The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  “They have all died of hunger,” he said slowly, not taking his eyes off the candle. “Aunt Varya died on the way to the hospital, Avdotiya in her factory on the job. And the house was destroyed by a shell.”

  “That means no one lives there now?”

  “No,” he replied. “No one. Now it is just a snowdrift.”

  She was silent, then spoke again. “Papa,” she said, “for my part I am no longer alive.”

  “Nonsense,” he said sharply. “Of course, you are living. If you were not living, you would not be lying here and you could not have come here.”

  But, she thought, it really was not true. She did not want to live.

  “Such foolishness!” her father said. “Take me. I want to live very much. I’ve even become a collector.”

  It was a psychosis, he said. He had started to collect postcards, buttons and rose seeds. Someone, he said, had promised to send him the seeds of a special rose, called “Glory of Peace.” It was a fragrant, slow-blooming rose with golden tints and orange touches at the edge of the blossoms. Unfortunately, the wooden fence outside the clinic had been burned for fuel. But in the spring they would put up a new one, and beside it he would plant his roses. In two or three years they would bloom. Would she come and see them? Olga Berggolts heard herself saying that she would.

  “Now,” said her father, “sleep. Sleep is the best of all. And then you will see along my fence the new roses, Glory of Peace.”

  Before Olga Berggolts closed her eyes she looked at her father’s hands lying under the flickering candlelight—the hands of a Russian doctor, a surgeon who had saved thousands and thousands of lives of soldiers and ordinary Russians, hands that had cut steps in the ice staircase, hands that would grow new flowers, never seen before on the earth.

  “Yes,” she thought, “I will see my father’s roses. It will be just as he says.”

  * * *

  1 Only wired radio was in service in Leningrad. All ordinary receivers were confiscated on the second day of the war. Possession of a set or listening to a foreign broadcast was punishable by death.

  43 ♦ The Leningrad Apocalypse

  THE HAYMARKET OR SENNAYA OCCUPIED THE HEART OF Leningrad. Some years earlier it had been named Peace Square, but no one called it that. The Haymarket it had been since the early days of “Piter,” and the Haymarket it was in this winter of Leningrad’s agony. But sometimes it was called the Hungry Market.

  At one end of the Haymarket stood an old and undistinguished church and across from it a small barracks of early nineteenth-century architecture. The Haymarket was a square which opened out in the curving Sadovaya, the garden boulevard, one of the busiest shopping streets of pre-Bolshevik Russia. It had been a center of pushcart and stall trade, of peddlers, of izvozchiki, of coachmen and troikas, of flower girls and prostitutes, for two hundred years. Back of the Haymarket, in the tangle of streets between it and the imposing façade of St. Isaac’s Square, extended a web of side streets, the region which Vsevolod Krestovsky memorialized in his classic Petersburg Slums. Here Fedor Dostoyevsky had lived. Here was the house of Mikhail Raskolnikov. Between Spassky and Demidov lanes rose the old building which had once been known as the noisy “Raspberry House.” And at the corner of Tairov Street still stood the de Roberti house. These two had been the lowest dives in old Petersburg, notorious dens into which many a man walked never to emerge again alive. Nearby was the so-called Vyazemskaya Lavra, a haunt of thieves and criminals throughout the nineteenth century. Just beyond the Griboyedov Canal on Stolyarny Lane could be found the house in which Dostoyevsky himself lived when he was writing Crime and Punishment. It was a quarter similar to that in Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths. Here human life was cheap. The air was heavy with the fumes of cheap vodka, cheap makhorka or tobacco, cheap perfume, cheap whores, petty thieves, roguery, blackmail and murder.

  All this, of course, had long since been put behind the Haymarket by the Revolution. No more prostitution. No more thievery. No more criminals. So it was said. Whether this had really been true before the war, before Hitler’s invasion, before Leningrad fell into blockade, was difficult to know. But now the Haymarket was once again what it had been in the past—the center for every kind of crime which could find a setting in the besieged city.

  Before the war there had been in the Haymarket a great peasant market. This had been long closed, but as starvation deepened, trading for food began again in the Haymarket. By winter it had become the liveliest place in Leningrad. The market bore little resemblance to any other in the world. It was a market of exchange. Money, that is, paper rubles, had virtually no value. Bread was the common currency. Vodka held second place as a medium of exchange. For bread anything was for sale—women’s bodies or men’s lives. Nothing approached it in purchasing power, as the people of Leningrad learned, coming to the Haymarket with a gold watch, a diamond ring or a fur neckpiece. They could get a crust of bread for their valuables— but not much more, not nearly as much as they hoped. Yet why keep anything of value? What good are valuables if you are about to die?

  Ordinary people found they had little in common with the traders who suddenly appeared in the Haymarket. These were figures straight from the pages of Dostoyevsky or Kuprin. They were the robbers, the thieves, the murderers, members of the bands which roved the streets of the city and who seemed to hold much of it in their power once night had fallen.

  These were the cannibals and their allies—fat, oily, steely-eyed, calculating, the most terrible men and women of their day.

  For cannibalism there was in Leningrad. You will look in vain in the published official histories for reports of the trade in human flesh. But the stain of the story slips in, here and there, in casual references, in the memoirs, in allusions in fiction, in what is not said as well as in what is said about the crimes-for-food committed in the city.

  The history of anthropophagy goes deep into man’s past. Suggestive traces of the practice have been found in fossil deposits as early as the Paleolithic period. Ancient chronicles suggest that cannibalism was no stranger to Russian soil, having been a custom of the Scythians, the mysterious peoples who inhabited the vast steppes before the rise of Kievan Russia. Among the nomadic tribal warriors who swept westward from the Asian heartlands it was not unknown and sometimes entered into myth, superstition and religion.

  But commercial anthropophagy or cannibalism-for-profit is rare in the human experience.

  Everything was for sale at the Haymarket. Here stone-faced men sold glasses filled with “Badayev earth"—plain dirt dug from the cellars of the Badayev warehouses into which tons of molten sugar had poured. After the great fire subsided, reclamation teams under Food Chief Pavlov pumped out molten sugar for days, but thousands of tons saturated the ashes and earth beneath the Badayev cellars. Alongside the official reclamation effort went forward unofficial digging (“on the left,” in the Russian phrase). With the onset of winter the digging intensified. Men and women slipped into the Badayev site with picks and axes and hacked at the frozen soil. They sold earth from the first three feet of soil for 100 rubles a glass, that from deeper in the cellar for 50 rubles a glass. Some purchasers refined the sugar by melting it in a pan and running it through a linen cloth. More often it was simply mixed with flour or paste into a gummy confection, part earth, part paste or ersatz flour, part carbonized sugar. This was “candy” or “jelly” or “custard"—whatever the imaginative housewife decided to call it.

  In the Haymarket people walked through the crowd as though in a dream. They were pale as ghosts and thin as shadows. Only here and there passed a man or woman with a face, full, rosy and somehow soft yet leathery. A shudder ran through the crowd. For these, it was said, were the cannibals. Dmitri Moldavsky met a man like that on the staircase of his apartment. The man had been to his mother’s flat, where he traded four glasses of flour and a pound of gelatin powder for some clothing. The man had a pink face and splendid, widely spaced blue eyes. Moldavsky thought he would never forget
the sight. Instinctively, he wanted to kill this man with the tender cheeks and the too, too bright eyes. He knew what he was.

  Cannibals . . . Who were they? How many were they? It is not a subject which the survivors of Leningrad like to discuss. There were no cannibals, a professor recalls. Or rather, there were cannibals, but it only happened when people went crazy. There was a case of which he had heard, for instance, the case of a mother, crazed for food. She lost her mind, went completely mad, killed her daughter and butchered the body. She ground up the flesh and made meat patties. But this was not typical. It was the kind of insane aberration which might happen anywhere at any time. In fact, the professor recalled reading of a similar case before the war.

  But rats and cats and mice and birds—that was different. No one could prove for certain that the rats abandoned the city of Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42. But there were many in Leningrad to testify that this was so. Rats had almost disappeared by the middle of January. Possibly they had frozen to death. But the men at the Leningrad front did not believe this. They believed that the Leningrad rats came up out of the frozen cellars, abandoned the bombed-out buildings and made their way by the tens of thousands to the front-line trenches. There food was more plentiful—not much more plentiful, but a bit more so. Certainly rats abounded at the front. The only comfort the starving Leningrad troops could take was that rats were more numerous in the German lines, where the food was better.

  Not all the rats had left. Vsevolod Vishnevsky knew a Leningrad poetess, once a beauty. Now she was alone in Leningrad. She sat in her apartment, in a shawl, a karakul coat and heavy boots. Her room was large, filled with pictures, bric-a-brac and—cold. In the evenings she sat beside a small iron stove. Around her gathered a small company of rats, quiet, fearless. She permitted them to join her for their company’s sake. They, too, wished to be warm. So she sat, night after night, alone, with the circle of rats. Perhaps they were waiting for her to grow weaker.

  Rumors of cannibalism—yes. Leningrad had been swept by rumors since autumn, when people began to keep their children off the streets. There were reports that children were being kidnaped. Boys and girls were young, easy to seize, and their flesh, it was said, was more tender.

  Whether the rumors were true no one really knew. Anything could be true in these times. There were other rumors—that officers at the front were living in luxury with special rations and champagne while the people in the city starved. This was not true. The front was starving like the rest of the city. But in these winter months the radio often did not work for lack of power. Leningradskaya Pravda continued to appear. It missed only one day, January 25, when the power went off and the ink froze in the presses. But often only a few copies were printed and there was no one to distribute them. No one had the strength to lift the bundles. The newspaper Smena did not appear between January 9 and February 5. In fact, all the printing plants in Leningrad had been shut down in December to save electricity except the Volodarsky publishing plant which printed Leningradskaya Pravda—and ration cards. Frequently the matrices from which Pravda was printed did not arrive in Leningrad. They were flown every day from Moscow. But sometimes the planes got lost. At other times the matrices simply vanished. No one knew where they went. No wonder that any kind of story was believed in the Leningrad of January and February. Life was so terrifying for each Leningrader that all other terrors were believable.

  In these times people took a special attitude toward mice. Vera Inber and her husband, Dr. Strashun, had a mouse in their frigid apartment. They called her “Princess Myshkina.” In the first days of January Princess Myshkina vanished. Apparently she had died. Vera Inber was surprised how much she missed the mouse, a little spot of life in a frozen world. A few days later she noted with delight in her diary that Princess Myshkina had appeared again. Vera Inber and her husband had had a feast—half a small raw onion, heavily salted and slightly pickled, their bread ration, three little tartlets and some Ararat port wine. After they went to bed she heard Princess Myshkina at work, picking at the crumbs like a bird. Then the mouse climbed the cream pitcher. It was empty, of course. At that point Vera Inber lighted a match. Summoning her last strength, Princess Myshkina leaped from the cream pitcher and vanished.

  A mouse confronted one little Leningrad boy with a difficult moral problem. His grandmother had a tin box in which she put every extra scrap of bread and crackers. It was the family’s “iron reserves.” If all else failed— but only then—they would dig into the box. One day the boy was alone in the freezing flat. He heard a noise inside the tin can. He knew what this meant. A mouse was eating the iron reserves. He could not immediately decide what to do. Should he open the box and release the mouse? Should he open the box, kill the mouse and throw it away? Or should he kill the mouse and eat it? The last alternative was the one which most tempted him for, after all, the mouse had been consuming their food. But the thought of eating the mouse was repulsive. Finally, he took the lid from the box, shook it and let the mouse escape. After all, he thought, the mouse was as hungry as he, and how did he know whether it did not have as much right to live as he did?

  Other Leningraders, starving though they were, nonetheless each night carefully put a saucer on the floor with a few crumbs from their miserly ration for a Prince Myshkin or Princess Myshkina.

  There were, of course, no more birds in Leningrad. First to disappear were the crows, the black-and-gray northern European crows. They flew off to the German lines in November. Next to go were the gulls and the pigeons. Then the sparrows and starlings vanished. They died of cold and hunger just as the people did. Some said they had seen sparrows drop like stones while flying over the Neva, simply frozen to death in flight. An old ship worker, named Ilya Kroshin, recalled that when Petrograd was starving in 1920 the crows lived in the factory shops. “Now there are no crows,” he observed sadly.

  There was hardly a cat or a dog left in Leningrad by late December. They had all been eaten.1 But the trauma was great when a man came to butcher an animal which had lived on his affection for years. One elderly artist strangled his pet cat and ate it, according to Vsevolod Vishnevsky. Later, he tried to hang himself, but the rope failed, he fell to the floor, breaking his leg, and froze to death. The smallest Leningrad children grew up not knowing what cats and dogs were. One of the most savage attacks directed at Anna Akhmatova in the postwar years was written by a Leningrad working girl who accused the great poetess of ignorance of Leningrad in the blockade years because, in a poem, she spoke of pigeons in the square before the Kazan Cathedral. There were no pigeons there, the girl asserted. They all had long since been eaten.

  On January 1 a young man came to Yelena Skryabina and asked whether a large gray cat which belonged to a certain actress was still alive in her apartment building. He explained that the actress adored the cat. Unfortunately, Yelena Skryabina had to disillusion the young man. There was not a single creature alive in the building except people. All cats, dogs and other pets had been eaten. In fact, the son of the actress had led the hunt for stray dogs and cats and had been very energetic in killing pigeons and other birds.

  Special patrols of front-line soldiers were detailed to move through the Leningrad streets, dealing with any kind of situation which might arise on the spot. Colonel B. Bychkov, a Leningrad police officer, kept a diary of the problems he encountered day by day. One of the most critical was the theft of ration cards at the beginning of each month. Anyone losing his card at the beginning of the month almost certainly would be dead before he could get a new card. The military patrols observed no judicial procedures in such crimes. They simply halted suspicious persons, searched them, and if stolen cards or unaccountable food supplies were found, they shot the person on the spot. Bychkov lectured the patrols on violations of legalities. But it seemed to make no difference. He probably did not mind too much himself. The patrols of front-line soldiers were the only real force for law and order in the city.

  But no great effort was made
to interfere with the grisly trade at the Haymarket. As early as November, according to some accounts, meat patties made from ground-up human flesh went on sale, although many Leningraders refused to believe that the meat was human. They insisted it was horse meat —or dog, or cat.

  One Leningrader, walking through the world of ice late at night, came upon a bloody snowdrift into which had been hurled the heads of a man, a woman and a small girl, her blond hair still plaited in Russian braids. The bodies, he felt certain, had been carted off by the cannibals for butchering. No other explanation seemed to fit the presence of the human heads in the drift.

  The evidence of butchery of corpses was widespread. Many a Leningrad woman, pulling a child’s sled behind her, bringing the body of a husband or child to the vicinity of a cemetery, was appalled to see that fleshy parts had been cut from the corpses which lay about like scattered cordwood.

  “In the worst period of the siege,” a survivor noted, “Leningrad was in the power of the cannibals. God alone knows what terrible scenes went on behind the walls of the apartments.”

  He claimed to know of cases in which husbands ate their wives, wives ate their husbands and parents ate their children. In his own building a porter killed his wife and then thrust her severed head into a red-hot stove.

  Not a few soldiers on duty in the front lines made occasional trips-without-leave back into the city to bring food to their starving families. Coming into Leningrad late at night, at an hour when there was hardly a patrol on the streets, these soldiers not infrequently fell victim to attacks by the cannibals. They were regarded as preferable victims since they had been better fed. The center of trade in flesh, as in every kind of food product, was the Haymarket. Starving men and women did not inquire too clÖsely as to the nature of the cutlets—ground meat patties—which were offered for sale. Why should they? They knew that at best they must be made of horse meat, probably adulterated with cat meat or dog meat, possibly rat meat. They told themselves that, of course, there could be no human flesh mixed in. Indeed, it was not a question they were likely to put to the hard-eyed men or women who stood like rocks in their heavy boots and heavy coats, shrugging their shoulders at the possible purchasers. Take it or leave it. The prices were fantastic—300 or 400 rubles for a few patties. For some reason it was almost always meat patties which were offered, seldom sausage.