Leningrad Page 18

  This period – from September to the end of December 1941 – was, as the historian Sergei Yarov puts it, when Leningraders ‘fell down the funnel’. Over the course of three months, the city changed from something quite familiar – in outward appearance not unlike London during the Blitz – to a Goya-esque charnel house, with buildings burning unattended for days and emaciated corpses littering the streets. For individuals the accelerating downward spiral was from relatively ‘normal’ wartime life – disruption, shortages, air raids – to helpless witness of the death by starvation of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and children – and for many, of course, to death itself.

  So swift was the transition, so anomalous its backdrop, that grapevine news of hunger deaths was at first greeted with incredulity. Lidiya Ginzburg wrote her forensic memoir of the blockade in the guise of an anonymous, composite ‘Siege Man’. For him famine belonged ‘in the desert, complete with camels and mirages’. He ‘didn’t believe that the inhabitants of a large city could die of hunger . . . On hearing of the first cases of death amongst their acquaintances, people still thought: Is this the one I know? In broad daylight? In Leningrad? With a master’s degree? From starvation?’3

  Yelena Skryabina, whose first reaction to the announcement of war had been to rent a holiday cottage at a knockdown price, similarly found the idea of death by starvation ‘demeaning and absurd’. Though responsible for four dependants – her mother, two sons and an elderly former nanny – she returned to the city only in mid-August and thus began stocking up with food very late. On 15 September she made a trip to the city outskirts, to barter with villagers: ‘I had cigarettes, my husband’s boots, and some women’s shoes . . . Everywhere I had to beg, literally implore. The peasants are already overloaded with valuable things; they don’t even want to talk.’ A few days later she managed, at the cost of endless queuing, to buy vodka, which she traded for potatoes with a ‘drunk old woman . . . Lucky for us that there are still such old women around.’4 Another lucky contact was a Tartar pedlar, who sold her chocolate and horsemeat for cash (‘completely unbelievable these days, since money’s worth nothing any more’) and a bottle of red wine. Not all the inhabitants of her communal apartment, she noted in early October, were as fortunate:

  People turn into animals before our eyes. Who would have thought that Irina, always such a quiet, lovely woman, would be capable of beating her husband, who she has always adored? And for what? Because he wants to eat all the time and can never get enough. He just waits for her to bring something home, and then throws himself on the food . . .

  The most grisly sight in our apartment is the Kurakin family. He, back from exile and emaciated by years in prison, is already beginning to bloat. It’s simply horrible! Of his wife’s former love, there is little left. She is constantly irritated and argumentative. Their children cry and beg for food. But all they get is beatings. However, the Kurakins are no exception. Hunger has changed almost everyone.

  Two lifelines helped prevent Skryabina’s family from going the same way. The first was a pass to her military engineer husband’s mess, from which she was able to bring home small but regular amounts of soup and porridge. The second was a fictitious job, arranged by a friend, for her fifteen-year-old son Dima, which allowed him an adult worker’s ration. But though her younger son, five-year-old Yura, continued happy and lively, ‘helping’ the yardman to chop firewood and sweep snow, for teenage Dima even this was not enough:

  He has lost interest in everything. He won’t read or talk . . . he’s even indifferent to bombing. The only thing that rouses him is food. He’s hungry all day long and rattles through the cupboards, looking for something to eat. When he can’t find anything he chews on coffee grounds or those abominable oil cakes which used to be fed only to cattle . . . Even in September he used to walk around the city looking for things to buy, took an interest in the military communiqués, met friends. Now he’s like an old man, constantly freezing. He spends whole days standing next to the stove in his winter jacket, pale, with deep blue circles under his eyes. If he goes on like this he will die.5

  Another job, arranged by Skryabina’s husband, did not help. Attached as a messenger boy to a hospital, Dima was sent to and fro across the city in what was by now biting cold, often only to be cheated of the agreed-upon evening meal in exchange. The hospital’s kitchen manager, Skryabina raged, was a thief: ‘Only when Dima shows up with the director’s son does he get everything – even meat patties. No wonder that boy is so well-nourished and rosy-cheeked.’ On 15 December, having collapsed in the street, Dima took permanently to his bed – or in siege shorthand, ‘lay down’. ‘He lies quietly and won’t talk at all, burying his face in his pillow. He no longer gets up to search for food in the cupboards and the sideboard . . . He’s so tall and thin, and unbelievably pitiful . . . I look at him in horror. I’m afraid he will die.’6 In a little over four months, Skryabina had gone from playing with her boys in the Catherine Palace park, to watching the elder of them waste away from simple want of enough to eat.

  Olga Grechina lived with her mother and younger brother Volodya (Vova for short) in a grey-painted, ponderously ornate mansion block halfway down Mayakovsky Street, one of the shabby-grand boulevards leading off the Nevsky. Her father, a doctor, had died a few years earlier, and her older brother Leonid had been called up into the army. In October, having been released from trench-digging, she was able to visit Leonid at the village near Shlisselburg where he was stationed with his mortar battery. There he introduced her to his new medical orderly fiancée – an unsuitable girl, Olga couldn’t help thinking, who insisted that they be photographed ‘heads together, smiling, in the best village tradition’, and seemed able to talk about nothing but curtains. Leonid and his fellow soldiers were cheerful – happy to have got out of the Kingisepp encirclements alive. But they had no bread or sugar and their horses were emaciated, tearing at the wooden porch to which they were tethered with huge yellow teeth. Nor did the unit have enough ammunition: ‘Each battery gets five shells. When you let them off the Germans retaliate, and keep going for twenty-four hours, but there’s nothing for us to fire back with.’

  Soon after Olga returned to Leningrad her mother was hit by a car during the blackout. Though only slightly injured, she rapidly weakened and had to be helped down to the basement during raids. She also insisted on sharing her ration with the family dog, a beloved ‘ball of fluff’ called Kashtanka, so that Olga was half relieved when the animal was stolen – if the rumours were right, for food. The informal system of mutual favours whereby Russians got round shortages and bureaucracy – blat in Soviet slang – was now, Olga discovered, beginning to break down. To get medicine for her mother, she appealed to a former colleague of her father’s, a Dr Mikhailov. The favour he owed the Grechin family dated back to 1916, when he had been caught saving ‘self-shooters’ – soldiers who had shot themselves in the left hand so as to be invalided out of the army – from execution by sending them to the rear. Instead of denouncing him, Olga’s father had restitched the soldiers’ hands so as to disguise the bullet wounds, and transferred him to another hospital. Mikhailov now worked in a clinic round the corner from the Grechins on Pestelya, a gracious, Italianate street book-ended by two perfectly proportioned churches. Olga found him

  besieged by old women – or that’s how they looked then. He seemed to have sunk into old age himself as well. I asked him to come and see Mama, but he refused, saying ‘You know we only make house calls in exceptional circumstances now, and she’s already had diagnosis and treatment.’ I was indignant, I remember, and berated him – He, having been educated in the humanitarian tradition, having taken the Hippocratic oath, refused to visit a sick person. He sadly heard me out, then said, ‘If I come to you, I won’t be able to get home. For me everything is measured out: once a day I can get from Tchaikovsky Street to Pestelya. I haven’t got the strength to do more. And if I don’t get to work, what will happen to all these people?’ And he pointed to the
door, behind which waited all his patients.

  Another doctor, whom Olga paid in advance for a house call, first advised, cruelly, that her mother be fed chicken soup and milk, then left the bedroom to write out a prescription for sedatives. After he had gone, Olga noticed that some sweets that had been sitting in a tin on the kitchen table had disappeared.

  In November Olga and Vova both found jobs, Vova as a boilerman, which meant chopping and loading wood but provided a meal and warmth, and Olga in a polygraph machine-turned-ammunition factory, checking half-made shell casings and carrying them from workbench to workbench. Though the casings were heavy and greasy, and covered with steel shavings which cut her hands, the work earned her 230 roubles a week and as much soup (‘really only hot water’) as she could drink, plus some to take home to her mother. At the end of the month the family received news of its first death – Leonid’s, killed in fighting near where Olga had visited him a few weeks before.

  In early December swollen legs and infected sores on her hands stopped Olga from working, and she began to hear of the deaths of neighbours in her apartment block. The first to go (as was typical throughout the city) were low-status ancillary workers: the building’s porter – ‘a very neat, respectable man’ – and his wife, then the yardman, then a ‘small, mustachioed and gloomy plumber, who lived on the first floor and spent his time chasing the boys for hooliganism’. Next came the turn of the building’s ordinary residents, starting with the husband of a singer, who lived with their mentally handicapped son on the floor above:

  One December night at about 11 p.m. someone knocked on the door. I opened up, and there was our neighbour N with a small glass in her hand. She said, ‘My son is dying – I beg you, give me a spoonful of sunflower oil. If I pour it into his mouth I might be able to save him.’

  ‘But I don’t have any oil!’

  ‘Yes you do, you must have! You have to save my son!’

  No, I insisted – but in fact I did have a hundred grams of oil, which by chance I had managed to get on my card somewhere or other. But I couldn’t spare any for N – I was feeding Mama with it. If I gave it to N’s son – who I had always found deeply unpleasant – then what would I give her? I got angry with N – saying no to her was excruciatingly shameful – and she left. In the morning her boy died. I felt like a murderer.7

  As Leningraders’ bodies began to fail, so did the arteries of the city itself. In October the power stations began to run out of fuel, reducing the electricity supply to a trickle. The trolley buses had long since been commandeered for use as ambulances; now the trams ground to a halt at random points on their routes, and began to gather frost and icicles. Their failure, as Ginzburg put it, ‘restored the reality of city distances’, lengthening streets and especially the windswept, shelterless Neva bridges. Snow went uncleared, so that all but major thoroughfares became impassable save for trodden-down, single-file paths, which traced new short cuts through bomb sites and the remains of fuel-scavenged fences. The patchworks of newsprint, wrapping paper, planks and plywood covering apartment-building windows lost the odd gaiety they had had at the start of the war. Now the boards had a ‘funeral symbolism’, they marked ‘people jammed together, perishing, buried alive’.8

  From 27 November residential buildings were banned from using electricity between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., by which time it was anyway supplied very erratically or not at all. For light and heat, Leningraders turned instead to the technologies of the village. Various sorts of home-made lamp were devised – an improvised ‘bat’ or storm lantern and the koptilka, or ‘smoker’, which consisted of a wick suspended in a small bottle, tin cup or upturned kettle lid. Both types burned dirtily, covering faces, hands and walls in sticky black soot. When kerosene ran out – a final two and a half litres per person was distributed in September – camphor, stain-remover, machine oil, eau-de-cologne and insecticide were burned instead. All rapidly disappeared from the shops and fetched increasingly outlandish prices in the street markets. The second vital piece of siege equipment was a small, usually home-made metal stove, or burzhuika, its pipe leading outdoors via a boarded-up or cushion-stuffed casement window. Into it went wood scavenged from bomb sites, furniture (in the street markets, wardrobes fetched more chopped up than whole), graveyard crosses, books and parquet tiles. Georgi Knyazev was advised by the Tartar wife of the Academy boilerman to feed his with dried faeces, as practised on the steppe. The burzhuika nickname – from the Russian for ‘bourgeois’ – came from the stoves’ tubby shape, or from their greediness for fuel, or from the fact that it was the old middle classes who had resorted to them during the Civil War. (Metalworking equipment used to make burzhuiki, a crime report of January 1942 noted, was being stolen from factories and sold on the black market.) Third – and today most powerfully symbolic of the blockade of all – came the sanki, or child’s sled, vital for transporting firewood, water and, finally, corpses.

  Leningraders also had to master village skills. They learned that birch wood burned well and aspen badly, that dried maple leaves could substitute for tobacco, and how to light the resulting cigarette, rolled in newspaper, by holding a lens up to the sunlight, or by striking metal against stone. Oddly, few tried to ice-fish, probably because they lacked the necessary lines and drills. One man, a theatre producer, likened it to being in a time machine. The blockade had hurled Leningrad back to the eighteenth century – but worse, because people no longer owned fur coats, there weren’t wells at every corner any more, and water had to be carried home in kettles instead of with buckets and yokes.9 In most apartment buildings the water supply failed by degrees, starting with the top floor. When the last tap dried residents resorted first to neighbouring buildings, then to broken pipes and ice holes, cut by the fire brigade, on the frozen canals and river. Over time, spillages turned into icy hillocks, up which one had to push oneself and one’s receptacle on hands and knees. Dmitri Likhachev was able to collect water from a fire hydrant, dragging it home on a sled in a zinc baby’s bath. Less sloshed out on the way, he discovered, if he floated a few sticks in it first. His elderly father (‘the most inconsistent and short-tempered man I ever knew’) turned out to be unexpectedly good at chopping wood, being a veteran, like the burzhuiki, of the Civil War. Zoologists, Likhachev remarks, survived the siege, because they knew how to catch rats and pigeons. Impractical mathematicians died.

  As the official ration dwindled and private stocks ran out, Leningraders also sought out their own, increasingly desperate, substitute foods. The commonest of these were zhmykh and duranda – the husks of linseed, cotton, hemp or sunflower seeds, pressed into blocks and normally fed to cattle. Grated and fried in oil, they could be turned into ‘pancakes’, the elaborate preparation of which helped give the comforting impression of a real meal. Also near-universally eaten was joiner’s glue, made from the bones and hooves of slaughtered animals. Likhachev found eight sheets of it at Pushkin House, which his wife soaked in several changes of water then boiled with bay leaves to make a foul-smelling jelly, which they forced down with the help of vinegar and mustard. They also cooked up the semolina used to clean their daughters’ white sheepskin jackets: ‘It was full of strands of wool and grey with dirt, but we were all glad of it.’ An art teacher searched the flats of evacuated friends: ‘I rummaged in all the cupboards and took rusks of any kind – green, mouldy, anything . . . Altogether I collected a small bagful. I was extremely pleased to have got quite a good amount. Later one of my students brought me oilcake – three blocks this size. That was something tremendous – three blocks of oilcake!’10 He also ate linseed oil and fish glue, used for mixing paints and priming canvases.

  Substitutes were often dangerous. Even if not poisonous in themselves, they could cause diarrhoea and vomiting, or damage thinned stomach linings. Anything, though, was better than nothing. Glycerine contained calories, Leningraders discovered, as did tooth powder, cough medicine and cold cream. Factory workers ate industrial casein (an ingredient in paint), dextrine
(used to bind sand in foundry moulds), tank grease and machine oil. At the Physiological Institute Pavlov’s slavering dogs were eaten; at another, scientists shared out their stocks of ‘Liebig extract’ – a dried meat broth made from the embryos of calves and used as a medium for growing bacteria. One father brought home the maggoty knee of a reindeer, an air-raid casualty at the zoo.11

  Eaten also were the vast majority of household pets. ‘All day long’, a wife wrote to her husband at the front, ‘we’re busy trying to find something to eat. With Papa we’ve eaten two cats. They’re so hard to find and catch that we’re all looking out for a dog, but there are none to be seen.’12 One family, to save themselves embarrassment in front of neighbours, referred to cat meat by the French chat. Others swapped pets so as not to have to eat their own animal, or bartered them for other necessities. A teacher brought a handwritten advertisement, which she had found pasted up in the street, into her staff room. Reading ‘I will trade 4.5 metres of flannel and a primus for a cat’, it sparked a ‘long argument – Is it moral to eat cats or not?’13 Such squeamishness soon faded. ‘Not all parents’, a siege survivor remembered of her astronomer father’s colleagues at the Pulkovo observatory,