THE HAYMARKET OR SENNAYA OCCUPIED THE HEART OF Leningrad. Some years earlier it had been named Peace Square, but no one called it that. The Haymarket it had been since the early days of “Piter,” and the Haymarket it was in this winter of Leningrad’s agony. But sometimes it was called the Hungry Market.
At one end of the Haymarket stood an old and undistinguished church and across from it a small barracks of early nineteenth-century architecture. The Haymarket was a square which opened out in the curving Sadovaya, the garden boulevard, one of the busiest shopping streets of pre-Bolshevik Russia. It had been a center of pushcart and stall trade, of peddlers, of izvozchiki, of coachmen and troikas, of flower girls and prostitutes, for two hundred years. Back of the Haymarket, in the tangle of streets between it and the imposing façade of St. Isaac’s Square, extended a web of side streets, the region which Vsevolod Krestovsky memorialized in his classic Petersburg Slums. Here Fedor Dostoyevsky had lived. Here was the house of Mikhail Raskolnikov. Between Spassky and Demidov lanes rose the old building which had once been known as the noisy “Raspberry House.” And at the corner of Tairov Street still stood the de Roberti house. These two had been the lowest dives in old Petersburg, notorious dens into which many a man walked never to emerge again alive. Nearby was the so-called Vyazemskaya Lavra, a haunt of thieves and criminals throughout the nineteenth century. Just beyond the Griboyedov Canal on Stolyarny Lane could be found the house in which Dostoyevsky himself lived when he was writing Crime and Punishment. It was a quarter similar to that in Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths. Here human life was cheap. The air was heavy with the fumes of cheap vodka, cheap makhorka or tobacco, cheap perfume, cheap whores, petty thieves, roguery, blackmail and murder.
All this, of course, had long since been put behind the Haymarket by the Revolution. No more prostitution. No more thievery. No more criminals. So it was said. Whether this had really been true before the war, before Hitler’s invasion, before Leningrad fell into blockade, was difficult to know. But now the Haymarket was once again what it had been in the past—the center for every kind of crime which could find a setting in the besieged city.
Before the war there had been in the Haymarket a great peasant market. This had been long closed, but as starvation deepened, trading for food began again in the Haymarket. By winter it had become the liveliest place in Leningrad. The market bore little resemblance to any other in the world. It was a market of exchange. Money, that is, paper rubles, had virtually no value. Bread was the common currency. Vodka held second place as a medium of exchange. For bread anything was for sale—women’s bodies or men’s lives. Nothing approached it in purchasing power, as the people of Leningrad learned, coming to the Haymarket with a gold watch, a diamond ring or a fur neckpiece. They could get a crust of bread for their valuables— but not much more, not nearly as much as they hoped. Yet why keep anything of value? What good are valuables if you are about to die?
Ordinary people found they had little in common with the traders who suddenly appeared in the Haymarket. These were figures straight from the pages of Dostoyevsky or Kuprin. They were the robbers, the thieves, the murderers, members of the bands which roved the streets of the city and who seemed to hold much of it in their power once night had fallen.
These were the cannibals and their allies—fat, oily, steely-eyed, calculating, the most terrible men and women of their day.
For cannibalism there was in Leningrad. You will look in vain in the published official histories for reports of the trade in human flesh. But the stain of the story slips in, here and there, in casual references, in the memoirs, in allusions in fiction, in what is not said as well as in what is said about the crimes-for-food committed in the city.
The history of anthropophagy goes deep into man’s past. Suggestive traces of the practice have been found in fossil deposits as early as the Paleolithic period. Ancient chronicles suggest that cannibalism was no stranger to Russian soil, having been a custom of the Scythians, the mysterious peoples who inhabited the vast steppes before the rise of Kievan Russia. Among the nomadic tribal warriors who swept westward from the Asian heartlands it was not unknown and sometimes entered into myth, superstition and religion.
But commercial anthropophagy or cannibalism-for-profit is rare in the human experience.
Everything was for sale at the Haymarket. Here stone-faced men sold glasses filled with “Badayev earth"—plain dirt dug from the cellars of the Badayev warehouses into which tons of molten sugar had poured. After the great fire subsided, reclamation teams under Food Chief Pavlov pumped out molten sugar for days, but thousands of tons saturated the ashes and earth beneath the Badayev cellars. Alongside the official reclamation effort went forward unofficial digging (“on the left,” in the Russian phrase). With the onset of winter the digging intensified. Men and women slipped into the Badayev site with picks and axes and hacked at the frozen soil. They sold earth from the first three feet of soil for 100 rubles a glass, that from deeper in the cellar for 50 rubles a glass. Some purchasers refined the sugar by melting it in a pan and running it through a linen cloth. More often it was simply mixed with flour or paste into a gummy confection, part earth, part paste or ersatz flour, part carbonized sugar. This was “candy” or “jelly” or “custard"—whatever the imaginative housewife decided to call it.
In the Haymarket people walked through the crowd as though in a dream. They were pale as ghosts and thin as shadows. Only here and there passed a man or woman with a face, full, rosy and somehow soft yet leathery. A shudder ran through the crowd. For these, it was said, were the cannibals. Dmitri Moldavsky met a man like that on the staircase of his apartment. The man had been to his mother’s flat, where he traded four glasses of flour and a pound of gelatin powder for some clothing. The man had a pink face and splendid, widely spaced blue eyes. Moldavsky thought he would never forget the sight. Instinctively, he wanted to kill this man with the tender cheeks and the too, too bright eyes. He knew what he was.
Cannibals . . . Who were they? How many were they? It is not a subject which the survivors of Leningrad like to discuss. There were no cannibals, a professor recalls. Or rather, there were cannibals, but it only happened when people went crazy. There was a case of which he had heard, for instance, the case of a mother, crazed for food. She lost her mind, went completely mad, killed her daughter and butchered the body. She ground up the flesh and made meat patties. But this was not typical. It was the kind of insane aberration which might happen anywhere at any time. In fact, the professor recalled reading of a similar case before the war.
But rats and cats and mice and birds—that was different. No one could prove for certain that the rats abandoned the city of Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42. But there were many in Leningrad to testify that this was so. Rats had almost disappeared by the middle of January. Possibly they had frozen to death. But the men at the Leningrad front did not believe this. They believed that the Leningrad rats came up out of the frozen cellars, abandoned the bombed-out buildings and made their way by the tens of thousands to the front-line trenches. There food was more plentiful—not much more plentiful, but a bit more so. Certainly rats abounded at the front. The only comfort the starving Leningrad troops could take was that rats were more numerous in the German lines, where the food was better.
Not all the rats had left. Vsevolod Vishnevsky knew a Leningrad poetess, once a beauty. Now she was alone in Leningrad. She sat in her apartment, in a shawl, a karakul coat and heavy boots. Her room was large, filled with pictures, bric-a-brac and—cold. In the evenings she sat beside a small iron stove. Around her gathered a small company of rats, quiet, fearless. She permitted them to join her for their company’s sake. They, too, wished to be warm. So she sat, night after night, alone, with the circle of rats. Perhaps they were waiting for her to grow weaker.
Rumors of cannibalism—yes. Leningrad had been swept by rumors since autumn, when people began to keep their children off the streets. There were reports that children were being kidnaped. Boys and girls were young, easy to seize, and their flesh, it was said, was more tender.
Whether the rumors were true no one really knew. Anything could be true in these times. There were other rumors—that officers at the front were living in luxury with special rations and champagne while the people in the city starved. This was not true. The front was starving like the rest of the city. But in these winter months the radio often did not work for lack of power. Leningradskaya Pravda continued to appear. It missed only one day, January 25, when the power went off and the ink froze in the presses. But often only a few copies were printed and there was no one to distribute them. No one had the strength to lift the bundles. The newspaper Smena did not appear between January 9 and February 5. In fact, all the printing plants in Leningrad had been shut down in December to save electricity except the Volodarsky publishing plant which printedLeningradskaya Pravda—and ration cards. Frequently the matrices from which Pravda was printed did not arrive in Leningrad. They were flown every day from Moscow. But sometimes the planes got lost. At other times the matrices simply vanished. No one knew where they went. No wonder that any kind of story was believed in the Leningrad of January and February. Life was so terrifying for each Leningrader that all other terrors were believable.
In these times people took a special attitude toward mice. Vera Inber and her husband, Dr. Strashun, had a mouse in their frigid apartment. They called her “Princess Myshkina.” In the first days of January Princess Myshkina vanished. Apparently she had died. Vera Inber was surprised how much she missed the mouse, a little spot of life in a frozen world. A few days later she noted with delight in her diary that Princess Myshkina had appeared again. Vera Inber and her husband had had a feast—half a small raw onion, heavily salted and slightly pickled, their bread ration, three little tartlets and some Ararat port wine. After they went to bed she heard Princess Myshkina at work, picking at the crumbs like a bird. Then the mouse climbed the cream pitcher. It was empty, of course. At that point Vera Inber lighted a match. Summoning her last strength, Princess Myshkina leaped from the cream pitcher and vanished.
A mouse confronted one little Leningrad boy with a difficult moral problem. His grandmother had a tin box in which she put every extra scrap of bread and crackers. It was the family’s “iron reserves.” If all else failed— but only then—they would dig into the box. One day the boy was alone in the freezing flat. He heard a noise inside the tin can. He knew what this meant. A mouse was eating the iron reserves. He could not immediately decide what to do. Should he open the box and release the mouse? Should he open the box, kill the mouse and throw it away? Or should he kill the mouse and eat it? The last alternative was the one which most tempted him for, after all, the mouse had been consuming their food. But the thought of eating the mouse was repulsive. Finally, he took the lid from the box, shook it and let the mouse escape. After all, he thought, the mouse was as hungry as he, and how did he know whether it did not have as much right to live as he did?
Other Leningraders, starving though they were, nonetheless each night carefully put a saucer on the floor with a few crumbs from their miserly ration for a Prince Myshkin or Princess Myshkina.
There were, of course, no more birds in Leningrad. First to disappear were the crows, the black-and-gray northern European crows. They flew off to the German lines in November. Next to go were the gulls and the pigeons. Then the sparrows and starlings vanished. They died of cold and hunger just as the people did. Some said they had seen sparrows drop like stones while flying over the Neva, simply frozen to death in flight. An old ship worker, named Ilya Kroshin, recalled that when Petrograd was starving in 1920 the crows lived in the factory shops. “Now there are no crows,” he observed sadly.
There was hardly a cat or a dog left in Leningrad by late December. They had all been eaten.1 But the trauma was great when a man came to butcher an animal which had lived on his affection for years. One elderly artist strangled his pet cat and ate it, according to Vsevolod Vishnevsky. Later, he tried to hang himself, but the rope failed, he fell to the floor, breaking his leg, and froze to death. The smallest Leningrad children grew up not knowing what cats and dogs were. One of the most savage attacks directed at Anna Akhmatova in the postwar years was written by a Leningrad working girl who accused the great poetess of ignorance of Leningrad in the blockade years because, in a poem, she spoke of pigeons in the square before the Kazan Cathedral. There were no pigeons there, the girl asserted. They all had long since been eaten.
On January 1 a young man came to Yelena Skryabina and asked whether a large gray cat which belonged to a certain actress was still alive in her apartment building. He explained that the actress adored the cat. Unfortunately, Yelena Skryabina had to disillusion the young man. There was not a single creature alive in the building except people. All cats, dogs and other pets had been eaten. In fact, the son of the actress had led the hunt for stray dogs and cats and had been very energetic in killing pigeons and other birds.
Special patrols of front-line soldiers were detailed to move through the Leningrad streets, dealing with any kind of situation which might arise on the spot. Colonel B. Bychkov, a Leningrad police officer, kept a diary of the problems he encountered day by day. One of the most critical was the theft of ration cards at the beginning of each month. Anyone losing his card at the beginning of the month almost certainly would be dead before he could get a new card. The military patrols observed no judicial procedures in such crimes. They simply halted suspicious persons, searched them, and if stolen cards or unaccountable food supplies were found, they shot the person on the spot. Bychkov lectured the patrols on violations of legalities. But it seemed to make no difference. He probably did not mind too much himself. The patrols of front-line soldiers were the only real force for law and order in the city.
But no great effort was made to interfere with the grisly trade at the Haymarket. As early as November, according to some accounts, meat patties made from ground-up human flesh went on sale, although many Leningraders refused to believe that the meat was human. They insisted it was horse meat —or dog, or cat.
One Leningrader, walking through the world of ice late at night, came upon a bloody snowdrift into which had been hurled the heads of a man, a woman and a small girl, her blond hair still plaited in Russian braids. The bodies, he felt certain, had been carted off by the cannibals for butchering. No other explanation seemed to fit the presence of the human heads in the drift.
The evidence of butchery of corpses was widespread. Many a Leningrad woman, pulling a child’s sled behind her, bringing the body of a husband or child to the vicinity of a cemetery, was appalled to see that fleshy parts had been cut from the corpses which lay about like scattered cordwood.
“In the worst period of the siege,” a survivor noted, “Leningrad was in the power of the cannibals. God alone knows what terrible scenes went on behind the walls of the apartments.”
He claimed to know of cases in which husbands ate their wives, wives ate their husbands and parents ate their children. In his own building a porter killed his wife and then thrust her severed head into a red-hot stove.
Not a few soldiers on duty in the front lines made occasional trips-without-leave back into the city to bring food to their starving families. Coming into Leningrad late at night, at an hour when there was hardly a patrol on the streets, these soldiers not infrequently fell victim to attacks by the cannibals. They were regarded as preferable victims since they had been better fed. The center of trade in flesh, as in every kind of food product, was the Haymarket. Starving men and women did not inquire too clÖsely as to the nature of the cutlets—ground meat patties—which were offered for sale. Why should they? They knew that at best they must be made of horse meat, probably adulterated with cat meat or dog meat, possibly rat meat. They told themselves that, of course, there could be no human flesh mixed in. Indeed, it was not a question they were likely to put to the hard-eyed men or women who stood like rocks in their heavy boots and heavy coats, shrugging their shoulders at the possible purchasers. Take it or leave it. The prices were fantastic—300 or 400 rubles for a few patties. For some reason it was almost always meat patties which were offered, seldom sausage.
But if questions were not asked in the markets, there was terrible gossip in the queues where the women waited and waited for the bread shops to open. The talk was of children, how careful one must be with them, how the cannibals waited to seize them because their flesh was so much more tender. Women were said to be second choice. They were starving like the men, but, it was insisted, their bodies carried a little more fat and their flesh was more tasty.
In the Haymarket could be bought wood alcohol (it was said that if the alcohol was passed through six layers of linen it could be safely drunk), linseed oil which was used for frying blini or pancakes, occasional pieces of bacon fat or lard, hardtack from army stores, tooth powder which could be used for making pudding if mixed with a little starch or potato flour (it sold for 100 rubles a packet), and library paste in bars like chocolate.
There was usually bread for sale at the market, sometimes whole loaves. But the sellers displayed it gingerly and clutched the loaves tightly under their coats. They were not afraid of interference by the police, but they desperately feared the thieves and hungry robbers who might at any moment draw a Finnish knife or simply knock them over the head and flee with the bread.
There was more than one way in which the dead might help the living to survive. Again and again at Piskarevsky and Serafimov and the other great cemeteries the teams of sappers sent in from the front to dynamite graves noticed as they piled the corpses into mass graves that pieces were missing, usually the fat thighs or arms and shoulders. The flesh was being used as food. Grisly as was the practice of necro-butchery there was no actual law which forbade the disfigurement of corpses or which prohibited consumption of this flesh.
The dead also served the living through their ration cards. The cards were supposed to be invalid as soon as the holder died. There were strict penalties for not reporting deaths and turning in cards. In practice no one turned in a ration card. They were used to the end of the month. At that time the bonus to the living came to an end for everyone had to appear in person to get his card renewed.
Among the fantastic tales which circulated in Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42 was one that there existed “circles” or fraternities of eaters of human flesh. The circles were said to assemble for special feasts, attended only by members of their kind. These people were the dregs of the human hell which Leningrad had become. The real lower depths were those occupied by persons who insisted on eating only “fresh” human flesh, as distinguished from cadaver cuts. Whether these tales were literally true was not so important. What was important was that Leningraders believed them to be true, and this added the culminating horror to their existence.
Two friends of Anatoly Darov, a young man and his girl named Dmitri and Tamara, visited the Haymarket in January of 1942. They had determined to buy a pair of valenki or heavy felt boots for a friend. By every kind of economy Tamara had managed to put aside 600 grams of bread to be traded for the boots.
The pair made their way to the Haymarket. Neither had visited it before. At first they could find nothing but men’s boots—policemen’s or conductors’. These were too big and crude. Finally, they saw a very tall man who was extremely well dressed by blockade standards, wearing a fine fur hat, a heavy sheepskin coat, beautiful gray boots. He had an impressive beard and despite the starving times seemed to be filled with strength. In his hands he held a single woman’s boot, exactly the kind the young people wanted.
They bargained for price. He asked a kilo (about 2 pounds) of bread for the boots. The young man offered 600 grams (about 1½ pounds). The giant examined the bread and finally agreed to take it. The other boot, he said, was at his flat in the tangle of Dostoyevsky streets nearby. With some trepidation the young man started off with the tall peddler. Tamara warned him to be careful. “Better to be without valenki than without your head,” she said, half-joking.
The two men entered a quiet lane and soon came to a good-sized building which had not been damaged by either German gunfire or bombing. Dmitri followed the tall man up the staircase. The man climbed easily, occasionally looking back at Dmitri. As they neared the top floor, an uneasy feeling seized Dmitri. There leaped into his mind the stories he had heard of the cannibals and how they lured victims to their doom. The tall man looked remarkably well fed. Dmitri continued up the stairs but told himself he would be on guard, ready to flee at the slightest sign of danger.
At the top floor the man turned and said, “Wait for me here.” He knocked at the door, and someone inside asked, “Who is it?” “It’s me,” the man responded. “With a live one.”
Dmitri froze at the words. There was something sinister about them. The door opened, and he saw a hairy red hand and a muglike face. From the room came a strange, warm, heavy smell. A gust of wind in the hall caught the door, and in the swaying candlelight Dmitri had a glimpse of several great hunks of white meat, swinging from hooks on the ceiling. From one hunk he saw dangling a human hand with long fingers and blue veins.
At that moment the two men lunged toward Dmitri. He leaped down the staircase and managed to reach the bottom ahead of his pursuers. To his good fortune, there was a light military truck passing through the lane.
“Cannibals!” Dmitri shouted. Two soldiers jumped from the truck and rushed into the building. A moment or two later two shots rang out. In a few minutes the soldiers reappeared, one carrying a greatcoat and the other a loaf of bread. The soldier with the greatcoat complained that it had a tear in it. The other one said, “I found a piece of bread. Do you want it?”
Dmitri thanked the soldier. It was his bread, the 600 grams he had planned to trade for the valenki. The soldiers told him that they had found human hocks from five bodies hanging in the flat. Then they got back into their truck and were off to Lake Ladoga, where they were part of the Road of Life.
Nina Peltser, ballet star of the Musical Comedy Theater, had a less shattering adventure obtaining a pair of valenki. She was afraid that her talented feet would freeze in the Leningrad cold and decided to protect them with the warmest footwear in town—a pair of conductor’s boots. She went to the chief of the Leningrad streetcar system and said, “Save my feet!” He found a heavy pair of men’s felt boots, which she wore constantly, even donning them between numbers on the frigid stage of the Pushkin Theater, where she often performed that winter. She received only a worker’s food ration, but admirers often brought her presents—a chocolate bar, a jar of fish paste or a tin of meat.
Police investigators in those months sometimes threatened to cast an obdurate suspect into the cell of the cannibals, “where they ate each other,” if their victim did not confess to the crime of which the procurator had decided he was guilty. Whether, in fact, there was such a cell, whether the police actually permitted cannibals to feast on each other, is another matter. It is hardly likely. Yet the possibility was realistic enough for police investigators to use it as a blackmail threat.
More and more, Leningrad seemed to its residents to have become the city of the white apocalypse where humans fed on humans and the very water which they drank carried the sweet stench of human corpses. The water was now largely drawn from the ice holes in the Neva, the Fontanka and other canals. But the ice around the holes was strewn with the corpses of those who collapsed or froze to death while drawing water. And hundreds of bodies were dumped in the rivers and canals. No one who drank the water drawn from the Leningrad ice holes ever got the taste of it out of his mouth. It made no difference whether it was boiled or not (and often there was no fire and no fuel with which to boil the water and it was simply drunk raw from the river). Even when used for surrogate tea or coffee, the telltale flavor seemed to be there—faintly sweet, faintly moldy, tainted with the presence of death.
Through this city of the ice apocalypse Pavel Luknitsky walked in late January. He was so weak he could hardly keep to his feet. Two days before by actual count there had been thirteen unburied bodies in the writers’ apartment house at No. 9 Griboyedov, including the body of one unknown man. Twelve members of the Writers Union had died of starvation—that he knew of—and twenty-four were on the verge of death. The widow of the poet Yevgeny Panfilov, with whom he had spoken at the Writers’ House a few days earlier, her face looking like gray leather, her head wrapped in a scarf like a mummy, sitting in an armchair, motionless, hoping for some assistance, had just been found dead in her flat, her face gnawed off by hungry rats.
Luknitsky had gone to his old apartment on Borovaya Ulitsa for the first time since a bomb fell on the building in late autumn. He had a small sled and proposed to carry his literary papers and manuscripts to a place of safekeeping in the flat where he now lived on the Petrograd side. (Actually, he was so weak he simply brought them to the Writers’ House at No. 18 Ulitsa Voinova.)
As he walked slowly through the streets, he thought of the heroic people who kept Leningrad alive—the Young Communist brigades who carried water from the Neva to the bakeries and brought half-dead people to the hospitals on their sleds, of the truck drivers transporting food over Lake Ladoga, of the people at Radio House who kept the radio going, of the handful of youngsters in the factories who turned out shells and bullets in arctic shops, of the thousands of people who each in his own way helped enable the city to survive.
And he thought, too, of the deadly criminals who attacked people for their ration cards, of the gangs of murderers and worse who roved the streets, and of the people who made their way through the city to their posts in these days of starvation, dying of hunger and risking attack from the bands of marauders who preyed on the weak in almost every street.
On the lips of the Leningraders who carried on in spite of every peril, he knew, was only one question, repeated again and again: “Will the Germans soon be driven off? Will the blockade soon be lifted?”
These thoughts filled his mind as he loaded on the sled his papers, which suddenly seemed almost more than he could drag. He made his way down the Borovaya. He passed a heavy sledge, heaped high with corpses, unbelievably thin, blue and terrifying—just skeletons with skin stretched tight and splotched with red and lilac-colored death marks. On the Zvenigorod he saw beside a house eight corpses, covered with rags or old clothes, lashed by ropes to small sleds, ready to be dragged to the cemetery. On Marat sprawled on his back was the corpse of an incredibly thin man, a fur hat falling from his head, and, two steps farther along, two women were emerging from a house. One with frantic face kept calling, “Lena, mine. Lena!” A third woman was muttering quietly, “Leonid Abramovich is dead and lying on the pavement.”
On Vladimirsky Prospekt Luknitsky found his sled colliding with those of others passing him with corpses. One was a sled on which there were two corpses, the body of a woman with long hair trailing in the snow and that of a small girl, possibly ten years old. He passed carefully in order to avoid tangling the whitish-yellow hair of the corpse with the runners of his sled.
On the Volodarsky near the Liteiny Bridge he encountered a five-ton truck with a mountain of bodies. Farther on he met two old women who were conveying their corpses to the cemetery in style. They had hitched their sleds to an army sledge which was slowly pulled through the streets by a pair of starving horses. There he met the shadow of a man who carried nestled to his breast an incredibly thin dog—one of the rarest of city sights. The eyes of both the man and the dog were filled with hunger and terror, the dog’s terror, no doubt, because he sensed his fate and the man’s, perhaps, because he feared someone might rob him of the dog and he would not have the strength to defend his possession.
So Luknitsky walked through the city, passing hundreds of people, struggling to survive, pulling the corpses of their relatives toward hospitals or cemeteries, pulling their little sleds bearing pails of water.
Among the hundreds he met another kind as well—a man with a fat, self-satisfied face, well fed, with greedy eyes. Who was this man? Possibly, a food store worker, a speculator, an apartment house manager who stole the ration cards of the tenants as they died and with the aid of his mistress exchanged the miserable bread rations in the Haymarket for gold watches, for rich silks, for diamonds or old silver or golden rubles. The conversation of this man and his mistress would not be of survival, of how to live through their terrible times. On such things this man would merely spit. Was he a speculator? A murderer? A cannibal? There was little difference; each was trading on the lives of starving, dying people, each was living on the flesh of his fellows.
For such persons there was only one recourse. They must be shot.
Luknitsky met Red Army men, too. They were as thin and weak as the civilians. He passed two soldiers, half-carrying a third. Most of them, despite their weakness, tried to walk with a bold step.
“Such was the image of my own, unhappy, proud, besieged city,” Luknitsky noted. “I am happy that I did not run away, that I share its fate, that I am a participant and a witness of all its misfortunes in these difficult, unprecedented months. And if I live, I will remember them—I will never forget my beloved Leningrad in the winter of 1941–42.”
Daniel Leonidovich Andreyev, son of the great Leonid Andreyev, lived through the blockade in Leningrad. He wrote of the Leningrad apocalypse:
We have known everything . . .
That in Russian speech there is
No word for that mad war winter . . .
When the Hermitage shivered under bombs . . .
Houses turned to frost and pipes burst with ice . . .
The ration—100 grams . . . On the Nevsky corpses.
And we learned, too, about cannibalism.
We have known everything. . . .
1 By February there were only five police dogs still in the service of the Leningrad police department. (Dela i Lyudi, p. 275.)