Authors: Harrison Salisbury
In the great Kirov metallurgical plant there were about five thousand workers, still alive, still technically on the payroll, most of them living in the icy, shell-torn buildings, too weak to work, almost too weak to live.
After the blockade was lifted one of the girls, Anna Vasileyeva, a chubby, red-cheeked youngster, told of her life. She was a “Putilov girl,” that is, her family for at least two generations had been workers in the Putilov, now the Kirov, plant. Her father and two brothers worked at the factory. The family lived in a house in a nearby suburb, close enough so they could walk to work.
When the war started, Anna, only fifteen, began to work at Kirov, too. When the Nazis swept almost to the Kirov gates in September, 1941, Anna’s family had to abandon their house in the suburbs—it was in German-occupied territory. Then her father and one brother were killed by a German shell. The other brother went into the Red Army. Anna and her mother went to live in a flat in town. One day she came back from work to find her mother had been blinded by slivers of flying glass from a shell hit on a nearby apartment.
By January no work was being done at Kirov. No one was able to work. There was no power, no heat, no light. Several of the stronger girls, Anna among them, made up a brigade. Each day one or two started from Kirov with a child’s sled. They visited three or four flats where their relatives lived—to see if they were alive, to remove any dead, to bring a little food, to light a fire or heat some water, whatever they could do. In late afternoon they would come back to the little room where their comrades huddled around a tin stove.
“Here is the way it was,” she said. “The first thing you would do was to look around to see if everyone was there, if your friends were all alive.”
It was the same each morning. When you awoke from your troubled, hungry, freezing sleep, you looked around the circle.
“Then,” she said, “you’d notice someone sitting in a chair beside the stove. At first he would look all right. Then you’d look closer and see that he was sitting there dead. That was the way it was.”
Anna Vasileyeva was seventeen. She had survived. No one else in her family had.
Yelizaveta Sharypina visited a flat on the Nevsky where a worker named Pruzhan was supposed to live. He had failed to show up for work. She made her way along a dark corridor. The first door was padlocked. The next door would not open. Finally, she found, an unlatched door and entered a dark room. There was a cold stove in the center and two iron beds. A man lay with his face to the wall on one bed, a woman, feeble but able to talk, on the other. Pruzhan, she said, was dead. His wife had died a few days before him. A daughter was at the store getting the bread ration. She herself was not ill, only weak. She had lost her bread card. “Obviously it is the end,” she said quietly. Sharypina called a Young Communist team to see if the woman’s life could, by some means, be saved.
At another apartment on Borodinsky Street Sharypina found the dying Stepanov family. The father had been out of work for three months. A few days before he seemed a bit better and sat by the window where a little sun came in. “Now it will be all right,” he said. “We will live.” A few moments later he toppled over dead. With the aid of a porter twelve-year-old Boris Stepanov had taken his father’s body to the morgue. His mother, cloaked in a heavy coat, lay on her bed and stared into space. She had not said a word since her husband died. On a second bed lay sixteen-year-old Volodya. He did not speak. He chewed.
“What is he eating?” Madame Sharypina asked.
“He is not eating. There is nothing in his mouth,” his brother Boris said. “He just chews and chews. He says he doesn’t want to eat.”
Despite Sharypina’s efforts Boris and Volodya were dead within a few days. Only the shattered mother survived.
One February day Sharypina was walking slowly along Zagorodny Pros-pekt when she saw a child with a stick in his hand, a piece of blanket wrapped about his head. The child darted into the next courtyard and started digging at a mound of frozen garbage.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. The child, who appeared to be about seven years old, turned a pair of suspicious eyes on her and replied that he was looking for something for his sister Lena to eat. The night before, he said, he had found some cabbage stalks. Very good. Of course, they were frozen. Lena had eaten them and had given him a piece, too.
It was a typical Leningrad case—the father at the front, alive or dead no one knew, the mother long since taken to the hospital, alive or dead no one knew, the children living on frozen garbage heaps.
A doctor named Milova was called to Apartment No. 67 at 11/13 Boro-vaya Ulitsa one January day.
“The door to the apartment was open,” she reported. “I found the room I wanted and went in without knocking. My eyes met a frightful sight. A half-dark room. Frost on the walls. On the floor a frozen puddle. On a chair the corpse of a fourteen-year-old boy. In a child’s cradle the second corpse of a tiny child. On the bed the dead mistress of the flat, K. K. Vandel. Beside her, rubbing the dead woman’s breast with a towel, stood her oldest daughter Mikki. But life had gone, and it could not be brought back. In one day Mikki lost her mother, her son and her brother, all dead of hunger and cold. At the door, hardly able to stand from weakness, was her neighbor, Lizunova, looking without comprehension upon the scene. On the next day she died, too.”
A teacher, A. N. Mironova, saved more than a hundred children in the winter of 1941–42. On January 28 she noted in her diary:
To the 17th Line, House 38, Apartment No. 2 (on Vasilevsky Island) to get Yuri Stepanov, 9 years old. His mother was dead. The youngster slept day and night with his dead mother. (“How cold I got from mama,” he said.) Yuri didn’t want to come with me. He cried and shouted. A touching farewell with his mother (“Mama, what will happen to you without me?”).
Another entry from Mironova’s January diary:
Prospekt Musorgsky 68, Apartment 30. Took a girl, Shura Sokolova, born 1931. Father at the front. Mother dead. Body of mother in the kitchen. Little girl dirty, scabs on her hands. Found her in a pile of dirty linen under the mattress.
V. N. Ivanov, secretary of the Komsomols, in a report on the winter of 1942 said, “I must tell you that nothing more terrible and difficult could have been possible. I worked under the weight of psychological trauma. I could not bear to see the people dropping around me. Human beings simply slipped away. They no longer could stand.”
The Young Communists mustered 983 members for the service brigades, plus 500 to 600 additional young people enlisted in each region of the city. They visited 29,800 flats, provided medical aid to 8,450 persons and made daily visits to 10,350 starving persons—according to their official report. Another estimate puts the number of flats visited at 13,810 and the number of persons helped at 75,000.
Death, in a measure, was beginning to modify Leningrad’s problems. The figures are not very accurate. All the Soviet authorities concede this. Probably 11,085 persons died in November of hunger. Nearly five times as many, 52,881, died in December. The figures for January and February are less precise. One of the most conservative authorities, A. V. Karasev, estimated deaths in January at 3,500 to 4,000 a day, or 108,500 to 124,000. Dmitri V. Pavlov, whose task it was to feed the survivors, puts the combined January-February death toll at 199,187. Pavlov’s total is probably too low. The overburdened Leningrad Funeral Trust handled 9,219 bodies in November, 27,463 in December. The figures for January and February are missing.
Almost all these deaths were due to starvation-related diseases. By December dystrophy constituted 70 percent of the case load of clinics and hospitals and in January 85 percent. Most of these were men, and their death rate was about 85 percent. In February and March women constituted the majority of cases. One official report placed the death toll among those admitted to hospitals that winter at 30 to 35 percent. A more exact estimate places the dysentery death rate at 40.7 percent for the first quarter of 1942.
The disease and death statistics have no parallel in modern history.
3
Leningrad’s death rate in 1941 was 32 percent over 1940. But for the year 1942 it was fifteen times greater than for 1940. In prewar years the death rate in Leningrad hospitals was 6 to 8 percent. In the fourth quarter of 1941 it rose to 28 percent and in the first quarter of 1942 to 44.3 percent and, for the whole year of 1942, to 24.4 percent. The death rate of all diseases jumped astronomically—typhus from 4 percent to 60 percent, dysentery from 10 to 50 percent, stomach-intestinal diseases from 4.5 to 54.3 percent. All kinds of surgery became more dangerous, with the over-all death rate rising five times. The incidence of heart disease was estimated at 40 percent in blockade residents over forty years of age.
In these conditions the number of mouths to be fed in Leningrad dropped radically, day by day. But they were still far greater than the resources available. The total of Leningrad residents for January—calculated on the basis of ration cards issued—was 2,282,000. The first-quarter figure is given as 2,116,000. The number of persons holding workers’ food cards was about 800,000 (this meant 350 grams of bread daily after December 25). The number holding dependents’ cards (200 grams after December 25) was at least 700,000. Children and nonworker employees also got 200 grams a day. It was in this category (which had received only 125 grams of bread daily from November 21 to December 25) that the heaviest death toll occurred.
It was obvious to Zhdanov that people on these rations could not survive. To try to save at least some elements of the population he ordered on December 27 the opening of what were called
statsionari
, convalescent centers, in which slightly better food would be given together with minimum nursing attention. These were designed to save such elite personnel as could be saved. In reality many persons arrived at the convalescent stations so ill and weak they promptly died. By January 9 it was estimated that about 9,000 persons were being thus treated. That day Zhdanov ordered a vast expansion of the
statsionari
, and on January 13 the city authorities authorized an increase in beds to 16,450.
One of the principal convalescent stations was at the Astoria Hotel, where 200 beds were set up, largely for scientists, writers, intelligentsia.
Nikolai Markevich, a
Red Fleet
correspondent, took a room at the Astoria January 30. He wrote: “The hotel is dead. Like the whole city there is neither water nor light. In the dark corridors rarely appears a figure, lighting his way with a ‘bat,’ a hand-generator flashlight or a simple match. The rooms are cold, the temperature not rising above 40 degrees. Writing these lines my hand is almost frozen.”
The
statsionar
was just a drop in the bucket, as was evidenced by an appeal directed to the Leningrad Front Council on January 16 by the Writers Union:
The situation of the Leningrad writers and their families has become extraordinarily critical. Recently 12 writers have starved to death. In hospitals now are more than 15 writers and many more are awaiting places. The widow of the writer Yevgeny Panfilov who died at the front has died of starvation in spite of our efforts to save her (our possibilities are very limited). She leaves three children. In the last few days we had to recall urgently from the front the poet, Ilya Avramenko, because of the critical situation of his wife and newborn child. In the families of writers there is a very heavy death toll. Suffice to say that in the family of the major Soviet poet, Nikolai Tikhonov, working now in the writing group of the Leningrad front, six persons have died. In the Writers’ House at present lie a number of starving people who cannot walk and whom we do not have the strength to help.
The total of
statsionari
opened was 109, and 63,740 persons were helped by them in one way or another.
There was one slowly brightening spot. The Ladoga ice road, at long last, was beginning to work better. The urgent measures to improve the rail link from the lake to Leningrad had begun to take effect, and on January 11 the State Defense Committee ordered a rail line built from Voibokalo to the ice road. By February 10, thanks to a military construction crew, the link from Voibokalo to Kobona and Kosa was finished and the Ladoga truck haul was shortened by twenty miles.
In the first ten days of January the ice road delivered 10,300 tons of freight to Leningrad. In the second ten days the total more than doubled to 21,000 tons. For the first time, on January 18 the ice road teams exceeded their quota. For the first time since the start of the war, food was flowing into Leningrad faster than it was being eaten—in part because of better deliveries, in part because of the grievous decimation of the population.
Dmitri V. Pavlov, the food chief, breathed a bit easier. On January 20 he had nearly three weeks’ food supplies in sight, either on hand in Leningrad, en route over the lake or at depots awaiting delivery. His chart showed these tonnages:
Flour Cereals Meat Fats Sugar On hand in Leningrad 2,106 326 243 94 226 At West Ladoga warehouse 2,553 690 855 130 740 En route across Lagoda 1,020 210 220 108 90 At Voibokalo-Zhikharevo 6,196 846 1,347 360 608 Totals 11,875 2, 072 2, 665 692 1,664 Days’ supply at existing consumption rate 21 9 20 9 13