The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  For seventeen months she stood with the other women in the prison lines of Leningrad, waiting tor word of her son’s fate, bringing him food, bringing him packages. Once a woman next in line, a woman whose lips were blue with cold or fear, asked her, “And this—can you write about it?”

  “Yes,” Anna Akhmatova replied, “I can.”

  The woman smiled a strange and secret smile.

  Anna Akhmatova did, finally, write about those days:

  Would you like to see yourself now, you girl so full of laughter?

  The favorite of her friends,

  The gay sinner of Tsarskoye Selo?

  Would you like to see what’s happened to your life?

  At the end of a queue of three hundred,

  You stand outside Kresty Prison,

  And your hot tears are burning holes in the New Year’s ice.

  By this time her son had been cast into exile, there to remain until Stalin’s death in 1953.

  In this September of 1941 Anna Akhmatova’s life was taking another turn. She was leaving Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad. September was ending and she had to go, orders of the City Party. The plane—one of the few— was waiting. Already she had moved from the palace on the Fontanka to the building at No. 9 Griboyedov where so many writers had their home. Pavel Luknitsky dropped in to say good-bye. He found her ill and weak. She emerged from the dark little porter’s house wearing a heavy coat and they talked together on a bench. Anna Akhmatova told how she had been sitting in a slit trench outside the Sheremetyev Palace during a raid. She was holding a youngster in her arms when she heard the “dragon’s shriek” of falling bombs and then a “tremendous din, a crackle and a crunch.” Three times the walls of the trench quivered and then grew quiet. How right it was, she said, that in their ancient myths the earth was always the mother, always indestructible. Only the earth could shrug at the terrors of bombardment. The first of the bombs fell next door in the former Catherine Institute, now a hospital. It did not explode. But two exploded in the Sheremetyev gardens, one at the corner of Zhukovsky and Liteiny and one in the house where the writer Nikolai Chukovsky lived. Fortunately he was at the front.

  Anna Akhmatova confessed that the explosions left her crushed and feeble. A feeling of terror came over her as she looked at the women with their children wearily waiting in the bomb shelter during the raids—terror for what might happen to them, for what fate held.

  The terror for the children of Leningrad did not leave her. From the desert oasis of Tashkent, to which she was evacuated in early October, she wrote in memory of Valya Smirnov, a little boy whom she might have held in her arms, a little boy who was killed by a German bomb:

  Knock on my door with your little fist and I’ll open it. ...

  I did not hear you moan.

  Bring me a little maple twig

  Or simply a handful of grass,

  As you brought last spring.

  And bring a handful of cold, pure Neva water

  And I’ll wash away the traces of blood

  From your little golden head, . . .

  Deus Conservat Omnia. . . .

  It was a time for God to come to the aid of the city beside the gray waters of the Neva. But He did not seem to hear. He did not hear the crunch of the bombs, the bark of the guns, the cries of the children with golden hair.

  A. M. Dreving was on the rooftop of Leningrad’s Public Library one late September day, a sunny day, a warm day. He stood with his fellow ARP workers when the guns began to go, scattering over the roof steel slivers of shrapnel. He watched a German plane sweeping up toward the library from the Summer Gardens. Bombs began to fall. One near the circus, another close to the Nevsky near Malaya Sadovaya. The plane headed straight for the library. He knew they usually carried four bombs. Would it hit the library? It did not. It fell a short distance away in the Catherine Gardens. Possibly it was one of the cluster which dropped about Anna Akhmatova as she sat in the slit trench with the little boy.

  The big Erisman Hospital, of which Vera Inber’s husband was the director, was located in what Leningraders called the “deep rear,” Aptekarsky Island, one of the more remote parts of the city, lying on the north side of the Neva.

  With the incendiaries the Germans dropped leaflets: “For the house-warning.” Vera Inber worried because the grenadiers’ barracks next to the hospital was used both by medical students as a dormitory and by the military as a storehouse for shells and ammunition. If these were touched off, there would be a dreadful tragedy. The shells were loaded and unloaded from freight trucks on the street outside or from barges in the Karpovka Creek. Beside the loading platform stood an AA battery. Unpleasant neighbors for a large hospital, overflowing with wounded, many of them critically hurt.

  On a late September morning, just after ten o’clock, the air alert having just sounded, an enormous bomb fell beside the hospital’s poly clinic, next to a fountain filled with cast-iron sculpture. It did not explode.

  All day a sappers’ detachment labored to defuse it. When the day ended, they had not yet succeeded. Streetcar traffic in the area was halted. The streets were cleared and the hospital surrounded by guards. The lying-in ward, adjacent to the bomb, was moved to other quarters.

  It struck Vera Inber as curious that she had hardly felt the shock when the bomb struck the earth. It had seemed for a moment that someone had closed a heavy door at a distance. The building shook—nothing else.

  The next day the sappers still worked on the bomb. Vera Inber sat with the wounded during a raid. She tried to read to them. No one was interested. The wounded were very nervous, helpless, trapped. They knew that if a bomb fell they could not save themselves.

  On the third day the bomb still lay in the garden, sinking further into the earth. But the fuse had been taken off.

  On the fifth day the bomb still lay there, and almost everyone in Leningrad had heard about it. Luknitsky knew it was only one of many delayed-action bombs which had been dropped and with which the demolition squads labored in sweat and danger. Yevgeniya Vasyutina heard a wild rumor that the great bomb had been filled with granulated sugar. It was said nine out of twelve bombs did not explode and that inside there were notes which read: “Save us if you can.” She thought this was nonsense, and later she heard the truth—that the Erisman bomb weighed more than a ton and had penetrated nearly fifteen feet into the earth. No sugar.

  Not until October 4 was the bomb hoisted out of the ground. Vera Inber and her husband went to see it—a monstrous thing painted blue with yellow speckles, a spiky snout and a blunt end. The huge object was carted off to a display of German war trophies. For days Vera Inber could not get it out of her mind. Finally she wrote a few lines about it for her poem “Pul-kovo Meridian.”

  The atmosphere in the city grew more grim. Private telephone service had been disconnected; only public phone booths still worked. When Vera Inber heard a young woman’s fresh voice say; “Until the end of the war the telephone is being disconnected,” she wanted to say something, to protest, but it was useless. When she picked up the phone, it was silent and dead. Till the end of the war. Who knew when that might be?

  Rumors . . . rumors . . . rumors . . . They grew with the disconnecting of the telephones. The government had cut off the phones because it feared the people, or to keep the enemy from spreading more rumors—that was the rumor. And the others: that all the house registers had been burned for fear they might fall into the hands of the Germans; that the police had destroyed their own records lest they be used against them; that the police had hidden their civilian clothes in cupboards, ready to try a quick getaway if worse came to worst.

  There were hopeful rumors: that the Finns were being pushed back at Beloostrov and Sestroretsk; that Mga and Pushkin had been recaptured; that the troops on the northern bank of the Neva had broken the circle and made contact with a shock group pushing out from Volkhov. Unfortunately, as Luknitsky knew, when his photographer friend, he of the massive food reserve, passed on this
news, none of it was true.

  He knew that efforts were being made to break the encirclement—or would be. But he knew of no successes. What he did know was that there were spies in the city who spread false reports. He knew there were residents who were potential collaborators, who were ready to welcome the Germans.

  There was, for instance, the friend of Yelena Skryabina’s who announced he was confident that the Germans would break into the city—if not that day, then surely the next. “And,” he concluded, “in any case if my expectations are not fulfilled, I have this.” He drew a small revolver from his pocket. Madame Skryabina knew her friend was not alone, that there were many who awaited the Germans with impatience as “saviors.”

  It was not only Leningrad and its fate, Leningrad and its trials and hardships, which affected people’s morale. It was the news from the other fronts. The fall of Kiev had been a terrible blow. Kiev was the mother of Russian cities, the founding capital.

  The day that Kiev fell Vera Inber was sitting in a shelter with the correspondent, Anatoly Tarasenkov. He took from his pocket a letter he had just gotten from his wife in Moscow. She told how Marina Tsvetayeva, ill, suffering, evacuated to a miserable village in the Urals, separated from her son, had hanged herself, one more poet’s life sacrificed to the Russian god of tragedy. It told of the death of their friend Margerita Aliger’s husband. Outside, the noise of the guns and the bombs went on.

  As the tempo of the German attack slackened at Leningrad, the storm rose around Moscow. Moscow fought for its life. Luknitsky felt that Moscow, like Leningrad, would hold out. He did not know why, but he felt it. Yet the news from Moscow was shocking. There had been panic. Probably not as frantic as Kochetov described it. As Kochetov told the story, thousands of little and middle-rank bureaucrats tried to flee the capital. They rushed out of Moscow along the highway toward the rear, toward Gorky. Workers detachments guarding the outskirts of the city intercepted them and pushed their automobiles into the canals. “This is hard to believe,” Kochetov piously added, “because we know of nothing like this happening here in Leningrad.” Vishnevsky heard there was panic among some artists in Moscow.

  Luknitsky’s version was less splashy, more accurate. There had been panic, but it had fairly quickly been brought under control.1

  In these days Luknitsky found people standing in lines for hours to get 300 grams (about % of a pound) of bread, which was the ration of those who were not production workers.

  Many were going into the nearby countryside, looking for cabbage or potatoes or beets. They found little. They stood in the queues through airraid alarms unless forced by the ARP squads or police to take shelter. Most stores and even the movie houses continued to operate despite the alarms, but many establishments had permanently shut their doors. Even the soft-drink and fruit-juice stands had quit. About the only nonrationed products sometimes available were coffee and chicory.

  One day Yevgeniya Vasyutina stood in line from ten in the morning to three in the afternoon to get two kilos (five pounds) of beet sugar. Yelena Skryabina blessed the good fortune that had enabled her to acquire twenty or thirty pounds of coffee in August. Now it kept her family going. An old Tatar servant turned up one day with four chocolate bars. Fortunately he was willing to take money for them. Usually, now, food was traded only for gold, jewels, furs or vodka.

  Two days later Yelena Skryabina made an entry in her diary. The husband of an old friend had died on October i. The cause: hunger. He lay down one evening to sleep. In the morning he was dead.

  A week or so later Kochetov and his wife Vera were walking on the Nevsky near his newspaper office. In front of a pharmacy between the Yusupov Gardens and the Haymarket they saw an old man lying on the sidewalk, face down. His hat had fallen off and his long matted hair flowed over his shoulders like a wig. Kochetov turned the man over. The man protested feebly, “Don’t bother, I beg of you.” Kochetov tried without success to get the man to his feet. Then he went into the pharmacy and berated the middle-aged clerk for not doing something to help.

  “What do you think, young man, that this is a first-aid station?” she said sourly. “Hunger is a terrible condition. Your old man has collapsed from hunger. And I might collapse any day myself—I’m getting more and more swollen.”

  Kochetov saw how puffed her legs were and realized that she looked very bad.

  He next sought out a policeman. “It’s just impossible,” the officer said. Kochetov saw that he, too, was thin and hungry. He returned to the old man. First aid was no longer necessary. He was dead.

  This was the first death from hunger which Kochetov had seen. It would not be the last.

  The impact of Pavlov’s rigid ration control fell most heavily on dependents and upon children. For the time being, workers and state employees got enough food to maintain their strength. But not the rest of the city—not those who were not making a direct and vital contribution to the war effort.

  Nonworkers and children, as of October i, received one-third of a loaf of poor-quality bread a day. For the month they got one pound of meat, a pound and a half of cereals or macaroni, three-quarters of a pound of sunflower-seed oil or butter and three pounds of pastry or confectionery. That was all. In addition to the slender bread distribution, they were expected to maintain life on a total of five and a quarter pounds of food a month—a little more than a pound a week. Moreover, almost immediately distribution of the nonbread items fell below schedule. Fish or canned good were substituted for meat. The “pastry” was so full of substitutes it had little nourishment. Candy might be substituted for oil or fat. As time went on, bread—such as it was—more and more often was the only food issued. A boy of sixteen and an infant of five got the same ration. The deaths which occurred in late September and October, surprising and shocking to the Leningraders who knew of them, occurred among people subjected to this radically reduced diet and who had no personal food reserves to fall back on.

  Dmitri V. Pavlov, the energetic young civil servant who became Leningrad’s food dictator September 8, drove relentlessly to muster every ounce of food for the city. The task was endless. He knew that, but he went ahead regardless. New ration cards were issued October 1 and rules were tightened.

  The reissue brought the total down to 2,421,000, 97,000 less than in September, but still a very large number. Pavlov banned special rations of all kinds—there had been 70,000 special cards issued in September. Many had gone to children who had been evacuated, persons not living in Leningrad. Extra rations had been issued by factories to their office workers. All this came to a halt. Officials were warned they would be brought before military tribunals for violation of ration-card rules. One woman who worked in the printing shop where the cards were turned out was found with a hundred in her possession. She was shot. Armed guards were stationed in the print shop. A metal barrier was set up and not even the plant director was permitted in the area.

  Precautions, Pavlov knew, were imperative. Every kind of device was being tried to obtain extra rations. Rackets sprang up. Swindlers painstakingly forged cards with ink and paper stolen from state supplies. In the dim light of flickering kerosene lanterns clerks could not detect forgeries.

  Pavlov went further. He persuaded Zhdanov to issue a special decree October 10 which provided that every ration card in the city must be reregistered between October 12 and October 18. He feared that large numbers of forged ration cards might be introduced by the Germans.2 It was an enormous task. Three thousand Party workers were enlisted to make the check. Thousands of man-hours were spent. Every citizen had to present his card and documentary proof that he was the individual to whom it was assigned. No food could be obtained after October 18 without cards stamped “reregistered.” Cards not reregistered were confiscated after that date. Hard rules, but they cut bread ration cards by 88,000, meat cards by 97,000, cards for fats by 92,000. It was vital if Pavlov was to come anywhere near to fulfilling his job.

  On the other side of the coin, Pavlov was gath
ering food from the most unexpected sources. He collected 2,352 tons of potatoes and vegetables from the suburban regions by September 20, often under German fire. Another 7,300 tons were brought in before the fields froze iron-hard. Eight thousand tons of malt were salvaged from the closed breweries and mixed with flour for bread. Five thousand tons of oats were seized from military warehouses. It went into bread. The horses starved or were slaughtered. Some were saved by substitute food—bundles of twigs, stewed in hot water and sprinkled with cottonseed cake and salt. Another horse-food substitute was made of compressed-cottonseed cake, peat shavings, flour dust, bone meal and salt. The horses didn’t care much for it. A scientific team, headed by V. I. Sharkov of the Wood Products Institute, worked out a formula for edible wood cellulose made from pine sawdust. In the middle of November it was added to the bread, and nearly 16,000 tons were consumed in the blockade days.

  On September 15 Pavlov ordered bread baked according to the following formula: rye flour 52 percent, oats 30, barley 8, soya flour 5, malt 5. By October 20 the barley was exhausted. The formula was changed to: rye 63 percent, flax cake 4 percent, bran 4, oats 8, soya 4, malt 12, flour from moldy grain 5.

  “The flavor of this bread was impaired,” Pavlov conceded. “It reeked of mold and malt.”

  Food was brought in by barge and ship across Lake Ladoga. Zhdanov told the sailors the fate of Leningrad depended on them. Forty-nine barges were assigned to this service. Some were sunk with their grain cargoes, but 2,800 tons of grain, sprouting and not very appetizing, were salvaged from the lake bottom. That gave the bread its moldy flavor.

  Yet Leningrad lived at the edge of disaster. On October 1 the city had on hand only a fifteen-to-twenty-day supply of flour—20,052 tons, to be precise.