The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The two wept. The mother kept saying, “Lulya, you have put me into my grave—still living.” The girl looked into space and mumbled, “What a night! What a night!” Vera Inber and her husband helped them to make out a report to the police. But what good it would do no one knew. They had no ration cards and it was only February 3. Four weeks without food: a death sentence.

  Vsevolod Kochetov also lost his ration card but in a different way. He had gone with his wife Vera across Lake Ladoga to the Fifty-fourth Army front in late December. About January 12 he returned to Tikhvin to find that an urgent telegram from his editor, Zolotukhin, had been waiting several days for him, ordering him back to Leningrad. A whole week passed between the arrival of the telegram and Kochetov’s return to Leningrad. He got back to find that Zolotukhin—with whom he had never hit it off—had put him up on chargés of violation of military discipline. He was summarily dischargéd from Leningradskaya Pravda and expelled from the Communist Party. By coincidence (or possibly not by coincidence) Kochetov’s best friend and wartime companion, Mikhalev, was given similar treatment for a slightly different offense—for using the newspaper car to transport a sick colleague across Lake Ladoga.

  Kochetov eventually got his expulsion from the Party reversed. But he didn’t get his job back, and he didn’t get his ration card back. The ration card went with the job. Regardless of cause (and the only source for what happened is Kochetov, who never paints himself in anything but heroic colors), it was no snap being caught in Leningrad in midwinter of the blockade without a ration card. At one point he was reduced to buying 900 grams of lard at one ruble a gram—900 rubles—in the black market. Finally, the radio committee gave him a job, but it was several weeks before he got a ration card. He tramped five or ten miles a day in search of food, usually going to the front, to commanders whom he knew. Sometimes they let him share a bowl of soup. Sometimes they gave him a tin of canned meat, a half-loaf of black bread or a bit of sausage. Here and there around the city he stopped to look at bulletin boards and read the announcements posted there, handwritten on bits of yellow, white or blue paper: “Will remove corpses— for bread"; “Will buy or exchange valuables for records of Vertinsky and Leshchenko"; “For Sale: Complete works of Leonid Andreyev, Edgar Poe, Knut Hamsun"; “Lost: Little girl, seven years old, in red dress and fur hood. Anyone who has seen or met her . . .”

  What could have happened to the little girl in the red dress and fur hood? Had she been on the way to the food store when an air raid struck and fallen victim to a random bomb? Was she a victim of the casual shelling of German long-range guns which went on day after day at any hour, sometimes in one street, sometimes another? Had she simply collapsed of hunger and died in the street as thousands did every day? Or was there a more sinister explanation? Anything could and did happen on the streets of starving Leningrad. The possibilities of tragedy were endless. More than one child had been killed for a ration card, even though theirs were of the lowest category. As early as November mothers and fathers had begun to keep their children off the streets because of rumors of cannibalism.

  Both adults and children were turned into beasts by the privations. Yeliz-aveta Sharypina went to a store one day on Borodinsky Street. She saw an excited woman swearing at a youngster about ten years old and hitting him again and again. The child sat on the floor, oblivious of the blows, and greedily chewed a hunk of black bread, stuffing it into his mouth as rapidly as he could work his jaws. Around the woman and the child stood a circle of silent spectators.

  Sharypina grabbed the woman and tried to make her halt.

  “But he’s a thief, a thief, a thief,” the woman cried.

  She had received her day’s bread ration from the clerk and had let it sit for one moment on the counter. The youngster snatched the loaf, sat down on the floor and proceeded to devour it, heedless of blows, heedless of shouts, heedless of anything that went on around him.

  When Sharypina tried to calm the woman, she broke into tears and sobbed that she had taken her only child to the morgue a few weeks before. Finally, Sharypina got the people in the bread store to contribute bits of their ration to the woman who had lost hers. She then questioned the ten-year-old. His father, he thought, was at the front. His mother had died of hunger. Two children remained, he and a younger brother. They were living in the cellar of a house which had been destroyed by a bomb. She asked why they hadn’t gone to a children’s home. He said they had to wait for their father. If they went to a home, they would be sent out of Leningrad and never see him again.

  Even the stoutest heart began to wonder whether Leningrad could survive such a plight. Vera Inber, a woman of flaming courage who had deliberately come to Leningrad to share its fate with her physician husband, wrote in her diary for January 4:

  It seems to me that if in the course of ten days the blockade is not lifted the city will not hold out. Leningrad has taken the full brunt of this war. What is needed is that the Germans on the Leningrad front receive their due. ... If only someone knew how Leningrad is suffering. The winter is still long. The cold is ferocious.

  Three days later she wrote that everyone in Leningrad was saying that General Meretskov’s troops would be in Leningrad by the tenth. “Well,” she commented, “whether it is the tenth, the fifteenth or the twentieth or even the end of January, just let it happen.”

  The wildest rumors coursed through Leningrad. One was the legend of the “noble bandit.” A young girl was attacked by a bandit gang on her way home late at night. She was compelled to hand over her fur coat, her wool dress, her new shoes. The bandits were about to leave her naked and freezing in the bitter night when one took off his leather jacket and threw it over her shoulders. The girl ran to her apartment and there, plunging her hand into the pocket of the jacket, pulled out a packet of money—5,000 rubles. Or, in another version, obviously influenced by the blockade, she put her hand in the pocket and drew out a loaf of bread and a large package of butter.

  On January 122 Mayor Peter Popkov called a press conference at Smolny. The reporters thought he looked tired. His eyes were red and deeply shadowed, his face pale but freshly shaven. He did not rise to greet them, simply motioning to chairs at a long table covered with green baize. Without preliminaries he began to speak of the city’s difficulties. His voice was hoarse, and he talked slowly without intonation. The city had been under siege for five months. There had been terrible problems with food. Now, he thought, the Ladoga road was solving them. “The enemy planned to stifle the city by hunger,” he said. “This aim will be thwarted.” But two things must be done. The food must be gotten into the city, and within the city a merciless struggle must be fought against robbers and “marauders,” or pillagers as the officials called the organized gangs preying on Leningrad. “Robbers, speculators and marauders will be mercilessly punished by the laws of war,” Popkov said.

  The suffering grew worse.

  On January 25 Party Secretary Kuznetsov got an urgent telephone call at Smolny from Power Station No. 5, the only plant still operating. The station had been limping along on daily shipments of 500 cubic meters of wood, delivered by the October Railroad. That day the last fuel had been exhausted. None came in by rail.

  “Try to hold out a few hours,” Kuznetsov begged. But there was no more fuel. The turbines turned slower and slower and finally halted. That deprived Leningrad’s remaining water-pumping station of power. The pumps halted. No more water for the bread bakeries. Without water the bakers could not bake bread.

  It may have been on this day that the City Soviet telephoned Power Station No. 2 and asked for 100 kilowatts of power. “We can’t,” came the answer. “We’re sitting here by an oil lamp ourselves.”

  Leningrad was left with a total power production of 3,000 kilowatts, turned out by a small emergency turbine at Station No. 1.

  At the Frunze regional bakery, one of eight still operating in the city, two fire department pumpers were brought in and kept the bakery going. In the Petrograd region
the pipes quickly froze. A call was sent to the Young Communist headquarters:

  “We must have 4,000 pails of water by evening for the bakery or there will be no bread tomorrow. We must have a minimum of 2,000 Young Communists because none of them can carry more than two pails; they don’t have the strength.”

  The youngsters were somehow mobilized and formed a chain from the frozen banks of the Neva to the nearest bakery. They managed to provide enough water and then, on children’s sleds, distributed the bread to the food shops.

  By chance Vsevolod Vishnevsky made a speech before a thousand police workers the day after the power was cut off. He spoke in a large room at police headquarters and noted that it was in good order. There was light, although it was being “economized.” He was told that the principal problem lay with the railroad, which was working so badly that 70,000 t6ns of food had piled up at Osinovets because it was impossible to bring it into Leningrad. If Vishnevsky found anything curious in the fact that with Leningrad bereft of light and heat the police force still was able to assemble in lighted, heated quarters, he made no notation of the fact. He did, however, make an oblique comment on the comparatively well-fed appearance of the NKVD.

  When Vera Inber heard the news about cessation of power, she noted in her diary for January 25:

  7 P.M. The situation is catastrophic. People now have fallen on the wooden fence around the hospital and are smashing it up for kindling. There is no water. If tomorrow the bakeries halt for even one day, what will happen? Today we hadn’t even any soup—only cereal. There was coffee this morning, but there will be no more liquids. Our water supply: half a teakettle (we keep it on the warm stove), half a pan for washing and a quarter-bottle for tomorrow. That’s all.

  The next day she wrote:

  I cried for the first time from grief and bitterness. I upset the cereal in the stove. Ilya swallowed a few spoonfuls mixed with ashes. No bread yet...

  On the twenty-seventh she learned of the bucket brigade at the Neva which had been mustered to help the bakeries. There were enormous lines at the bread shops, but bread did appear toward evening and was slowly passed out. For practical purposes, however, Leningrad’s bakeries in the depth of the famine winter were closed down for about forty-eight hours.

  The fuel famine worsened despite every effort of Zhdanov, Kuznetsov and the others.

  Leningrad had entered the blockade in no better shape for fuel than for food. On September 1 Leningrad had gasoline and oil reserves of 18 to 20 days, coal for 75 to 80 days. The Power Trust had 18 days’ supply of wood, the bread bakeries 60 days’. By September 30 fuel oil was virtually exhausted and most factories were down to their last coal. The October 1 stock of wood was 118,851 cubic meters—about two weeks’ supply. It had been 370,000 cubic meters a month earlier.

  By mid-October power production had fallen to one-third prewar level. Young Communist battalions were beginning to be sent out to the suburban forests to chop wood.

  The city in peacetime got 120 trainloads of fuel a day. Now it had three or four trains of firewood at best.3

  The heating of buildings virtually ceased, although it was officially supposed to be maintained at 54 degrees Fahrenheit in apartments, 50 degrees in offices and 47 degrees in factories, as of November 17. In fact, by December there was no central heating whatever. The use of electricity for lighting was limited to Smolny, the General Staff building, police stations, Party offices, AA commands, post and telegraph offices, the fire department, courts and apartment house offices. Even the military were running out of fuel. By the end of November they were down to ten to eleven days of aviation gas and seven days’ supply for the trucks.

  By December 15 the director of Power Station No. 1 reported he was receiving only 150 to 350 tons of coal a day against a minimum use of 700 to 800. He was compelled to exhaust his emergency supplies and closed down. In the course of December most hospitals lost all their electricity, and in the forty which were dependent on electricity for heating, temperatures fell to 35 to 45 degrees. Laundries ceased to operate. So did public baths.

  On December 10, 2,850 persons were sent out to cut wood. On December 12 another 1,400 were mobilized, mostly Young Communists. On December 24 it was decided to demolish wooden structures for fuel. Even so, only 20 percent of the December wood quota of 130,000 cubic meters was met. The bakeries got 18,000 cubic meters of wood from the demolition of 279 houses in January. In February they got another 17,000 cubic meters.

  On January 1 the city authorities estimated fuel reserves at 73,000 tons of coal, a little more than a month’s supply at minimum use. There were less than 2,000 tons of anthracite left in the city. The only sources of fuel now were the small forests around the city, a little peat that lay under frozen snow and ice along the north bank of the Neva and the wooden houses and buildings of Leningrad. Andrei Zhdanov authorized the demolition of almost any structure made of wood. He promised that after the war Leningrad would be rebuilt in new grandeur. Youngsters even tore away some wooden planks around the Bronze Horseman, the heroic statue of Peter the Great. On those that remained they scrawled, “He is not cold and we will be warmed.”

  The principal means of heating were the burzhuiki set up in apartments with a chimney that went out through the fortockka, the small ventilating window.

  The result .was inevitable: hundreds upon hundreds of fires, caused by the cranky, poorly installed, poorly attended makeshift stoves. From January 1 to March 10 there were 1,578 fires in Leningrad, caused by the estimated 135,000 burzhuiki in the city.

  When the fuel supplies ran out at Power Station No. 5, the main water-pumping station got no power for thirty-six hours, the Southern and Petro-grad stations got none for four days. The temperature was 30 degrees below zero. By the time the pumps came back, Leningrad’s water system had been fatally frozen. So had the sewer system.

  The city began to burn down. In January there were more than 250 serious fires and an average of nearly thirty a day of all kinds. Some were caused by German bombardment but most of them by the burzhuiki. They burned day after day. On January 12 there was a very bad series of fires, twenty in all. One of the worst was on the Nevsky, where the Gostiny Dvor, badly battered in the September bombing, burned again.

  With his usual suspiciousness Vsevolod Vishnevsky thought that Nazi diversionists must be at work, although he conceded that the fires might be due to carelessness with the burzhuiki.

  The sight of the Leningrad fires was chilling even to an insensitive observer like Vsevolod Kochetov. It terrified him to see a fire burn in a big building and return a day or two later to find it still burning, slowly eating away apartment after apartment, often with no one making any effort to extinguish it. The pipes were frozen, there was no fuel for the fire trucks, and most of the fire fighters were too sick or too weak to answer a call even if anyone had bothered to put one in. By December only 7 percent of the fire engines were still operative. In January in a typical fire command only eight of eighty fire fighters were able to report for duty.

  One night Aleksandr Chakovsky was walking back to the Astoria Hotel from Smolny. A great fire was burning in the heart of the city, the sky was ablaze and rosy shadows played on the snow. As he approached, he found a large stone apartment house afire. There were no firemen about. But several women had formed a chain and were handing possessions out of the house— a baby in a perambulator, a samovar, a kerosene stove, a couch on which a figure lay wrapped in a blanket, possibly the mother of the baby.

  Fedor Grachev, a doctor in chargé of a large hospital on Vasilevsky Island, was walking through Theater Square, across from the Mariinsky Theater, one evening when he saw the glow of a huge fire on Decembrists Street. He turned into the street, soot falling in his face. The flames had attacked the three upper stories of a tall building at the corner of Decembrists Street and Maklin Prospekt, a building decorated with figures and scenes from Russian fairy tales. “The House of Fairy Tales” was what the Leningraders called it.

&
nbsp; Tongues of fire licked out of the windows, casting a lurid light over the scene, and underfoot there was a carpet of broken glass. The heat of the fire was melting snow and ice, and this had attracted a crowd of people who patiently filled their pails and buckets with the precious water. No one made any attempt to put out the fire. In fact, no one paid any heed to it, except to take advantage of the rare source of easily obtainable water.

  “Has it burned a long time?” Grachev asked a woman.

  “Since morning,” she said.

  Grachev stopped long enough to warm himself and then went on.

  In an effort to prevent soldiers passing through Leningrad from deserting to the ranks of the food bandits, heavy security detachments were thrown around the suburban railroad stations. Even so, a few men managed to slip away from almost every detachment.

  It was at this point that the Leningrad Military Council, the City Party Committee and the City Council began to receive letters proposing that Leningrad be declared an “open city"—that is, as the Soviet historians note, that the front be opened and the Germans be permitted to occupy the city.

  There are few references to the “open city” proposal in Soviet historical works. And in each case they draw upon the same documents in the Leningrad State Archives.

  The Soviet historians seem convinced that the “open city” proposals came from resident Nazi agents within Leningrad. The “open city” proposal was first advanced, they contend, at the time of the September battles. They quote a Nazi agent as saying that the German plan was to stir up a revolt within Leningrad, simultaneous with the final attack on the city. Later on, the plan was changed and the Germans decided to provoke an uprising within the city, carry out a pogrom against Jews and Party commissars, and then invite the Germans into the city to restore order.4

  Another Nazi agent (or perhaps the same one) is quoted as having said that with the deepening of the blockade the Germans hoped to touch off a “hunger revolt” in which bread shops and food stores would be attacked and women would then march out to the front lines and demand that the troops give up the siege and let the Germans enter the city.