The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The Ladoga route had been brought into order. It was in constant flow, food and fuel pouring into Leningrad, people pouring out.

  In a dugout Vera Inber sat with a division commander. It was so warm near the little iron stove that two or three birch shoots had pushed through the earthen walls and begun to sprout a few tender leaves. They drank a toast to the liberation of Leningrad, and the commissar said, “To live or not live—that is not the question. Our life belongs to Leningrad.”

  * * *

  1 Luknitsky’s assignment was arranged by Vera Ketlinskaya, secretary of the Writers Union, and N. D. Shumilov, a Party official at Smolny. Luknitsky learned the secret only eighteen years later when he found a notation to this effect in the unpublished papers of Vera Ketlinskaya. (Luknitsky, op. cit., p. 700.)

  46 ♦ Death, Death, Death

  PAVEL LUKNITSKY RETURNED TO LENINGRAD FROM THE Fifty-fourth Army on March 5, improved in health and spirits. He drove almost directly to his home. As he entered Cheboksarsky Pereulok, a woman walked toward him in the dusk, chanting a lament: “Death! Death! Death!”

  As she came nearer, she stared at Luknitsky with unseeing eyes and continued her monologue. He heard her say, “Death by starvation will take us all. The soldiers will live a while longer. But we will die. We will die. We will die.”

  The woman passed him like a terrified spirit.

  It was hardly an auspicious welcome, but Luknitsky threw over his shoulders his two big knapsacks, filled with food and supplies brought back from the “mainland,” and climbed the five flights to his apartment. Everything was in order—except that the roof had been blasted off.

  Death stalked Leningrad at winter’s end.

  The city was filled with corpses. They lay by the thousands on the streets, in the ice, in the snowdrifts, in the courtyards and cellars of the great apartment houses. The city and Party authorities were preparing to launch an enormous spring clean-up. But V. N. Ivanov, secretary of the Young Communists, was afraid of the psychological effect on his young boys and girls when they confronted the mountains of frozen, decayed and disintegrating bodies.

  On one March night a sanitary brigade drove up to the courtyard “morgue” at the Hermitage and carted off forty-six bodies to the Piskarev-sky Cemetery. There were corpses in the gardens of the Anichkov Palace, now the Palace of Pioneers, on the Fontanka and in the vaults of the Alexandrinsky Theater. There were twenty-four bodies in the Nikolsky Cathedral, awaiting delivery to a cemetery—one in a coffin, twenty-three wrapped in sheets and rags. Bodies had piled up in the hospitals. In many institutions the doctors and nursing personnel were too ill or weak to care for patients. There had been 6,500 doctors in Leningrad at the start of the war. By January 1 there were only 3,379 and by April 1 only 3,288. Leningrad lost 195 doctors from January 1 to March 15.

  Illness was as widespread as death. In one big factory 55 percent of the workers were on sick call in January (mostly starving), 61 percent in February and 59 percent in March. On February 20 only 2,416 of 10,424 workers at the Kirov metallurgical works reported for duty—23 percent. The Kirov works lost 3,063 workers by death in 1942. Of 6,000 on the Kirov rolls in March and April, 2,300 died.

  Scurvy was universal. Professor A. D. Bezzubov invented a process for extracting vitamin C from pine needles. Eight factories were put to work making pine-needle extract, and 16,200,000 doses were produced in 1942.

  Even more critical threats appeared. Typhus broke out in a children’s home at the corner of Mozhaisky Street and Zagorodny Prospekt in late February. The house was cordoned off. Only persons with medical clearance were permitted in and out. Fortunately, the epidemic was contained. Another case of suspected typhus appeared in the student dormitory at Erisman Hospital.

  A special epidemiology committee was set up under Mayor Peter S. Pop-kov, and mass inoculation of the population was undertaken. By mid-March half a million Leningraders had been inoculated against typhus, typhoid and plague. More than four hundred disinfecting points were at work by April 10 and two thousand beds for contagious diseases were provided in children’s homes.

  The city was choked with filth. The lunchrooms and cafeterias where many Leningraders were fed were so dirty they defied imagination. Dishes and tableware had not been washed for weeks. Often food was served in tin cans. Dishes were shoved to the feeble customers without spoons or forks. They could eat with their fingers or lap it up like dogs. The City Party Committee, fearful of a general epidemic, ordered special measures to clean up all food dispensaries.

  The people were as dirty as their eating halls. There had been no baths, showers or laundries in the city since the end of December. Now they began to reopen, and by the end of March twenty-five baths were operating—at least on paper. In the second quarter of 1942 thirty-two baths and a hundred laundries were reopened.

  But the big task was to clean the city. Unless the corpses, filth and debris could be removed, Leningrad would perish in the epidemics of spring. The job started on March 8, International Women’s Day, a traditional holiday, a day when every woman in Russia expects to get a present from every man who is close or dear to her—husband, brother, son, lover, father or friend.

  This year it was a different kind of March 8. Several thousand women, spades and picks in hand, tackled the ice-clad streets. Vsevolod Vishnevsky made a typical note in his diary: “The city had a clean-up day. Cleaning up snow, streetcar routes, courtyards. People worked with enthusiasm. Belief in victory stirs them!”

  That wasn’t exactly how it seemed to Maria Razina. A concert had been arranged for the evening, but she and her friend Liza were so tired and weak they could hardly walk there. It was frigid in the meeting hall. There were speeches and reports. Through an open door they could see a table set for dinner. No one wanted to hear the concert. All they wanted was to eat. A shivering young woman in an evening dress sang “The Lark.” Then the audience shouted, “Enough! Get dressed!” They trooped in to dinner—a piece of black bread, about 150 grams, two slices of sausage, a white roll and two apples. Later there was hot tea. They walked home beside the Neva. The snow was as high as a mountain. The two women agreed that the city must be cleaned and rapidly.

  The job really got under way March 15 when more than 100,000 Lenin-graders turned out. Then on March 26 the City Council ordered all able-bodied Leningraders into the streets. Posters went up. The radio blared an appeal. On the first day 143,000 feeble, tottering men and women (mostly women) went into the streets. The next day there were 244,000; by March 31, 304,000; and by April 4, 318,000. Between March 27 and April 15, 12,000 courtyards were cleaned up, 3,000,000 square yards of streets were cleared and 1,000,000 tons of filth were removed.

  Everyone went into the streets—old women, men hardly able to hold a shovel, children.

  One of them was Hilma Stepanovna Hannalainen. She had worked all winter in the great Leningrad Public Library. The library never closed. In the basement the main catalogue had been set up adjacent to a small public reading room. Almost every day one or two hundred persons could be found there, sitting in fur hats and overcoats, huddled over books, reading by the light of small oil lamps. The librarians sent books to the hospitals. They answered a thousand questions put to them by the military and civil authorities: How could Leningrad make matches? How could flint and steel lighters be manufactured? What materials were needed for candles? Was there any way of making yeast, edible wood, artificial vitamins? How do you make soap? The librarians found recipes for candles in old works of the eighteenth century.

  The library lost its light and heat January 26 and had to close the one reading room which had remained open. However, readers were permitted to use the director’s room and one or two other small rooms where there were temporary stoves. In May a general reading room was opened again. The library lost 138 of its staff during the war, most of them in the winter of 1941–42.

  One of those who worked day after day quietly and without complaint was Hilma Stepanovna. She was not
alone. With her was her five-year-old son Edik. Edik was solemn, serious, strong, square-faced, silent, solid—very much like his mother. He came each day. While his mother was busy with the catalogue, moving between the aisles, Edik sat on a stool, swathed in heavy coat, felt boots, fur hat. He never spoke and his eyes never left his mother. If one wanted to know into which aisle Hilma had vanished, one had only to look at Edik. His eyes focused on the spot where she had disappeared and did not leave it until she reappeared.

  When the call came to clean the streets, Hilma Stepanovna and the library workers answered it. They gathered in Stremyanny Lane. There was a mountainous heap of rubbish and at the bottom of it the very well-preserved body of a young man. It was frozen so hard that an iron crowbar hardly made a dent.

  Standing to one side, his eyes on his mother, was Edik. He never moved despite the cold.

  A few days after the mountain on Stremyanny Lane had been cleared away Hilma Stepanovna disappeared. So did Edik. At first it was said they had been evacuated to the rear. Then the truth slipped out.

  They had been arrested as “enemies of the people"—this strong, solid woman and her strong, solid five-year-old. Despite the blockade, despite Leningrad’s hardships, the vigilant secret police had not been inactive. They managed to send the mother and boy out of the besieged city to distant exile in Siberia. The reason was a conventional one in Stalin’s Russia. Her husband had been an editor of a Karelo-Finnish paper who was executed at the time of the winter war with Finland, and his wife and son had been left behind in Leningrad. For reasons known only to themselves, the police at the end of the cruel winter of 1941–42 decided to send Hilma Stepanovna and the youngster into exile. Thus began a wandering life that lasted more than twenty years. In 1945 Hilma tried to return to Leningrad but was ordered out of the city on twenty-four hours’ notice. She was permitted to live for a while in Estonia and then in Petrozavodsk. Not until 1964, nearly twenty-five years after her husband had been executed, was he formally “rehabilitated” by the Soviet authorities. Once again Hilma Stepanovna tried to return to Leningrad and once again she was refused permission to live in the city. She had lost her hearing in a bomb explosion during the Leningrad blockade and was completely deaf. In these conditions she found life very difficult.1

  It was not only filth that had accumulated in Leningrad’s streets. The life of the city had ground to a halt. It had been months since mail or telegrams had been delivered. Nikolai Mikhailovsky and Anatoly Tarasenkov went to the central post office one day to see if there was any mail for the fleet newspaper from the “mainland.” They were halted at the door by an armed guard.

  “What do you want?” the guard said angrily.

  “We are looking for our mail,” they said.

  “What kind of mail?” the guard asked in surprise.

  “Ordinary mail.”

  “One of you can come along,” he said, “and you can find out.”

  Tarasenkov came back shaken. The great hall of the main post office was filled with thousands of boxes of mail. There were post bags halfway to the ceiling—all in disorder, the building unheated, unlighted, no one at work.

  By March the jam almost burst the building. There were 280,000 boxes of mail, unsorted, stacked in disorder in corridors and halls. Communist Youth brigades were sent to the post office to try to move the accumulation. The first mail and telegrams in months were delivered March 8—about sixty thousand pieces—but it was a year before the backlog was cleared up. Sometimes the youngsters who tried to deliver the mail were badly shaken. One young Komsomol girl took a letter to deliver. She found everyone dead in the apartment of the addressee. She went back to the post office. It was locked, and there was no one to tell her what to do.

  A woman who had gotten no letters for a year came home one night to find her mailbox full. She started to read, beginning with the first letter from her husband. She read the letters, one by one. Then she opened the last letter and fainted. It was from her husband’s commander, and it told of his death.

  On April 11 Mayor Popkov signed an order directing the Streetcar Administration to establish normal operations on trolley routes No. 3, No. 7, No. 9, No. 10 and No. 12 at 6:30 A.M., April 15. (Routes No. 3 and No. 9 took you to the front.) The Streetcar Administration was not certain it could meet the directive, but by strenuous efforts 116 cars were sent out of the barns at 6 A.M. April 15. The sound of streetcar bells, the clatter of the cars over the rails, the sharp burst of sparks at the crossings, sent Leningrad wild. People cried on the Nevsky at the sight. “Really!” one exclaimed. “I rode the streetcar! I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like I hadn’t been on a tram for ten years.”

  A German prisoner, Corporal Falkenhorst, told his captors he had lost faith in Hitler when he heard the sound of streetcars in the Leningrad streets on the morning of April 15.

  “The city again is lively,” Vishnevsky wrote. “A Red Army unit, probably convalescents, came by with a band. So surprising, so strange, after Leningrad’s quiet. Streetcars are moving, jammed with passengers. On Bol-shoi Prospekt there is trade and exchange. Money will buy more than in winter. Many are selling clothing—of the dead.”

  Actually, black market prices had risen a little. A packet of cigarettes would buy 150 grams of bread—against 200 grams a bit earlier. Bread sold at 60 rubles for 100 grams. The speculators were calculating that soon the ice on Lake Ladoga would go out and that supplies would be short, at least for a time. People still posted notices on walls that they would trade mahogany beds and Bekker pianos for bread.

  The tensions in Leningrad had not lightened. Vishnevsky felt the strain, heightened by what he called “intrigues and lack of understanding.” He did not spell out what he meant, but he was having difficulty getting approval of a script for the Leningrad in Battle film, and Ivan (the Terrible) Rogov, the Navy Political Commissar, had come to town. Vishnevsky noted that “evidently there are deep nervous marks left from the literary dramas and wounds of 1930–1937–1938.” What Vishnevsky was hinting was that the fatal quarrels, feuds and purges of the thirties had continued through the most horrible moments of the war.

  Vera Inber found that winter’s end brought most difficult times. She was deathly concerned about her husband, the physician Ilya Strashun. She had never seen such colors as appeared in his face—dust yellow with red spots. He was walking with a cane because he had a badly swollen foot. She feared he had been exposed to typhus in treating a student in the dormitory. The toll of death around her was rising more rapidly than ever—a good friend, Professor P.; the husband of Yevfrosinya Ivanovna; another friend named Dina Osipovna. She felt so exhausted. She was not afraid of bombs, shells or hunger but of spiritual exhaustion, of the limits of weariness at which you begin to hate things, sounds and objects. She worried that her nerves would give out and that she would be unable to write. She decided to sleep in another room, hers was so cold. She lay down on a divan. But she could not sleep. She kept thinking of a friend, now dead, who had slept there. At 1 A.M. she heard distant bombardment, but she got the feeling that it was actually an air raid and that she had not heard the alarm. In the strange room she fell into such terror as she had never experienced. She began to tremble. Finally, she woke up her husband. He said, “It’s nonsense, dear.” It did not seem so to her. She ran down to the shelter. It was locked. The night was bright as day—a full moon on the snow. She went back to her room and tried to read a French novel. Nothing worked. The panic went on the next day. Her strength was at the breaking point.

  In this fateful atmosphere the first steps were being taken to put Leningrad back onto its feet. Party Secretary Kuznetsov called his regional Party chiefs, heads of factory units and directors of institutions to Smolny March 9. He told them the city must begin immediately to produce basic military supplies—shells, ammunition, mines. Power stations began to work again. New generators went into operation at the 5th and 1st Power Stations. Beginning March 20 the city got 550,000 kilowatt hours of power—more
than three times the February rate.

  The Party re-established its ties with the outer world. A delegation of partisans from the Leningrad region emerged from the marshes and forests. It was met at Kobona, on the eastern edge of Lake Ladoga, by Aleksei Kosygin, in chargé of the Ladoga evacuation, Party Secretary Kuznetsov and other Leningrad officials. The partisans came into Leningrad for a meeting at Smolny with Zhdanov and the Leningrad Military Command. Delegations from Soviet cities began to arrive. A Moscow Young Communist group came in, headed by the Moscow City Young Communist chief, A. N. Shelepin, now a member of the Soviet Politburo.

  The Chief of Artistic Affairs in Leningrad, B. I. Zagursky, was confined to his bed in a tiny room in the Bolshoi Drama Theater at the end of winter 1942. Nonetheless, he called in Karl I. Eliasberg, director of the Radio Committee orchestra. Eliasberg and his wife were suffering from dystrophy and were being treated in the statsionar on the seventh floor of the Astoria Hotel. Not since early December had there been a concert in Leningrad. Eliasberg brought with him a list of his orchestra members. Twenty-seven names were underlined in black pencil. They were dead. Most of the others were underlined in red. They were near death from dystrophy. Eight names were not underlined. They were available to play.

  A few days later an announcement was made on the radio that a symphony orchestra was being formed. Volunteers were asked. Toward the end of March about thirty musicians gathered for rehearsal. These were all the able-bodied musicians in Leningrad.

  The first concert was given April 5 in the Pushkin Drama Theater. (The Philharmonic Hall had been hit by a shell and was not yet repaired.) The performance started at 7 P.M., after the Musical Comedy Theater’s presentation of Silva had finished.

  Eliasberg appeared on the rostrum in a starched shirt and tail coat. Underneath he wore a cotton-padded jacket. He stood firm and tall, although he had to be helped to the theater. He had gone from the Astoria to his home on Vasilevsky Island to pick up the shirt and suit. A German artillery attack started. Had he not been given a lift by a Baltic Fleet commissar, he might not have made it. The concert was not long. The artists were too weak for a full presentation. They played Glazunov’s Triumphal Overture, excerpts from Sivan Lake, an aria sung by Nadezhda Velter, and concluded with the Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla.