The 900 Days (82 page)

Vera Inber found that winter’s end brought most difficult times. She was deathly concerned about her husband, the physician Ilya Strashun. She had never seen such colors as appeared in his face—dust yellow with red spots. He was walking with a cane because he had a badly swollen foot. She feared he had been exposed to typhus in treating a student in the dormitory. The toll of death around her was rising more rapidly than ever—a good friend, Professor P.; the husband of Yevfrosinya Ivanovna; another friend named Dina Osipovna. She felt so exhausted. She was not afraid of bombs, shells or hunger but of spiritual exhaustion, of the limits of weariness at which you begin to hate things, sounds and objects. She worried that her nerves would give out and that she would be unable to write. She decided to sleep in another room, hers was so cold. She lay down on a divan. But she could not sleep. She kept thinking of a friend, now dead, who had slept there. At 1
A.M.
she heard distant bombardment, but she got the feeling that it was actually an air raid and that she had not heard the alarm. In the strange room she fell into such terror as she had never experienced. She began to tremble. Finally, she woke up her husband. He said, “It’s nonsense, dear.” It did not seem so to her. She ran down to the shelter. It was locked. The night was bright as day—a full moon on the snow. She went back to her room and tried to read a French novel. Nothing worked. The panic went on the next day. Her strength was at the breaking point.

In this fateful atmosphere the first steps were being taken to put Leningrad back onto its feet. Party Secretary Kuznetsov called his regional Party chiefs, heads of factory units and directors of institutions to Smolny March 9. He told them the city must begin immediately to produce basic military supplies—shells, ammunition, mines. Power stations began to work again. New generators went into operation at the 5th and 1st Power Stations. Beginning March 20 the city got 550,000 kilowatt hours of power—more than three times the February rate.

The Party re-established its ties with the outer world. A delegation of partisans from the Leningrad region emerged from the marshes and forests. It was met at Kobona, on the eastern edge of Lake Ladoga, by Aleksei Kosygin, in chargé of the Ladoga evacuation, Party Secretary Kuznetsov and other Leningrad officials. The partisans came into Leningrad for a meeting at Smolny with Zhdanov and the Leningrad Military Command. Delegations from Soviet cities began to arrive. A Moscow Young Communist group came in, headed by the Moscow City Young Communist chief, A. N. Shelepin, now a member of the Soviet Politburo.

The Chief of Artistic Affairs in Leningrad, B. I. Zagursky, was confined to his bed in a tiny room in the Bolshoi Drama Theater at the end of winter 1942. Nonetheless, he called in Karl I. Eliasberg, director of the Radio Committee orchestra. Eliasberg and his wife were suffering from dystrophy and were being treated in the
statsionar
on the seventh floor of the Astoria Hotel. Not since early December had there been a concert in Leningrad. Eliasberg brought with him a list of his orchestra members. Twenty-seven names were underlined in black pencil. They were dead. Most of the others were underlined in red. They were near death from dystrophy. Eight names were not underlined. They were available to play.

A few days later an announcement was made on the radio that a symphony orchestra was being formed. Volunteers were asked. Toward the end of March about thirty musicians gathered for rehearsal. These were all the able-bodied musicians in Leningrad.

The first concert was given April 5 in the Pushkin Drama Theater. (The Philharmonic Hall had been hit by a shell and was not yet repaired.) The performance started at 7
P.M.
, after the Musical Comedy Theater’s presentation of
Silva
had finished.

Eliasberg appeared on the rostrum in a starched shirt and tail coat. Underneath he wore a cotton-padded jacket. He stood firm and tall, although he had to be helped to the theater. He had gone from the Astoria to his home on Vasilevsky Island to pick up the shirt and suit. A German artillery attack started. Had he not been given a lift by a Baltic Fleet commissar, he might not have made it. The concert was not long. The artists were too weak for a full presentation. They played Glazunov’s Triumphal Overture, excerpts from
Sivan Lake
, an aria sung by Nadezhda Velter, and concluded with the Overture to
Ruslan and Ludmilla
.

The Road of Life was coming to an end. Day by day with the advance of spring the ice became more spongy, the danger of breakthroughs more likely. Evacuation of refugees from Leningrad by the ice road was halted April 12 by Kosygin. He reported to the State Defense Committee that from January 22 to April 12 he had removed from Leningrad a total of 539,400 persons, including workers, employees, families and military personnel, 347,564; trade school pupils, 28,454; students, scientific workers, professors and teachers and their families, 42,319; orphans, 12,639; peasants from Karelia, 26,974; wounded, 40,986; plus 15,152 tons of valuable machinery and supplies.
²

The ice road had continued to improve its performance. From November to April 24, when the last supplies came through, it delivered 356,109 tons of freight, including 271,106 tons of food. It built up in Leningrad reserves of flour for 58 days, cereals for 57 days, meat and fish for 140 days, sugar for 90 days, fats for 12 3 days.

The road delivered 52,934 tons in January, of which 42,588 tons were food. The average delivery was 1,708 tons a day. In February this was lifted to 86,041 tons, of which 67,198 tons were food. Average deliveries were 3,072 tons daily. In March a peak of 113,382 tons was reached, including 88,607 tons of food, a daily average of 3,660. The April total was 87,253 tons, including 57,588 tons of food, a daily average of 2,910 tons.

The road delivered 31,910 tons of military supplies and 37,717 tons of fuel.

The last supplies to come by ice road were onions. Three carloads arrived at the eastern base April 23. The road had been closed, but drivers worked through the twenty-third and twenty-fourth and managed to bring 65 tons of onions across the lake.

Leningrad got through the winter with no attention from the Luftwaffe. There had been no raids throughout January, February and March. However, the Nazi artillery had stayed active. In January 2,696 shells fell on Leningrad, in February 4,771, and in March 7,380. The bombardment killed 519 Leningraders and wounded 1447.
³

On April 15 Leningrad marked the 248th day of siege. The city had survived. But the cost had no equal in modern times. In March the Leningrad Funeral Trust buried 89,968 persons. In April the total rose to 102,497. Some of these burials were due to the clean-up, but the death rate was probably higher in April than in any other month of the blockade.

There now remained in Leningrad, with evacuation at an end, 1,100,000 persons.
⁴
The total of ration cards was 800,000 less than in January. When Leningrad’s supply resources—the 58 days of flour, the 140 days of meat and fish—were calculated, it was on the basis of a population on April 15 only one-third what it had been when the blockade began August 30 with the loss of Mga.

More people had died in the Leningrad blockade than had ever died in a modern city—anywhere—anytime: more than ten times the number who died in Hiroshima.
⁵
By comparison with the great sieges of the past Leningrad was unique. The siege of Paris had lasted only 121 days, from September 19, 1870, to January 27, 1871. The total population, military and civilian, was on the order of one million. Noncombatant deaths from all causes in Paris during November, December and three weeks of January were only 30,236, about 16,000 higher than the number in the comparable period of the preceding year. The Parisians ate horses, mules, cats, dogs and possibly rats. There was a raid on the Paris zoo and a rhinoceros was killed and butchered. There were no authenticated instances of cannibalism. Food was scarce, but wine was plentiful.

In the great American siege, that of Vicksburg between May 18 and July 4, 1863, only 4,000 civilians were involved, although the Confederate military force was upwards of 30,000. About 2,500 persons were killed in the siege, including 119 women and children. No known deaths from starvation occurred. Horses, mules, dogs and kittens were eaten and possibly rats.

Leningrad exceeded the total Paris civil casualties on any two or three winter days. The Vicksburg casualties, military and civil, were exceeded in Leningrad by starvation deaths on any January, February, March or April day.

How many people died in the Leningrad blockade? Even with careful calculation the total may be inexact by several hundred thousand.

The most honest declaration was an official Soviet response to a Swedish official inquiry published in
Red Star
, the Soviet Army newspaper, June 28, 1964, which said: “No one knows exactly how many people died in Leningrad and the Leningrad area.”

The original figure announced by the Soviet Government of deaths by starvation—civilian deaths by hunger in the city of Leningrad alone—was 632,253. An additional 16,747 persons were listed as killed by bombs and shells, providing a total of Leningrad civilian deaths of 649,000. To this were added deaths in nearby Pushkin and Peterhof, bringing the total of starvation deaths to 641,803 and of deaths from all war causes to 671,635. These figures were attested to by the Leningrad City Commission to Investigate Nazi Atrocities and were submitted at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.

The Commission figures are incomplete in many respects. They do not cover many Leningrad areas, including Oranienbaum, Sestroretsk and the suburban parts of the blockade zone. Soviet sources no longer regard the Commission totals, which apparently were drawn up in May, 1944, as authoritative, although they were prepared by an elaborate apparatus of City and Regional Party officials, headed by Party Secretary Kuznetsov. A total of 6,445 l°cal commissions carried out the task, and more than 31,000 persons took part. Individual lists of deaths were made up for each region. The regional lists carried 440,826 names, and a general city-wide list added 191,427 names, providing the basic Commission-reported total of 632,253.
⁶

Impressive evidence has been compiled by Soviet scholars to demonstrate the incompleteness of the Commission’s total. All official Leningrad statistics are necessarily inaccurate because of the terrible conditions of the winter of 1941–42. The official report of deaths for December, 53,000, may be fairly complete, but for January and February the figures are admittedly poor. Estimates of daily deaths in these months run from 3,500 to 4,000 a day
⁷
to 8,000. The only total available gives deaths for the period as 199,187. This is offered by Dmitri Pavlov. It represents deaths officially reported to authorities (probably in connection with the turning in of ration cards of the deceased). The number of unregistered deaths is known to be much higher. The Funeral Trust buried 89,968 bodies in March (it has no records for January and February), 102,497
^m
April and 53,562 in May. It continued to bury 4,000 to 5,000 bodies a month through the autumn of 1942, although by this time Leningrad’s population had been cut by more than 75 percent. Thus mortality as a result of the blockade and starvation continued at a high rate through the whole year.

The Funeral Trust buried 460,000 bodies from November, 1941, to the end of 1942. In addition, it is estimated that private individuals, work teams of soldiers and others transported 228,263 bodies from morgues to cemeteries from December, 1941, through December, 1942.

No exact accounting of bodies delivered to cemeteries was possible in Leningrad during the winter months, when thousands of corpses lay in the streets and were picked up like cordwood, transported to Piskarevsky, Vol-kov, Tatar, Bolshaya Okhta, Serafimov, and Bogoslovsky cemeteries and to the large squares at Vesely PÖselok (Jolly Village) and the Glinozemsky Zavod for burial in mass graves, dynamited in the frozen earth by military miners.

Leningrad had a civilian population of about 2,280,000 in January, 1942. By the close of evacuation via the ice road in April, 1942, the population was estimated at 1,100,000—a reduction of 1,180,000, of whom 440,000 had been evacuated via the ice road. Another 120,000 went to the front or were evacuated in May and June. This would indicate a minimum of deaths within the city of about 620,000 in the first half of 1942. Official statistics show that about 1,093,695 persons were buried and about 110,000 cremated from July, 1941, through July, 1942.

To take another approach. Leningrad had about 2,500,000 residents at the start of the blockade, including about 100,000 refugees. At the end of 1943 as the 900 days were drawing to a close, Leningrad had a population of about 600,000—less than one-quarter the number of residents at the time Mga fell August 30, 1941.

The most careful calculation suggests that about 1,000,000 Leningraders were evacuated during the blockade: 33,479 by water across Ladoga in the fall of 1941; 35,114 by plane in November-December, 1941; 36,118 by the Ladoga ice road in December, 1941, and up to January 22, 1942; 440,000 by Ladoga from January 22 to April 15; 448,694 by Ladoga water transport from May to November, 1942; 15,000 during 1943. In addition, perhaps 100,000 Leningraders went to the front with the armed forces.

This suggests that not less than 800,000 persons died of starvation within Leningrad during the blockade.

But the 800,000 total does not include the thousands who died in the suburban regions and during evacuation. These totals were very large. For instance, at the tiny little station of Borisova Griva on Ladoga 2,200 persons died from January to April 15, 1942. The
Leningrad Encyclopedia
estimates deaths during evacuation at “tens of thousands.”