The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  But if questions were not asked in the markets, there was terrible gossip in the queues where the women waited and waited for the bread shops to open. The talk was of children, how careful one must be with them, how the cannibals waited to seize them because their flesh was so much more tender. Women were said to be second choice. They were starving like the men, but, it was insisted, their bodies carried a little more fat and their flesh was more tasty.

  In the Haymarket could be bought wood alcohol (it was said that if the alcohol was passed through six layers of linen it could be safely drunk), linseed oil which was used for frying blini or pancakes, occasional pieces of bacon fat or lard, hardtack from army stores, tooth powder which could be used for making pudding if mixed with a little starch or potato flour (it sold for 100 rubles a packet), and library paste in bars like chocolate.

  There was usually bread for sale at the market, sometimes whole loaves. But the sellers displayed it gingerly and clutched the loaves tightly under their coats. They were not afraid of interference by the police, but they desperately feared the thieves and hungry robbers who might at any moment draw a Finnish knife or simply knock them over the head and flee with the bread.

  There was more than one way in which the dead might help the living to survive. Again and again at Piskarevsky and Serafimov and the other great cemeteries the teams of sappers sent in from the front to dynamite graves noticed as they piled the corpses into mass graves that pieces were missing, usually the fat thighs or arms and shoulders. The flesh was being used as food. Grisly as was the practice of necro-butchery there was no actual law which forbade the disfigurement of corpses or which prohibited consumption of this flesh.

  The dead also served the living through their ration cards. The cards were supposed to be invalid as soon as the holder died. There were strict penalties for not reporting deaths and turning in cards. In practice no one turned in a ration card. They were used to the end of the month. At that time the bonus to the living came to an end for everyone had to appear in person to get his card renewed.

  Among the fantastic tales which circulated in Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42 was one that there existed “circles” or fraternities of eaters of human flesh. The circles were said to assemble for special feasts, attended only by members of their kind. These people were the dregs of the human hell which Leningrad had become. The real lower depths were those occupied by persons who insisted on eating only “fresh” human flesh, as distinguished from cadaver cuts. Whether these tales were literally true was not so important. What was important was that Leningraders believed them to be true, and this added the culminating horror to their existence.

  Two friends of Anatoly Darov, a young man and his girl named Dmitri and Tamara, visited the Haymarket in January of 1942. They had determined to buy a pair of valenki or heavy felt boots for a friend. By every kind of economy Tamara had managed to put aside 600 grams of bread to be traded for the boots.

  The pair made their way to the Haymarket. Neither had visited it before. At first they could find nothing but men’s boots—policemen’s or conductors’. These were too big and crude. Finally, they saw a very tall man who was extremely well dressed by blockade standards, wearing a fine fur hat, a heavy sheepskin coat, beautiful gray boots. He had an impressive beard and despite the starving times seemed to be filled with strength. In his hands he held a single woman’s boot, exactly the kind the young people wanted.

  They bargained for price. He asked a kilo (about 2 pounds) of bread for the boots. The young man offered 600 grams (about 1½ pounds). The giant examined the bread and finally agreed to take it. The other boot, he said, was at his flat in the tangle of Dostoyevsky streets nearby. With some trepidation the young man started off with the tall peddler. Tamara warned him to be careful. “Better to be without valenki than without your head,” she said, half-joking.

  The two men entered a quiet lane and soon came to a good-sized building which had not been damaged by either German gunfire or bombing. Dmitri followed the tall man up the staircase. The man climbed easily, occasionally looking back at Dmitri. As they neared the top floor, an uneasy feeling seized Dmitri. There leaped into his mind the stories he had heard of the cannibals and how they lured victims to their doom. The tall man looked remarkably well fed. Dmitri continued up the stairs but told himself he would be on guard, ready to flee at the slightest sign of danger.

  At the top floor the man turned and said, “Wait for me here.” He knocked at the door, and someone inside asked, “Who is it?” “It’s me,” the man responded. “With a live one.”

  Dmitri froze at the words. There was something sinister about them. The door opened, and he saw a hairy red hand and a muglike face. From the room came a strange, warm, heavy smell. A gust of wind in the hall caught the door, and in the swaying candlelight Dmitri had a glimpse of several great hunks of white meat, swinging from hooks on the ceiling. From one hunk he saw dangling a human hand with long fingers and blue veins.

  At that moment the two men lunged toward Dmitri. He leaped down the staircase and managed to reach the bottom ahead of his pursuers. To his good fortune, there was a light military truck passing through the lane.

  “Cannibals!” Dmitri shouted. Two soldiers jumped from the truck and rushed into the building. A moment or two later two shots rang out. In a few minutes the soldiers reappeared, one carrying a greatcoat and the other a loaf of bread. The soldier with the greatcoat complained that it had a tear in it. The other one said, “I found a piece of bread. Do you want it?”

  Dmitri thanked the soldier. It was his bread, the 600 grams he had planned to trade for the valenki. The soldiers told him that they had found human hocks from five bodies hanging in the flat. Then they got back into their truck and were off to Lake Ladoga, where they were part of the Road of Life.

  Nina Peltser, ballet star of the Musical Comedy Theater, had a less shattering adventure obtaining a pair of valenki. She was afraid that her talented feet would freeze in the Leningrad cold and decided to protect them with the warmest footwear in town—a pair of conductor’s boots. She went to the chief of the Leningrad streetcar system and said, “Save my feet!” He found a heavy pair of men’s felt boots, which she wore constantly, even donning them between numbers on the frigid stage of the Pushkin Theater, where she often performed that winter. She received only a worker’s food ration, but admirers often brought her presents—a chocolate bar, a jar of fish paste or a tin of meat.

  Police investigators in those months sometimes threatened to cast an obdurate suspect into the cell of the cannibals, “where they ate each other,” if their victim did not confess to the crime of which the procurator had decided he was guilty. Whether, in fact, there was such a cell, whether the police actually permitted cannibals to feast on each other, is another matter. It is hardly likely. Yet the possibility was realistic enough for police investigators to use it as a blackmail threat.

  More and more, Leningrad seemed to its residents to have become the city of the white apocalypse where humans fed on humans and the very water which they drank carried the sweet stench of human corpses. The water was now largely drawn from the ice holes in the Neva, the Fontanka and other canals. But the ice around the holes was strewn with the corpses of those who collapsed or froze to death while drawing water. And hundreds of bodies were dumped in the rivers and canals. No one who drank the water drawn from the Leningrad ice holes ever got the taste of it out of his mouth. It made no difference whether it was boiled or not (and often there was no fire and no fuel with which to boil the water and it was simply drunk raw from the river). Even when used for surrogate tea or coffee, the telltale flavor seemed to be there—faintly sweet, faintly moldy, tainted with the presence of death.

  Through this city of the ice apocalypse Pavel Luknitsky walked in late January. He was so weak he could hardly keep to his feet. Two days before by actual count there had been thirteen unburied bodies in the writers’ apartment house at No. 9 Griboyedov, including the body of
one unknown man. Twelve members of the Writers Union had died of starvation—that he knew of—and twenty-four were on the verge of death. The widow of the poet Yevgeny Panfilov, with whom he had spoken at the Writers’ House a few days earlier, her face looking like gray leather, her head wrapped in a scarf like a mummy, sitting in an armchair, motionless, hoping for some assistance, had just been found dead in her flat, her face gnawed off by hungry rats.

  Luknitsky had gone to his old apartment on Borovaya Ulitsa for the first time since a bomb fell on the building in late autumn. He had a small sled and proposed to carry his literary papers and manuscripts to a place of safekeeping in the flat where he now lived on the Petrograd side. (Actually, he was so weak he simply brought them to the Writers’ House at No. 18 Ulitsa Voinova.)

  As he walked slowly through the streets, he thought of the heroic people who kept Leningrad alive—the Young Communist brigades who carried water from the Neva to the bakeries and brought half-dead people to the hospitals on their sleds, of the truck drivers transporting food over Lake Ladoga, of the people at Radio House who kept the radio going, of the handful of youngsters in the factories who turned out shells and bullets in arctic shops, of the thousands of people who each in his own way helped enable the city to survive.

  And he thought, too, of the deadly criminals who attacked people for their ration cards, of the gangs of murderers and worse who roved the streets, and of the people who made their way through the city to their posts in these days of starvation, dying of hunger and risking attack from the bands of marauders who preyed on the weak in almost every street.

  On the lips of the Leningraders who carried on in spite of every peril, he knew, was only one question, repeated again and again: “Will the Germans soon be driven off? Will the blockade soon be lifted?”

  These thoughts filled his mind as he loaded on the sled his papers, which suddenly seemed almost more than he could drag. He made his way down the Borovaya. He passed a heavy sledge, heaped high with corpses, unbelievably thin, blue and terrifying—just skeletons with skin stretched tight and splotched with red and lilac-colored death marks. On the Zvenigorod he saw beside a house eight corpses, covered with rags or old clothes, lashed by ropes to small sleds, ready to be dragged to the cemetery. On Marat sprawled on his back was the corpse of an incredibly thin man, a fur hat falling from his head, and, two steps farther along, two women were emerging from a house. One with frantic face kept calling, “Lena, mine. Lena!” A third woman was muttering quietly, “Leonid Abramovich is dead and lying on the pavement.”

  On Vladimirsky Prospekt Luknitsky found his sled colliding with those of others passing him with corpses. One was a sled on which there were two corpses, the body of a woman with long hair trailing in the snow and that of a small girl, possibly ten years old. He passed carefully in order to avoid tangling the whitish-yellow hair of the corpse with the runners of his sled.

  On the Volodarsky near the Liteiny Bridge he encountered a five-ton truck with a mountain of bodies. Farther on he met two old women who were conveying their corpses to the cemetery in style. They had hitched their sleds to an army sledge which was slowly pulled through the streets by a pair of starving horses. There he met the shadow of a man who carried nestled to his breast an incredibly thin dog—one of the rarest of city sights. The eyes of both the man and the dog were filled with hunger and terror, the dog’s terror, no doubt, because he sensed his fate and the man’s, perhaps, because he feared someone might rob him of the dog and he would not have the strength to defend his possession.

  So Luknitsky walked through the city, passing hundreds of people, struggling to survive, pulling the corpses of their relatives toward hospitals or cemeteries, pulling their little sleds bearing pails of water.

  Among the hundreds he met another kind as well—a man with a fat, self-satisfied face, well fed, with greedy eyes. Who was this man? Possibly, a food store worker, a speculator, an apartment house manager who stole the ration cards of the tenants as they died and with the aid of his mistress exchanged the miserable bread rations in the Haymarket for gold watches, for rich silks, for diamonds or old silver or golden rubles. The conversation of this man and his mistress would not be of survival, of how to live through their terrible times. On such things this man would merely spit. Was he a speculator? A murderer? A cannibal? There was little difference; each was trading on the lives of starving, dying people, each was living on the flesh of his fellows.

  For such persons there was only one recourse. They must be shot.

  Luknitsky met Red Army men, too. They were as thin and weak as the civilians. He passed two soldiers, half-carrying a third. Most of them, despite their weakness, tried to walk with a bold step.

  “Such was the image of my own, unhappy, proud, besieged city,” Luknitsky noted. “I am happy that I did not run away, that I share its fate, that I am a participant and a witness of all its misfortunes in these difficult, unprecedented months. And if I live, I will remember them—I will never forget my beloved Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42.”

  Daniel Leonidovich Andreyev, son of the great Leonid Andreyev, lived through the blockade in Leningrad. He wrote of the Leningrad apocalypse:

  We have known everything . . .

  That in Russian speech there is

  No word for that mad war winter . . .

  When the Hermitage shivered under bombs . . .

  Houses turned to frost and pipes burst with ice . . .

  The ration—100 grams . . . On the Nevsky corpses.

  And we learned, too, about cannibalism.

  We have known everything. . . .

  * * *

  1 By February there were only five police dogs still in the service of the Leningrad police department. (Dela i Lyudi, p. 275.)

  44 ♦ “T” Is for Tanya

  IN THE CITY MUSEUM OF HISTORY IN LENINGRAD THERE are a few torn pages of a child’s notebook, ABC pages in the Russian alphabet: A, B, V, G, D and so on.

  On them there are scrawled under the appropriate letters simple entries in a child’s hand:

  Z—Zhenya died 28 December, 12:30 in the morning, 1941.

  B—Babushka died 25 January, 3 o’clock, 1942.

  L—Leka died 17 March, 5 o’clock in the morning, 1942.

  D—Dedya Vasya died 13 April, 2 o’clock at night, 1942.

  D—Dedya Lesha, 10 May, 4 o’clock in the afternoon, 1942.

  M—Mama, 13 May, 7:30 A.M., 1942.

  S—Savichevs died. All died. Only Tanya remains.

  The entries were made by Tanya Savicheva, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl. They tell the story of her family during the Leningrad blockade. The Savichevs lived in House No. 13, Second Line, Vasilevsky Island. The house still stands, no signs of war to be found on its bland surface, and even the building across the street, which was hit by bombs in 1941, gives no appearance of damage. All the wounds have been healed.

  For years it was supposed that the entire Savichev family had died and that after making her last entry Tanya, too, died. This was not quite correct. Like many Leningraders Tanya was evacuated in the spring of 1942. She was sent to Children’s Home No. 48 in the village of Shakhty in the Gorky area, suffering from chronic dysentery. Efforts by doctors to save her life failed, and she died in the summer of 1943.

  Two members of the Savichev family survived the war. Both had been out of Leningrad during the blockade. An older sister, Nina Nikolayevna Pavlova, returned to Leningrad in 1944. Tanya’s notations had been made in her notebook. The sister found it when she came back to the apartment on Vasilevsky Island, lying in a box with her mother’s wedding dress. A brother, Mikhail, also survived. When war broke out, he was at Gdov in the nearby countryside and fought with the partisans.

  The obliteration of the Savichev family was not unusual. This was what was happening to Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42. Not everyone died that winter. But the deaths went on in the months and years ahead as the privations of the blockade took their toll.

&nb
sp; In the measured words of the official Leningrad historian:

  In world history there are no examples which in their tragedy equal the terrors of starving Leningrad. Each day survived in the besieged city was the equal of many months of ordinary life. It was terrible to see how from hour to hour there vanished the strength of those near and dear. Before the eyes of mothers their sons and daughters died, children were left without parents, a multitude of families were wiped out completely.

  Party Secretary Zhdanov and his associates now knew the price that must be paid for the siege. Only the most radical measures would pull Leningrad through the winter, and how many would survive till spring was an open question. Hope that the offensive so boldly planned in Moscow by Stalin, Zhdanov and the generals in early December would liberate Leningrad was petering out. The attacks by the Fifty-fifth Army headed by General V. P. Sviridov on the Leningrad front, driving toward Tosno in an effort to unhinge the Germans at Mga, yielded meager results—and heavy losses. On January 13 General Meretskov of the Volkhov front and General Fedyunin-sky’s Fifty-fourth Army of the Leningrad front launched a simultaneous attack, hoping to free the rail and highway connections between Moscow and Leningrad. The battles went on all winter long.

  “I will never forget,” General Meretskov wrote, “the endless forests, the bogs, the water-logged peat fields, the potholed roads. The heavy battle with the enemy went on side by side with the equally heavy battle with the forces of nature.”