The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The chronicler of the catacombs was Aleksandr Nikolsky, chief architect of the Hermitage. Day by day Nikolsky kept a diary of Hermitage life. He and his wife Vera had moved to Bomb Shelter No. 3, having undergone a month and a day of continuous German air attack. On their first night, he noted, “we slept like stones under its uncrushable walls.”

  At first each morning the occupants of Bomb Shelter No. 3 would emerge —some to work in the Academy of Science, some in the Academy of Art, some in the Hermitage rooms. The older men and women, if they had nothing else to do (and there was no air raid), would go to the school cabinet and sit looking out the tall windows at the frozen Neva, across the river to the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

  There were two thousand people living in the cellars of the Hermitage.

  To go from Bomb Shelter No. 2 to Bomb Shelter No. 3 one had to cross the vast Hall of Twenty Columns, emerging through the emergency door under an arched roof.

  At night this route through the corridors and halls of the Hermitage was fantastic to the point of terror. There were no blackout curtains in the museum windows and lights were forbidden. On the floor of the great Hall of Twenty Columns there was a tiny light, but all around it was dark as a prison.

  From the Hall of Twenty Columns you went into a smaller room that led to a chamber in which stood a vase of incredible size (the Kolyvan vase, eight feet tall and fifteen feet in diameter, weighing nineteen tons).

  The darkness occasionally was lightened by a door opening; then all would again be black and you could see neither the floor, the ceiling, the columns nor even the vase.

  Bomb Shelter No. 3 was located under the Italian Hall of the Hermitage. Nikolsky’s cot and that of his wife were on the left side in the corner. Nearby lived the artist G. S. Vereisky. The Nikolskys shared their table with the Buts family. Buts was a bookkeeper at the Hermitage.

  Nikolsky was an indefatigable artist. In late October he began sketching from life. Then as cold and darkness set in, he sketched the scenes of life in Bomb Shelter No. 3, Bomb Shelter No. 2, Bomb Shelter No. 5, from memory. There was no longer light to do so otherwise.

  In late December Bomb Shelter No. 3 had its first vernissage. Nikolsky invited his friends to the corner where he lived. Here he spread his sketches on the bed and on the table. Crowding about in felt boots, cotton-padded jackets, so thin they could hardly stand, his comrades examined the sketches by the light of three altar candles. Here was the domed roof of Bomb Shelter No. 2 under the Hall of Twenty Columns, here Bomb Shelter No. 5 under the Egyptian Hall, here the Neva as seen from a Hermitage window, here the smashed interior of a Hermitage hall.

  “To yield our city is impossible,” Nikolsky noted in his diary. “Better die than give up. I am confident that soon the siege will be lifted, and I have already begun to think about a project for an arch of triumph with which to welcome the heroic troops who liberate Leningrad.”

  Nikolsky drafted plans for the Arch of Triumph and a Park of Victory, and after the war these were incorporated in a Victory Stadium and Park along the Baltic embankment.

  During the Navoi festival Orbeli had not made his customary daily inspection of the Hermitage. Actually, his rheumatism was so bad, the pain so severe in the eternal cold, that it was almost impossible for him to get about. The pain lightened a bit during the Navoi meetings. Now it was back, stronger than ever.

  Nonetheless, he determined to make his tour. He began on the second floor, walking from hall to hall. The palace mirrors reflected his stooped figure, his peasant’s jacket, his fur hat. Here the windows were broken. Orbeli felt the walls—over them a coating of ice. The ceremonial rooms of the Winter Palace were even colder than those of the New Hermitage. One bomb had exploded in the courtyard of the theater across the Winter Canal from the Hermitage and the Winter Palace. There was plywood over some windows. Over some there was nothing. Orbeli went below to the halls of antique art. He walked through the Hall of Athens, the Hall of Hercules. These halls were not empty. Here there were many objects of art, removed from the more exposed upper chambers. He could hardly get through the Hall of Jupiter it was so crammed with packing cases. At the staircase he saw snow on the steps, knapsacks and packages—some Hermitage workers were still bringing objects of art from the Stieglitz Museum on the other side of the Champs de Mars for safekeeping in the Hermitage vaults.

  Orbeli worked at his office as long as there was light from the windows on the Neva side. But in December this meant for only a few hours. It was deathly cold. His rheumatism grew worse.

  One day he had a visitor, Captain A. V. Tripolsky, a famous submarine commander. Tripolsky had known Orbeli in the past, in fact, ever since his portrait had been hung in the Hermitage gallery of Heroes of the Soviet Union in 1940.

  Orbeli greeted him warmly. He took off his glasses, put down his book, rose with difficulty (Tripolsky saw how crippled he was by rheumatism) and invited the captain to come below where it was warmer.

  “It’s too dark to work, anyway,” Orbeli said. They crossed the Hall of Twenty Columns, Tripolsky following Orbeli blindly in the darkness. They made their way past the great Kolyvan vase, across the courtyard and down the staircase leading to Bomb Shelter No. 3. To the right was the shelter, to the left Orbeli’s room. Orbeli lighted a candle and set it in a three-branch silver candlestick.

  “My blockade office,” he said proudly. There was a narrow cot, a table filled with books.

  After leaving Orbeli, Tripolsky made his way straight to the Neva embankment. There, frozen in the ice, stood the Polar Star, once the Czar’s private yacht, now a headquarters ship for the Baltic Fleet.

  Tripolsky sought out the chief electrician.

  “You know the Hermitage?” he asked.

  “Naturally,” he said. “It’s right across from us.”

  Tripolsky explained its plight. They had no light, no electricity. Could the Polar Star help out by stringing a cable to the Hermitage?

  “In a minute,” said the electrician.

  Within a few hours a cable had been laid across the ice and hooked up to the Hermitage. The sailors appeared in Orbeli’s office, turned on the lamp and there was light. Orbeli clapped his hands like a small child. Then he sat down and lighted a cigarette. His leg was paining him badly. The sailors looked under his desk and found an electric heater which was not working. Soon they had it going.

  “The ship gave its current to several of the rooms of the Hermitage,” Nikolsky noted in his diary. “We have light. It is a priceless blessing.”

  It was a blessing, but a limited one. The Polar Star had fuel to power her dynamos—but not very much.

  In the diary of V. V. Kalinin there is this notation of January 8 (the 130th day of the siege):

  I was in the city at the Hermitage. It is so melancholy there. They are so thin, their faces so white, bags under their eyes. They sit at their tables— in the cold by the weak light of a candle.

  In the bomb shelter the chief of guides, Sergei Reichardt, and his wife Kseniya have died. Sergei died January 6 among his beloved books, asking just before he died for one of his rare books to which he softly pressed his hand. Kseniya died today.

  I went to Orbeli in his little office in the arched cellar. It smelled raw and damp. An altar candle was burning. He seemed today particularly weak and nervous.

  Possibly Orbeli’s mood stemmed from the fact that on this day he had gotten two more requests, one from the Union of Architects, one from the Museum of Ethnography, each asking the same thing: “We request that the Hermitage prepare a coffin. . . .”

  The great stock of packing materials which Orbeli had assembled to ship his treasures to safety was being put to new use. Almost alone in the city the Hermitage had a store of lumber, of packing boxes from which coffins could be made. This in early January was the principal task of the emaciated workers of the Hermitage—making coffins for their friends.

  Now on this day for the first time Orbeli had to refuse a request for a coffin.
The Hermitage carpenter had died, and there was no one with the strength to build one—not even for the Hermitage staff itself.

  Henceforth when someone died at the Hermitage—and there were many deaths every day—the bodies were simply carried to the Vladimir corridor to lie there until, occasionally, a truck and army crew came and carted the bodies away.

  Leningrad was, indeed, becoming a city of death.

  * * *

  1 At the beginning of October the City Council had ordered all horses unfit for work to be delivered to the Kolomyagi and Porokhov slaughterhouses. Individual slaughter of horses was forbidden. The horses were slaughtered under veterinary observation, and the horse meat was used in the preparation of sausage according to the recipe: horse meat 75 percent, potato flour 12 percent, pork 11 percent, with saltpeter, black pepper and garlic added. (Pavlov, op. cit., 2nd edition, pp. 77–78.)

  40 ♦ The Sleds of the Children

  IN DECEMBER THEY BEGAN TO APPEAR—THE SLEDS OF THE children, painted bright red or yellow, narrow sleds with runners, sleds for sliding down hills in fur earlaps and a woolen muffler trailing behind, Christmas presents, small sleds, big enough for a boy taking a belly-flopper, or a boy and a girl clutching each other as they raced around the icy curves.

  The children’s sleds, suddenly they were everywhere—on the Nevsky, on the broad boulevards, moving toward Ulitsa Marat, toward the Nevskaya Lavra, toward Piskarevsky, toward the hospitals. The squeak, squeak, squeak of the runners sounded louder than the shelling. It deafened the ears. On the sleds were the ill, the dying, the dead.

  In December Vladimir Konashevich, the artist, the illustrator of Pushkin and Lermontov, Hans Christian Andersen and Mark Twain, decided to write his memoirs. What else was there to do? He was starving and freezing. It was almost impossible to paint. He would write of his childhood in the last century in Moscow. It might drive out of his ears the squeaking of the sleds, the endless movement of the people in their coats of black wool as they drew the children’s sleds along the icy sidewalks and dragged them through the streets.

  There were no automobiles in the city. Only the people, pulling their burdens, the dead in coffins of unpainted wood, large and small, the ill clinging to the runners of the sleds, precariously balanced pails of water and bundles of wood. As Konashevich picked his way through the drifts, he thought more and more of his Moscow childhood, of the winter streets, the scenes of snow, the quiet, broken only by the sledges and the sleighs.

  Not that he could drive the present from his consciousness. Try as he would, he could not drown out the cries of an old woman who lived in his communal apartment, who sat on a stool at her doorstep, thin, black, a hand extended, hoarsely whispering, “Bread . . . bread . . .” Every time he passed down the hall the hand went out and the voice croaked, “Bread . . . bread.” Then the woman died.

  Nothing now was more common than death in Leningrad. Luknitsky came back to his father’s flat one night after a day at Smolny. He walked most of the way home to find that his aunt, Vera Nikolayevna, had died. She had gotten up that morning, complaining of a pain in her heart, sat down and lost consciousness. In a few hours she was dead. They put the body on a table in her room and closed the door. Now in the kitchen supper was being prepared, a small roast, cut from the remains of Mishka, the dog.

  On December 29 Luknitsky noted in his diary that ten days earlier he had been told that six thousand persons a day were dying of starvation.1 “Now, of course, many more,” he observed. Six members of the Writers Union had died in the last two or three days—Lesnik, Kraisky, Valov, Varvara Naumova and two more. The aunt of M. Kozakov had lain in her flat dead for more than ten days. Kraisky died in the dining room of the Writers’ House. He lay six days before they got around to moving the body out.

  “To take someone who has died to the cemetery,” Luknitsky said, “is an affair so laborious that it exhausts the last vestiges of strength in the survivors, and the living, fulfilling their duty to the dead, are brought to the brink of death themselves.”

  Luknitsky commented, as did all the Leningrad diarists, on the quiet of the city. It was the quiet of the grave. Automobiles rarely appeared—only frail people, slowly pulling the children’s sleds. Not all the dead were in coffins. Many were simply swathed in a sheet, and when they were brought to the cemeteries, there was no one to dig a grave, no one to say a prayer. The body was just dumped. Not infrequently those who pulled the sled fell beside the corpse, themselves dead, without a sound, without a groan, without a cry.

  Vera Inber discovered a terrifying spectacle at the back gate to the Erisman Hospital next to the dissection room. Here on the banks of the Kar-povka Canal a mountain of corpses was growing. Each day eight to ten more bodies were added to the pile. The snow fell and covered them. Then new bodies were piled on top, some wrapped in rugs, some in curtains, some in sheets. Once she saw a very small body, obviously that of a child, tied in wrapping paper, bound with ordinary string. Sometimes, from under the snow an arm or a leg projected, strangely alive in the bright wrappings of the shrouds.

  Vera Inber could not imagine what could be done about this. The dissection room itself was jammed with corpses. There were no trucks to take bodies to the cemetery, no strength for the task. There could be no registration of deaths under these conditions. The best that could be done was to give a simple body count to ZAGS (the city clerk).

  The largest number of bodies were in the reception rooms. Many brought their dead to the hospital. Many tottered into the reception room and died. At the cemeteries long trenches were being dynamited for mass burials. Individual graves were almost impossible to obtain. Only for bread, the most precious of Leningrad commodities, would a gravedigger bury a corpse.

  Leningrad’s terrible winter—it was the coldest in modern times, with an average temperature in December of 9 above zero Fahrenheit (13 degrees below normal) and 4 degrees below zero in January (20 degrees below normal)—froze the ground like iron. The weakened Leningraders had no strength to hack out graves. Most corpses lay on the surface, gradually becoming buried under snow and ice.

  Some were placed in common graves—actually long trenches, dynamited by army sappers—at the Volkov, Bolshaya Okhta, Serafimov, Bogoslovsky, Piskarevsky, Zhertva 9 Yanvarya, and the Tatar cemeteries. They were also buried in open squares on Golodai Island, at Vesely settlement and at the Glinozemsky factory. More than 662 common graves were dug in the winter of 1941–42, with a total length of 20,000 yards.

  “I remember the picture exactly,” recalled Y. I. Krasnovitsky, director of the Vulcan factory. “It was freezing cold. The bodies were frozen. They were hoisted onto trucks. They even gave a metallic ring. When I first went to the cemetery, every hair stood up on my head to see the mountain of corpses and the people, themselves hardly alive, throwing the bodies into trenches with expressionless faces.”

  The dead from the Kuibyshev, Dzerzhinsky, Red Guard and Vyborg sections were transported to Piskarevsky Cemetery. Steam shovels of Special Construction Administration No. 5 were ordered there. When they had completed their twenty-mile trip to Piskarevsky, the operators could hardly believe their eyes. They began to dig the trenches, trying not to look at the heap of bodies.

  Returning from Lake Ladoga late at night, Vsevolod Kochetov saw the shovels at work. He thought they were working on new fortifications. The chauffeur corrected him.

  “They are digging graves—don’t you see the corpses?”

  Kochetov looked more clÖsely in the dim light. What he had thought were cords of wood were piles of corpses, some wrapped in blankets, shawls or sheets, some not.

  “There are thousands,” the chauffeur said. “I go past here every day, and every day they dig a new trench.”

  Even so, many bodies remained unburied or simply lay in open trenches.

  A Leningrader, jotting down his impressions in January, 1942, wrote:

  The nearer to the entrance to Piskarevsky I approached, the more bodies appeared on both sides of
the road. Coming out of town where there were small one-story houses, I saw gardens and orchards and then an extraordinary formless heap. I came nearer. There were on both sides of the road such enormous piles of bodies that two cars could not pass. A car could go only on one side and was unable to turn around. Through this narrow passage amidst the corpses, lying in the greatest disorder, we made our way to the cemetery.

  The Leningrad authorities, almost powerless to act, nonetheless ordered on January 7 the observance of the “strictest sanitary norms” under threat of the “revolutionary tribunal"—in other words, death before the firing squad. Needless to say, the threat was meaningless.

  “Never in the history of the world,” comments the official Leningrad history of the blockade, “has there been an example of tragedy to equal that of starving Leningrad.”

  Every day more coffins both full and empty, appeared on the street. If they were empty, they slid from side to side on the sleds. One hit Vera Inber a glancing blow in the ankle. Usually two women pulled a sled. They put the straps over their shoulders—not because the corpses were so heavy, but because the women were so weak.

  Once Vera Inber saw a corpse, that of a woman, on a sleigh. She was in a shroud, not a coffin, and those who had prepared her had carefully stuffed the shroud with shavings to give her breasts a more comely appearance. The professional touch made Vera Inber shudder. Someone probably had been paid, possibly in bread, to prepare this poor body—for what? Another time she saw two children’s sleds pulled in tandem. On one was a coffin atop which, neatly arrayed, were a shovel and a crowbar. On the other was a load of wood. On the one death, on the other life.

  You could see almost anything on a child’s sled that winter in Leningrad: A brand-new chest of drawers being pulled by a starving woman, the chest to be broken up for kindling. Two women pulling a third, pregnant, hurrying to the hospital to give birth, yellow, thin, her face skeletal. Or two women pulling a man, his feet dragging behind him, shouting again and again, “Be careful. Be careful.”