Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  These ghastly decisions were made in a welter of starvation, which sharpened the senses but confused thought. “The brain is devoured by the stomach,” said one sufferer. Tempers flared irrationally. Children subsided into dementia, sitting at the table and tearing up paper into smaller and smaller pieces or wailing without cease. Deterioration caused some people to go insane. Brothers killed brothers for ration coupons. Parents murdered their own children.

  As a foreman at the Kirov Tank Works said, “Human beings showed what they were like in those days. I don’t suppose people had ever before witnessed such a revelation of greatness of soul on the one hand and of moral degradation on the other.”

  There were those who banded together to find strength and connection. Then there were those who looked out only for themselves and who hunted alone.

  There are two words for cannibalism in Russian: trupoyedstvo (“corpse-eating”) and lyudoyedstvo (“person-eating”).

  Corpse-eating was far more common. Mourners would descend to their apartment building’s shed or well house, where their relatives’ bodies were being stored, only to discover that the thighs or buttocks had been hacked off in the night. Militia searching buildings for survivors came across the bodies of the neglected dead with limbs missing. One man found several heads in a snowdrift; a little girl’s still had its blond hair in long Russian braids. The NKVD files are unspeakably macabre. One family (a father, a mother, and a thirteen-year-old boy) were arrested for stealing bodies from a hospital morgue, presumably for resale as food. A nurse was arrested for purloining amputated limbs from the surgery room floor. A mother shared the body of her eleven-year-old son with two fellow workers from the Lenin Plant.

  The criminal profile of corpse-eaters was surprising. Only 2 percent had a previous criminal record. They were primarily women, uneducated females with no employment and no local Leningrad address. They were, in other words, often refugees who had fled to the city and who therefore did not have ration books at all. They had to make a choice between eating those already dead or dying themselves.

  A Leningrad woman named Elena Taranukhina, who lived with her mother and her baby daughter, was disgusted to find that several of the corpses in the courtyard of her apartment complex had been hacked up for food. This was not the worst of it, however. One morning as she stood in one of the endless bread lines, waiting for rations, she “felt that something was horribly wrong,” and left her place in the queue to rush home.

  When she got there, the scene was like one out of the worst Grimm’s fairy tale: The baby was in the aluminum bathtub over a flame, but without water. The grandmother, pushed over the edge into insanity by hunger and cold, was cooking her granddaughter, muttering, “What a fatty child, what a fatty child, what a fatty child.”

  Taranukhina restrained the frantic old woman and saved her daughter. Two days later, the grandmother died of hunger.

  This was the line between “corpse-eating” and “person-eating”: killing someone for food.

  Most of those who were caught and tried for person-eating acted alone. It was, after all, the ultimate expression of individualism: the absolute belief that one’s own life matters more than another’s. One woman, a girl at the time, described being chased down a dark corridor by a cannibal who no longer looked human to her. As he scrambled after her through the dark, he “looked like a beast.” He had an ax. She was saved by some passing soldiers.

  A woman named Vera Lyudyno recorded the disappearance, one by one, of children in her apartment building. Finally their clothing was found in the apartment of a nearby violinist, along with the clothing of his own five-year-old son.

  In another part of the city, a mother whose child disappeared went to the police. They directed her into a room filled with crates of clothing marked by number. They told her to search for her child’s clothes. When she found the clothing, she could report the number on the crate to the police and they would tell her the district where her child was eaten.

  Rumors whispered at the time that there were organized bands of cannibals hunting in the streets and alleys. A young couple, for example, went to the Haymarket to search for a pair of felt boots. As currency, they clutched 600 grams of bread they had carefully hoarded for weeks. The Haymarket was located in the crooked quarter of the city described by the great Dostoyevsky in his novel Crime and Punishment and was a place fraught with pickpockets and con men in the best of times. The couple searched the stalls and could only find stiff, old, ill-fitting military shoes — until they spied a tall man in a nice sheepskin coat, serenely holding a single boot and searching the crowd for buyers.

  They approached him and asked about the boot; he said that yes, he had two, but he had left the other one back at his apartment for safekeeping. He would give them the pair for two pounds of bread. The young couple haggled with him. Finally, they got his price down to 600 grams and showed him their loaf. He agreed to take the young man back to his apartment to fetch the other boot.

  The young man followed the gentleman in sheepskin through the maze of streets to an apartment building. Walking up the stairs, he felt a strange chill. He couldn’t help but notice how well-fed the man looked. They walked up floor after floor. The man seemed to have a spring in his step.

  When they got to the top of the staircase, the man in the sheepskin coat said, “Wait for me here.” He knocked on a door.

  “Who is it?” said a male voice from inside.

  “It’s me,” said the man in the sheepskin coat. “With a live one.”

  The door opened a crack, and the young man spied a hairy red hand, and, in the background, lit by bobbing candlelight, “a glimpse of several great hunks of white meat, swinging from hooks on the ceiling. From one hunk he saw dangling a human hand with long fingers and blue veins.”

  He bolted toward the stairs as the two cannibals made a rush for him. Though he was weaker than the two sleek, well-fed person-eaters, fear and alarm gave him speed. He tumbled out into the street. Farther up the lane, a truck of soldiers was headed out of the city for duty on Lake Ladoga. The young man shouted, “Cannibals!” and the truck pulled to a halt; the soldiers came running.

  He saw them dive into the building. A few seconds later, shots rang out.

  When the soldiers came out of the building, they were carrying the cannibal’s coat, complaining about the bullet hole that had ruined it. They told the young man that they’d found the remains of five bodies in the apartment, and handed him a hunk of bread — his, as it turned out — that they’d reclaimed from the murderers. With that, they climbed back in their truck and headed off to the east.

  Horror stories like this — and the issue of Leningrad cannibalism as a whole — could not be talked about openly during the Soviet period. Such an admission of the breakdown of society was considered demoralizing. Only in 2002 were NKVD files opened so academics could discover the gruesome statistical realities of person-eating.

  It appears that especially in late January and in February, when order utterly broke down in some districts of the city, there really were a few organized cannibal bands that hunted down lonely military couriers for food or lured people from bread lines and clubbed them over the head. By and large, the far greater danger was those lone individuals who lost contact with others and were driven crazy by animal hunger.

  There were nine arrests for cannibalism in the first ten days of December 1941. Two months later, this number had jumped to 311. A year later, the final figure, which includes arrests for both corpse-eating and person-eating, was 2,015. Those who ate the dead usually got off reasonably lightly; those who murdered and then ate their victims were shot.

  What does this mean about us as an animal? Was this creature that loped down sooty corridors, hunting others, what we all are at heart?

  There were many who came to think so. An anonymous eyewitness who was eleven years old in 1941 later wrote:

  After the blockade I visualized the world in the shape of a beast of prey lying in w
ait. . . . I grew to be suspicious, hard, and as unjust to people as they had become to me. As I looked at them I would be thinking, “Oh yes, you’re pretending at the moment to be kind and honest. Yet, take away your bread and warmth and light and you’ll all turn into two-legged wild beasts.” And it was during the first few years after the blockade that I did a few abominable things which to this day lie heavily on my conscience. It took almost a decade for me to become rehabilitated. Up till about the age of twenty I felt that something inside me had grown irreversibly old and I looked upon the world with the gaze of a broken and all-too-experienced person. It was only in my student years that youth came into its own and the fervent desire to become involved in work beneficial to mankind enabled me to shake off my morbid depression.

  And as all of this happened, informants passed on updates about Leningrad’s deteriorating morale and morality to the Germans. The Nazis asked carefully about when precisely people stopped helping one another in the streets, about how many people were being arrested for cannibalism. As one diarist wrote in December, “Countless tragedies are taking place every day, dissolving into the silence of the city. . . . Meanwhile, the Germans look at Leningrad with cold curiosity.”

  Brutal self-interest was not the only way to survive in Leningrad, however. There was another way. “A kind of polarization seemed to be taking place among people,” said a historian who spent the war trapped in the city, burning classical encyclopedias for warmth. Some people had chosen to “survive in any way possible at the expense of a relative, a friend — anybody.” But there were many others who “acted honestly, according to their conscience, whatever the circumstances. . . . Human feelings and qualities, love, marriage, family ties, parental feelings — were subjected to a stiff test.”

  If we are a predatory animal (canines bared), we are also an animal that has survived and flourished through cooperative action. This proved true in the besieged city, too.

  People moved in with friends and relatives. This kept rooms warmer through breath and body heat. Also, tasks could be shared and divided. Able-bodied adults could go out and collect rations if someone was too sick or too weak to move. Kids made forays out to bombed buildings for wood to burn. Many apartments now had small makeshift stoves called burzhuiki with stovepipes leading out the windows.1 Friends and neighbors found furniture to feed the fire. Others had to go out to the frozen canals and the Neva River to dredge up water. This was an overwhelming task for those weakened by dystrophy, and there were always corpses frozen near the watering holes. At times, however, people formed huge cooperative bucket brigades. All of these tasks made it almost impossible to survive alone. Only by creating sanctuaries where many came together to share the work, the food, and the warmth could people carry on. “We moved into one room and lived as a family, playing chess, reading Pushkin out loud in the evenings,” one man remembered. “It was vital to keep helping others.”

  A young nurse named Marina Yerukhmanova, for example, worked at the Grand Europe Hotel, which had been turned into a hospital. As a hospital, it had gradually deteriorated. There was no running water. The toilets had frozen and exploded. The patients — many of them ex-convicts from the Soviet Sixteenth Punishment Battalion — had taken over a lot of the ex-hotel, strolling about in bedsheets draped piratically like capes, robes, and turbans. They lay in wait in the dark and mugged the orderlies.

  Yerukhmanova, her sister, and several other nurses ended up forming a sort of “ark” in one of the upstairs rooms. They all camped there together. They uncovered a bottle of medical alcohol in the pharmacy and sold it for a burzhuika stove. They protected one another and checked one another for lice. At night, they would sit feeding their tiny stove with broken furniture and the hotel’s pre-Revolutionary account books, reading old letters from bellboys, butlers, and pastry chefs before tossing them into the flames.

  Many people found refuge at their places of work. By banding together, they survived, pooling their resources, creating communal laundries, baths, and child-care centers. Brigades of factory workers went out to check on missing employees. They took food to the dying and helped families deal with the sick and the dead. A group of schoolteachers took it upon themselves to search empty buildings for children whose parents had died; so did the Communist Youth League.

  As one survivor said, “Everyone had a savior.” Another claimed, “Helping others was crucial to survival. . . . Sharing became our way of life, and helping others, keeping busy, working, taking responsibility, gave strength to people.”

  The Leningrad Public Library remained open throughout the siege and became a place for people to congregate. “People came to the library to read, even when weak from cold and exhaustion,” one of the librarians explained. “Some died in their places, with a book propped in front of them. We would carry the bodies outside, hoping that the trucks would take them away, but increasingly they were simply left in the snow.”

  The building itself had been seriously damaged during air raids — though fortunately, the shell that fell on the interlibrary loan department didn’t explode. In the course of the war, the librarians greatly expanded the collection, purchasing books from the starving, who were desperate to sell anything for food. Some of the city’s librarians scoured bombed ruins for volumes, scrabbling over the piles of brick with their backpacks full of salvaged books.

  The heat in the library gave out early, and the plumbing eventually froze and burst. In late January, the building finally lost its electricity. The librarians still searched the shadowed stacks with lanterns, and, when they ran out of oil, with burning pieces of wood. They still served patrons and sought out the answers to practical questions posed by the city government: alternative methods of making matches or candles, forgotten sources of edible yeast. As the building grew colder and more battle-scarred, they closed the reading rooms one by one. Finally, patrons and librarians all huddled in the director’s office, where there was still a kerosene lamp and a burzhuika stove.

  Reading novels and writing diaries and poetry were surprisingly popular during the siege, especially when the circumstances grew particularly grim. Activities like these reminded people of another life and prodded them to remember the codes and routines of civilization in the midst of chaos. It allowed them escape when they were entrapped. As it happens, many famous Russian novels are quite long. This was a perfect time, some soldiers and civilians found, to read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There were other benefits to fiction: a Red Army lieutenant reading an early sci-fi novel, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, got an idea for how to use the hydrogen in the city’s barrage balloons to self-propel them when they were being lowered and relocated.

  Of course, many found a more direct use for books — as fuel. “We warm ourselves by burning memoirs and floorboards. Prose, it turns out, provides more heat than poetry. History boils the kettle to make our tea.”

  In the vaults and crypts beneath the Hermitage Museum, research still went on. In Bomb Shelter No. 3, hundreds of scholars hunkered down by candle stubs, barely alive, slowly scratching out monographs on the art of the Netherlands or Sumerian philology. Their rations were minimal; a few of them died each night. The rest were kept alive by frying a few small, frozen potatoes in the linseed oil used to prepare artists’ canvases. During the day, some of them walked the nearly ten miles of galleries and corridors in the abandoned Hermitage Museum and Winter Palace, clearing debris, shutting off rooms where the windows had been shattered by bombs, carrying bodies to their makeshift morgue. For a while, they even managed to arrange for a fluctuating flow of electricity by snaking wires across the granite embankment and hooking them up to the generator on the tsar’s private yacht, the Polar Star, which stood frozen in the ice of the Neva River. Altogether, about two thousand lives were saved in Bomb Shelter No. 3 in the stone arcades beneath the empty museum.

  An old Russian proverb runs, “When the guns speak, the Muses fall silent.” Shostakovich fam
ously retorted that in Leningrad, the Muses were not silent: “Here, the Muses speak together with the guns.” This was true — and it made a huge difference in morale and people’s ability to go on from day to day.

  Surprisingly, Leningrad’s Musical Comedy Theater remained open, though the performances grew more feeble as the weeks passed. An actress recalled the conditions for a performance of The Three Musketeers, for example: The theater was well below freezing. She had to thaw out her makeup over a lamp. Her costume was skimpy, so she muffled herself with a heavy coat until she went onstage. (Sometimes, people from the audience would shout out to her to cover up.) Halfway through the performance, she saw that one of the Musketeers had died of hunger. He lay on the floor with a shattered cup in his hand. The show, quite incredibly, went on. An announcement was made. The actress went out onstage to speak her lines and could not talk for grief. Everyone waited, knowing what she was going through. Somehow, she found the strength to carry on. They finished the play with only two Musketeers.

  Leningrad’s radio station also kept broadcasting. No one had much strength, so for many hours of the day, they broadcast only the ticking of the metronome. The poet Olga Berggolts, now yellow with jaundice and swollen with edema, spoke to the city of the dead about “human brotherhood.” “Through the hallucinations of hunger, [Berggolts’s] compassion and love broke through to people,” two soldiers on the front remembered. “These came from a woman who was undergoing the same agonies, was also starving, who understood everything, felt everything herself.”