by Anna Reid
How macabre they look on the snow! Occasionally an arm or leg protrudes from the crude wrappings . . . It reminds me of a battlefield and of a doss-house, both at the same time.16
Dmitri Lazarev, who visited the Erisman to take leave of a friend, described overflowing slop buckets – ‘honey-buckets’ – and the only nursing as being done by visitors.17 On 15 January its mortuary went up in flames, the origin of the fire the still-smouldering quilted jackets, lined with raw cotton wadding, of workers killed in a factory blaze. Overall, according to the city health department, 40 per cent of those admitted to its seventy-three hospitals in the first quarter of 1942 died in them. Wide discrepancies between different institutions – the Karl Marx Hospital reported 84 per cent mortality among patients admitted in January, the October District Second Children’s Hospital only 12 per cent – suggest the figure may be less than complete.18
Marina Yerukhmanova witnessed the rapid deterioration of conditions in the hotel-turned-hospital Yevropa. On 16 November a bomb had landed just outside the main entrance, knocking out its electricity supply, and with it heating, lighting, stoves and lifts. Remaining peacetime trappings – starched tablecloths, white-jacketed waiters – quickly fell away, but the hospital managed to keep on operating fairly normally until New Year, when its running water failed and its lavatories froze. Thereafter it quickly descended into squalor and disorder. Patients relieved themselves on the marble main staircase, turning it into a ‘yellow ice mountain’. They set up a black market in the second-floor restaurant, and mugged the orderlies – many, like Marina and her sister, gently reared ‘Turgenev girls’ – carrying food along the dark corridors. Shtrafniki – dark-skinned, glittering-eyed soldiers from the 16th Punishment Battalion, mostly former convicts – took over the grandest bedrooms, pinning rugs over their shoulders and twisting velvet curtains into turbans ‘like the crew of a pirate ship’. A grand piano was gradually stripped of its mahogany casing, which went into stoves for fuel, and the ‘Eastern’ dining room with its stained-glass longboats was turned into a mortuary.
On 4 January, having been working fifteen-hour days carrying buckets of hot water up four flights of ice-covered stairs, Marina collapsed with stomach pains. A kind nurse put the girls and their mother into what had been one of the hotel’s cheaper bedrooms, on the top floor. Its grey-painted walls were covered with fernlike swirls of hoarfrost, the indoor temperature being eleven degrees below freezing. What allowed them to make the room habitable was Marina’s mother’s discovery of a half-litre bottle of alcohol in the hotel’s former pharmacy. With one half of it she bought sukhari, and with the other paid a man to make a burzhuika out of a bucket. Stoked with broken-up furniture and the hotel’s old personnel files – Marina and her sister leafed through application letters from long-gone wine waiters and pastry chefs before feeding them to the flames – the stove turned the room into the Yerukhmanovas’ ‘ark’. Two nurses moved in, one with her elderly mother; no gloomy talk was allowed and everyone got fully undressed daily, so that they could check each other’s clothes for lice. The ‘ark’ could not, however, carry all. A first cousin, twelve-year-old Lesha, came to visit early in the New Year:
The little boy had reached the last stage of starvation. He was all oedema – the liquid had swelled his body so much that it seemed as if his skin wouldn’t hold . . . We somehow pulled him together, gave him something to eat. Like a stuck record, he kept repeating and repeating that he would die within a week, his mother maybe sooner, and so on and so on. And we sat and listened, but our feelings were so blunted . . . We lived only in order to live. Thought and emotion somehow came to a standstill.
All over the city, public institutions – schools, factories, banks, post offices, police stations, university departments – similarly ground to a halt, though employees with strength enough continued to turn up for warmth, companionship and the chance of obtaining a plate of watery soup in the canteen. ‘In the mornings’, Lazarev wrote of his Optical Institute, ‘we sat round the stove in silence, heads bowed. We sat for hours, not moving, not talking. When there was no more firewood the stove went out. Though there was a big pile of wood in the courtyard nobody had the strength to chop it and carry it up the stairs. Instead, we sat out the wait until lunch in the cold. After lunch we went home.’ The first to die (as in Georgi Knyazev’s Academicians’ Building and Olga Grechina’s apartment block) were the Institute’s ancillary staff. ‘The old cleaning lady has just died of hunger’, he wrote on 25 December. ‘Only the day before yesterday she was dusting my desk. I’m told that she went home, lay down on her bed, stretched out her arms, sighed and died. Today, entering the lab, I saw the corpse of our recently deceased security guard in the next room.’
Unlike the cleaning lady, Lazarev had access to the Scholars’ Building, a clubhouse for academics splendidly housed a few doors down from the Hermitage on the Neva. Through September pirozhki, coffee and potatoes had been available there off-ration, though by New Year this had been cut to soup and sweet tea. ‘In the freezing hall’, wrote Lazarev
a long queue winds up the marble staircase. People stand and wait in silence. Almost everyone carries a document case over their shoulder, with hidden inside it a container for carrying food back home to the family. The wait feels endless. It’s especially cold standing next to the massive marble banisters – a perceptible wave of cold streams off them. At last our turn comes, and we enter the canteen. Frozen, in fur coats and hats, we sit down at the free tables. After some time a desultory conversation begins. A zoologist – tall and formerly overweight – complains that people of different sizes are all given the same food. ‘Mark my words, bigger men . . .’ But nobody listens to him, since Katyusha is approaching our table with her scissors and the matchbox for coupons. She is our favourite waitress – it seems to us that she serves up faster, and that her portions are a little bigger. People come to the canteen with their own plates and spoons. The respectable grey-haired professor licks his plate clean before hiding it in his gas-mask bag.19
Lazarev himself fell gravely ill in the spring, and was reprieved only by a providential secondment to a minelayer, which as well as providing him with proper meals allowed him to pass his ration cards to his wife and daughter.
The Leningrad Party Committee officially closed 270 factories over the winter, but most of the rest hardly functioned and even what remained of the defence plants managed only a little erratic repair work.20 Olga Grechina, orphaned by her mother’s death in January, stood guard duty at night in her semi-shut missile factory. Alone in the empty workshops she kept fear at bay by reading H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds by the light of a ‘bat’ – the person on duty got the best book, as a distraction from the rats that scuttered ‘loathsomely and incessantly’ across the concrete floors. Off-duty she sat in the warmth of the janitor’s room, stripping pine branches of their needles for processing into a vitamin C drink – another food supplement devised by the Forestry Academy. The job paid her a single meal at 2 a.m. each day, of soup and kasha.
Out of the 270 workers of Workshop 15 of Vasili Chekrizov’s Sudomekh shipyard, 47 had died by the end of January. ‘How many will die in February nobody knows. Only seventy appear for roll-call, or at the canteen. All the others are lying down . . . Skilled, qualified workmen, the backbone of the shop, have died . . . Only a few people are working on repairs, and you can’t really call it work – in truth they’re just marking time.’21 The usual draconian punishments for absenteeism ceased to have any effect. At the Marti shipyard, a report to Zhdanov of early February complained,
hundreds of people fail to appear for work, and nobody pays any attention. Every day the number absent without leave rises . . . After the district Party Committee told the management that their behaviour sheltered truants, in the course of two days they brought proceedings against seventy-two absentees. But this was not the end of [the management’s] mistakes. Of the 72 cases half had to be sent back again, for lack of evidence.22
So we invent things for the laboratory assistants to do, just to keep them occupied. If you stop working, lie down, it’s bad – there’s no guarantee you’ll get up again. One of the assistants died in the lab itself. She was found in the morning curled up in a ball underneath a warm shawl, wearing new brown felt boots. She hadn’t gone home, it was too far. Another assistant’s husband was killed in the street during an artillery barrage. She took two days’ absence and then returned to work, her dropsy-swollen face even puffier from tears. She is silent. Does work go on? Yes it does, somehow. The important thing is not to give up. The examinations are happening, and I’m taking the orals – their presentations aren’t bad! The lectures sank in after all! And the examiner, my assistant, grills them thoroughly but gently. Where do they get their strength from?23
Inber watched another Erisman doctor defend his thesis in the hospital’s air-raid shelter; the toasts afterwards were drunk in diluted spirits.24
The higher-profile institutions especially persisted in a defiant, almost surreal facsimile of normal life right through the winter’s worst days. On 9 February Inber attended a two-day Conference of Baltic Writers, organised by the Writers’ Union. To prepare she darned extra gloves and stockings, swapped four canteen meals for two eggs and a small piece of dried-up cheese, and dipped into her private food stock for a bar of chocolate. The walk from the Erisman to the conference venue, in normal times a pleasant stroll from the Petrograd Side to Vasilyevsky Island, took two hours, during which she passed snowed-in trams, a building that had been burning, unattended, all night, and a street flooded by a broken fire hydrant, the unexpected water giving off twists of vapour that caught the pink dawn light. At the end of a day of readings, reports and speeches she retired to a bunk set up behind a curtain in the tobacco-fugged conference hall. In the early hours she was woken by the sound of smashing wood. ‘It was Z, who was using an axe to demolish the chair on which he had been sitting during the presentations. I watched him throw the pieces into the stove – helpless Leningrad chairs! I grew warm again and went back to sleep.’
At the Academy of Sciences Georgi Knyazev, confined more than ever to his ‘small radius’ because the cold had seized up his wheelchair, watched helplessly as his subordinates – to whom he had so recently given pep talks – died around him. ‘Shakhmatova Kaplan and her sixteen-year-old son Alyosha’, he wrote on 5 January, ‘have died of dystrophy. The boy was extremely gifted and loved astronomy. He would undoubtedly have made a name for himself, perhaps even have become an Academician. The news greatly affected me and all our staff.’ The following day a Commission on the History of the Academy of Sciences went ahead with a scheduled meeting, at which Knyazev presented a report (‘perhaps my last’) titled ‘The History of the Heads of the Academy’s Departments Throughout its Existence (1925–1941)’. As he read a ‘poor wretch’ lay outside in the courtyard, already stripped of his boots. Keeping up a confident façade, Knyazev admitted to his diary, was now almost impossible:
I try to smile when I’m with other people, to sound cheerful and optimistic, to raise their spirits . . . Only here, on these pages, do I permit myself to relax my self-restraint. Here I am as I really am. I saw Svikul, who has just lost her fifteen-year-old son Volodya, a modest youngster. Inconsolable grief, despair – these are pitiful words in comparison with what is expressed in her eyes, her sunken cheeks and quivering chin. I put my arms around her, hugged her, and that was all I could do.25
At the Hermitage, staff and their families – about two thousand people altogether – had moved permanently into twelve air-raid shelters in the palace vaults, where they slept on plank beds incongruously mixed with ancient Turkmen rugs and gilded palace furniture. Area-level windows having been bricked up, the rooms were almost pitch-black even in daytime. One, the office of museum director Iosif Orbeli, was supplied with electricity via a cable led in from Tsar Nicholas’s old pleasure yacht the Polar Star, moored outside on the Neva. Otherwise, the only light came from icon lamps and ‘bats’ – fuelled, one memoir claims, with seal oil from the zoo. Several female members of staff, Boldyrev noted, bashfully produced long-hidden wedding candles – the tall, ribboned beeswax tapers held by bride and groom during the traditional Orthodox marriage service.
One of the most famous blockade-defying events of the winter was a symposium held by the Hermitage in mid-December, to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Timurid poet Alisher Navai. A display was put together of porcelain decorated with scenes from Navai’s verse (an artist from the old Imperial porcelain works, Mikhail Mokh, painted a small bowl in the style of a Mogul miniature); Boldyrev gave a paper and his fellow Persianist Nikolai Lebedev (so weak that he had to remain seated) read his own new Navai translation. The audience included Boldyrev’s elderly mother, who insisted on contributing a small piece of bread with pork fat to the official lunch. It didn’t matter, one attendee remembered, that there was not a single Uzbek amongst them – the event was ‘a challenge to the enemy. Light was fighting darkness.’26 Boldyrev, ever the realist, thought his old friend Lebedev’s presentation ‘bad and disorganised’, but the translation itself ‘wonderful – the bright clear language of Pushkin’s fairy tales’. His own paper had been worth the effort too: ‘In work lies the only happiness and satisfaction of our days. The worse the situation physically – up to a point – the brighter and fresher the workings of our minds.’27
Two months later Boldyrev heard of Lebedev’s death, from starvation combined with dysentery. He had last seen him a fortnight earlier, in the Hermitage cellars:
He and his wife were lying in cold and complete darkness, in the underground hell of the basement (shelter no. 3). He recognised me by my voice, and grabbed me like a drowning man clutching at a straw. They gave me 250 roubles, imploring me to buy bread and candles for them in the market . . . His last words to me were ‘How I want to live, Sandrik, how I want to live!’ He spoke with that amazing, melodious voice of his, with which he so inimitably read his marvellous, musical translations . . . At that point I was too squeezed myself to give real help, and couldn’t buy him anything. Rather Galya, who did occasionally go to the market, didn’t make it, not having the strength. And bread was hardly being sold for money anyway.28
Also celebrated as a manifestation of the defiant Leningrad spirit is the fact that some of its dozens of theatres and concert halls continued to function. The Musical Comedy Theatre – the Muzkomediya – stayed open almost throughout the winter, and concerts continued to be held under the crystal-less chandeliers of the Philharmonia into December. (Of the string players, an audience member noted, only the double bassists could wear sheepskin coats. The rest wore padded cotton jackets, which allowed freer movement of the arms.) It is claimed that altogether, Leningraders enjoyed over twenty-five thousand public performances of different kinds in the course of the blockade, and the image of artists flinging themselves into war work – Shostakovich on the roof of the Conservatoire, Akhmatova standing guard duty outside the Sheremetyev Palace, prima ballerinas sewing camouflage nets – is one of the key tropes of the siege.
At the time, however, many Leningraders were cynical. As one diarist noted of a concert given by the great violinist David Oistrakh (flown in from Moscow for the occasion), the audience were not the usual intelligentsia types, and appeared unusually healthy. He and his wife were by far the most ‘dystrophic-looking’ present.29 Even a fervent Stalinist, watch
ing crowds jostle for tickets to an operetta (A Sailor’s Love) in March 1942, was reminded of bread and circuses.30 One of the bitterest siege diary entries must be the following, written by Vera Kostrovitskaya, the dance teacher at the Mariinsky ballet school:
Since in April it became necessary to portray the rebirth of the city at the hands of the half-dead, L.S.T. [the school’s director] got the vain idea that our school – or to be more accurate, what was left of it – would give the first [springtime] public performance at the Philharmonia.
Some of the girls had stayed relatively healthy, thanks to fortunate conditions at home, but they all had scurvy. The most talented of them, Lyusa Alekseyeva, couldn’t dance the classics – her legs, covered with blue blotches, gave way and wouldn’t obey.
I informed L.S.T. of the situation.
In reply there came a furious shout and threats to deny those who refused to dance their ration coupons for the next month . . .
The performance took place. We even had the ‘dying swan’ and other balletic nonsense. Petya, made up by me to look like a living person, ‘danced’ two numbers. To keep him going, the girls had brought him bread and kasha. I led him on stage and tried not to watch as he ‘danced’. During the break he collapsed into my arms and vomited the kasha he had eaten.
There was no public audience at the concert, for there was none in the city. The first two rows were taken by arts administrators and representatives from the Smolniy and Party organisations. With her hair dyed red and dressed up like a model, L.S.T. shone during the entr’acte, accepting greetings and unnaturally loudly recounting her love for the children, whose lives she had been busy saving all through the winter.