ABOVE THE IRON GATES OF THE SHEREMETYEV PALACE ON the Fontanka embankment where Anna Akhmatova lived, the legend was inscribed on an old coat of arms: “Deus Conservat Ornnia” From her window she looked out upon the palace courtyard, guarded by a great maple whose branches reached toward her, rustling nervously through the long winters and gently stirring during the soft daylight of the white nights. Now the maple’s scarlet and golden leaves had fallen, spattering the pavement with pastels that gradually turned to mud in the autumn rains. Now it seemed to Anna Akhmatova that the naked black branches of the maple reached out to her more urgently, calling to her, telling her to stay, to stay in Petersburg.
Anna Akhmatova was the queen of Russian poetry. She was, perhaps, the queen of Leningrad. Surely no one had more of the city in her life, in her blood, in her experience—its fears, its hopes, its tragedies, its genius. She was not Petersburg-born. But her parents had brought her to the northern capital, to the gentle pleasure gardens of Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), when she was a child. Her first memories were of “the green damp magnificence of the parks, the meadows where my nurse used to take me for a walk, the hippodrome where little dappled horses galloped, the old railroad station.” There she grew up, breathing the air of poets—of Pushkin, of Lermontov, of Derzhavin, of Nekrasov, of Shelley. The princess, the queen-to-be—none so mad, none so gay, so feminine, so passionate, so lyric, so romantic, so urgent, so madcap—so Russian.
Before she was five she spoke French. She went to a girls’ school, studied law, studied literature, raced to Paris, fell in love with Modigliani (she didn’t know he was a genius, but she knew he had “a head like Antonius and eyes that flashed gold”). She saw the Imperial Ballet of Diaghilev in its Paris triumph. She saw Venice, Rome, Florence. She married a poet, the love of her schoolgirl days in Tsarskoye, Nikolai Gumilev, a dark, brilliant, difficult man. With him she founded a new school of poetry, a neoclassical movement which they called Acmeism. Everything was possible, everything experienced. Her life was a poem of mirrored images, of galloping sleighs in white snows, of warm summer evenings in leafy parks, of boudoirs, of boulevards, of Paris, of golden stars. Of love. Of tragedy. These were, she later understood, the luminous lighthearted days, the hour before dawn. She did not know that shadows soon would pass at her window, terrifying, hiding behind lamp posts, changing the gold to drossy brass.
But tragedy’s hand clutched early at her life. She saw it overhanging Petrograd in the war of the Kaiser and the Czar. She saw the “black cloud over mournful Russia.” She saw her Petrograd transformed from a northern Venice to a “granite city of glory and misfortune.” By the end of World War I Gumilev brought anguish and divorce to her. The tragedy deepened when he faced a Bolshevik firing squad in 1921 and was shot as a White Guard conspirator. The golden years of Tsarskoye Selo had ended. Now came the iron years of the Revolution’s mills, grinding ever more harshly until the terror of Stalin’s police closed in and swept away her son, Lev.
For seventeen months she stood with the other women in the prison lines of Leningrad, waiting tor word of her son’s fate, bringing him food, bringing him packages. Once a woman next in line, a woman whose lips were blue with cold or fear, asked her, “And this—can you write about it?”
“Yes,” Anna Akhmatova replied, “I can.”
The woman smiled a strange and secret smile.
Anna Akhmatova did, finally, write about those days:
Would you like to see yourself now, you girl so full of laughter?
The favorite of her friends,
The gay sinner of Tsarskoye Selo?
Would you like to see what’s happened to your life?
At the end of a queue of three hundred,
You stand outside Kresty Prison,
And your hot tears are burning holes in the New Year’s ice.
By this time her son had been cast into exile, there to remain until Stalin’s death in 1953.
In this September of 1941 Anna Akhmatova’s life was taking another turn. She was leaving Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad. September was ending and she had to go, orders of the City Party. The plane—one of the few— was waiting. Already she had moved from the palace on the Fontanka to the building at No. 9 Griboyedov where so many writers had their home. Pavel Luknitsky dropped in to say good-bye. He found her ill and weak. She emerged from the dark little porter’s house wearing a heavy coat and they talked together on a bench. Anna Akhmatova told how she had been sitting in a slit trench outside the Sheremetyev Palace during a raid. She was holding a youngster in her arms when she heard the “dragon’s shriek” of falling bombs and then a “tremendous din, a crackle and a crunch.” Three times the walls of the trench quivered and then grew quiet. How right it was, she said, that in their ancient myths the earth was always the mother, always indestructible. Only the earth could shrug at the terrors of bombardment. The first of the bombs fell next door in the former Catherine Institute, now a hospital. It did not explode. But two exploded in the Sheremetyev gardens, one at the corner of Zhukovsky and Liteiny and one in the house where the writer Nikolai Chukovsky lived. Fortunately he was at the front.
Anna Akhmatova confessed that the explosions left her crushed and feeble. A feeling of terror came over her as she looked at the women with their children wearily waiting in the bomb shelter during the raids—terror for what might happen to them, for what fate held.
The terror for the children of Leningrad did not leave her. From the desert oasis of Tashkent, to which she was evacuated in early October, she wrote in memory of Valya Smirnov, a little boy whom she might have held in her arms, a little boy who was killed by a German bomb:
Knock on my door with your little fist and I’ll open it. ...
I did not hear you moan.
Bring me a little maple twig
Or simply a handful of grass,
As you brought last spring.
And bring a handful of cold, pure Neva water
And I’ll wash away the traces of blood
From your little golden head, . . .
Deus Conservat Omnia. . . .
It was a time for God to come to the aid of the city beside the gray waters of the Neva. But He did not seem to hear. He did not hear the crunch of the bombs, the bark of the guns, the cries of the children with golden hair.
A. M. Dreving was on the rooftop of Leningrad’s Public Library one late September day, a sunny day, a warm day. He stood with his fellow ARP workers when the guns began to go, scattering over the roof steel slivers of shrapnel. He watched a German plane sweeping up toward the library from the Summer Gardens. Bombs began to fall. One near the circus, another close to the Nevsky near Malaya Sadovaya. The plane headed straight for the library. He knew they usually carried four bombs. Would it hit the library? It did not. It fell a short distance away in the Catherine Gardens. Possibly it was one of the cluster which dropped about Anna Akhmatova as she sat in the slit trench with the little boy.
The big Erisman Hospital, of which Vera Inber’s husband was the director, was located in what Leningraders called the “deep rear,” Aptekarsky Island, one of the more remote parts of the city, lying on the north side of the Neva.
With the incendiaries the Germans dropped leaflets: “For the house-warning.” Vera Inber worried because the grenadiers’ barracks next to the hospital was used both by medical students as a dormitory and by the military as a storehouse for shells and ammunition. If these were touched off, there would be a dreadful tragedy. The shells were loaded and unloaded from freight trucks on the street outside or from barges in the Karpovka Creek. Beside the loading platform stood an AA battery. Unpleasant neighbors for a large hospital, overflowing with wounded, many of them critically hurt.
On a late September morning, just after ten o’clock, the air alert having just sounded, an enormous bomb fell beside the hospital’s poly clinic, next to a fountain filled with cast-iron sculpture. It did not explode.
All day a sappers’ detachment labored to defuse it. When the day ended, they had not yet succeeded. Streetcar traffic in the area was halted. The streets were cleared and the hospital surrounded by guards. The lying-in ward, adjacent to the bomb, was moved to other quarters.
It struck Vera Inber as curious that she had hardly felt the shock when the bomb struck the earth. It had seemed for a moment that someone had closed a heavy door at a distance. The building shook—nothing else.
The next day the sappers still worked on the bomb. Vera Inber sat with the wounded during a raid. She tried to read to them. No one was interested. The wounded were very nervous, helpless, trapped. They knew that if a bomb fell they could not save themselves.
On the third day the bomb still lay in the garden, sinking further into the earth. But the fuse had been taken off.
On the fifth day the bomb still lay there, and almost everyone in Leningrad had heard about it. Luknitsky knew it was only one of many delayed-action bombs which had been dropped and with which the demolition squads labored in sweat and danger. Yevgeniya Vasyutina heard a wild rumor that the great bomb had been filled with granulated sugar. It was said nine out of twelve bombs did not explode and that inside there were notes which read: “Save us if you can.” She thought this was nonsense, and later she heard the truth—that the Erisman bomb weighed more than a ton and had penetrated nearly fifteen feet into the earth. No sugar.
Not until October 4 was the bomb hoisted out of the ground. Vera Inber and her husband went to see it—a monstrous thing painted blue with yellow speckles, a spiky snout and a blunt end. The huge object was carted off to a display of German war trophies. For days Vera Inber could not get it out of her mind. Finally she wrote a few lines about it for her poem “Pul-kovo Meridian.”
The atmosphere in the city grew more grim. Private telephone service had been disconnected; only public phone booths still worked. When Vera Inber heard a young woman’s fresh voice say; “Until the end of the war the telephone is being disconnected,” she wanted to say something, to protest, but it was useless. When she picked up the phone, it was silent and dead. Till the end of the war. Who knew when that might be?
Rumors . . . rumors . . . rumors . . . They grew with the disconnecting of the telephones. The government had cut off the phones because it feared the people, or to keep the enemy from spreading more rumors—that was the rumor. And the others: that all the house registers had been burned for fear they might fall into the hands of the Germans; that the police had destroyed their own records lest they be used against them; that the police had hidden their civilian clothes in cupboards, ready to try a quick getaway if worse came to worst.
There were hopeful rumors: that the Finns were being pushed back at Beloostrov and Sestroretsk; that Mga and Pushkin had been recaptured; that the troops on the northern bank of the Neva had broken the circle and made contact with a shock group pushing out from Volkhov. Unfortunately, as Luknitsky knew, when his photographer friend, he of the massive food reserve, passed on this news, none of it was true.
He knew that efforts were being made to break the encirclement—or would be. But he knew of no successes. What he did know was that there were spies in the city who spread false reports. He knew there were residents who were potential collaborators, who were ready to welcome the Germans.
There was, for instance, the friend of Yelena Skryabina’s who announced he was confident that the Germans would break into the city—if not that day, then surely the next. “And,” he concluded, “in any case if my expectations are not fulfilled, I have this.” He drew a small revolver from his pocket. Madame Skryabina knew her friend was not alone, that there were many who awaited the Germans with impatience as “saviors.”
It was not only Leningrad and its fate, Leningrad and its trials and hardships, which affected people’s morale. It was the news from the other fronts. The fall of Kiev had been a terrible blow. Kiev was the mother of Russian cities, the founding capital.
The day that Kiev fell Vera Inber was sitting in a shelter with the correspondent, Anatoly Tarasenkov. He took from his pocket a letter he had just gotten from his wife in Moscow. She told how Marina Tsvetayeva, ill, suffering, evacuated to a miserable village in the Urals, separated from her son, had hanged herself, one more poet’s life sacrificed to the Russian god of tragedy. It told of the death of their friend Margerita Aliger’s husband. Outside, the noise of the guns and the bombs went on.
As the tempo of the German attack slackened at Leningrad, the storm rose around Moscow. Moscow fought for its life. Luknitsky felt that Moscow, like Leningrad, would hold out. He did not know why, but he felt it. Yet the news from Moscow was shocking. There had been panic. Probably not as frantic as Kochetov described it. As Kochetov told the story, thousands of little and middle-rank bureaucrats tried to flee the capital. They rushed out of Moscow along the highway toward the rear, toward Gorky. Workers detachments guarding the outskirts of the city intercepted them and pushed their automobiles into the canals. “This is hard to believe,” Kochetov piously added, “because we know of nothing like this happening here in Leningrad.” Vishnevsky heard there was panic among some artists in Moscow.
Luknitsky’s version was less splashy, more accurate. There had been panic, but it had fairly quickly been brought under control.1
In these days Luknitsky found people standing in lines for hours to get 300 grams (about % of a pound) of bread, which was the ration of those who were not production workers.
Many were going into the nearby countryside, looking for cabbage or potatoes or beets. They found little. They stood in the queues through airraid alarms unless forced by the ARP squads or police to take shelter. Most stores and even the movie houses continued to operate despite the alarms, but many establishments had permanently shut their doors. Even the soft-drink and fruit-juice stands had quit. About the only nonrationed products sometimes available were coffee and chicory.
One day Yevgeniya Vasyutina stood in line from ten in the morning to three in the afternoon to get two kilos (five pounds) of beet sugar. Yelena Skryabina blessed the good fortune that had enabled her to acquire twenty or thirty pounds of coffee in August. Now it kept her family going. An old Tatar servant turned up one day with four chocolate bars. Fortunately he was willing to take money for them. Usually, now, food was traded only for gold, jewels, furs or vodka.
Two days later Yelena Skryabina made an entry in her diary. The husband of an old friend had died on October i. The cause: hunger. He lay down one evening to sleep. In the morning he was dead.
A week or so later Kochetov and his wife Vera were walking on the Nevsky near his newspaper office. In front of a pharmacy between the Yusupov Gardens and the Haymarket they saw an old man lying on the sidewalk, face down. His hat had fallen off and his long matted hair flowed over his shoulders like a wig. Kochetov turned the man over. The man protested feebly, “Don’t bother, I beg of you.” Kochetov tried without success to get the man to his feet. Then he went into the pharmacy and berated the middle-aged clerk for not doing something to help.
“What do you think, young man, that this is a first-aid station?” she said sourly. “Hunger is a terrible condition. Your old man has collapsed from hunger. And I might collapse any day myself—I’m getting more and more swollen.”
Kochetov saw how puffed her legs were and realized that she looked very bad.
He next sought out a policeman. “It’s just impossible,” the officer said. Kochetov saw that he, too, was thin and hungry. He returned to the old man. First aid was no longer necessary. He was dead.
This was the first death from hunger which Kochetov had seen. It would not be the last.
The impact of Pavlov’s rigid ration control fell most heavily on dependents and upon children. For the time being, workers and state employees got enough food to maintain their strength. But not the rest of the city—not those who were not making a direct and vital contribution to the war effort.
Nonworkers and children, as of October i, received one-third of a loaf of poor-quality bread a day. For the month they got one pound of meat, a pound and a half of cereals or macaroni, three-quarters of a pound of sunflower-seed oil or butter and three pounds of pastry or confectionery. That was all. In addition to the slender bread distribution, they were expected to maintain life on a total of five and a quarter pounds of food a month—a little more than a pound a week. Moreover, almost immediately distribution of the nonbread items fell below schedule. Fish or canned good were substituted for meat. The “pastry” was so full of substitutes it had little nourishment. Candy might be substituted for oil or fat. As time went on, bread—such as it was—more and more often was the only food issued. A boy of sixteen and an infant of five got the same ration. The deaths which occurred in late September and October, surprising and shocking to the Leningraders who knew of them, occurred among people subjected to this radically reduced diet and who had no personal food reserves to fall back on.
Dmitri V. Pavlov, the energetic young civil servant who became Leningrad’s food dictator September 8, drove relentlessly to muster every ounce of food for the city. The task was endless. He knew that, but he went ahead regardless. New ration cards were issued October 1 and rules were tightened.
The reissue brought the total down to 2,421,000, 97,000 less than in September, but still a very large number. Pavlov banned special rations of all kinds—there had been 70,000 special cards issued in September. Many had gone to children who had been evacuated, persons not living in Leningrad. Extra rations had been issued by factories to their office workers. All this came to a halt. Officials were warned they would be brought before military tribunals for violation of ration-card rules. One woman who worked in the printing shop where the cards were turned out was found with a hundred in her possession. She was shot. Armed guards were stationed in the print shop. A metal barrier was set up and not even the plant director was permitted in the area.
Precautions, Pavlov knew, were imperative. Every kind of device was being tried to obtain extra rations. Rackets sprang up. Swindlers painstakingly forged cards with ink and paper stolen from state supplies. In the dim light of flickering kerosene lanterns clerks could not detect forgeries.
Pavlov went further. He persuaded Zhdanov to issue a special decree October 10 which provided that every ration card in the city must be reregistered between October 12 and October 18. He feared that large numbers of forged ration cards might be introduced by the Germans.2 It was an enormous task. Three thousand Party workers were enlisted to make the check. Thousands of man-hours were spent. Every citizen had to present his card and documentary proof that he was the individual to whom it was assigned. No food could be obtained after October 18 without cards stamped “reregistered.” Cards not reregistered were confiscated after that date. Hard rules, but they cut bread ration cards by 88,000, meat cards by 97,000, cards for fats by 92,000. It was vital if Pavlov was to come anywhere near to fulfilling his job.
On the other side of the coin, Pavlov was gathering food from the most unexpected sources. He collected 2,352 tons of potatoes and vegetables from the suburban regions by September 20, often under German fire. Another 7,300 tons were brought in before the fields froze iron-hard. Eight thousand tons of malt were salvaged from the closed breweries and mixed with flour for bread. Five thousand tons of oats were seized from military warehouses. It went into bread. The horses starved or were slaughtered. Some were saved by substitute food—bundles of twigs, stewed in hot water and sprinkled with cottonseed cake and salt. Another horse-food substitute was made of compressed-cottonseed cake, peat shavings, flour dust, bone meal and salt. The horses didn’t care much for it. A scientific team, headed by V. I. Sharkov of the Wood Products Institute, worked out a formula for edible wood cellulose made from pine sawdust. In the middle of November it was added to the bread, and nearly 16,000 tons were consumed in the blockade days.
On September 15 Pavlov ordered bread baked according to the following formula: rye flour 52 percent, oats 30, barley 8, soya flour 5, malt 5. By October 20 the barley was exhausted. The formula was changed to: rye 63 percent, flax cake 4 percent, bran 4, oats 8, soya 4, malt 12, flour from moldy grain 5.
“The flavor of this bread was impaired,” Pavlov conceded. “It reeked of mold and malt.”
Food was brought in by barge and ship across Lake Ladoga. Zhdanov told the sailors the fate of Leningrad depended on them. Forty-nine barges were assigned to this service. Some were sunk with their grain cargoes, but 2,800 tons of grain, sprouting and not very appetizing, were salvaged from the lake bottom. That gave the bread its moldy flavor.
Yet Leningrad lived at the edge of disaster. On October 1 the city had on hand only a fifteen-to-twenty-day supply of flour—20,052 tons, to be precise.
The struggle to find substitute food never ended. A stock of cottonseed cake was found in the harbor. It had been destined to be burned in ships’ furnaces. Such cake had never been used as human food before because it contained some poisons. However, Pavlov found that high-temperature treatment removed the poisonous essences. He added the cake—4,000 tons of it—to the food supplies. At first the cake made up only 3 percent of the bread formula, then it was raised to 10 percent.
“We are eating bread as heavy as cobblestones and bitter with cottonseed cake,” Yevgeniya Vasyutina said. “This cottonseed cake ought to be given out on some kind of cattle ration.”
Every nook and cranny was explored for food. A search of the warehouses of Kronstadt turned up 622 tons of rye flour, 435 tons of wheat, 3.6 tons of oats and 1.2 tons of cooking oil. In the Stepan Razin brewery a cellar full of grain was uncovered. By sweeping out warehouses, elevators and railroad cars 500 tons of flour were reclaimed. A recheck of supplies disclosed that flour reserves had been understated by 32,000 tons.
As October wore on, the shortages of food were felt more deeply. Sometimes, Yevgeniya Vasyutina went home and cried all evening. She was hungry and cold, and the news was too bad to think about. Feverish trading sprang up in the city. Vodka was No. 1 in trading goods. Next came bread, cigarettes, sugar and butter. People began to talk more and more about a new cut in the rations. Others said the rations would be lifted, that plentiful supplies were coming in over Lake Ladoga.
The mood of the city grew more grim. Luknitsky, nervous, worried about his elderly father, his cousins, his close friend Lyudmila, all more or less dependent on him, went to the Writers’ House, just off the Neva embankment on Ulitsa Voinova. The last time he had been there with Vera Ketlinskaya it had been almost empty. That was three weeks ago. Now in mid-October it was overflowing with people. Only 130 meals could be served in the restaurant. That was all the food there was. Many writers went away hungry. An old translator hysterically cried that she would cut her throat with a razor that minute if she were not permitted to eat. Finally, she was quieted. But she got no food. Dinner consisted of watery soup with a little cabbage, two spoons of kasha, two bits of bread and a glass of tea with a piece of candy.
Luknitsky walked home along the Neva embankment. The Petropavlovsk spire was silhouetted against the sky. So were the formidable shapes of the Baltic warships standing guard, their guns elevated, their masts a fretwork against the darkening clouds.
Now another of the Nazis’ allies moved into Leningrad: cold . . . winter ... snow. . . . The first flakes fell at eleven in the morning on the fourteenth of October. The thermometer dropped. It was below freezing. “Ski day,” the day the snow cover reached ten centimeters (about four inches), came October 31—an unprecedentedly early date. Always in Leningrad the first snow marked a holiday. This was the winter capital, the capital of snow and ice, the sparkling city of frost. But now the cold and snow brought forbidding thoughts. What about the water pipes? There was hardly any heat in the buildings. Most people got only a ration of 2.5 liters of kerosene in September. Now there was none. Nor would there be any until February. It was cold in the great stone buildings along the Neva. And it was growing colder. Luknitsky noticed ice on the sidewalks in the morning.
Autumn had ended, such an autumn as Leningrad had never known. Winter was setting in. Perhaps, he thought, it would help Russia—as it had against Napoleon. He did not then know how right he was. Winter would help Russia. But it would come near to destroying Leningrad.
He noticed a change in himself. He was constantly on the move between Leningrad and the front, now in Leningrad for four or five days, then at the front for a week. At the front he lived on army rations. The troops still were fed fairly normally—800 grams of bread, almost two pounds, a day, 150 grams of meat, 140 of cereals, 500 of vegetables and potatoes. For a day or two after coming back from the front he did not feel hungry. Then hunger overwhelmed him. From morning until late night he wanted to eat. The evening dab of cereal or macaroni did not satisfy him. He went to bed hungry and woke up hungry after five or six hours.
All over the city this was happening.
People grew thinner while you looked at them. And they grew more like beasts. Yelena Skryabina had a friend, Irina Klyueva, a beautiful, elegant, quiet woman, who adored her husband. Now she fought and even beat him. Why? Because he wanted to eat. Always. Constantly. Nothing satisfied him. As soon as she prepared food he threw himself on it. And she was hungry herself. Before October ended Irina Klyueva’s husband had died of hunger. She did not even pretend to grieve.
Each person tried to make the ration go further. Yelena Skryabina’s mother divided each piece of bread into three portions. She ate one in the morning, one at noon, one at night. Madame Skryabina ate her whole portion in the morning with her coffee. That gave her strength to stand in food queues for hours or hunt about the city for food. In the afternoon she usually felt so weak she had to lie down. She worried about her husband. He had a military rear-area ration, but it was not much better than that of the civilians. He got a cup of cereal with butter in the morning. But he saved it for their son, Yuri. The food queues grew so long that it was almost impossible to get into a store before the small supply was exhausted. Finally, her husband got their ration cards registered with a military facility where the family received eight bowls of soup and four bowls of cereal every ten days. By this time speculators were getting 60 rubles for a small loaf of bread, 300 rubles for a sack of potatoes and 1,200 rubles for a kilo of meat.
Yevgeniya Vasyutina sat at home like a troglodyte. There was no heat. She wore her greatcoat and felt boots, removing the boots only when she slept. But not the coat. She covered herself with the mattress and pillows, but when she rose her body was stiff and sore. She heated her tea and food on a tiny grill set between two bricks. Thin shavings provided the fuel. There was no electricity. A burzhuika, a little potbellied stove (the name burzhuika had come from their use by the “former people” during the cold and famine of Petrograd’s 1919 and 1920), was beyond her dreams. More than anything in the world she just wanted a simple tea—tea with sugar and a roll. But this was impossible. She divided her ration of bread into three pieces, each the size of a chocolate bar. She put a little butter or oil on each. One she ate for breakfast, one for lunch, and the third she hid in her lamp shade, the one with a little dancing girl on it. She liked to spin the shade so that the dancer twirled in a rosy whirl. Now the electricity didn’t work. No one would think, she devoutly believed, of looking there for food.
Hunger and cold had begun their harsh regime. Bombs and shells rained down. On only two days between September 12 and November 30 did the Nazis refrain from shelling Leningrad. The bombardment was continuous: in September 5,364 shells, 991 explosive bombs, 31,398 incendiaries; in October 7,590 shells, 801 explosive bombs, 59,926 incendiaries; in November 11,230 shells, 1,244 explosive bombs, 6,544 incendiaries; in December 5,970 shells, 259 bombs, 1,849 incendiaries. There were fires without number—more than 700 in October alone.
In these dreary fall months occurred 79 percent of the air raids which were to strike Leningrad during the whole of the war and 88 percent of the air-raid casualties.
The reports piled up in the City Records Office. One for October read:
Ulitsa Marat Dom 74. Two explosive bombs fell on two different wings. Under the wreckage of the ruined building were found the bodies of Engineer-Architect Zukov, 35; Ogurtsova 14, Ogurtsova 17, Tutina, 35, Potekhina, V., 17, Tsvetkov, 28. The body of Ye. V. Kunenkova, 60, was found in the opposite wing where she had been blown from a window by the explosive wave. Potekhina, V., was found under the wreckage of a two-story house; the girl was crying for help, and her father, being at the scene with the ARP team, started to pull away the wreckage. From under the obstruction came the cry: “Father, save me.” But when the last timbers were pulled away, the girl had died of a wound in the forehead.
The Germans had charted the city for artillery. Firing point No. 736 was a school in Baburin Pereulok, No. 708 the Institute for Maternal Care, No. 192 the Pioneer Palace, No. 89 the Erisman Hospital, No. 295 the Gostiny Dvor, No. 9 the Hermitage, No. 757 an apartment house on Bol-shaya Zelena Ulitsa, No. 99 the Nechayev Hospital, No. 187 the Red Fleet library. Smolny Institute, the NKVD headquarters on the Liteiny and the Admiralty were favorite targets. The Germans had the biggest guns in Europe trained on Leningrad—cannon from Skoda, from Krupp, from Schneider; railroad guns of calibers as high as 400 mm and 420 mm, firing shells of 800 and 900 kilos, over distances of 15,000, 28,000 and even 31,000 yards from six great artillery investments, circled about the city.
But life went on. Vera Ketlinskaya broadcast over Leningrad radio on October 19, marking the seventeenth week of war:
I was teaching my little son his first uncertain steps when the radio brought into our lives that new all-engulfing word—war. Now seventeen weeks have passed. War has changed the lives of each of us, in big things and little. I have put aside the book I was writing about happiness in order to write about struggle, about bravery, about unyielding stubborn resistance. My son sleeps in a bomb shelter and knows the sound of the airraid sirens as well as the words “to walk” and “to eat.” ... There is no good news. Not yet. But we will wait. We will fight. . . .
The Philharmonic put on a concert in the big hall on October 25. Alek-sandr Kamensky played Tchaikovsky. He did the Prater Waltz for an encore. The concert was given during the afternoon, and deep shadows filled the unheated hall. Spectators sat in their greatcoats. Many were military men.
Most of the famous old secondhand bookstores were still open. Ilya Glazunov3 and his father visited their favorite, from time to time, at the corner of Bolshoi Prospekt and Vvedensky streets. Not much had changed since the war. Old men in overcoats, with chapped hands and gold-rimmed spectacles huddled together and peered at calf-bound volumes. There were stacks of a new edition of Dickens’ Great Expectations. It had come off the press just before the blockade. Now all the copies were penned up in Leningrad. On the cover there was a drawing of a little boy, his hand held by a middle-aged man, looking at a ship vanishing into the distance, far, far into the distance. It made a small boy dream.
The astronomer A. N. Deich undertook to rescue from the Pulkovo observatory whatever remained of the telescopic lenses, the scientific equipment, the valuable charts of the stars, the catalogues of the heavens, the remarkable library and archives. Battle had raged in and around the observatory buildings for weeks. The great dome of the main telescope site had been badly smashed, but Deich discovered that the central vaults in which most of the materials had been stored were still in Russian hands and apparently undamaged. He led an expedition to the observatory late in the night of October 13. The German lines were only a few hundred feet distant. Under cover of darkness the most valued observatory possessions, the incunabula among them, were removed. They had to be carried by hand for a quarter of a mile because the trucks could not mount the observatory hill.
Three nights later Professor N. N. Pavlov and a convoy of five trucks started for the observatory, also at night. They were spotted about a mile from the observatory and had to halt as the Germans brought them under fire. They took refuge in a ditch but finally were able to remove a full load of records and equipment. On their way out they again came under German fire.
One October night when the bombardment was particularly heavy Nikolai Tikhonov, the poet who was now a war correspondent, encountered a familiar figure in one of the lower corridors of Smolny —a stocky, handsome man, fiery, a great charmer of the ladies, with hair like King Lear and a beard like Jove—Professor Iosif Orbeli, director of the Hermitage.
Orbeli greeted Tikhonov with enthusiasm.
“You haven’t, of course, forgotten the Nizami anniversary?” Orbeli said eagerly. Nizami was the national poet of Azerbaijan. His eight hundredth anniversary was October 19. Long before the war the Hermitage had made plans to mark the occasion. As Orbeli talked, Tikhonov could hear the crash of bombs, the bark of guns.
“Dear Iosif Abramovich,” Tikhonov said. “You hear what’s going on all around us. In these circumstances a celebration might not be very triumphant.”
Bombs or no bombs, war or no war, Orbeli was determined to stage his meeting. He persuaded Tikhonov to speak. He persuaded the military authorities to release “for one day only” half a dozen leading Orientologists, serving on the Pulkovo or Kolpino lines. He promised that they would be back in the trenches before dawn.
Precisely as scheduled, the meeting was held at 2 P.M. on October 19 in the Hermitage and completed a few minutes before the customary late-afternoon alert. It was, Tikhonov later discovered, the only celebration in all Russia of the great poet’s anniversary. Neither in Moscow nor in Baku was the day marked.
“People of light”—that was what Tikhonov called the people of Leningrad in these times.
But the light was flickering out for some—for a group of sailors who knifed a captain at the naval docks, stole a boat and tried to make their way to a Finnish port. They were caught. A cutter brought them back. The command was mustered out and the five men were lined up before an open ditch. One dropped to his knees, crying for his life. The order was given, a volley rang out and the five slowly fell into the ditch.
The light was dim for another group of sailors. They bought some samogon, moonshine, from a peasant and got drunk on duty. They were sent into a penalty battalion, where death would be their companion on mission after mission of the kind from which few return.
It was dim, too, for a buxom Russian girl with a strong face and rough hands. She wore a sailor’s jacket and a short skirt. An ersatz sailor, the men at Kronstadt called her. They joked with her, tough sailor’s jokes. She answered them back in kind. Jolly, tough, witless—so she seemed. One day she asked for the keys to the gun room. She said she’d forgotten to clean one of the guns. She unlocked the locker, took out a rifle, went to her bunk, kicked the boot off her right foot, hooked the trigger with her big toe and shot herself.
She could not go on longer. This was her second war. The first had begun in the late thirties when the “black crow” of the police had swept up to the jewelry store where she worked. All the clerks had been arrested. The manager, it seemed, had been stealing. What happened to him did not matter. What happened to Vera brought an end to her life. She was sent to an island, a prison where the men were on one side of a wall, the women on the other. Sometimes they beat the wall down. The men were like beasts. So were the women. Somehow, she had survived that. Now she wanted love, a home, children. And the man she loved did not love her. All around were war and death and suffering. It was too much. Why go on? She killed herself.
Hunger . . . cold . . . bullets . . . bombs . . . the allies of the Germans were hard at work in Leningrad.
Deus Conservat Omnia . . .
1 The Moscow situation was so critical that Stalin put the city in a state of siege—that is, under strict martial law. The action was taken between 10 and n P.M. on the evening of October 19 at a meeting in Stalin’s Kremlin office attended by most of the State Defense Council members and A. S. Shcherbakov, the Moscow Party leader. Stalin called in the Moscow commandant, Lieutenant General Pavel A. Artemev, and his commissar, K. F. Telegin. For days Moscow had been disorganized by a wild flight of broken units and refugees. Stalin asked Artemev what the situation was. Artemev said that it was still alarming. He had taken steps to restore order. They had not been sufficient, and he proposed proclamation of a state of siege. Stalin ordered Georgi Malenkov to write out the decree. Then, irritated by Malenkov’s slowness and wordiness, he snapped angrily at him, tore the paper from his hands, and dictated to Shcherbakov a new proclamation, which was promptly posted on the Moscow walls and broadcast over the radio. (K. F. Telegin,Voprosy Istorii KPSS, No. 9, September, 1965, p. 104.) On October 16 the High Command had been divided into two groups, a first echelon, the operational group, headed by Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky, and a second, headed by Marshal B. M. Shaposh-nikov. The second echelon was moved out of Moscow to an unnamed location from which it could continue to direct the troops, even if Moscow fell or was encircled. Both the Defense and Naval Commissariats were removed to Kuibyshev. General S. M. Shtemenko directed the loading of the special headquarters train on the morning of October 17. The train left Moscow at 7 P.M. and arrived at the new headquarters the next morning. Shtemenko returned to Moscow by car on the night of October 18. The High Command was working during evenings in the Byelorussian subway station because of the persistence and severity of German air attacks. It has been widely rumored that Stalin left Moscow briefly at this time, but there is no confirmation in the memoirs. The Shaposhnikov group returned to Moscow in late December, but a communications center was continued in the emergency locale for some time. (Shtemenko, op. cit., pp. 40-45; A. M. Vasilevsky, Bitva Za Moskvu, 2nd edition, Moscow, 1968, p. 20.) In his famous “secret speech” Khrushchev claimed that Stalin summoned the Communist Party Central Committee to Moscow for a plenary session during October, 1941. The members came to Moscow and waited several days, but the meeting was never called. Whether the meeting and its postponement or cancellation were related to the critical October days on the Moscow front Khrushchev never made clear.
2 In fact, in Pavlov’s opinion, no forged ration cards were introduced by the Germans. (Personal communication, April 30, 1968.)
3 Glazunov is now a well-known Soviet painter of modernist tendencies.