The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  A film project to make a picture of Leningrad in battle fared no better than those for books and magazines. Vsevolod Vishnevsky was engaged to write the scenario in March of 1942. Several Soviet cameramen had shot thousands of feet of action, among them Yefim Uchitel, Andrei Pogorely and Yevgeny Shapiro. Directors Roman Karmen and Nikolai Komarovtsev were enlisted.

  Vishnevsky was so moved by the sequences—the ruined observatory at Pulkovo; Academician Nikolsky sketching in the cellars of the Hermitage; an old woman falling, dropping a bowl of soup from her trembling hands; a winter scene at the Summer Gardens; a pair of hands grasping the great iron gates and gradually slipping until the body fell into a snowdrift; the sign on the courtyard gates: “Point for collecting bodies"; the composer, Boris Asafyev, sitting at a grand piano and playing with cold-stiffened fingers; the body of the elephant, Betty, lying in a pool of blood at the Zoo—that he cried like a child. He wrote seven different scripts for the film. None was ever published. Finally, on July 9, 1942, the picture, Leningrad in Battle, appeared. It won a Stalin Prize. But thousands upon thousands of feet of the best sequences were not included. Nor have they been shown to this day. They remain in an archive of several hundred thousand feet of Soviet film which someday may show to the world the full measure of suffering which the war brought to Russia. A sequel to Leningrad in Battle, covering the events from May, 1942, to the liberation of the city in January, 1944, was also planned. Nikolai Tikhonov, the Leningrad poet and writer, was commissioned by the Leningrad Military Council to write the script. “It is a great pity,” Tikhonov later commented, “that this picture, very strong in its contents, never saw the light. If it had been released for the screen, millions of spectators would have seen much that was unexpected, tragic and heroic.”

  Vera Ketlinskaya was one of Olga Berggolts’ best friends. She had known “Olenka” for twenty years before the war—in fact, Ketlinskaya had first met her when Olenka’s head was shaved like a young boy’s, her hair cut off because of a children’s disease. The two women were opposites in many ways. Olga Berggolts was certain that every bomb was aimed directly at her. She felt every blow which struck her friends and neighbors, often more deeply than they did. Vera Ketlinskaya walked about Leningrad, even during air raids and long-range shelling, confident that no bomb or shell would hit her. As the blockade went on, Olga and Vera drew closer and closer. Almost every night Olga telephoned from Radio House to the Writers’ House: “Vera, you’re alive?” Or if shelling was going on: “Is it in your neighborhood?” Sometimes, Vera would reply, “Not so far,” and suddenly a terrific crash would come. Once as they were talking a shell hit the next apartment and Vera could not speak. She heard Olga on the telephone saying, “Vera, Vera—what’s happened? Vera! Vera!”

  Sometimes one or the other would get a present—a piece of frozen horse meat from the front, a packet of real coffee, or a pot of library paste from which they could make a wonderful jelly. They would invite each other to share such feasts.

  One night Ketlinskaya telephoned Olga and told her that she had got a bottle of cod-liver oil and that she was going to make some “fantastic pancakes” out of dough, the basic ingredient of which was coffee grounds.

  “I’ll be right over,” Olga Berggolts said.

  It was two blocks from Radio House to Vera Ketlinskaya’s flat. Ketlinskaya waited and waited. Olga did not appear. Finally, she arrived so shaken she could hardly talk. She had started out in the arctic night in streets that were completely dark. She felt her way along a path between high drifts, and as she passed Philharmonic Hall she slipped and fell heavily on something. The “something” was a corpse, half covered with snow. She lay stunned, weak, terrified, unable to rise. Suddenly, she heard her own voice, reading poetry. The voice came from the ether. It spoke quietly and simply. Olga Betggolts lay in terror. Was she resting on a frozen corpse or was it her own frozen body which she felt? She must be dead. Or perhaps she had lost her mind. She was gripped by such terror as never before had possessed her. On the periphery of consciousness she heard her voice halt and another begin to speak. It was the announcer for Radio Leningrad. What she was listening to was the radio loudspeaker at the corner before the Hotel Europa, transmitting a program she had recorded earlier in the day.

  Gradually, Olga Berggolts regained control of herself. She sat beside Ketlinskaya and, feeding pages from old books into the burzhuika, they ate the “fantastic pancakes,” wondering why in the past they had not liked fish oil.

  Later in the siege an English correspondent, Alexander Werth, came to Leningrad. He asked Vera Ketlinskaya and some of her friends to tell him not what enabled them to survive but hoiv they survived. This was the great question, and as years went by it became more and more difficult to answer.

  In retrospect it seemed unbelievable to Vera Ketlinskaya that she had sat in her apartment in Leningrad in January, 1942, with the temperature so low that the ink froze in the inkwell and she had to tap out her thoughts on an unfamiliar typewriter. She was working on the first pages of her book The Blockade, writing of the death, in the novel, of Anna Konstantinova. Her own year-and-a-half-old son, Serezha, slept beside her under a pile of clothing, and in the next room lay her mother, dead of starvation, placed there on the floor three days ago, with no immediate prospect of getting her body buried. Vera Ketlinskaya did not cry as she wrote. She simply tried to make her fingers hit the strange typewriter. Pavel Luknitsky spent the evening of January 31 with her. The body of her mother still lay frozen and unburied in the next room. But such was the temper of the times that he recalled the evening with warmth. They talked “from the soul,” in the Russian phrase, of the war, of the city, of the suffering, of the beauty and bravery of the epoch. They warmed themselves at the little iron stove, and Ketlinskaya read some lines from her new book.

  Nikolai Chukovsky returned to Leningrad in late January from a brief visit to one of the airfields. He was walking along the Neva embankment when he saw a terrible sight. A dozen holes had been broken in the Neva ice, and hundreds of women, pails in hand, were moving toward the holes. Around each water hole he saw dozens of corpses, half covered with ice and snow. The women, making their way toward the water, had to wind around the bodies of the frozen dead. The granite steps leading down to the Neva were sheathed in ice, so thick it was almost impossible to climb up or down. The women slipped and fell, some never to rise again. Along the Palace Square, along the Nevsky, along Gorokhovaya, the line of women, pails in hand, stretched and stretched. On Gorokhovaya, icy with spilled water from hundreds of pails, Chukovsky became fearful lest he meet someone he knew, fearful lest the fright which he could not keep his face from displaying would show. At that moment he encountered Olga Berggolts, head and shoulders wrapped in a heavy shawl and face almost black with frost. Taken aback, Chukovsky sought for something innocuous to say. “Ah,” he remarked, “how well you look, Olechka.”

  Olga Berggolts was pulling an empty child’s sled.

  “I’ve just come from the cemetery,” she said. “I’ve taken my husband there.”

  Years passed and Chukovsky was certain that Olga Berggolts would never forgive him the stupidity of his remark.

  Olga Berggolts’ husband, Nikolai Molchanov, died January 29, 1942. His death was not a surprise. Olga’s father, the doctor, Fedor Berggolts, had warned his daughter that her husband was doomed if they did not leave the city. Nikolai was a scholar, a specialist in literature and poetry. He had been exempted from military service because of his poor health and continued his literary work. He was planning after the war to publish a comparative examination of five poets—Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Blok and Maya-kovsky.

  “You must get out. Absolutely. By any means,” her father said. “In an ancient book it is written, ‘Woe to those trapped in a city under siege.’ “

  That was in October. Olga had managed to get to her father’s house a few hours before her grandmother died. The moment never left Olga’s memory, the moment when her grandmothe
r turned to her as explosions rocked the old wooden house (an air raid was in progress) and said, “Lyalechka, my first grandchild . . . you’re a godless one, a Young Communist. But I am going to bless you just the same. You’re not angry?”

  “No, Grandma,” Olga Berggolts replied.

  The old lady gave her blessing and Olga kissed her hand, already growing cold. Then the grandmother asked about a second granddaughter, Maria, who was in Moscow.

  “Which way is Moscow?” the grandmother asked. “On which side?”

  They pointed to the wall. The old lady turned and with great effort raised her hand and made a small cross.

  “Please, God,” she said, “save your servant, Maria, and your beautiful capital, Moscow.”

  Then she sank back dying.

  Now the prediction of Olga’s father that Nikolai Molchanov could not survive the blockade had come true. Olga Berggolts wept for the death of her husband. It was the only time she wept during the blockade, for as she wrote in one of her verses, “The tears of the Leningraders are frozen.” She wept when she took Nikolai’s body on the child’s sled and left it with the mountain of others at Piskarevsky Cemetery, and she wrote, in lines dedicated to Nikolai: “Really will there be a victory for me? What comfort will I find in it? Let me be. Let me be forgotten. I will live alone. . . .”

  All during the days of the blockade Olga Berggolts carried in her pocket a piece of cardboard, slightly smaller than a postcard. It bore the words: “Propusk No. 23637. Permit to walk and drive in the city of Leningrad.” This was her pass. It took her to every end of the city, by night and by day.

  Now in these first days of February she started on a long walk, the longest she was ever to make. She was going to her father at the factory where he worked as resident physician, a distance of ten or twelve miles from Radio House in the center of the city to the Neva Gates and beyond. Olga Berggolts’ comrades at Radio House had given her such supplies as they could spare—a child’s milk bottle filled with a liquid resembling sweetened tea, and two cigarettes. She had her own day’s ration of bread, 250 grams— all of this in a gas-mask bag.

  She decided to eat bits of the bread as she went along in order to bolster her strength. She started out, walking slowly. The day was overcast and cold. The people whom she passed wore masks over their faces to protect against the wind—red, black, green or blue masks with peepholes cut out for their eyes.

  Olga Berggolts had to walk all the way to the Lenin factory and then out the Shlisselburg highway. She even had to cross the Neva. Whether she would make it was not certain. She decided she would think only of the segments of her walk. First, to get to the Moscow Station. First, to walk down the Nevsky, counting one light pole after the other . . . one by one . . . one pole and then another—the stanchions where weakened victims of dystrophy held themselves up, then slowly sank for the last time to the ice and snow. One pole, then another. Now she had gotten to the Moscow Station. Now she could halt for a moment. Then, again out Staro Nevsky. From post to post. To the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Here the bodies lay thick in the street. Here the trolley-buses stood, dead, empty. It seemed to her that they had come from a different life, a different century. The path here was in the center of the boulevard, a wide path, and Olga Berggolts heard behind her the squeak, squeak of a child’s sled, a woman pulling a man wrapped in a blanket. The man was alive. Where could the woman be taking him? Olga Berggolts began to pass big barns, grain storage depots. She remembered the last time she had come this way, the day her grandmother died. Then the barns had been filled with grain, and even on the ground outside there had been mounds of rye and wheat. She could not stop thinking of grain, of the handfuls she had held in her hands in the threshing days as a child, of the smell of the rye fields. She had an overwhelming desire just to put a single grain into her mouth and taste its nutty flavor. Hunger overwhelmed her, and she almost reached into the gas mask and drew out her bread. But she said quietly to herself, “No. Only when I get to the Lenin factory. Then I’ll sit down and swallow a little tea and eat some bread.”

  She went on, and it began to seem to her that the road was surprisingly short and quiet. Somehow she felt ready for death—or if not for death, just to sink down in the snow in the great drifts. Everything began to seem soft and tender. It was a mood, she later knew, which lay close to death, the mood in which people began to speak very quietly, very gently, to suffix all their nouns with “chka” or “tsa”—that is, to turn them into loving diminutives—"a little piece of bread,” a “dear little drop of water.”

  Olga Berggolts came to a crossing of paths just as a woman, pulling a corpse in a small box on a sled, arrived at the same point. Each tried to let the other pass. Finally, Olga Berggolts stepped across the coffin and the two women sank in a snowdrift to rest a moment.

  “You’re from the city?” the woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Long?”

  “Quite a while—three hours, I think.”

  Olga Berggolts took one of her two cigarettes and lighted it. She had firmly determined not to smoke until she got to the Lenin factory. But now she smoked a bit and let her companion have a puff. Then she rose, telling herself she would not halt again until she reached the Lenin factory.

  As she walked, she met more and more women pulling sleds with corpses, wrapped in sheets or blankets. At the Lenin factory she sat on a concrete bench in a small dispatcher’s pavilion, constructed in Le Corbusier style, and accurately broke off a piece of bread. She ate it and then went on down the Shlisselburg Chaussée without looking to the right toward Palevsky, where five months ago her grandmother had died and where she had stood with her father and heard him warn that Nikolai could not survive the siege. She did not even think of that. All she felt was the cold, the hunger, the fatigue.

  Now she was at the Neva, at the place where she must cross the frozen river. Dusk was falling, and over the river there hung a kind of lilac mist. It seemed farther than ever to her father’s factory, although she could just glimpse it in the snow-filled distance and knew that to the left of the main shops was the old timbered building where he had his clinic.

  There was one piece of bread left in her gas-mask bag, about ioo grams. “As soon as I get to Father’s,” she told herself, “we’ll have a mug of hot water and eat this bread.”

  She walked out on the Neva. The path was very narrow and her steps grew uncertain. When she approached the other bank, she was in despair. It was like an ice mountain, leading up to heights that were cloaked in rosy-blue shadows. On her knees, starting to crawl up the ice, was a woman with a jug of water she had drawn from a hole in the ice.

  “I can’t climb that hill,” Olga Berggolts heard herself say. The whole terrible journey had been in vain. She came up close to the ice mountain and saw that there were steps cut in the cliff. The woman with the water spoke to her: “Shall we try it?”

  The two started up together, supporting each other by the shoulder, climbing on hands and knees, step by step, halting every two or three steps to rest.

  “The doctor cut these steps,” the woman said as they rested for the fourth time. “Thank God! It is a little easier when you are carrying water.”

  They reached the top and went on toward the factory, but when Olga Berggolts reached it, she halted in confusion. Somehow it all seemed strange, as if she had never been there before, a land of alien drifts of snow. Finally, she made her way into the building where she knew her father’s clinic must be located. There was a little waiting room, to which a flicker of light came from a neighboring room. On a wooden bench lay a woman, wrapped in a padded jacket. It looked as though she were taking a nap while waiting for the next train. But she was not asleep. She was dead.

  Olga Berggolts entered the next room. A man sat at a desk, his greenish-blue face lighted by a fat church candle, his gray hair tousled and his big blue eyes looking even bigger and bluer in the candlelight. She stood silently before him, and he raised his eyes and politel
y, very politely, asked, “Whom do you wish, citizen?”

  She heard herself saying in a wooden voice, “I am looking for Dr. Berggolts.”

  “At your service,” he replied. “What is the trouble?”

  She looked at him. A strange feeling possessed her—not terror, but something touched with death, something numb.

  He repeated, “What is the trouble?”

  Finally she found her voice: “Papa! It’s me. Lyalya.”

  For a moment her father said nothing. He instantly understood why she had come. He had known that Nikolai was in the hospital. He had known that he would not survive. But he said nothing. He rose, put his arm around her and said, “Now, come along, youngster. We’ll have some tea. And we’ll have something to eat, too.”

  The old doctor led his daughter into the next room. There by the light of two candles they sat beside a little stove, drank hot tea and ate pancakes made from old grain dredged from the cellars of a brewery. The doctor had two motherly aides, Matryusha and Aleksandra. They offered to give Olga Berggolts a hot bath. She refused uneasily but later found herself unable to resist Matryusha, who slipped off her heavy felt boots and bathed her cold, tired feet in warm water. She gave her father the single “coffin nail” cigarette. He inhaled lovingly, exclaiming, “What a rich life we are leading!”

  Her father put her to bed in one cot and sat beside her on another. They talked a bit of old times, of the Countess Varvara, who had served with the doctor on a hospital train during World War I, who had saved his life and who had stayed behind in Russia, a romantic distant figure. Where was she now? Olga Berggolts asked. He did not know. What about the family at Palevsky—what about her Aunt Varya, what about Dunya, the old servant?