36 ♦ Seven Men Knew

THE FIRST DAY OR TWO OR THREE WERE THE WORST. SO Nikolai Chukovsky found. If a man had nothing but a slice of bread to eat, he suffered terrible hunger pangs the first day. And the second. But gradually the pain faded into quiet despondency, a gloom that had no ending, a weakness that advanced with frightening rapidity. What you did yesterday you could not do today. You found yourself surrounded by obstacles too difficult to overcome. The stairs were too steep to climb. The wood was too hard to chop, the shelf too high to reach, the toilet too difficult to clean. Each day the weakness grew. But awareness did not decline. You saw yourself from a distance. You knew what was happening, but you could not halt it. You saw your body changing, the legs wasting to toothpicks, the arms vanishing, the breasts turning into empty bags. Skirts slipped from the hips, trousers would not stay up. Strange bones appeared. Or the opposite—you puffed up. You could no longer wear your shoes. Your neighbor had to help you to your feet. Your cheeks looked as though they were bursting. Your neck was too thick for your collar. But it was nothing except wind and water. There was no strength in you. Some said it came from drinking too much. Half of Leningrad was wasting away, the other half was swelling from the water drunk to fill empty stomachs.

It was not true, Chukovsky felt, that you feared most your own death. What was most terrible was to see the people around you dying. What you feared was the inevitable process, the weakness that seized you, the terror of dying alone by degrees in darkness, in cold and in hunger.

As Maria Razina, a Party worker, noted: “Leningraders live so badly it is not possible to imagine anything worse—hunger, cold, and darkness in every house with the fall of night.”

October had been hungry, and it was stormy after the fourteenth and snowy. The bombs and shells took their toll. In November the deaths began. Not only the deaths from hunger. The elderly slipped quietly away of many diseases. Younger people died of galloping consumption, of grippe. Any disease finished you quickly. An ulcer was fatal. Half the food you ate was inedible. People began to stuff their stomachs with substitutes. They tore the wallpaper from the walls and scraped off the paste, which was supposed to have been made with potato flour. Some ate the paper. It had some nourishment, they thought, because it was made from wood. Later they chewed the plaster—just to fill their stomachs. Vera Inber visited her friend, Marietta, a pharmacologist at the Erisman Hospital where her husband worked. She noticed that the cages for the guinea pigs and rabbits that lined the corridor were all empty now. Only the smell remained. Outside the bomb shelter she saw a watchdog, Dinka. The dog, like most of those in Leningrad, was trained to go to the shelter when the air-raid siren sounded. But already dogs were becoming rare in the besieged city. You noticed those that remained. You thought about them.

Dystrophy and diarrhea appeared—the result of the inedible elements in the diet, the chaff in the bread, the sweepings, the plaster, the paste and the other indigestibles. A man’s strength flowed right through him. Within a few hours he was dead. A certain order of starvation emerged. It was not the old who went first. It was the young, especially those fourteen to eighteen, who lived on the smallest rations. Men died before women. Healthy, strong people sank before chronic invalids. This was the direct result of the inequity in the rations. Young people twelve to fourteen received a dependent’s ration, which was identical with the ration for children up to the age of twelve. As of October 1 this was only 200 grams, about a third of a loaf of bread a day—just half the ration of a worker. But vigorous, growing children needed as much food as a worker. This was why they died so swiftly. The ration for men and women was the same—400 grams of bread for workers, 200 for all other categories. But men led more vigorous lives. They needed more food. Without it they died more rapidly than the women. The monthly meat ration for children and young people was 400 grams, hardly a third of that for workers (1,500 grams). Young people got half the fats, a little more than half the cereals and three-quarters the sweets. Troops at the front received twice the worker’s ration—800 grams of bread a day beginning October 1, 150 grams of meat a day, 80 grams of fish, 140 grams of cereal, 500 grams of potatoes and vegetables, 50 grams of fat and 35 grams of sugar.

“Today it is so simple to die,” Yelena Skryabina noted in her diary. “You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on the bed and you never again get up.”

She was concerned about her sixteen-year-old son, Dima. In August and September he chased from one end of the city to another in search of groceries, watching the war bulletin boards, playing with his friends. Now he was like an old man. He sat all day in his slippers beside the stove, pale-blue circles under his eyes. Unless he could be shaken from apathy he would die. Yelena Skryabina could find little to feed him. He got only a child’s ration of 200 grams a day—a couple of slices of bread. Nothing for a growing boy. She tried to tempt him with such delicacies as she could contrive—a jellied pâté made by boiling old leather, soup thickened with cellulose.

It was no longer uncommon to see people collapse of hunger. Yelena Skryabina noticed a man walking slowly ahead of her in the street. As she overtook him, she glanced at his face, frighteningly blue. Death, she felt, must be hovering over him. She had not taken more than a few paces when she looked back. He tottered and dropped slowly to the sidewalk. When she reached him, he was dead.

There were wild rumors of plague and cholera—fortunately not true. But rats became bolder. They, too, were hungry. A sailor awoke with the feeling someone was staring at him. It was the yellow eyes of a great rat on the foot of his bed. The rise in dystrophy and scurvy astonished the doctors. Before November came to an end 18 percent of the hospital case load was starvation-related diseases. On November 20 the clinic at the Kirov factory issued twenty-eight sick reports for dystrophy. The next day the total was fifty. The Vyborg region registry bureau was unable to keep up with the demand for death certificates. By the end of November at least 11,085 Lenin-graders had died of starvation.¹

Already the whispers had begun: In the markets some of the sausage was made not of pork but of human flesh. The militia, it was said, had evidence of this in their possession. Who could tell whether or not it was true? Better to take no chances. Yelena Skryabina’s husband warned her not to let five-year-old Yuri play far from the house, even if he was with his nurse. Children, it was said, had disappeared. . . .

A whole new standard of values was arising. Women would trade a diamond ring for a few pounds of black bread so coarse it seemed to be baked of straw. When Luknitsky returned from the front, women waited outside the railroad station. They tugged at his shoulder, saying, “Soldier, wouldn’t you like some wine?” They had a bottle or two of spirits to trade for bread, which was in better supply with the troops. Sometimes at the Writers’ House there would be a bit of meat in the soup—horse meat.

Hunger brought other changes. Sex virtually disappeared. It was not only that physical sex traits vanished—menstruation halted, women’s breasts shriveled, their faces sagged. The sex drive evaporated. Women made no effort to beautify themselves. Lipsticks were eaten as food in December and January. The grease was used for frying ersatz bread. Face powder was mixed into ersatz flour. The births dropped catastrophically in 1942 to only one-third the 1941 figure. In 1943 they dropped another 25 percent. The birth rate in 1940 was 25.1 per 1,000. In 1941 it was 18.3, in 1942 only 6.2.² The wife of a friend of Pavel Luknitsky, Edik Orlova, gave birth to a child at a lying-in home on Vasilevsky Island, February 12. She was brought from her home at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal in a sled. She gave birth in darkness, lighted only by the flickering flames from a tin stove. Despite every effort the child died on the eleventh day.

Nikolai Chukovsky believed that hungry bodies conserved strength by eliminating the sex drive. Among starving people it was hard to tell men from women. They slept together for warmth, but their bodies aroused no sexual stimulation.

In late winter he took some workers from the fleet newspaper to a bath— a rare treat. The Leningrad baths closed in December and did not work for two or three months. Few workers had even had their clothes off for weeks, living and working in buildings where the temperature was near zero. As they prepared to go to the bath, clean clothing in hand, a question arose about Zoya, one of the typesetters. She appeared, ready to join her comrades at the bath. Chukovsky was embarrassed. Zoya certainly had every right to a bath, but what to do with her among a crowd of men? Nonetheless, they started off together. At the bathhouse there was a surprise. It was ladies’ day! Zoya was the only one permitted to bathe. Now the shoe was on the other foot. Finally, Chukovsky appealed to the director and got permission for his sailors to bathe, too. The little band of men undressed and took their bath amid a crowd of women. There was not the slightest embarrassment. Chukovsky could not help thinking how his sailors would have reacted a few months before, surrounded by naked women. But here they were, all skin and bones, the women even more than the men. Neither men nor women gave it a thought. Zoya, instead of going into a corner by herself, joined the men. It seemed perfectly natural. They passed the soap back and forth, gossiped, soaked themselves, enjoyed the water and the warmth. There was no sign of sexual feeling on either side.

When rations began to increase, when starvation moderated, sex began to return to normal. The war gave rise to new forms of relations between men and women. “Front love” was what it was called in Leningrad—the love which sprang up between men and women, girls and boys, fighting in the lines together, serving in the AA crews, the love between the nurses and the men they cared for. Many of them had wives or husbands from whom they had long been separated. They did not know whether they would survive the war—or even the week. Chukovsky felt that “front love” commanded respect as a warm and necessary human relationship, one which was only natural in the unnatural conditions of the war and the siege.

Not everyone’s nerves held up. One evening Luknitsky sat in the Writers’ House at the table with Ernst Gollerbach, who began to explain that Hitler was bombing Leningrad in order to kill Gollerbach. He begged his companions not to blame him for the raids. “I would kill myself if it would stop the raids,” he said, “but I am a Christian and it is not possible.” After a few moments his companions realized that Gollerbach had gone out of his mind. What to do with the poor man? Could his wife care for him? To put him in an insane asylum was a death sentence. By this time the Writers’ House had begun to give meals only in exchange for coupons. This meant a 50 percent cut in the ration of writers who had been eating there. When Luknitsky went home after such a miserable meal, he drank a glass or two of ersatz coffee without sugar or bread to try to quench his hunger.

Captain Ivan V. Travkin was a submarine commander. His submarine was stationed in the Neva and his family was in Leningrad. He got leave to visit them and found his wife, her body badly swollen, her eyes sunken in their sockets, hardly able to move. His daughter with puffy eyes—the first sign of dystrophy—sat on the bed muffled in bedclothes, eating soup made from library paste. His mother-in-law wandered about the dark, cold room mumbling, laughing and crying—she had lost her reason. The windows had been broken by bomb blasts and replaced by plywood. The walls were black with smoke from the little iron stove. There was a flickering kerosene lamp. Outside shells could be heard bursting. It was a typical Leningrad family on a typical Leningrad day.

Prices rose steadily on the black market. In early November a small loaf of black bread (if you could find one) sold for 60 rubles ($10), a sack of potatoes for 300 and a kilo of meat for 1,200.

The truth, as none knew better than Pavlov, was that time was running out for Leningrad. The Lake Ladoga shipping route had been less than a brilliant success. The little overladen boats left for Osinovets usually at night. The crossing took sixteen hours. German bombers watched like hawks. The boats often sank, either with the load of food being brought to Leningrad or with refugees being taken out.

The route had worked badly almost from the start. A military man, Major General Afanasy M. Shilov, had been put in chargé. He ordered barges, overladen with grain and munitions, out onto the storm-tossed waters against the advice of their sailors. There were hideous losses. Shilov was called in by Andrei Zhdanov and warned that he would go before a military court (and face the firing squad) if he sent more ships out onto the lake against the will of the skippers.

Admiral A. T. Karavayev, who was present at the stormy meeting, thought Zhdanov looked seriously ill, pale and tired. He coughed and wheezed but never stopped smoking.

The pressure to get supplies into Leningrad was crushing. Two or three days later Zhdanov sent a telegram to Ladoga saying: “Bread is vanishing in Leningrad. Each 24 hours without shipments dooms the lives of thousands of Leningraders.”

Leningrad in October had been using about 1,100 tons of flour a day. But in the first thirty days the Ladoga route brought in only 9,800 tons of food. Mountains of supplies piled up around Volkhov and Gostinopolye. More and more barges and ships were being sunk by Nazi planes, despite appeals to Zhdanov for better fighter cover.

The situation grew so critical that Mayor Popkov was sent to Novaya Ladoga October 13 to try and straighten out the mess. He arrived coincident with a savage German bombing of the docks and storage area. A meeting of those working on the shipping route was summoned and Popkov spoke in solemn terms:

“You know that the ration has been lowered for the third time in Leningrad. Workers are getting 400 grams, employees and children 200. It’s not much. I remind you that a working man requires 2,000 calories. Four hundred grams of our bread gives a little more than 500 calories. . . . I’m not trying to persuade you of anything, but here is the situation: If for a few days grain is not brought across the lake, then the Leningraders will not receive a single gram of bread. The Military Council of the front and the fleet, the Party committee and the City Council have instructed me to tell you that the life of Leningrad is now in your hands.”

This appeal had an effect. By herculean efforts the back of the logjam was broken and 5,000 tons of food were pushed over the lake to Osinovets. At the same time 12,000 tons of flour, 1,500 tons of cereals and 1,000 tons of meat were moved up from Gostinopolye to Novaya Ladoga to wait shipment to Leningrad. Then violent autumn storms hit and hampered shipments as much as did the Germans.

One of the worst disasters occurred November 4 when a German JU-88 attacked the gunboat Konstruktor, en route from Osinovets to Novaya Ladoga with decks loaded with refugees, mostly women and children. The captain dodged one bomb, then the ship was hit and sank with a loss of 204 persons, including 34 crew members.

Lake shipping came to an end with the formation of ice November 15 —except for a few final trips by Ladoga gunboats which managed to force their way through as late as November 30, bringing in another 800 tons of flour.

Total shipments by the lake had been 24,097 tons of grain and flour and 1,131 tons of meat and dairy products—a twenty-day supply in sixty-five days of shipping. Total freight brought into Leningrad was 51,324 tons— the difference being made up by munitions. In the same period about 10,000 tons of high-priority materials and 33,479 individuals were taken out over the lake. The blockade of Leningrad had occurred so suddenly and surprisingly that it trapped enormous shipments of industrial, military and artistic treasures, loaded in freight cars, unable to move from the Leningrad yards. A count of these goods after the blockade began found 1,900 cars loaded with art treasures, books, scientific apparatus and machinery. Another 227 cars were loaded with war supplies being sent out by the Defense Commissariat. In all, 282 trains of goods had been evacuated from Leningrad between June 29 and August 29, including 86 more or less complete factories. But the great Kirov works had not been sent out. It was only after the fall of Mga that Admiral I. S. Isakov was summoned to Smolny by Zhdanov and ordered to start to ship the Kirov machinery to the Urals— an operation which he attempted to carry out with the skimpy ship and port resources of Lake Ladoga plus what air transport could be commandeered. Again and again the Nazi air fleet struck at the Ladoga ships. By the end of the navigation period only 7 barges were left unsunk. Six small steamers and 24 barges had been lost.³

Leningrad began November with 15 days of flour on hand, 16 days of cereal, 30 days of sugar, 22 days of fats, almost no meat. What meat there was came in by air and that was not much.

“Everyone knew that food was scarce,” Pavlov recorded, “since rations were being reduced. But the actual situation was known to only seven men.”

Two confidential Party workers kept a record of deliveries of food to Leningrad. Only the inner circle of the Military Command and Pavlov knew the totals.

November 7 was approaching, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the big Soviet holiday. This was the day when all Russia celebrated with feasts, wine, vodka, fat turkeys, suckling pigs, sturgeon in aspic, roasted hams, goose, sausages. It was a time of gaiety, merriment, family dinners, feasting, much drinking.

Not in 1941. Leningrad had cold, not warmth; darkness, not light. Everyone in Leningrad was hungry all the time now. November 7 was no exception. Pavlov had nothing in his storehouses to give the people. For the children he manged to find 200 grams—half a cup—of sour cream and 100 grams—a couple of tablespoons—of potato flour. Adults got five pickled tomatoes—some adults, that is; a few got a half-liter of wine and a handful of chocolates. A line of women was standing outside a store on Vasilevsky Island, waiting for the wine to be passed out, when a German shell hit. Bodies were blasted to bits. A passing Red Army man named Zakharov, just back from the front, was horrified to see the surviving women pick their way over the human wreckage and reform the queue, fearful that they might miss their allotment.

Yevgeniya Vasyutina traded 200 grams of cottonseed oil for a liter of kerosene and baked some flatcakes of pea flour for her holiday feast. She had four pieces of candy. Her factory closed early, at five o’clock. She sat down beside her radio loudspeaker. Stalin was supposed to speak. Music played until 10:30 P.M. Then an announcement: No speech that night; listen again at 6 A.M. She felt cheated as she went to sleep in the icy room.

The Germans had been preparing for November 7. For days leaflets rained down on the city: “Go to the baths. Put on your white dresses. Eat the funeral dishes. Lie down in your coffins and prepare for death. On November 7 the skies will be blue—blue with the explosion of German bombs.”

It was not the first time the Germans had called on the women of Leningrad to wear their white dresses. In the terrible days of August when thousands worked on the fortifications outside the city the Nazi broadcasts had told them to wear white dresses—so the bombers could see and avoid attacking them. Hundreds of gullible babushkas put white scarves over their heads, white shawls over their shoulders, and were machine-gunned in the trenches, beautiful targets for low-flying Junkers.

The Leningrad Command was certain the Nazis planned a special observance on November 7. They now had a crack bomber echelon assigned to attack Leningrad, the Hindenburg Escadrille. In an effort to immobilize the German air arm over the November 7 holiday, the small Soviet Stormovik force carried out spoiling attacks on the nearby Nazi airdromes October 30 and again November 6. A night fighter patrol was set up over the city. On the night of November 4 there was a spectacular encounter. A young Soviet pilot named Aleksei Sevastyanov rammed his plane into a German Heinkel-i 1 bomber, which fell with a tremendous explosion in the Tauride Palace gardens in the center of the city. Both pilots came down by parachute. The Nazi flier was seized by a street crowd and almost lynched.

This did not weaken German determination to mark the November holiday in a special way. On the evening of November 6, as the radio was broadcasting Moscow’s traditional ceremonial, the air-raid sirens sounded.

Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Anatoly Tarasenkov made their way through the barrage to the apartment of the mother of Orest Tsekhnovitser, the Dostoyevsky scholar who had been lost in the Tallinn disaster. The mother had sent Vishnevsky a letter, begging to know the fate of her son. Neither Vishnevsky nor Tarasenkov had ever met the mother. They found her in the typical flat of a Leningrad intelligent—book-lined, crowded with heavy furniture, cold and dark. The mother was gray but spirited. Tsekhnovitser’s sister was there, old, worn and ugly. They insisted on hearing the whole tragic story. Then the mother told Vishnevsky that Tsekhnovitser’s apartment had been commandeered by a police sergeant with the connivance of the building superintendent. Tsekhnovitser’s valuable books had been sold. The women had been unable to get the police to oust the usurpers.

Vishnevsky carefully jotted down the details—the name of the police official (he was attachéd to the 35th Police Station), the address of the apartment, the superintendent’s name—and promised to do what he could. A month later the policeman was given a seven-year term, the superintendent five years. Vishnevsky laconically noted in his diary: “Justice!”

The two correspondents left the apartment low in spirits. The air raid was still going on.

At Smolny the Leningrad High Command sat in the bomb shelter under the main building. Here they did much of their work. Here, in a common dormitory, slept most of the top generals and Party chiefs.

Now they were listening to the radio transmission of the Moscow ceremonial meeting which, they knew, was being held in the great Mayakov-sky Square station of the Moscow subway, one hundred feet below ground, safe from interruption by Nazi bombers. The reception was very bad.

Marshal Voronov telephoned Moscow and spoke with General N. D. Yakovlev, chief of the Artillery Administration, who had just come back from the Mayakovsky Square meeting.

“There’s big news,” Yakovlev shouted. The connection was so poor Voronov couldn’t understand what the news was. He asked Yakovlev to spell it out by letters. Yakovlev spelled “P-A-R-A-D-E.” Finally, Voronov got it. The traditional parade in Red Square would be held tomorrow, regardless of the war, regardless of the Nazi drive on Moscow, regardless of air attacks.

Voronov told Zhdanov the news. Zhdanov didn’t believe it.

“They’re just joking with you,” the Party chief said. Then, he, too, called Moscow. It was true. Somehow it made Leningrad’s troubles a bit easier to bear. And they were heavy. The Nazi air attack had not ceased. In a print shop, located in one of the old chambers of the Peter and Paul Fortress, workers of the newspaper On Guard of the Fatherland had been listening to the Moscow broadcast. A heavy bomb smashed through the ancient structure, killing thirteen of the fourteen men in the shop. The fourteenth man fled from the chamber, mad.

At the Finland freight station Ivan Kanashin was working with a large group of Young Communists to clear the freight jam. This was the station where food and supplies from Lake Ladoga arrived in Leningrad. It was also the collection point for refugees being sent out of the city via the Ladoga steamers. That night a crowd of women, children and elderly persons jammed the station awaiting a train to take them out of Leningrad, out of the iron circle of hunger, cold, fear and danger.

The evening started badly. A railroad bridge near Kushelevka was hit by a bomb, and movement of trains in and out of the station was halted while the damage was repaired. The jam increased.

A little later the air-raid sirens sounded. Around the station was a heavy concentration of antiaircraft guns. They began to bark. Then a blinding light appeared in the sky. The Nazis had dropped enormous flares on parachutes, which made the whole area lighter than day. Women and children huddled closer in terror. The bombs began to fall.

These were not ordinary high explosives. These were heavier than anything the Germans had used on Leningrad before—naval magnetic mines, weighing a ton or more, with a diameter of nine or ten feet, attachéd to parachutes. Many were delayed-action weapons. The bomb disposal crews had no experience with these weapons. They did not know that if they attacked them with wrenches and metal hammers they were apt to set them off.

The heavy bombs smashed into the train yards, hurling loaded trains from the rails, crushing cars already filled with women and children. Then the Germans began to toss incendiary bombs into the smoking jumble. Kanashin was in a car which stood next to a huge boiler. The boiler blew up and knocked over the car. Only the heavy steel structure saved Kanashin and his fellow workers from being crushed. The raid went on all night. In the morning the freight station was strewn with the corpses of women and children. There were enormous bomb holes everywhere. The cars were twisted masses of metal. Two trainloads of heavily wounded had been in the station. Now there was nothing but formless wreckage, piled high with bodies.

Suddenly Kanashin heard a roar of voices. He saw a crowd of women approaching. They had in their hands a young Nazi flier who had been shot down during the night. They brought him up to the mountain of bodies which lay where the trains of the heavily wounded had been obliterated. “Do you see what you did, you murderer?” they shouted. “Do you see?”

The next day Luknitsky was returning to Leningrad from the front in Karelia. It was early morning, still dark. All night he had ridden in the unheated car, filled with silent people. They were unable to enter the Finland Station. The train halted two or three hundred yards away. The station lay in ruins, the platforms smashed. Passengers picked their way through a tiny service entrance. Tired and cold, with a heavy pack on his back, Luknitsky made his way into the dismal deserted streets. He had to walk from the Kirov Bridge all the way home. Streetcar No. 30 was not running because a huge delayed-action bomb still lay in Wolf Street.

On the night of November 6 submarine L-3 navigated without pilot, buoys or lights from Kronstadt through the Sea Canal and up the Neva into Leningrad. It was supposed to take up station at the Lieutenant Schmidt embankment but couldn’t get through the ice above the Institute of Mines. It dropped anchor there and some crew members went ashore through driving snow to see their families in Leningrad. German planes were overhead and fires swirled up in the city. Aboard the submarine the temperature was 12 degrees above freezing. The steward laid a white cloth on the mess table and produced some hot cocoa. The doctor found some wine in his supplies, and the submariners celebrated the holiday with a little gaiety. They were among the few.

Sergei Yezersky, a writer on Leningradskaya Pravda, jotted down his impressions of that night:

Midnight. The city is quiet and empty. The great streets and squares are dead. No lights. Only darkness. A cold wind whips the snow into little whirlwinds. The sound of artillery. Low clouds reflect the shelling. Nearby an explosion. The Germans are shelling the city. At the intersections and the bridges—patrols. They challenge sternly: “Halt! Who goes there?”

There was no celebration of the November 7 holiday. No parades. No review in Palace Square. No great meeting at Smolny or the Tauride Palace. A few red flags in the streets, on the Winter Palace and hung from windows. No banners proclaiming the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The street radios blared out readings from Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories—tales of the heroic siege of the defenders of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Vishnevsky, ever on the search for something to raise morale, thought the reading was marvelous. Zhdanov did not speak. There were speeches on the radio by Mayor Popkov, the Leningrad front commander Lieutenant General M. S. Khozin, the writer Nikolai Tikhonov and a few others. Leningradskaya Pravda set the tone with its editorial: “We will be cold—but we will survive; we will be hungry—but we will tighten our belts; it will be hard—but we will hold out; we will hold out—until we win.” Nikolai Akimov gave Leningrad its only holiday premiere. He presented Gladkov’s Stepchildren of Glory, a patriotic play about the war of 1812 at the Theater of Comedy. The cold, dark theater was half filled.

Cold and dark . . . those were the words most often used to describe Leningrad on the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Revolution. Sayanov walked down the Nevsky one early November day. Dusk had fallen. The wind hurried the people along and swung the signs above the shops, whirling the snow up in clouds, in and out of the doorways. It whistled through the drainpipes. The people, dark and black, muffled in their winter clothes, hastened along. They did not halt. They did not speak. Not far away shells were falling. No one paid heed. They struggled across the Neva bridges, past the granite embankments. Already there was ice on the river where the warships stood and here and there a steaming hole beside the shore. People had begun to bring water to their homes, where the pipes had frozen.

It was a gray, granite city, and the wind was king. Sometimes people found strange messages in their postboxes. Sheets of paper painfully initialed: “Only God can save Leningrad. Pray to Heaven. The Time of the Apocalypse has come. Christ is now in the peaks of the Caucasus.” There were Old Believers and Molokans, survivors of the sects of the forests, still in Leningrad, and this was their message to their fellow Russians.

Time of the Apocalypse, indeed ...

On November 8 the German 39th Motorized Corps under General Schmidt captured Tikhvin, forty miles east of Volkhov, and severed the rail connection between the Moscow mainland and the Ladoga supply route. On that day Hitler spoke at Munich. He said: “Leningrad’s hands are in the air. It falls sooner or later. No one can free it. No one can break the ring. Leningrad is doomed to die of famine.”

It was true—or almost true. Leningrad had not surrendered, but it was doomed. Brass bands played over the German radio. Nazi commentators in broadcasts directed to Leningrad said over and over again: “Leningrad will be compelled to surrender without the blood of German soldiers being shed.”

So it seemed. How could the city be fed? There were now panic and disarray in Leningrad. The news of Tikhvin’s fall spread like the fierce wind on the Nevsky from person to person. The press, of course, said nothing. What food was left in the city? Very little—much less than the Leningraders knew. But seven men did know. They added up the total on November 9: flour for 7 days, cereals for 8, fats for 14, sugar for 22. No meat, not a ton in the reserves. On the other side of Lake Ladoga, now so stormy, so ice-filled that boats could hardly break their way across, there were 17 days’ supply of flour, 10 days’ of cereals, 3 days’ of fats and 9 days’ of meat.

Supply trains could get no closer to Leningrad than the tiny way station of Zaborye, no miles from Volkhov. From Zaborye to Ladoga not even a forest road connected the 220 miles. Could trucks struggle through that distance even if a road could be built? How long would it take? Would not the city starve first?

The answers to these questions were terrifying.

But only seven men in Leningrad knew how terrifying, Pavlov first among them.

There was no time to lose if the city was to be saved—if the city could be saved.

Emergency orders ...

In Leningrad an immediate cut in military rations was instituted. The troops had been getting 800 grams of bread a day, plus hot soup and stew. Front-line troops were cut to 600 grams of bread and 125 grams of meat. Rear units got 400 grams of bread and 50 of meat.

To cut civilian rations further, Pavlov knew, would only doom the whole city to more rapid starvation. Civilians could not maintain themselves as it was. The hope was that the ice would quickly freeze on Lake Ladoga and food could be brought across the lake. The forecast was for lower temperatures.

Zhdanov and the Leningrad Defense Council gambled. They decided to hold the civilian ration at its present level. If the ice froze, it could be maintained. Each day their first concern was the thermometer. The temperature dropped, but the lake did not freeze. Five days passed. Supplies were near exhaustion. There was no alternative.

On November 13 the city’s rations were cut again—to 300 grams (about ⅔ of a pound) of bread daily for factory workers. Everyone else was cut to 150 grams.

That reduced the daily consumption of flour to 622 tons. But Pavlov knew this level could be maintained for only a few days. He waited. He waited for the ice. It did not freeze, it was still thin. By November 20, time—and flour—were running out. Again the ration was cut—brutally: to 250 grams for factory workers, 125 (two slices) for everyone else. Front-line troops got 500 grams, rear echelons 300.

That was the day that Director Zolotukhin of Leningradskaya Fravda came to Sergei Yezersky and asked him to write the editorial which brought the terrible news to Leningrad.

“To write the lead editorial,” he recalled, “was always an honor. But what a difficult task this time!”

He went to his table in the section of the newspaper’s cellar which was occupied by the literary department. It was a crowded corner, neither light nor dark, neither cold nor warm. The workers slept on couches, and if there wasn’t room, they slept on the desks. There was always water on the concrete floor and they walked on wooden planking.

His editorial began:

Bolsheviks never have kept anything from the people. They always tell the truth, harsh as it may be. So long as the blockade continues it is not possible to expect any improvement in the food situation. We must reduce the norms of rations in order to hold out as long as the enemy is not pushed back, as long as the circle of blockade is not broken. Difficult? Yes, difficult. But there is no choice. And this everyone must understand. . . .

The new norms brought daily consumption of flour down to 510 tons. Pavlov was now feeding something like 2,500,000 people on 30 carloads of flour a day.

It was incredible. He had cut the daily use of flour by about 75 percent.

Here are the figures:

Beginning of blockade to September 11	2,100 tons
September n-September 16	1,300
September 16-October 1	1,100
October 1-October 26	1,000
October 26-November	1 880
November 1-November	13 735
November 13-November 20	622
November 20-December 25	510

These rations doomed thousands to their deaths. By one estimate the cut doomed one-half the population of the city. Zhdanov knew this. So did Pavlov. They saw no alternative.

Zhdanov called in the leaders of the city’s Young Communists. On these younger people would rest the main shock and burden of trying to pull the city through the tragedy which was unfolding.

“Factories are beginning to close down,” he said. “There is no electricity, no water, no food. The fall of Tikhvin has put us into a second ring of encirclement. The task of tasks is to organize the life of the workers—to give them inspiration, courage, firmness in the face of all difficulties. This is your task.”

On November 13 the bread formula had been changed again. Henceforth it was to contain 25 percent “edible” cellulose. Three hundred people were mobilized to collect “edible” pine and fir bark. Each region of the city was ordered to produce two to two-and-a-half tons of “edible” sawdust per day.

Terror began to live with people. Vera Inber and her husband were walking across Leo Tolstoy Square. There had been two air raids, and now the Germans were shelling the area. It was evening and the sidewalk was icy. Just outside a bakery they heard in the dusk a quavering voice: “Dearie . . . angel . . . help me.”

It was an old woman who had fallen in the dark. Overhead the planes roared, the guns barked. She was alone. They helped her to her feet and started to go on. The old woman spoke again, “Darlings. I’ve lost my bread card. Do help me. I can’t find it without you.”

To her horror Vera Inber heard herself saying, “Find it yourself. We can’t help.”

But her husband, saying nothing, hunted on the icy ground and found the old woman’s card. Then he and Vera Inber hurried down Petropavlovsk Street, and she wondered what had come over her.

To lose a ration card meant almost certain death. The niece of a friend of Luknitsky’s was in a store when someone snatched her card and that of her mother. They were left without food until the end of the month. Luknitsky’s friend gave them her card and tried to live on the watery soup of her hospital lunchroom. When he upbraided her, she angrily replied, “It’s one thing when a grownup is hungry and another when it’s a child.”

In Yevgeniya Vasyutina’s communal apartment her friend Zina’s little daughter cried and cried. She was hungry. On the market you could trade 100 grams of sugar for a pound of cottonseed meal or a kilo of bread for a half-liter of vodka or a tin stove. Cats were beginning to get scarce. So were crows and sparrows. On November 26 Yelena Skryabina heard that 3,000 persons a day were dying in the city. That day, completely unexpectedly, an unknown Red Army man appeared at her door and handed her a pail of sauerkraut. It was manna from heaven.

The temperature was dropping. It was 15 below on November 11 and 20 below on the fourteenth. Luknitsky was sure the cold would beat the Germans. He did not realize it was likely to kill starving Leningrad first.

“November was the most alarming month of the whole blockade,” the official historians of Leningrad concluded, “not only because of the difficulties but because of the uncertainties. War is war. And it was difficult to predict how events would develop around Leningrad. The Fascist command might again mount an offensive toward Svirstroi or toward Vologda. Such a possibility could not be excluded.”

Vera Inber wrote in her diary for November 28:

The future of Leningrad is alarming. Not long ago Professor Z told me: “My daughter spent the whole evening in the cellar, looking for a cat.” I was ready to congratulate her on such love for a cat when Z explained: “We eat them.” Another time Z, a passionate hunter, said: “My life is finished when I have killed my last partridge. And it seems to me I have killed it.”

As the plight of Leningrad worsened, the rumors flew. Toward the end of November everyone heard rumors that on the first of December no more bread would be issued. On that date adults would begin to receive cottonseed cake. Children would get hardtack. This was more than torn nerves could stand. Hundreds of people stormed the few food stores. On November 25 more than 2,000 persons pushed into the Vasilevsky Island department store. An enormous line appeared outside Milk Store No. 2 in the Smolny region, where soya milk was being issued. The queue did not disperse when air-raid sirens sounded. People patiently waited. Whatever they got would be better than what they could get after December 1.

“I’ve waited since 4 A.M.,” one said. “I’ve not eaten all day.” “I can’t go home,” another said. “My children are starving.”

Shells fell in their midst. Some fell, killed and wounded. Others ran in terror. But half an hour later the survivors were back in line, waiting for the saleswomen, wrapped up like snow maidens, their fingers trembling with weakness and cold, to tear off the coupon and give them a husk of bread.

On December first, walking down Wolf Street, Vera Inber saw something she had never before seen—a corpse on a child’s sled. Instead of being placed in a coffin the body had been tightly wrapped in a sheet, the knees and breast clearly outlined in the white swaddling cloth. A strange sight, like something out of the Bible or ancient Egypt. She did not know it would soon become a sight so common as not to attract a passing glance.

On December first the siege of Leningrad entered its ninety-second day. Ninety-one days had passed since the fall of Mga. Seven men knew the secret of Leningrad’s destiny. It was so terrible they themselves could not believe the future which the black figures foretold.

¹ By comparison, the autumn shelling of the city killed 681, wounded 2,269; bombing in September killed 566, wounded 3,853; in October killed 304, wounded 1,843; in November killed 522, wounded 2,505. The total of killed and wounded in three months’ bombing and shelling was 12,533.

² In December, 1943, for the first time since the start of the blockade the birth rate exceeded the death rate. (N.Z., p. 584.)

³ Some Leningrad sources, including the authoritative N.Z., give the figure of food shipments into Leningrad as 45,000 tons. This, D. V. Pavlov explains, is a figure which includes all shipments from September 1 through December 7. It includes freight re-shipped from Shlisselburg after the arrival of the Nazis on the Neva at Ivanovskoye on August 29. Shipments into Leningrad included, in addition to food, 6,600 tons of gasoline, 508,000 shells and mines, 114,000 hand grenades and 3,000,000 bullets. (N.Z., p. 207; Pavlov, op. cit., 3rd edition, p. 124.) By airlift Leningrad received, from October 10 to December 25, 6,186 tons of high-priority freight and 47.3 tons of mail. The planes evacuated 50,099 persons and carried out 47.2 tons of mail and 1,016.7 tons of freight.(Leningrad v VOV, p. 225.)