St. Petersburg
Page 41
Owing to the swiftness of the German advance, the evacuation of the surrounding palaces was not so successful. At Gatchina, they buried sculptures in the park and bricked up treasures in the extensive cellars. But many furnishings had to be left in place. An alert curator, on the point of departing, saved a portfolio of drawings by the architects Quarenghi, Rossi and Voronikhin. Later in the siege, an article published in Leningradskaya Pravda reported how the invaders were looting the gilded statues at Peterhof, dismantling the Amber Room panels in Rastrelli’s palace at Tsarskoe Selo and trashing the palaces.13 Swastikas were cut into tapestries and hung in German bunkers.
The streets of Leningrad were savaged. Not, at first, by the Germans. Inhabitants scarred its prospekts and open spaces with sharp concrete pyramids and clusters of short girder tank-blockers. They dug trenches, crevices and dugouts two metres deep for gun emplacements. Six anti-aircraft batteries were mounted in the Field of Mars. Barrage balloons were inflated in open spaces and were walked like giant sausage-dogs along streets that were empty but for army lorries, antique trams and trolley buses. During the first weeks of the invasion, more than 320 balloons were deployed at heights of two and four kilometres above the city. Also escorted through the streets were German POWs, eliciting both curiosity and incomprehension. Every so often, someone drew close to spit in their faces.’14
One of the strangest sights was the batteries of ‘listeners’ – quartets of huge cubist tubas that were used to scan the skies for the sounds of approaching bombers. Air-raid sirens were tested, sending people scurrying towards imperfect shelters and fracturing sleep in the middle of the night. On 4 September – the first day of shelling – German gunners demonstrated their knowledge and uncanny accuracy by hitting railway stations and factories. Two days later the first bombs dropped on the Nevsky Prospekt, damaging buildings and bursting a water pipe. The major food-storage depot – the Badaev warehouses – were hit on the 8th and the 10th.15 Clouds mushroomed in the sky, gloriously amber, then bronze in the dying rays of the early autumn sun. Then a sinister helix pierced the splendour and obscured the scene. Oil depots had been set on fire.16 On the 9th, Luftwaffe attacks became more sustained and shells pounded the city, shaking the ground. Smothering smoke spiralled through burnt-out buildings. Yellow flames licked black walls. On 19 September, gostiny dvor was hit, killing 100 shoppers. Hospitals and markets were targeted, along with the dense concentration of factories in the southern part of the city, close to the German front line. During the first months the university on Vasilevsky Island and the Academy of Arts were hit. A shell took a bite out of the Kirov theatre, and the vital Elektrosila power plant was hit again and again.17
Air defence sound receivers mounted on a bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
First you heard ‘the whirr of an enemy shell, then a whistle, a crack, the thunderclap of a building collapsing’, followed by a rumbling echo. On 14 September, teenage Lena Mukhina recorded that already-familiar sequence in her diary.18 As tenements tumbled, they left bathtubs stranded in space and doors to nowhere. Human chains formed to salvage what was still intact. After a bombardment, as the chemical-thick clouds dispersed, odd assortments of pianos, lamps and sewing machines were heaped in the street beside their bewildered and homeless owners. A couple seemed to embrace. Then one lowered the other to the ground. Buildings burned for days. Volcanoes mocking the gaining cold.
An air-raid hits the Nevsky Prospekt.
A bombed-out Leningrad street.
People stumbled across unsteady hillocks of tumbled bricks, past forests of charred beams and futuristic explosions of smashed wood and jagged, shattered glass. Their eyes fixed firmly on the ground in front of them, in order to avoid unfamiliar hazards – rubble, shell-holes, corpses. In the following months, survivors would come to negotiate such obstacles without so much as a second glance. People deprived of fats and sugar became prone to vertigo19 and – like blitzed buildings – seemed on the point of teetering. In her diary, Lydia Ginzburg noted how easy it was to lose one’s balance, even in the simple act of tying up a shoe. The body ‘slithered out of control’ and wanted ‘to fall like an empty sack into some incomprehensible abyss’.’20 People found themselves short of breath and wondered – slowly – why the simplest thing took a deal of effort. They gradually lost interest in what had always fascinated them. Some complained of a constant droning in the ear: the buzz of the radio, the drone of aircraft, the wail of the air-raid sirens or some relentless tension drumming an inexplicable tinnitus. Gums started to swell. In food queues, racoon-eyed, swollen-faced survivors waited patiently for a bread ration that had been reduced five times since the introduction of rationing in July. An understandable crumbling of resolve occurred as a quite reasonable idea gnawed at the spirit: the Germans might be preferable to Stalin. Painted images of their leader’s face gloated from walls – with that smile that doesn’t smile – on the mess of his own making. Swastikas splashed across the crumbling walls of tenements. But Leningraders’ familiarity with sacrifice and deprivation helped strengthen their resolve. The poet Olga Berggolts, who had been arrested in the 1930s and beaten until she miscarried, read comforting, uplifting poetry on the local radio.21
Snow fell in mid-October – about the time the power stations ran low on fuel. The dancer Vera Kostrovitskaya observed that people became ‘aware of days and dates only by means of small square paper coupons with the number 125’, which signified the next ration of ‘a small piece of greenish-brown bread, half wood shavings’.22 Bakers were obliged to find all kinds of alternatives. Flour was eked out with dust scraped from the walls and from beneath floorboards at the mills. Nearly half the quantity of flour needed to make a loaf of bread was substituted by bran, the pressed seeds of oil-producing plants and wood-cellulose extracted from pine shavings.23 Kasha kept many people alive. An ersatz ‘meat jelly’ was fabricated from carpenter’s glue. It tasted authentic because wood-glue was manufactured by boiling the hooves and horns of animals. Industrial glue, dextrin, was less tasty and tended to stick people’s teeth together. At home, people scraped the dried glue from peeling wallpaper. They gouged dusty crumbs from table cracks, scurf from hats, softened leather from the inside of worn belts. Medicine was drunk, cosmetics consumed. People gnawed their furniture and chewed their clothes. Lena Mukhina, a pupil at Leningrad’s School no. 30 on Vassilevsky Island, was ‘so terribly hungry. There’s a horrible emptiness in my stomach. I’m so desperate for bread. I want it so badly. Right now I feel as though I would give anything to fill my stomach.’24 The going price for a Bechstein piano was ‘a few loaves of bread’. By late October, corpses were being put out on the streets.25
Paraffin ran out and people burned solvents and insecticides. Home-made metal stoves were fuelled by wood taken from bombed-out buildings or by antique books or broken furniture. By mid-November low-wattage bulbs were used in those institutions that were allowed electricity. By the end of the month, home use was forbidden during the day.26 The water supply and sanitation had been hit. Abandoned rooms were used as toilets. Indispensable was a long-handled cylindrical ladle capable of scooping water from the holes cut in the thickening ice. Also useful, as the snow compacted, was a child’s sledge. Everybody on the streets seemed to drag bundles behind them: water, fuel, a few possessions gathered from a bombed-out life, a body. Everyone seemed on the move and yet there was nowhere to go.
Some people – raw and hungry – just sat down in the middle of a short journey and could not, or did not want to, get up and froze to death. Vera Kostrovitskaya passed a man who, ‘on his way to the Finland Station, got tired, and sat down. For two weeks while I was going back and forth to the hospital, he “sat”, without his knapsack, without his rags, in his underwear, naked, a skeleton with ripped-out entrails’.27
The winter of 1941-2 was severe and – in one week in December – almost 850 people died in the street. More than 50,000 people perished of starvation that month and mortality in the city peaked at over
100,000 in January and then again in February, before falling back gradually in March and April. Medical orderlies were working around the clock. Valentina Gorokhova remembered that her hospital was completely unprepared. ‘The temperature in the wards was below zero. The medicines froze . . . The wounded were put two to a bed.’ Instead of uniforms, ‘staff and doctors worked in their winter coats’ and used a covering sheet as a lab tunic, secured ‘at the back, on the arms, and at the wrist with surgical instruments’.28
In mid-January 1942, with temperatures at – 30°, Lena Mukhina despaired. The ‘shops are empty, the lights don’t work, there’s no water and the lavatory won’t flush’. Some corpses scattered in the streets were wrapped up for burial, others stared with glazed eyes, their yellowing faces ghosted under settling snow.29 In a bleak echo of Peter the Great’s funeral cortège, isolated individuals sledged a coffin or a corpse across the frozen Neva to a communal grave, where workers fish-hooked corpses into parallel lines to ensure maximum capacity. New morgues were set up and, in February, 25,000 bodies piled up at the Piskarevskoye cemetery, stacked in rows 200 metres long and two metres high.30 With so many dead, it was almost possible to imagine how Stalin could hold life so cheap.
Without the usual pollution – 270 factories closed, and others barely functioning – the winter became shockingly beautiful, with the crispness that had delighted and dazzled the eyes of court artist Robert Ker Porter. Snow lay like Gautier’s ‘crushed marble’.31 The unused spiders’ webs of tramlines were gently fuzzed by frost. But, for all the beauty, Ginzburg noted that, in the cold, ‘fingers tended to double up and freeze in some chance attitude and the hand lose its ability to grasp. Then it could only be used as a paw, like a stump or club-like implement.’32
Everything took so long. Elza Greinert described the wait to get a coffin for her late husband. On 14 January 1942, she ‘went to the clinic to register a certificate, stood in line from 8.30 to 2.00’. On the 17th, she couldn’t ‘get a coffin since there were fist fights over them and you had to stand in line’. At last she found someone in her building who made a coffin from her own material ‘for 400 gms of bread and 50 roubles cash’.33 Against the frustrations and delays, Ginzburg insisted on the importance of strategies for acting, rather than merely reacting.34 The absolute ordinariness of much that happened seemed almost ghoulish beside the boundless suffering and death. When air raids started, people having their hair permed would not budge. Life went on as best it could.
Horses dropped dead in the street and crowds gathered to hack off meat and scoop out offal. If you loved your cat or dog, you kept it indoors. But that might prove a murderous temptation. When members of the militia went to collect the dead from apartments, they sometimes found limbs missing. A teenager axed his grandmother to death to eat her innards. Another scavenged an unburied body to mince it. A black market opened up for human flesh.
The Russian language makes a very important distinction between trupoedstvo, the eating of already-dead human flesh, and lyudoedstvo, the consumption of people killed on purpose. When survival was at stake – in sieges, famines and shipwrecks – the former could be justified. But there were abuses and arrests: more than 2,000 from the late autumn of 1941 to December 1942.35 Many of the culprits were uneducated or illiterate. Olga Berggolts heard of a couple who ate their own child, then trapped and killed three more. Elsewhere, a one-year-old was slaughtered to feed her two-year-old sister.
Not everyone needed to resort to such extremes. The cafeteria at party headquarters in the Smolny served cutlets and small pies throughout the first winter of the siege.36 Recuperation clinics for party leaders offered choice food and decent medical treatment. City leaders had a resthouse in the woods to the north of city, where lamb, chicken and fish were available.37 The NKVD ate well and, in 1943, while the city was still under siege, the council arranged for ranking officials to receive, annually, 5,000-6,000 roubles worth of subsidised goods.38 Throughout the siege, corrupt bosses arranged unfair food distribution and – in a scam right out of Gogol’s Dead Souls – people obtained ration cards in the names of those departed for the front or evacuated to the east. People even hoped that if a member of their family had to die, they would do so after 1 January, the date on which a new ration card was issued. 39 Bakery staff were bribed outrageously. Food-industry workers stole huge quantities of provisions. Three chiefs from one shop were arrested for stealing 700 kilos. Teenagers – orphans mostly – snatched purchases as people left bakeries. Some stole from stealers by threatening to report them.40 People killed for groceries or ration cards and, in the first half of 1942, there were 1,200 related arrests. The NKVD asked Moscow for reinforcements. Food crime was demanding a good deal of their time and they had other concerns.41 Between the beginning of the siege and the summer of 1943, nearly 4,000 civilians were convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes.
During the first winter of the siege ‘the road of life’ helped save those who were left to be saved. By the beginning of November, barge traffic across the southern end of Lake Ladoga was halted as the water began to freeze. The last railway line into the city was cut as Tikhvin fell to the Germans. The only way in and out of the city was by air. On 17 November, the ice on Lake Ladoga was ten centimetres thick too thin for any kind of traffic. But, with temperatures falling, sledges and even lorries would soon be able to attempt a crossing. At —5°, fifteen centimetres of ice – capable of supporting a horse and sledge with a load of one tonne – takes six days to form. For a lorry carrying a similar load, a thickness of twenty centimetres was necessary.
On 20 November, at – 12° and with ice eighteen centimetres thick, sledges drawn by worn horses pulled out of Kabona and started the twenty- to thirty-kilometre journey through the arctic white-out to Osinovets. Traffic controllers and prisoners were spread along the way, testing the ice, maintaining the track and receiving the necessary vodka to sustain them. Horses too weak to complete the journey were shot for meat to feed the city. Two days later, the ice was thick enough for sixty lorries to set off across Lake Ladoga and onwards – overland through the block of Soviet-held territory between the Finnish and the German front lines – into the starving city. Lorries kept a good distance between them and hauled sledges, in order to spread their load. With freezing fog and blizzard squalls, visibility was often down to a few metres. German bombs rained down, plummeting through the ice to detonate at the bottom of the lake. When the ice fractured, controllers modified the route. But with the drifting snow, cracks were often covered and lorries were lost when they sagged into splintered ice. When a German attack force set out on skis from Shlüsselburg to sabotage the ‘road of life’, they were beaten back. For all this effort and endurance, in the last third of November only flour sufficient to feed the city for two days had been delivered. Moscow ordered women, children and the elderly to be evacuated in empty trucks returning across the lake. Despite the grim situation in the city, many were reluctant to leave. The journey was arduous. The fifty-kilometre rail trip to Osinovets could take several days. In their severely weakened condition, many evacuees simply fell from the lorries as they zigzagged across the lake. Each morning, infant corpses were collected by the traffic patrols. Many of those who did make it across died during the hardships of the onward journey.42
A convoy of lorries forming the ‘Road of Life’ across frozen Lake Ladoga.
With Stalin’s campaign to destroy or convert churches, it was the Nazi invasion that saved Leningrad’s flamboyant Church of Christ the Saviour on the Spilt Blood. A good number of the city’s other churches were still intact, and priests offered hope and urged defiance. Powerful appeals by the clergy from the earliest days of the invasion forced the dictator to realise that the church was a useful ally in the struggle against Hitler. Every day of the siege, the Metropolitan, Alexei, processed around Leningrad’s baroque Cathedral of St Nicholas, holding an icon high to protect his population and defy German bombers.43 But with beetroot juice substituting for holy wine a
t mass, it seemed that nothing short of a miracle could transubstantiate the fate of Peter’s city.
People were starving to death, the Nazis were pounding the city, but the weather was improving. With the spring came the thaw, and severely weakened bodies banded together in an effort to clear rubble, corpses, excrement and all the broken traces of damaged lives. There were outbreaks of typhoid and dysentery, and many died in the aftermath of the cruellest winter of all the cruel winters they had known. For those left alive, a new determination burgeoned as Leningrad’s green spaces were turned into vegetable patches. Seedlings were distributed and hoes and wheelbarrows provided. In Catherine the Great’s hanging garden on the first floor of the Small Hermitage, beet, spinach, cabbage and carrots were planted.44 As spring grew into summer, cabbages – like aliens from a distant planet – took over St Isaac’s Square. By the autumn of 1942 the city had cultivated, on its own embattled turf, enough food to keep itself alive for up to four months. People started to eat normally – some so enthusiastically that they made themselves severely ill. Markets opened, attracting speculators and high prices. The syncopated rattle of passenger trams was heard again, but for a population strung out on its nerves, the freight trams were unsettling. Lydia Ginzburg noted that they came screeching around curves in the track, sounding like ‘anti-aircraft sirens’.45 Evacuation resumed over Lake Ladoga by barge, and more supplies were brought in. With cables and an oil pipeline laid across the bottom of the lake, life was looking more possible as the city entered the second year of the siege.