Authors: Harrison Salisbury
Orbeli worked at his office as long as there was light from the windows on the Neva side. But in December this meant for only a few hours. It was deathly cold. His rheumatism grew worse.
One day he had a visitor, Captain A. V. Tripolsky, a famous submarine commander. Tripolsky had known Orbeli in the past, in fact, ever since his portrait had been hung in the Hermitage gallery of Heroes of the Soviet Union in 1940.
Orbeli greeted him warmly. He took off his glasses, put down his book, rose with difficulty (Tripolsky saw how crippled he was by rheumatism) and invited the captain to come below where it was warmer.
“It’s too dark to work, anyway,” Orbeli said. They crossed the Hall of Twenty Columns, Tripolsky following Orbeli blindly in the darkness. They made their way past the great Kolyvan vase, across the courtyard and down the staircase leading to Bomb Shelter No. 3. To the right was the shelter, to the left Orbeli’s room. Orbeli lighted a candle and set it in a three-branch silver candlestick.
“My blockade office,” he said proudly. There was a narrow cot, a table filled with books.
After leaving Orbeli, Tripolsky made his way straight to the Neva embankment. There, frozen in the ice, stood the
Polar Star
, once the Czar’s private yacht, now a headquarters ship for the Baltic Fleet.
Tripolsky sought out the chief electrician.
“You know the Hermitage?” he asked.
“Naturally,” he said. “It’s right across from us.”
Tripolsky explained its plight. They had no light, no electricity. Could the
Polar Star
help out by stringing a cable to the Hermitage?
“In a minute,” said the electrician.
Within a few hours a cable had been laid across the ice and hooked up to the Hermitage. The sailors appeared in Orbeli’s office, turned on the lamp and there was light. Orbeli clapped his hands like a small child. Then he sat down and lighted a cigarette. His leg was paining him badly. The sailors looked under his desk and found an electric heater which was not working. Soon they had it going.
“The ship gave its current to several of the rooms of the Hermitage,” Nikolsky noted in his diary. “We have light. It is a priceless blessing.”
It was a blessing, but a limited one. The
Polar Star
had fuel to power her dynamos—but not very much.
In the diary of V. V. Kalinin there is this notation of January 8 (the 130th day of the siege):
I was in the city at the Hermitage. It is so melancholy there. They are so thin, their faces so white, bags under their eyes. They sit at their tables— in the cold by the weak light of a candle.
In the bomb shelter the chief of guides, Sergei Reichardt, and his wife Kseniya have died. Sergei died January 6 among his beloved books, asking just before he died for one of his rare books to which he softly pressed his hand. Kseniya died today.
I went to Orbeli in his little office in the arched cellar. It smelled raw and damp. An altar candle was burning. He seemed today particularly weak and nervous.
Possibly Orbeli’s mood stemmed from the fact that on this day he had gotten two more requests, one from the Union of Architects, one from the Museum of Ethnography, each asking the same thing: “We request that the Hermitage prepare a coffin. . . .”
The great stock of packing materials which Orbeli had assembled to ship his treasures to safety was being put to new use. Almost alone in the city the Hermitage had a store of lumber, of packing boxes from which coffins could be made. This in early January was the principal task of the emaciated workers of the Hermitage—making coffins for their friends.
Now on this day for the first time Orbeli had to refuse a request for a coffin. The Hermitage carpenter had died, and there was no one with the strength to build one—not even for the Hermitage staff itself.
Henceforth when someone died at the Hermitage—and there were many deaths every day—the bodies were simply carried to the Vladimir corridor to lie there until, occasionally, a truck and army crew came and carted the bodies away.
Leningrad was, indeed, becoming a city of death.
1
At the beginning of October the City Council had ordered all horses unfit for work to be delivered to the Kolomyagi and Porokhov slaughterhouses. Individual slaughter of horses was forbidden. The horses were slaughtered under veterinary observation, and the horse meat was used in the preparation of sausage according to the recipe: horse meat 75 percent, potato flour 12 percent, pork 11 percent, with saltpeter, black pepper and garlic added. (Pavlov,
op. cit
., 2nd edition, pp. 77–78.)
IN DECEMBER THEY BEGAN TO APPEAR—THE SLEDS OF THE children, painted bright red or yellow, narrow sleds with runners, sleds for sliding down hills in fur earlaps and a woolen muffler trailing behind, Christmas presents, small sleds, big enough for a boy taking a belly-flopper, or a boy and a girl clutching each other as they raced around the icy curves.
The children’s sleds, suddenly they were everywhere—on the Nevsky, on the broad boulevards, moving toward Ulitsa Marat, toward the Nevskaya Lavra, toward Piskarevsky, toward the hospitals. The squeak, squeak, squeak of the runners sounded louder than the shelling. It deafened the ears. On the sleds were the ill, the dying, the dead.
In December Vladimir Konashevich, the artist, the illustrator of Pushkin and Lermontov, Hans Christian Andersen and Mark Twain, decided to write his memoirs. What else was there to do? He was starving and freezing. It was almost impossible to paint. He would write of his childhood in the last century in Moscow. It might drive out of his ears the squeaking of the sleds, the endless movement of the people in their coats of black wool as they drew the children’s sleds along the icy sidewalks and dragged them through the streets.
There were no automobiles in the city. Only the people, pulling their burdens, the dead in coffins of unpainted wood, large and small, the ill clinging to the runners of the sleds, precariously balanced pails of water and bundles of wood. As Konashevich picked his way through the drifts, he thought more and more of his Moscow childhood, of the winter streets, the scenes of snow, the quiet, broken only by the sledges and the sleighs.
Not that he could drive the present from his consciousness. Try as he would, he could not drown out the cries of an old woman who lived in his communal apartment, who sat on a stool at her doorstep, thin, black, a hand extended, hoarsely whispering, “Bread . . . bread . . .” Every time he passed down the hall the hand went out and the voice croaked, “Bread . . . bread.” Then the woman died.
Nothing now was more common than death in Leningrad. Luknitsky came back to his father’s flat one night after a day at Smolny. He walked most of the way home to find that his aunt, Vera Nikolayevna, had died. She had gotten up that morning, complaining of a pain in her heart, sat down and lost consciousness. In a few hours she was dead. They put the body on a table in her room and closed the door. Now in the kitchen supper was being prepared, a small roast, cut from the remains of Mishka, the dog.
On December 29 Luknitsky noted in his diary that ten days earlier he had been told that six thousand persons a day were dying of starvation.
1
“Now, of course, many more,” he observed. Six members of the Writers Union had died in the last two or three days—Lesnik, Kraisky, Valov, Varvara Naumova and two more. The aunt of M. Kozakov had lain in her flat dead for more than ten days. Kraisky died in the dining room of the Writers’ House. He lay six days before they got around to moving the body out.
“To take someone who has died to the cemetery,” Luknitsky said, “is an affair so laborious that it exhausts the last vestiges of strength in the survivors, and the living, fulfilling their duty to the dead, are brought to the brink of death themselves.”
Luknitsky commented, as did all the Leningrad diarists, on the quiet of the city. It was the quiet of the grave. Automobiles rarely appeared—only frail people, slowly pulling the children’s sleds. Not all the dead were in coffins. Many were simply swathed in a sheet, and when they were brought to the cemeteries, there was no one to dig a grave, no one to say a prayer. The body was just dumped. Not infrequently those who pulled the sled fell beside the corpse, themselves dead, without a sound, without a groan, without a cry.
Vera Inber discovered a terrifying spectacle at the back gate to the Erisman Hospital next to the dissection room. Here on the banks of the Kar-povka Canal a mountain of corpses was growing. Each day eight to ten more bodies were added to the pile. The snow fell and covered them. Then new bodies were piled on top, some wrapped in rugs, some in curtains, some in sheets. Once she saw a very small body, obviously that of a child, tied in wrapping paper, bound with ordinary string. Sometimes, from under the snow an arm or a leg projected, strangely alive in the bright wrappings of the shrouds.
Vera Inber could not imagine what could be done about this. The dissection room itself was jammed with corpses. There were no trucks to take bodies to the cemetery, no strength for the task. There could be no registration of deaths under these conditions. The best that could be done was to give a simple body count to ZAGS (the city clerk).
The largest number of bodies were in the reception rooms. Many brought their dead to the hospital. Many tottered into the reception room and died. At the cemeteries long trenches were being dynamited for mass burials. Individual graves were almost impossible to obtain. Only for bread, the most precious of Leningrad commodities, would a gravedigger bury a corpse.
Leningrad’s terrible winter—it was the coldest in modern times, with an average temperature in December of 9 above zero Fahrenheit (13 degrees below normal) and 4 degrees below zero in January (20 degrees below normal)—froze the ground like iron. The weakened Leningraders had no strength to hack out graves. Most corpses lay on the surface, gradually becoming buried under snow and ice.
Some were placed in common graves—actually long trenches, dynamited by army sappers—at the Volkov, Bolshaya Okhta, Serafimov, Bogoslovsky, Piskarevsky, Zhertva 9 Yanvarya, and the Tatar cemeteries. They were also buried in open squares on Golodai Island, at Vesely settlement and at the Glinozemsky factory. More than 662 common graves were dug in the winter of 1941–42, with a total length of 20,000 yards.
“I remember the picture exactly,” recalled Y. I. Krasnovitsky, director of the Vulcan factory. “It was freezing cold. The bodies were frozen. They were hoisted onto trucks. They even gave a metallic ring. When I first went to the cemetery, every hair stood up on my head to see the mountain of corpses and the people, themselves hardly alive, throwing the bodies into trenches with expressionless faces.”
The dead from the Kuibyshev, Dzerzhinsky, Red Guard and Vyborg sections were transported to Piskarevsky Cemetery. Steam shovels of Special Construction Administration No. 5 were ordered there. When they had completed their twenty-mile trip to Piskarevsky, the operators could hardly believe their eyes. They began to dig the trenches, trying not to look at the heap of bodies.
Returning from Lake Ladoga late at night, Vsevolod Kochetov saw the shovels at work. He thought they were working on new fortifications. The chauffeur corrected him.
“They are digging graves—don’t you see the corpses?”
Kochetov looked more clÖsely in the dim light. What he had thought were cords of wood were piles of corpses, some wrapped in blankets, shawls or sheets, some not.
“There are thousands,” the chauffeur said. “I go past here every day, and every day they dig a new trench.”
Even so, many bodies remained unburied or simply lay in open trenches.
A Leningrader, jotting down his impressions in January, 1942, wrote:
The nearer to the entrance to Piskarevsky I approached, the more bodies appeared on both sides of the road. Coming out of town where there were small one-story houses, I saw gardens and orchards and then an extraordinary formless heap. I came nearer. There were on both sides of the road such enormous piles of bodies that two cars could not pass. A car could go only on one side and was unable to turn around. Through this narrow passage amidst the corpses, lying in the greatest disorder, we made our way to the cemetery.
The Leningrad authorities, almost powerless to act, nonetheless ordered on January 7 the observance of the “strictest sanitary norms” under threat of the “revolutionary tribunal"—in other words, death before the firing squad. Needless to say, the threat was meaningless.
“Never in the history of the world,” comments the official Leningrad history of the blockade, “has there been an example of tragedy to equal that of starving Leningrad.”
Every day more coffins both full and empty, appeared on the street. If they were empty, they slid from side to side on the sleds. One hit Vera Inber a glancing blow in the ankle. Usually two women pulled a sled. They put the straps over their shoulders—not because the corpses were so heavy, but because the women were so weak.
Once Vera Inber saw a corpse, that of a woman, on a sleigh. She was in a shroud, not a coffin, and those who had prepared her had carefully stuffed the shroud with shavings to give her breasts a more comely appearance. The professional touch made Vera Inber shudder. Someone probably had been paid, possibly in bread, to prepare this poor body—for what? Another time she saw two children’s sleds pulled in tandem. On one was a coffin atop which, neatly arrayed, were a shovel and a crowbar. On the other was a load of wood. On the one death, on the other life.
You could see almost anything on a child’s sled that winter in Leningrad: A brand-new chest of drawers being pulled by a starving woman, the chest to be broken up for kindling. Two women pulling a third, pregnant, hurrying to the hospital to give birth, yellow, thin, her face skeletal. Or two women pulling a man, his feet dragging behind him, shouting again and again, “Be careful. Be careful.”
On a Sunday, walking from the gate of the Erisman Hospital to Leo Tolstoy Square, Vera Inber counted eight big and little sleds, each with a corpse, each wrapped in a different kind of shroud.
The very smell of the city was changing. No longer did you smell gasoline, tobacco, horses, dogs or cats. The healthy smell of people had vanished. Now the city smelled of raw snow and wet stone. White frost painted entry halls and staircases. And on the street one smelled the harsh and bitter odor of turpentine. This meant that a truck with bodies, bound for the cemetery, had just passed. Or one which had been to the cemetery coming back. The turpentine was used to drench the trucks and the corpses. The harsh smell lingered in the frosty air like the very scent of death.
In the charnel house that Leningrad was becoming the hospitals were worst of all. Yelena Skryabina, almost frantic with fear for her son Dima, who day by day was sinking into torpor, managed to get a job for him as a messenger in a hospital on the Petrograd side. For this he would receive one meal a day —a meat soup. This might save the youngster’s life. The boy was so weak that he could hardly walk, and he returned from the hospital near collapse. It was jammed with bodies. There were bodies in the corridors, on the staircases, in the entryway. He could hardly get in and out of the building.
The streets were becoming places of inconceivable terror. Madame Skry-abina’s friend, Lyudmila, was hurrying home from work one night. A woman clutched at her arm, crying that she was too weak to take another step, she must have help. But Lyudmila herself could hardly stand. The woman’s clutch was like iron. The two women slowly struggled Until Lyudmila wrenched herself free, throwing the woman into a snowdrift, and ran down the street. She arrived home face white, eyes filled with terror, breath coming in gasps, saying again and again, “She is dying, she will die today.”
Dmitri Moldavsky each day followed the same route. He went down Ulitsa Marat (more and more difficult to get through as bodies piled up at the morgue), down the Nevsky, across the bridge to the university. It took him three hours to walk this route with one halt. This was at a trolley-bus frozen in the ice at the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and the Griboyedov Canal, the very heart of the city. In this he stopped, unwound his scarf and rested while he counted to seventy-five. Then, difficult as it was to get up, he rose and continued his walk. He was never alone in the bus. There were always other passengers, the same passengers—three corpses. Who they were he did not know. Possibly others like himself who had paused a moment to rest and never got up again.
Once Moldavsky saw a woman fall in front of him on the Nevsky. She tried to rise but could not. She struggled and finally became still. He came up to her. Her face was black, her lips shriveled, her eyes open. Beside her lay a pair of red mittens, and he saw her fingers, white and thin as macaroni. Moldavsky and a woman passer-by tried vainly to put her on her feet. The victim opened her lips, muttering something that sounded like “soup.” A Red Army man came along and the three of them got the woman up, but she fell again, dead.
“Well, we tried,” the woman said.
“That’s it!” said the soldier. “Let’s go!”
Another time Moldavsky saw a man ahead of him, tottering down the Nevsky and nibbling at a crust of bread. A second man watched the man stagger along, bread in hand. “That’s very good,” said the second man. “A breakfast roll . . .”
He stood watching. Perhaps, thought Moldavsky, he is watching in case the man falls in hopes of getting the crust of bread.
People would do anything for food, for bread. In early December cemetery workers would provide a coffin and a grave for 300 rubles’ worth of bread. Yevgeniya Vasyutina bought a little tin stove on December 10. She paid three days’ bread ration for it—and the stove pipe was extra.
One day the wife of a friend came to Admiral Panteleyev. She and her family were starving. Panteleyev confessed he could do nothing to help. As she rose to go, she noticed his worn leather portfolio.
“Will you give me that?” she asked in despair.
He gave her the briefcase in puzzlement. A few days later he got a present from the woman. A dish of meat jelly and the nickel fittings for the portfolio. A note said she hadn’t been able to make anything out of the nickel, but the jelly was the product of his briefcase.