The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  A few days after New Year’s Vera Inber ventured for the first time into the hospital reception room. She went into the shower rooms. The nude body of a male corpse lay on a stretcher. It was a mere skeleton. She found it hard to believe it had ever known human life. The eyes were open and the face was covered with post-mortem whiskers. The nose seemed to protrude remarkably. In the next room she found more stretchers on which corpses of men and women lay. In other rooms and in the corridors, on benches, on stretchers and simply on the floor, sat or lay living corpses— patients who were only a step from death. They sat or lay motionless hour by hour. Two nurses attended them, and the nurses, too, were more like corpses than humans. The patients were not being treated; they were simply being fed—an infinitesimal quantity. The disease from which they suffered was hunger.

  A few nights later the dissection rooms burned. To the dissection laboratory had been brought many half-burned bodies from a factory which had caught fire. The corpses were still clothed in cotton-padded jackets, and in the jackets sparks had smoldered. No one noticed, and after smoldering for hours the sparks burst into flame, racing through the cotton and setting fire to the dry wood which had been collected for coffins.

  The hospital fire command tried to pull the corpses out of the fire. They had no water. They tried to extinguish the fire with snow but failed. Hardly had the dissection rooms burned when a worse fire broke out on the other side of the Karpovka Canal, spreading to a gasoline tank and sending up flames higher than the hospital chimney.

  Vsevolod Vishnevsky was released from the hospital on January 4 and walked again along the Liteiny Prospekt, along the frozen Neva, past the Admiralty with its spire, past the Winter Palace, past the Hermitage and the white wastes of the Champs de Mars. He hastened to jot down his impressions—of cold, stillness, snowdrifts, shadows, children hauling the bodies of their dead parents on sleds, parents hauling the bodies of their dead children on sleds, the Apraksin Palace, windows smashed in, the Passage department store, still open for business, selling Vologda lace, children’s wooden toys, phonograph records, silk ribbons and children’s stockings (but not needles or thread).

  Vishnevsky noted the aspects of the people who passed him on the street —some pale white, some earthen gray, some puffed, some skeletal.

  It was on one of these days that Dmitri Shcheglov came back to Leningrad by truck across Lake Ladoga. He was shocked to see people sitting in doorways, resting on icy steps, heads in their hands. Only when he came closer did he realize they were dead—starved and frozen. Past them walked the living, almost unnoticing.

  Shcheglov met a friend: “Before me stood a blue-colored man with puffed cheeks. He looked like a ghost in a child’s play. Only his eyes seemed to be alive.”

  This was Leningrad in January, 1942. As Nikolai Markevich, a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda who was later killed in an airplane crash near Velikye Luki, noted in his diary for January 24, 1942:

  The city is dead. There is no electricity. Warm rooms are most rare. No streetcars. No water. Almost the only kind of transport is sleds . . . carrying corpses in plain coffins, covered with rags or half clothed. . . . Daily six to eight thousand die. . . . The city is dying as it has lived for the last half-year—clenching its teeth.

  In the future museum of the Leningrad blockade, commented Secretary Ivanov of the Young Communists, the child’s sled should have a place of honor.

  * * *

  1 Incomplete data compiled at Smolny in January provided an estimate of 3,000 to 4,000 daily deaths. (N.Z., p. 267.) Some Leningrad residents think the death rate rose to 10,000 a day at the worst time of the blockade. (Anatoly Darov, Blokada, New York, 1964, p. 145.)

  2 Zinaida Shishova’s poem “Blockade” is one of the most moving—some Soviet critics feel the most moving—work to be written in Leningrad during the blockade, an impression of the agony of the city as seen by a mother, trying vainly to save her infant son from death by starvation. Probably because of the realism and pathos of her lines the poem has never been published in full in the Soviet Union. It was read by Shishova at the Writers’ House in Leningrad in late 1942. Excerpts from it are contained in Poeziya V Boy, a collection of war poems published by the Ministry of Defense in 1959. As the critic A. Abramov noted, even Shishova’s name is hardly known to the present generation of Soviet readers and critics. {Neva, Mo. 6, June, 1965, p. 173.)

  41 ♦ A New Kind of Crime

  IT BEGAN AS WINTER SET IN, AND WITH EACH WEEK IT grew—what the pedantic clerks of the Leningrad militia or police department called “a new kind of crime,” a kind which none of the many branches of the Soviet police had encountered before.

  It was, in simplest terms, murder for food. It happened every day. A blow from behind and an old woman in a food queue fell dead, while a pale youth ran off with her sumka, or purse, and her ration card. The quick flash of a knife and a man walking away from a bakery fell in the snow as a dark figure vanished with the loaf of bread he had been carrying.

  The Leningrad police, like all of Stalin’s police, were well organized, well staffed even in these difficult days. But the new crimes were not, for the most part, being committed by hardened criminals (among whom the police had an efficient network of stool pigeons). The crimes were the acts of ordinary Soviet citizens, driven to murder and robbery by starvation, bombardment, cold, suffering. Some had wives or children at home, dying of dystrophy.

  “It was characteristic,” Militia Major A. T. Skilyagin wrote, “that many of these crimes were committed not by inveterate criminals, not by elements alien to our society, but simply by persons driven to desperation by hunger, bombing and shelling, persons whose psyches had been broken by the weight of their experiences.”

  As the winter wore on, roving gangs of murderers appeared on the streets of Leningrad. Sometimes they included deserters from the front, ex-Red Army men, desperate elements of every kind. They preyed on persons standing in queues, seizing their ration cards or their food; they descended on lone pedestrians, either by day or night; they carried out bold attacks on the bread shops and even commandeered trucks and sleds, bringing supplies to the bread shops. They entered flats, rifled them of valuables, and if an occupant raised a voice (often there was no one but the dead in the apartments), they hit him on the head and set fire to the flat to cover the traces.

  Not all the criminals were Soviet citizens. There were German agents in Leningrad—it was no trick to slip them through the lines in the suburbs of the city. Sometimes the agents spread rumors, stirred up trouble in the bread queues, engaged in agitation, sometimes in sabotage.

  The danger from within the city had been strongly in the minds of the Leningrad leadership since the outbreak of war. It had always been a preoccupation of Stalin and his police chief, Beria. It played a significant role in the political maneuvering which handicapped Leningrad’s defense in August and September. By winter Leningrad was crisscrossed with internal defense organizations, “destroyer” battalions of workers, special public order brigades of Young Communists. But as the blockade tightened, as starvation began to set in, as the “new kind of crime” appeared, none of this seemed to be enough.

  On November 15 after the fall of Tikhvin confronted Zhdanov and his associates with the realization that the blockade might not quickly be lifted, that the suffering of the city might well carry beyond any parameters thus far conceived, that the spirit of Leningrad might break under the impact of these crushing blows, new steps were taken to defend the internal security of the city.

  The Military Council of the Leningrad front established a special Administration for Internal Defense. This took a different form from the ill-fated effort by Zhdanov and Marshal Voroshilov to set up a Leningrad Council for Defense in August.

  The new internal defense organization was to be independent and self-sufficient. It was designed to cope with any threat which might arise within Leningrad. It was comprised of workers battalions (often badly under-strength), several brigade
s of Baltic Fleet sailors, the city police department, such NKVD troops as were still available within Leningrad, the fire brigades, and odds and ends of artillery and machine-gun regiments. Five workers battalions were finally organized, numbering about 16,000 men. The total command as listed on paper by December, 1941, comprised about 37,000 men. The city was divided into six sectors, with fire points in many apartment houses.

  Many workers detachments continued to stand duty in the great factories of the city, although by December they were frigid morgues in which hand-fuls of people tried to keep alive, huddled about tiny temporary stoves. The troops were available for any emergency, including, of course, internal disturbances or uprisings. They had one other task—to guard the approaches to the city over the ice, particularly from the direction of Peterhof. There were many small engagements fought on the ice, sometimes between iceboat patrols, scudding along at sixty miles an hour, but for the most part these were just scouting skirmishes.

  The precautions were by no means unjustified. The regular police had been brutally weakened by forced drafts which had sent most of the NKVD units to the front. Many functions had been taken over by women. The regular police, like everyone in Leningrad, suffered from starvation, cold and physical weakness. Some reports suggest that the police, both regular and secret, almost ceased to function in late fall and winter, because of physical debilitation. Also, some Leningrad residents assert, the police were intimidated by the plight of the city and preferred not to show themselves too readily to the civilian population.

  In the dangerous days of September the police had panicked. Some commandeered planes and got out of Leningrad. Day after day they burned their files, destroying Party lists, secret documents and even house registers, lest they be used by Nazi occupation authorities for compiling execution lists. The panic was not quite so compelling as in Moscow, where, in October, the sky was clouded for days by smoke from the burning files of the secret police, and citizens sometimes found their half-burned dossiers fluttering down from the NKVD furnace chimneys into the streets. But from September onward more and more Leningraders had demonstrated less and less fear of the police. They spoke more openly among themselves, heedless of who might hear or what might be reported about them.

  Official accounts lay great stress on the physical weakness of the police. In December most units had only eight or ten men on duty, and these men had to work shifts of fourteen to sixteen or even eighteen to twenty hours daily. In January 166 police in Leningrad died of starvation and 1,600 were on sick call. In February the death toll rose to 212.1

  The criminals with whom the police had to deal were far better armed than in peacetime. Often they had military rifles, sometimes submachine guns and almost always revolvers.

  As the ration was cut and then cut again and again, not all Leningraders, as one Soviet source puts it tactfully, “received the news with bravery.”

  One January evening with the temperature at 20 below zero Maria Razina and Peter Yakushin, political workers in a large Leningrad apartment house, went to apartment No. 5 where an evacuated family was living. The mother was dead and three small children huddled about her. No ration cards could be found. Soon the owner of the flat, a man named Mark Schacht, returned and said he was making arrangements to take the youngsters to a children’s home.

  On a hunch Yakushin demanded that Schacht return the family’s ration cards. He denied having them. Yakushin grabbed him by the throat and shouted, “Give me the cards, you bandit, or I’ll kill you on the spot!”

  Schacht suddenly produced the missing ration cards. Before Yakushin could summon a military tribunal (a squad of Red Army soldiers) to execute him, the landlord vanished.

  Not all workers in the food distribution system could resist temptation. A grocery store director named Lokshina stole nearly 400 pounds of butter and 200 pounds of flour. She was shot. This was the fate of food criminals whenever they were uncovered. The chief of a Smolny region bread store named Akkonen and his assistant, a woman called Sredneva, cheated their customers of four or five grams of bread per ration. They sold the surplus, taking furs, objects of art and gold jewelry in exchange. They were summarily tried and shot.

  As Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov put it bluntly in the spring of 1942, “I will tell you plainly that we shot people for stealing a loaf of bread.”

  In November Leningradskaya Pravda began to carry brief items, almost invariably on its back page, reporting the actions of military tribunals in cases of food crimes: three men shot for stealing food from a warehouse; two women shot for profiteering on the black market; five men shot for the theft of flour from a truck; six men shot for conspiring to divert food from the state system. Sometimes the defendants got twenty-five years in a labor camp. But not often. The usual penalty was shooting.

  It was a rare day when Leningradskay a Pravda did not publish at least one such item, along with a theater listing or two (these vanished after January 10), a few notices of dissertations being defended, the daily communiqué of the Soviet Information Bureau, the press conferences of Solomon Lozovsky, the official government spokesman in Moscow, and an occasional dispatch by Vsevolod Kochetov, Nikolai Tikhonov or Vsevolod Rozhdest-vensky.

  The ordinary Leningrad city court was transformed, by order of the Leningrad Military Council, into a military court and the city procurator was made a military procurator. This put all persons accused of food crimes under military law. In practice it meant they went almost directly before the firing squad, with a minimum of formality and only the vaguest nod toward judicial process. A total of 3,500 Young Communists were directed into the stores and the rationing system, instructed by Party Secretary Zhdanov not to permit “even a suspicion” of dishonesty in food handling. The Young Communists carried out sudden raids on every link in food distribution and repeatedly uncovered irregularities. In one action in the Vyborg region twenty-three Young Communist units participated and exposed a whole network of food criminals. All were shot summarily.

  The worst disaster which could befall a Leningrader was loss of his ration card. On June 22 Ivan Krutikov had been rowing on the lake at Pushkin when the war news broke. On December 15 he was in Leningrad, where his factory had been removed from Pushkin. He had suffered a concussion in a bombing raid and was weakened by scanty rations. On December 15 worse misfortune befell him. As he stood in a queue, a thief grabbed his ration card and fled. Krutikov gave chase but was able to run only a short distance. He saw the robber disappear and burst into tears at his helplessness. He didn’t even have the breath to shout, “Stop thief!”

  It was virtually impossible under the rigid rules established by Food Director D. V. Pavlov to get a substitute ration card. Prior to December a person who lost his card could apply to a regional bureau and get a new one. In October 4,800 substitute cards were issued. In November 13,000 persons got replacements. These figures seem to have been regarded as normal. But in December long lines began to form at the rationing bureaus. Before the alarmed Pavlov could halt the practice 24,000 cards had been given out. The people invariably claimed that they had lost their card during a bombardment or shelling or when their house burned down. Pavlov knew that many claims were legitimate. But he knew also that many persons must be claiming fraudulent losses in order to get a second ration. The power to issue substitute cards was withdrawn from regional offices. Hereafter new cards could be obtained only from the central office and only with irrefutable proof—testimony of eyewitnesses, supporting evidence from the building superintendent, the local Party worker, the police. For a time Zhdanov himself was the only man who was empowered to replace a lost ration card. It was impossible for the ordinary citizen to assemble the data required for issuance of a new card. Applications quickly dropped to zero for, in fact, if you lost your card you could not get another. The problem was solved, but at the cost of almost certain death for thousands of unfortunates who actually did lose their cards.

  Thus Krutikov faced sixteen days without food—in
other words, death. He had one hope. His factory was no longer operating due to lack of electric power, and he had applied for front-line duty in the army. On December 17 he got a notice to appear for induction and reported for medical examination. But the doctor rejected him, saying, “You have dystrophy in the full meaning of the word. We can’t admit you until you have fed up a bit. Sorry not to be able to help you.” At that time Krutikov weighed about eighty-four pounds, half his prewar weight. For four days he did not eat. Finally, his factory director suggested that he try to get readmission to a workers battalion in which he had formerly served.

  It took Krutikov sixteen hours to walk four or five miles from his factory to the Narva Gates, where the workers battalion had its headquarters in the Gorky House of Culture. The temperature was 25 degrees below zero. He was so weak he had to rest every fifteen or twenty paces. Krutikov’s old commander put him back on the rolls, with a ration of 250 grams of bread a day plus 100 to 120 grams of cereal and a bowl of hot water for breakfast. His life was saved.

  Most were by no means so fortunate.

  One night a mother, a pensioner, and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Lulya, appeared at Erisman Hospital. The daughter wore a cape and carried a fur muff. Both were in a state of hysteria. A confidence woman had made the daughter’s acquaintance in a bread line and promised to get her a job with good meals in Military Hospital No. 21. At the beginning of February, she got the mother to lend her 45 rubles (all she had), took the pair’s ration cards and led them through the blackout to Erisman Hospital for an “interview.” In the complete darkness the mother and daughter heard their benefactor cry, “Follow me!” Then she vanished.