The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The writers and the poets were luckier than ordinary Leningraders. They could throw themselves into creative work and to some extent forget the suffering which surrounded them.

  The diary of Vsevolod Vishnevsky, the greatest optimist among them, discloses how difficult this was.

  On November 19 he made these entries:

  Last night we were thinking of the recent past . . . Strela . . . theaters . . . restaurants, . . . favorite dishes (it makes one’s mouth water) . . . shashlik, in Kars style, Georgian soup, greens, greens . . . almonds, borsht, Kievsky cutlets, pies, champagne. . . . And in reality . . . today soup and cereal. Tomorrow soup and cereal. How boring.

  The next day (November 20):

  Our military ration has been cut to 300 grams of bread. Monotonous food. We joke: It’s better than the resort at Kislovodsk.

  But the jokes were as thin as the breakfast gruel. The same day he entered in his diary:

  Someone telephoned: The sailor-poet Lebedev has died. What talent! A romantic. He died on a submarine. For 12 years he served in the fleet.

  It was true. Aleksei Lebedev was dead. Vera Petrovna could not believe it. Even when she saw before her the yellow slip of paper from the Baltic Fleet Command, saying, “Your husband, Lieutenant Aleksei Lebedev, died in November, 1941, in battle for the socialist fatherland, true to his military duty, heroically and bravely.”

  It could not be. There still was imprinted before her eyes the image of Aleksei as he lay asleep in her lap beside the Baltic Sea on that distant June 22 when an unknown girl came running to ask, “Haven’t you heard the radio? It’s war!”

  Vera Petrovna had not often seen Aleksei since that day. On October 26 she met him on the Neva embankment near the Liteiny Bridge. She watched him approach, a long figure in a black-leather coat, black beard, hands deep in his pockets. He saw her and his eyes lighted. They embraced. And the next question was: “How are you getting on for food?”

  He pulled out a couple of bars of chocolate, but she thrust them back into his pockets, saying she had no place to keep them. In reality she was afraid she’d start eating them if they stayed in her hands.

  They had a few moments together and Alex read her a new poem:

  The cutter takes me to the ship

  Under the flaming clouds of scarlet,

  And I say “I love you,”

  For you are the best of all.

  It was their last meeting.

  Aleksei’s mother got a letter: “Looking back at the city, so beautiful in its tragic colors in this gentle fall, I feel how good life is, how short it is, how senselessly war annihilates all that is good, all that humanity has achieved.”

  Then, one day in late November Vera Petrovna got a letter, too. Her heart rose. The notice was not true. Aleksei was alive. She looked at the date. November n. It had been written two days before he went to sea on his last mission, a mission which she knew was to take him far in the rear of the Germans toward the Kiel Canal.

  She opened the letter and read:

  Remember me, Ruth [her pet name], sometimes, for in a couple of hours I will already be far away and when I return—or if I shall return—I do not know. I am writing you and only you before I leave. You know that sometimes we may not speak for a long time but that then we even more strongly love one another. ... I kiss you, my darling. Forgive me for the sorrow I have brought you. Do not forget me.

  Your Alex

  Lebedev put to sea as a lieutenant on the submarine L-2. The submarine was lost November 18 in the Baltic. Aleksei Lebedev was twenty-nine years old. His friends believed him one of the most talented of the Leningrad poets. The playwright Aleksandr Kron felt that his loss was sheer tragedy, not just an accident of war. The L-2, he was convinced, was poorly commanded. Kron, himself a naval man and a naval writer, knew submarine life. He knew how strong was the factor of morale, of training, of close-knit action and confidence in the command. A few days before his last voyage Lebedev confided to Kron that morale aboard the L-2 was not good, that the commander imposed his orders from above, that the initiative of the crew was stifled.

  “Who knows,” said Kron, “perhaps in that circumstance lies the cause of the loss of the L-2.”

  On November 20, the day Leningrad’s ration was cut to 125 grams of bread daily, the composer Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky noted that fact in his diary, observing that “the food situation is becoming more difficult.”

  He then proceeded to other matters—a recital at the Union of Composers by Boris Asafyev. The great hall of the union was darkened by metal screens over the balcony windows and was very cold. They used candles for light. There was no electricity. Fifteen members listened to Asafyev. All wore hats, heavy coats, overshoes.

  Asafyev played “attractively and temperamentally and was childishly happy at the general reaction,” Bogdanov-Berezovsky noted. There was a long discussion of his performance and by rare chance no air raid during the several hours of playing and talk.

  Bogdanov-Berezovsky’s next diary entry, for November 28, began: “Fourth day without warm food and only one tiny bread ration.”

  The questions of what happened, of how they had come to the brink of catastrophe, pressed urgently on the Leningraders. Pavel Luknitsky sat one cold evening in the Writers’ House, listening to three young officers, convalescing from wounds, argue. A tank officer said he and his comrades had fought as best they could, but there had been mistakes at the top. Obviously, Russia hadn’t been prepared. An engineer disagreed. Russia had not been surprised either politically or materially.

  “Politically,” snapped the tank officer, “maybe not. But matériel? What are you saying? Do you really think you can fight the Germans with T-26 tanks? Or a division of People’s Volunteers armed with shovels—can they stop the German Panzers? Do you call a bottle of flaming gasoline a modern military weapon? And what about automatic rifles?”

  The engineer cited the KV 60-ton tank. He had seen five in action at Izhorsk.

  “Sure,” snorted the tankist. “Five KV’s. And if we’d had five hundred, where would the Germans be now?”

  An aviator joined in the conversation, complaining that Soviet planes readily caught fire because their frames were made with magnesium instead of Duralumin. Soviet Duralumin, he said bitterly, had been provided to the Germans before June 22.

  Frankly, he said, it was simply unbelievable that the Germans had captured Minsk, had swept through Byelorussia, the Ukraine, capturing Pskov and driving up to the very outskirts of Leningrad.

  The three young men turned to Luknitsky for some explanation. He was deep in thought. So many of his countrymen had suffered disillusion. Now they knew the bitter truth. No one was going to save them—not Stalin, not the Red Army. Only themselves, only each man and each woman, fighting as he could, struggling as he could, just the simple men and women of Russia, of Leningrad, fighting in their ruined city, starving in the zero cold, fighting as long as they had strength . . .

  These thoughts stayed in Luknitsky’s mind as he came back to his flat. He learned of an incident that had happened the night before. A horse had fallen on the ice beside the house where his brother lived. In the morning only half the horse lay on the street. A policeman followed the tracks in the snow and found the missing half in a student dormitory. Horses were priceless. A soldier told of seeing one killed by a shell fragment. A score of people came running and within minutes had butchered the beast. He helped a girl cart home a horse’s leg. It was too heavy for her to lift.1

  Luknitsky recalled a talk he had had with his father about their dog Mishka. His father proposed giving the dog to a military unit because they could not feed it. Luknitsky objected: “Wait a minute, maybe it would be better to eat the dog ourselves.” His father was appalled: “I would never under any circumstances eat our beloved dog.” But after a few days his father said, “I’ve been talking with a man. He takes the head and feet of dogs and makes a good stew. . . .” And the two had looked at Mishka’s sorrowful e
yes, and each thought of how many tasty cutlets might be made from their faithful friend.

  The problem of food worried Luknitsky more and more. He knew only too well the Germans were counting on starving them out. He knew that they must hold on until the Red Army tore loose the blockade. He tried to be bright and optimistic in public, to talk in easy confidence about the victory which was just around the corner. That, he felt, was his duty. But he was not blind. Speaking to himself, he had to ask: What will happen if the food situation is not improved? Even a man with the strongest spirit must have a minimum of calories to maintain strength. Hunger, general hunger, simply led to death.

  There was rumor in the city of some move by the English or the Americans to save the city—a drive from Murmansk perhaps. But could it come in time, could it save Leningrad from starvation if Leningrad in the very next few days did not break the blockade?

  He was not certain. His doubt was shared by his fellow citizens. And was Leningrad really doing all that could be done? He did not believe so. The battle to recapture Mga (he believed) was raging violently at that very moment. But not all of Leningrad’s forces had been thrown into it. Everything should be committed to the battle—while Leningrad still had the strength to fight. At any price, at any sacrifice, the ring must be broken. Perhaps the cost would be tens of thousands of lives. But only thus could three million lives be saved.

  Within ten days Mishka had been slaughtered by Luknitsky’s brother with the aid of the porter. The first meal had been eaten—dog-leg stew. The intestines and one leg had gone to the porter as his share. Luknitsky had been at the front, but owing to bureaucratic red tape his ration was only two spoons of soup. He could hardly wait to partake of the tasty dog stew.

  Luknitsky, a correspondent for Tass, a good Party man, kept his public front.of confidence. Privately, his thoughts were pessimistic. He was not alone. In those days Aleksandr Dymshits, a writer serving on the Karelian front, occasionally came into Leningrad. He had a double task. In Leningrad he recorded broadcasts, telling of the bravery, fighting spirit and confidence of the men at the front. Once as he was going back to the front he heard his own voice on the loudspeaker. He was pleased how confident, how bold he sounded. Actually, like the others he was weak and worn. When he got to the front, he wrote stories for the army paper, telling the troops how strongly and well the people in Leningrad were fighting. Alas, he admitted to himself, the real situation bore little resemblance to the brave broadcasts. He spent his time in Leningrad exchanging news with his friends, learning who was dead, who had starved, who had been wounded. The Leningraders were like gray shadows, thin, tired and hungry. He was the same. They could hardly stand on their feet. A nightmare.

  A nightmare, indeed. On the twenty-first of June Academician Orbeli had been concerned about the Hermitage expedition to Samarkand, preparing for the five hundredth anniversary of the Timurid poet, Alisher Navoi. Now the day of the anniversary, December 10, was at hand. On the ninth the last streetcars in Leningrad stopped. On December 10 Leningradskaya Pravda was published for the first time on a single sheet, two pages, instead of the usual four.

  Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, the poet who had entered the People’s Volunteers in July, was still with his unit near the Obvodny Canal within the city. Rozhdestvensky had been on duty all night. He was sleeping heavily in a dugout when a sentry summoned him to the political officer, who handed him a pass. “You’re wanted at the Hermitage. Be back by midnight.” Rozhdestvensky was instructed to appear at the five hundredth anniversary celebration. Leningrad was starving, the city was near death, but Orbeli was going to hold the ceremony.

  Rozhdestvensky walked all the way, past shattered apartment buildings and stores whose windows were boarded with plywood. He could hear from the direction of Pulkovo Heights the heavy thud of cannon, the thin whistle of shells, and the explosions in the city itself. The Germans were engaged in their daily bombardment.

  He found the Nevsky virtually deserted. There were hummocks of snow in the street. Here and there a trolleycar stood frozen and battered. He walked past the Sadovaya, past the great Engineers Castle, past the Champs de Mars, studded with antiaircraft emplacements, to Palace Square and across the Winter Canal to the service entrance of the Hermitage, the very entrance where on the morning of June 22 employees had gathered for the “air-raid drill.”

  Now Orbeli stood here again, welcoming guests to the Navoi festival. The meeting was held in the State Council room of the former Czar, a great room with high ceiling and long windows giving onto the frozen Neva. It was cold, very cold, and Rozhdestvensky had difficulty in recognizing anyone among the bundled figures, their faces ravaged by cold, thin as hawks. But Orbeli was as always energetic, his long beard, now gray, flowing over his cotton-padded jacket. As he began to talk, his big dark eyes grew animated. He spoke of Leningrad’s brave spirit, its unquenchable will, the humanism of Soviet science, the city’s suffering, and the fact that Germany thought it a city of death.

  At that moment there came a tremendous explosion. A shell had landed nearby.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Orbeli said, without change of voice. “Shall we remove the meeting to the shelter?” No one rose. “Very well,” he said, “the meeting will go on.”

  Rozhdestvensky read his translations of Navoi. Another speaker was a young scholar, Nikolai Lebedev, specialist in Eastern literature. He was suffering from acute dystrophy. He knew what this meant. Already he was too ill to walk. His comrades had carried him to the hall. When his turn came, Orbeli asked him to remain seated while he read. His voice was so thin it hardly carried to the next row. Two days later a second Navoi session was held. Academician B. B. Piotrovsky read a paper on “Motifs of Ancient Eastern Myths in the Works of Alisher Navoi.” Then Lebedev read excerpts from the poem “Seven Planets.”

  The effort exhausted him. He was carried down to his cot in the icy chambers under the Hermitage. There he collapsed and in his final weakness kept whispering verses from Navoi.

  “When he lay already dead, covered with a flowered Turkmenian shawl, it seemed that he was still whispering his verses,” a friend recalled.

  The day after the Navoi festival Academician Sergei Zhebelev, seventy-four years old, slowly made his way through a new fall of heavy snow to the Hermitage. His great overshoes left enormous holes in the drifts at the door. He had come to thank Orbeli for the “holiday of science.” Zhebelev was the last survivor among Orbeli’s academic teachers.

  “I am so glad,” he told his onetime pupil, “that science continues to develop with us even under such difficult conditions. This is the way we scholars fight Fascism.”

  Zhebelev asked about his old friends at the Hermitage. They were working, Orbeli said. Natalia Flittner, a shawl around her shoulders, walked to all ends of the city to give lectures in hospitals, to military units. “They are all cold,” Orbeli said, “all hungry, but they write and they work.” Zhebelev asked about a friend, Valter, a librarian, and his wife, an antiquarian. Orbeli did not reply. He did not want to tell the old man that both had died in the underground vault only a few days earlier. Zhebelev began to talk of Yakov Smirnov, his close friend of university days, a man who had done much to save the Hermitage in the troubled times of Civil War. Smirnov had died at the age of eighty, in 1918, having continued his lectures up to three days before his death.

  Finally, the two men embraced. Orbeli helped Zhebelev down the steps and through the heavy drifts around the entrance. He watched the old man as he slowly made his way along the embankment, wondering whether he would ever see him again.

  That was December 13. December 29 was a terrible day at the Hermitage. There was heavy German shelling and one shell hit the wing of the Winter Palace near the kitchen courtyard. A second smashed the façade of the palace on the Admiralty side. A third crumpled the stone canopy over the granite Atlantae at the entrance to the Hermitage. That was the day Orbeli heard of the death of Zhebelev.

  Some years after the war Orbeli wrote a
brief essay which he called “About What I Thought During the Days and Nights of the Leningrad Blockade.”

  His thoughts were down-to-earth: of the thousands of treasures of the Hermitage which lay still in the chambers and cellars, subject to damage from German bombs and shells; of the safety of the priceless works of art sent to the Urals; of his native Armenia and the lands of the Caucasus where he spent his youth, and of the scholars of Leningrad and their dedication to science; of his last conversation with Zhebelev, “of his words, of all the thoughts which he then shared with me, of the great strength of the human spirit, the spirit of a man who in the course of his whole life fulfilled his duty unswervingly—the duty of a scholar, a teacher, a citizen.”

  The life of the Hermitage now descended to the subterranean chambers. Bomb Shelter No. 3, one of twelve in the great vaults under the palace, was the center of activity. Here people lived, worked, studied and died in darkness under the low ceilings. Here were their cots, row after row; here the plank tables where they huddled, swathed in greatcoats, a tiny “bat” light or candle stub flickering over the books of the scholars, the thin scratch of pens on yellow paper, the ink so close to freezing it had to be warmed by their breath. These were the catacombs—the center, such as it could be, of Leningrad’s scholarly life. Here people worked until they died. Each day a few more were dead. With the civilian ration down to 125 grams a day (all the Hermitage was on this minimum ration), Orbeli had found one unexpected resource—the by-product of the interminable delay of the painters, the fierce wrangling in which he had been engaged at the time war broke out.

  In preparation for the redecorating a quantity of linseed oil had been purchased for the Hermitage stores. There was also a large supply of paste. These products were edible. The linseed oil was used to fry bits of frozen potatoes, dug out of garden patches on the edge of the city. The paste was used to make a kind of “meat” jelly which became the stand-by of the Hermitage diet.