The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The struggle to find substitute food never ended. A stock of cottonseed cake was found in the harbor. It had been destined to be burned in ships’ furnaces. Such cake had never been used as human food before because it contained some poisons. However, Pavlov found that high-temperature treatment removed the poisonous essences. He added the cake—4,000 tons of it—to the food supplies. At first the cake made up only 3 percent of the bread formula, then it was raised to 10 percent.

  “We are eating bread as heavy as cobblestones and bitter with cottonseed cake,” Yevgeniya Vasyutina said. “This cottonseed cake ought to be given out on some kind of cattle ration.”

  Every nook and cranny was explored for food. A search of the warehouses of Kronstadt turned up 622 tons of rye flour, 435 tons of wheat, 3.6 tons of oats and 1.2 tons of cooking oil. In the Stepan Razin brewery a cellar full of grain was uncovered. By sweeping out warehouses, elevators and railroad cars 500 tons of flour were reclaimed. A recheck of supplies disclosed that flour reserves had been understated by 32,000 tons.

  As October wore on, the shortages of food were felt more deeply. Sometimes, Yevgeniya Vasyutina went home and cried all evening. She was hungry and cold, and the news was too bad to think about. Feverish trading sprang up in the city. Vodka was No. 1 in trading goods. Next came bread, cigarettes, sugar and butter. People began to talk more and more about a new cut in the rations. Others said the rations would be lifted, that plentiful supplies were coming in over Lake Ladoga.

  The mood of the city grew more grim. Luknitsky, nervous, worried about his elderly father, his cousins, his close friend Lyudmila, all more or less dependent on him, went to the Writers’ House, just off the Neva embankment on Ulitsa Voinova. The last time he had been there with Vera Ketlinskaya it had been almost empty. That was three weeks ago. Now in mid-October it was overflowing with people. Only 130 meals could be served in the restaurant. That was all the food there was. Many writers went away hungry. An old translator hysterically cried that she would cut her throat with a razor that minute if she were not permitted to eat. Finally, she was quieted. But she got no food. Dinner consisted of watery soup with a little cabbage, two spoons of kasha, two bits of bread and a glass of tea with a piece of candy.

  Luknitsky walked home along the Neva embankment. The Petropavlovsk spire was silhouetted against the sky. So were the formidable shapes of the Baltic warships standing guard, their guns elevated, their masts a fretwork against the darkening clouds.

  Now another of the Nazis’ allies moved into Leningrad: cold . . . winter ... snow. . . . The first flakes fell at eleven in the morning on the fourteenth of October. The thermometer dropped. It was below freezing. “Ski day,” the day the snow cover reached ten centimeters (about four inches), came October 31—an unprecedentedly early date. Always in Leningrad the first snow marked a holiday. This was the winter capital, the capital of snow and ice, the sparkling city of frost. But now the cold and snow brought forbidding thoughts. What about the water pipes? There was hardly any heat in the buildings. Most people got only a ration of 2.5 liters of kerosene in September. Now there was none. Nor would there be any until February. It was cold in the great stone buildings along the Neva. And it was growing colder. Luknitsky noticed ice on the sidewalks in the morning.

  Autumn had ended, such an autumn as Leningrad had never known. Winter was setting in. Perhaps, he thought, it would help Russia—as it had against Napoleon. He did not then know how right he was. Winter would help Russia. But it would come near to destroying Leningrad.

  He noticed a change in himself. He was constantly on the move between Leningrad and the front, now in Leningrad for four or five days, then at the front for a week. At the front he lived on army rations. The troops still were fed fairly normally—800 grams of bread, almost two pounds, a day, 150 grams of meat, 140 of cereals, 500 of vegetables and potatoes. For a day or two after coming back from the front he did not feel hungry. Then hunger overwhelmed him. From morning until late night he wanted to eat. The evening dab of cereal or macaroni did not satisfy him. He went to bed hungry and woke up hungry after five or six hours.

  All over the city this was happening.

  People grew thinner while you looked at them. And they grew more like beasts. Yelena Skryabina had a friend, Irina Klyueva, a beautiful, elegant, quiet woman, who adored her husband. Now she fought and even beat him. Why? Because he wanted to eat. Always. Constantly. Nothing satisfied him. As soon as she prepared food he threw himself on it. And she was hungry herself. Before October ended Irina Klyueva’s husband had died of hunger. She did not even pretend to grieve.

  Each person tried to make the ration go further. Yelena Skryabina’s mother divided each piece of bread into three portions. She ate one in the morning, one at noon, one at night. Madame Skryabina ate her whole portion in the morning with her coffee. That gave her strength to stand in food queues for hours or hunt about the city for food. In the afternoon she usually felt so weak she had to lie down. She worried about her husband. He had a military rear-area ration, but it was not much better than that of the civilians. He got a cup of cereal with butter in the morning. But he saved it for their son, Yuri. The food queues grew so long that it was almost impossible to get into a store before the small supply was exhausted. Finally, her husband got their ration cards registered with a military facility where the family received eight bowls of soup and four bowls of cereal every ten days. By this time speculators were getting 60 rubles for a small loaf of bread, 300 rubles for a sack of potatoes and 1,200 rubles for a kilo of meat.

  Yevgeniya Vasyutina sat at home like a troglodyte. There was no heat. She wore her greatcoat and felt boots, removing the boots only when she slept. But not the coat. She covered herself with the mattress and pillows, but when she rose her body was stiff and sore. She heated her tea and food on a tiny grill set between two bricks. Thin shavings provided the fuel. There was no electricity. A burzhuika, a little potbellied stove (the name burzhuika had come from their use by the “former people” during the cold and famine of Petrograd’s 1919 and 1920), was beyond her dreams. More than anything in the world she just wanted a simple tea—tea with sugar and a roll. But this was impossible. She divided her ration of bread into three pieces, each the size of a chocolate bar. She put a little butter or oil on each. One she ate for breakfast, one for lunch, and the third she hid in her lamp shade, the one with a little dancing girl on it. She liked to spin the shade so that the dancer twirled in a rosy whirl. Now the electricity didn’t work. No one would think, she devoutly believed, of looking there for food.

  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:

  Ulitsa Marat Dom 74. Two explosive bombs fell on two different wings. Under the wreckage of the ruined building were found the bodies of Engineer-Architect Zukov, 35; Ogurtsova 14, Ogurtsova 17, Tutina, 35, Potekhina, V., 17, Tsvetkov, 28. The body of Ye. V. Kunenkova, 60, was found in the opposite wing where she had been blown from a window by the explosive wave. Potekhina, V., was found under the wreckage of a two-story house; the girl was crying for help, and her father, being at the scene with the ARP team, started to pull away the wreckage. From under the obstruction came the cry: “Father, save me.” But when the last timbers were pulled away, the girl had died of a wound in the forehead.

  The Germans had charted the city for a
rtillery. 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:

  I was teaching my little son his first uncertain steps when the radio brought into our lives that new all-engulfing word—war. Now seventeen weeks have passed. War has changed the lives of each of us, in big things and little. I have put aside the book I was writing about happiness in order to write about struggle, about bravery, about unyielding stubborn resistance. My son sleeps in a bomb shelter and knows the sound of the airraid sirens as well as the words “to walk” and “to eat.” ... There is no good news. Not yet. But we will wait. We will fight. . . .

  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 Glazunov3 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.

  36 ♦ Seven Men Knew

  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.