1937–1938.” What Vishnevsky was hinting was that the fatal quarrels, feuds and purges of the thirties had continued through the most horrible moments of the war.