The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  It was not true, Chukovsky felt, that you feared most your own death. What was most terrible was to see the people around you dying. What you feared was the inevitable process, the weakness that seized you, the terror of dying alone by degrees in darkness, in cold and in hunger.

  As Maria Razina, a Party worker, noted: “Leningraders live so badly it is not possible to imagine anything worse—hunger, cold, and darkness in every house with the fall of night.”

  October had been hungry, and it was stormy after the fourteenth and snowy. The bombs and shells took their toll. In November the deaths began. Not only the deaths from hunger. The elderly slipped quietly away of many diseases. Younger people died of galloping consumption, of grippe. Any disease finished you quickly. An ulcer was fatal. Half the food you ate was inedible. People began to stuff their stomachs with substitutes. They tore the wallpaper from the walls and scraped off the paste, which was supposed to have been made with potato flour. Some ate the paper. It had some nourishment, they thought, because it was made from wood. Later they chewed the plaster—just to fill their stomachs. Vera Inber visited her friend, Marietta, a pharmacologist at the Erisman Hospital where her husband worked. She noticed that the cages for the guinea pigs and rabbits that lined the corridor were all empty now. Only the smell remained. Outside the bomb shelter she saw a watchdog, Dinka. The dog, like most of those in Leningrad, was trained to go to the shelter when the air-raid siren sounded. But already dogs were becoming rare in the besieged city. You noticed those that remained. You thought about them.

  Dystrophy and diarrhea appeared—the result of the inedible elements in the diet, the chaff in the bread, the sweepings, the plaster, the paste and the other indigestibles. A man’s strength flowed right through him. Within a few hours he was dead. A certain order of starvation emerged. It was not the old who went first. It was the young, especially those fourteen to eighteen, who lived on the smallest rations. Men died before women. Healthy, strong people sank before chronic invalids. This was the direct result of the inequity in the rations. Young people twelve to fourteen received a dependent’s ration, which was identical with the ration for children up to the age of twelve. As of October 1 this was only 200 grams, about a third of a loaf of bread a day—just half the ration of a worker. But vigorous, growing children needed as much food as a worker. This was why they died so swiftly. The ration for men and women was the same—400 grams of bread for workers, 200 for all other categories. But men led more vigorous lives. They needed more food. Without it they died more rapidly than the women. The monthly meat ration for children and young people was 400 grams, hardly a third of that for workers (1,500 grams). Young people got half the fats, a little more than half the cereals and three-quarters the sweets. Troops at the front received twice the worker’s ration—800 grams of bread a day beginning October 1, 150 grams of meat a day, 80 grams of fish, 140 grams of cereal, 500 grams of potatoes and vegetables, 50 grams of fat and 35 grams of sugar.

  “Today it is so simple to die,” Yelena Skryabina noted in her diary. “You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on the bed and you never again get up.”

  She was concerned about her sixteen-year-old son, Dima. In August and September he chased from one end of the city to another in search of groceries, watching the war bulletin boards, playing with his friends. Now he was like an old man. He sat all day in his slippers beside the stove, pale-blue circles under his eyes. Unless he could be shaken from apathy he would die. Yelena Skryabina could find little to feed him. He got only a child’s ration of 200 grams a day—a couple of slices of bread. Nothing for a growing boy. She tried to tempt him with such delicacies as she could contrive—a jellied pâté made by boiling old leather, soup thickened with cellulose.

  It was no longer uncommon to see people collapse of hunger. Yelena Skryabina noticed a man walking slowly ahead of her in the street. As she overtook him, she glanced at his face, frighteningly blue. Death, she felt, must be hovering over him. She had not taken more than a few paces when she looked back. He tottered and dropped slowly to the sidewalk. When she reached him, he was dead.

  There were wild rumors of plague and cholera—fortunately not true. But rats became bolder. They, too, were hungry. A sailor awoke with the feeling someone was staring at him. It was the yellow eyes of a great rat on the foot of his bed. The rise in dystrophy and scurvy astonished the doctors. Before November came to an end 18 percent of the hospital case load was starvation-related diseases. On November 20 the clinic at the Kirov factory issued twenty-eight sick reports for dystrophy. The next day the total was fifty. The Vyborg region registry bureau was unable to keep up with the demand for death certificates. By the end of November at least 11,085 Lenin-graders had died of starvation.1

  Already the whispers had begun: In the markets some of the sausage was made not of pork but of human flesh. The militia, it was said, had evidence of this in their possession. Who could tell whether or not it was true? Better to take no chances. Yelena Skryabina’s husband warned her not to let five-year-old Yuri play far from the house, even if he was with his nurse. Children, it was said, had disappeared. . . .

  A whole new standard of values was arising. Women would trade a diamond ring for a few pounds of black bread so coarse it seemed to be baked of straw. When Luknitsky returned from the front, women waited outside the railroad station. They tugged at his shoulder, saying, “Soldier, wouldn’t you like some wine?” They had a bottle or two of spirits to trade for bread, which was in better supply with the troops. Sometimes at the Writers’ House there would be a bit of meat in the soup—horse meat.

  Hunger brought other changes. Sex virtually disappeared. It was not only that physical sex traits vanished—menstruation halted, women’s breasts shriveled, their faces sagged. The sex drive evaporated. Women made no effort to beautify themselves. Lipsticks were eaten as food in December and January. The grease was used for frying ersatz bread. Face powder was mixed into ersatz flour. The births dropped catastrophically in 1942 to only one-third the 1941 figure. In 1943 they dropped another 25 percent. The birth rate in 1940 was 25.1 per 1,000. In 1941 it was 18.3, in 1942 only 6.2.2 The wife of a friend of Pavel Luknitsky, Edik Orlova, gave birth to a child at a lying-in home on Vasilevsky Island, February 12. She was brought from her home at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal in a sled. She gave birth in darkness, lighted only by the flickering flames from a tin stove. Despite every effort the child died on the eleventh day.

  Nikolai Chukovsky believed that hungry bodies conserved strength by eliminating the sex drive. Among starving people it was hard to tell men from women. They slept together for warmth, but their bodies aroused no sexual stimulation.

  In late winter he took some workers from the fleet newspaper to a bath— a rare treat. The Leningrad baths closed in December and did not work for two or three months. Few workers had even had their clothes off for weeks, living and working in buildings where the temperature was near zero. As they prepared to go to the bath, clean clothing in hand, a question arose about Zoya, one of the typesetters. She appeared, ready to join her comrades at the bath. Chukovsky was embarrassed. Zoya certainly had every right to a bath, but what to do with her among a crowd of men? Nonetheless, they started off together. At the bathhouse there was a surprise. It was ladies’ day! Zoya was the only one permitted to bathe. Now the shoe was on the other foot. Finally, Chukovsky appealed to the director and got permission for his sailors to bathe, too. The little band of men undressed and took their bath amid a crowd of women. There was not the slightest embarrassment. Chukovsky could not help thinking how his sailors would have reacted a few months before, surrounded by naked women. But here they were, all skin and bones, the women even more than the men. Neither men nor women gave it a thought. Zoya, instead of going into a corner by herself, joined the men. It seemed perfectly natural. They passed the soap back and forth, gossiped, soaked themselves, enjoyed the water and the warmth. There was no sign of sexual feeling on either side.

  When rations
began to increase, when starvation moderated, sex began to return to normal. The war gave rise to new forms of relations between men and women. “Front love” was what it was called in Leningrad—the love which sprang up between men and women, girls and boys, fighting in the lines together, serving in the AA crews, the love between the nurses and the men they cared for. Many of them had wives or husbands from whom they had long been separated. They did not know whether they would survive the war—or even the week. Chukovsky felt that “front love” commanded respect as a warm and necessary human relationship, one which was only natural in the unnatural conditions of the war and the siege.

  Not everyone’s nerves held up. One evening Luknitsky sat in the Writers’ House at the table with Ernst Gollerbach, who began to explain that Hitler was bombing Leningrad in order to kill Gollerbach. He begged his companions not to blame him for the raids. “I would kill myself if it would stop the raids,” he said, “but I am a Christian and it is not possible.” After a few moments his companions realized that Gollerbach had gone out of his mind. What to do with the poor man? Could his wife care for him? To put him in an insane asylum was a death sentence. By this time the Writers’ House had begun to give meals only in exchange for coupons. This meant a 50 percent cut in the ration of writers who had been eating there. When Luknitsky went home after such a miserable meal, he drank a glass or two of ersatz coffee without sugar or bread to try to quench his hunger.

  Captain Ivan V. Travkin was a submarine commander. His submarine was stationed in the Neva and his family was in Leningrad. He got leave to visit them and found his wife, her body badly swollen, her eyes sunken in their sockets, hardly able to move. His daughter with puffy eyes—the first sign of dystrophy—sat on the bed muffled in bedclothes, eating soup made from library paste. His mother-in-law wandered about the dark, cold room mumbling, laughing and crying—she had lost her reason. The windows had been broken by bomb blasts and replaced by plywood. The walls were black with smoke from the little iron stove. There was a flickering kerosene lamp. Outside shells could be heard bursting. It was a typical Leningrad family on a typical Leningrad day.

  Prices rose steadily on the black market. In early November a small loaf of black bread (if you could find one) sold for 60 rubles ($10), a sack of potatoes for 300 and a kilo of meat for 1,200.

  The truth, as none knew better than Pavlov, was that time was running out for Leningrad. The Lake Ladoga shipping route had been less than a brilliant success. The little overladen boats left for Osinovets usually at night. The crossing took sixteen hours. German bombers watched like hawks. The boats often sank, either with the load of food being brought to Leningrad or with refugees being taken out.

  The route had worked badly almost from the start. A military man, Major General Afanasy M. Shilov, had been put in chargé. He ordered barges, overladen with grain and munitions, out onto the storm-tossed waters against the advice of their sailors. There were hideous losses. Shilov was called in by Andrei Zhdanov and warned that he would go before a military court (and face the firing squad) if he sent more ships out onto the lake against the will of the skippers.

  Admiral A. T. Karavayev, who was present at the stormy meeting, thought Zhdanov looked seriously ill, pale and tired. He coughed and wheezed but never stopped smoking.

  The pressure to get supplies into Leningrad was crushing. Two or three days later Zhdanov sent a telegram to Ladoga saying: “Bread is vanishing in Leningrad. Each 24 hours without shipments dooms the lives of thousands of Leningraders.”

  Leningrad in October had been using about 1,100 tons of flour a day. But in the first thirty days the Ladoga route brought in only 9,800 tons of food. Mountains of supplies piled up around Volkhov and Gostinopolye. More and more barges and ships were being sunk by Nazi planes, despite appeals to Zhdanov for better fighter cover.

  The situation grew so critical that Mayor Popkov was sent to Novaya Ladoga October 13 to try and straighten out the mess. He arrived coincident with a savage German bombing of the docks and storage area. A meeting of those working on the shipping route was summoned and Popkov spoke in solemn terms:

  “You know that the ration has been lowered for the third time in Leningrad. Workers are getting 400 grams, employees and children 200. It’s not much. I remind you that a working man requires 2,000 calories. Four hundred grams of our bread gives a little more than 500 calories. . . . I’m not trying to persuade you of anything, but here is the situation: If for a few days grain is not brought across the lake, then the Leningraders will not receive a single gram of bread. The Military Council of the front and the fleet, the Party committee and the City Council have instructed me to tell you that the life of Leningrad is now in your hands.”

  This appeal had an effect. By herculean efforts the back of the logjam was broken and 5,000 tons of food were pushed over the lake to Osinovets. At the same time 12,000 tons of flour, 1,500 tons of cereals and 1,000 tons of meat were moved up from Gostinopolye to Novaya Ladoga to wait shipment to Leningrad. Then violent autumn storms hit and hampered shipments as much as did the Germans.

  One of the worst disasters occurred November 4 when a German JU-88 attacked the gunboat Konstruktor, en route from Osinovets to Novaya Ladoga with decks loaded with refugees, mostly women and children. The captain dodged one bomb, then the ship was hit and sank with a loss of 204 persons, including 34 crew members.

  Lake shipping came to an end with the formation of ice November 15 —except for a few final trips by Ladoga gunboats which managed to force their way through as late as November 30, bringing in another 800 tons of flour.

  Total shipments by the lake had been 24,097 tons of grain and flour and 1,131 tons of meat and dairy products—a twenty-day supply in sixty-five days of shipping. Total freight brought into Leningrad was 51,324 tons— the difference being made up by munitions. In the same period about 10,000 tons of high-priority materials and 33,479 individuals were taken out over the lake. The blockade of Leningrad had occurred so suddenly and surprisingly that it trapped enormous shipments of industrial, military and artistic treasures, loaded in freight cars, unable to move from the Leningrad yards. A count of these goods after the blockade began found 1,900 cars loaded with art treasures, books, scientific apparatus and machinery. Another 227 cars were loaded with war supplies being sent out by the Defense Commissariat. In all, 282 trains of goods had been evacuated from Leningrad between June 29 and August 29, including 86 more or less complete factories. But the great Kirov works had not been sent out. It was only after the fall of Mga that Admiral I. S. Isakov was summoned to Smolny by Zhdanov and ordered to start to ship the Kirov machinery to the Urals— an operation which he attempted to carry out with the skimpy ship and port resources of Lake Ladoga plus what air transport could be commandeered. Again and again the Nazi air fleet struck at the Ladoga ships. By the end of the navigation period only 7 barges were left unsunk. Six small steamers and 24 barges had been lost.3

  Leningrad began November with 15 days of flour on hand, 16 days of cereal, 30 days of sugar, 22 days of fats, almost no meat. What meat there was came in by air and that was not much.

  “Everyone knew that food was scarce,” Pavlov recorded, “since rations were being reduced. But the actual situation was known to only seven men.”

  Two confidential Party workers kept a record of deliveries of food to Leningrad. Only the inner circle of the Military Command and Pavlov knew the totals.

  November 7 was approaching, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the big Soviet holiday. This was the day when all Russia celebrated with feasts, wine, vodka, fat turkeys, suckling pigs, sturgeon in aspic, roasted hams, goose, sausages. It was a time of gaiety, merriment, family dinners, feasting, much drinking.

  Not in 1941. Leningrad had cold, not warmth; darkness, not light. Everyone in Leningrad was hungry all the time now. November 7 was no exception. Pavlov had nothing in his storehouses to give the people. For the children he manged to find 200 grams—half a cup—of sour cream and 1
00 grams—a couple of tablespoons—of potato flour. Adults got five pickled tomatoes—some adults, that is; a few got a half-liter of wine and a handful of chocolates. A line of women was standing outside a store on Vasilevsky Island, waiting for the wine to be passed out, when a German shell hit. Bodies were blasted to bits. A passing Red Army man named Zakharov, just back from the front, was horrified to see the surviving women pick their way over the human wreckage and reform the queue, fearful that they might miss their allotment.

  Yevgeniya Vasyutina traded 200 grams of cottonseed oil for a liter of kerosene and baked some flatcakes of pea flour for her holiday feast. She had four pieces of candy. Her factory closed early, at five o’clock. She sat down beside her radio loudspeaker. Stalin was supposed to speak. Music played until 10:30 P.M. Then an announcement: No speech that night; listen again at 6 A.M. She felt cheated as she went to sleep in the icy room.

  The Germans had been preparing for November 7. For days leaflets rained down on the city: “Go to the baths. Put on your white dresses. Eat the funeral dishes. Lie down in your coffins and prepare for death. On November 7 the skies will be blue—blue with the explosion of German bombs.”