The City of Peter (The siege of Leningrad, Part 2)

Prince Mishkin and  Princess  Mìshkina.

The burning of the warehouses Badajev was a terrible blow. The food supplies  had vanished  into a thin air. The city  was turned from end to end, looking for something edible.  A tireless officer, Dimitri Pavlov –author, among other things, of an interesting memoir book of those days–took care of it.  He found little. And so, the rations were reduced and the quality of the food got worse. The individual rations lowered from 800 grams of bread daily to 200 grams.  Soon the bread would have been a hard and bitter mixture of sawdust and cellulose.  The electricity was lacking: how could  the abodes be heated during the coldest months? Nothing to say: the Soviets not only had not prepared appropriate measures to deal with a siege, but they had not even thought about. And now they were about to suffer  terrible consequences.

Something, it is true, was arriving through the Ladoga, the big lake situated east of Leningrad. Barges and boats carried food, fuel and ammunitions into the besieged city and from the besieged city they evacuated the children, the civilian population and the wounded of the Red Army. But it did not last long time. In early November, the Germans  captured the town of Tichvin, blocking the way through which, from inland, the supplies towards the  Ladoga flowed. A second circle around Leningrad began to be tightened. The German radio triumphantly announced:  Achtung! Achtung: Tichvin has fallen!

The loss of Tichvin was a disaster. The works to fit out an alternative road to supply Leningrad, more than three hundred kilometres long in a difficult and inaccessible area, had not even been begun. Under the pressure of the events, it was set up in a hurry, but it began to work late and poorly. In some points, it was so narrow that the lorries could not  pass through. The flow of the supplies stopped and, inside the city, the rations were  reduced further.
Strict measures were adopted: who stole the ration books or who printed fake ration books or who was discovered to sell black market was immediately shot. Who lost his own ration book was doomed to die of starvation.

A lot of people went out from their houses under unceasing bombings  to look for cabbages, potatoes or, simply, grass in the fields, into the gardens, along the ditches; women crowded in front of the stores and  waited at the queue, careless of the bombs which were falling. In Leningrad it began dying of starvation. People were swelling up or losing weight; muscular dystrophy and scurvy took hold; few — the luckiest, the cleverest, the richest– were spared.  People fell on the road and often remained on the road. The young people were the first to die and also on the frontline, where they were fighting harshly, they were suffering starvation. In the city a diamond ring was worth as a loaf of brown bread.

The animals had disappeared.  There were no dogs, cats, pigeons, crows, sparrows . How far were the days when a Red Army soldier had met into the city a girl with a she-cat in her arms and two gas masks on her shoulders. “Why two masks?” He had asked. “One for me and one for my she-cat. Do you think I would leave it  dying, in case of an attack with gas? ” had replied the young girl. Now the cats were eaten. And the dogs, too. In the city there was a dog, Dinka, trained, in Pavlovian-style, to run to the air-raid shelter at the sound of sirens. All knew him. One day it disappeared.
Some time before, when a rescue convoy had reached the place of Koivisto, on the northern front, to evacuate the wounded and the soldiers submitted to a very heavy Finnish attack, a boat which had already left the harbour, had come back to rescue a mascot-dog which was whining on the pier. The animals of the regiments were well treated: the soldiers grew fond of them: they considered them a kind of lucky mascot.
For this reason Alexander Luknitzkij thought to give his dog, his very loved dog Mishka, to a military unit. On the front they feed better and the dog will survive, he told. But his son replied: it is better eating the dog. He won. Only some months before, Mishka, as we have seen, ran happy and hopeful with his master, along the Neva’s banks.
Another inhabitant of Leningrad killed and ate his dog. Soon after he was seized by a terrible remorse. So terrible to commit suicide. Another one was seen with his dog in his arms, while he was accompanying a funeral. The man and the dog were two skeletons and the animal had a mixture of terror and resignation in his wide open, unusually large , eyes . Its  master was holding tight it to his chest, as if  he would  protect it. Was it affection, was it solidarity or was it simply a desire to save his precious reserve of food? But not only the inhabitants of Leningrad kept going at  the animals. A Nazi bomb had hit the zoo cages  tearing down fences. The she-elephant Betty, hit by a shrapnel, had died after hours of agony, trumpeting  desperately. It seemed that the mice had moved in crowds to the front, where there were more consistent food stocks. They preferred the German side: there the food was better. Inside the city you could see a few of them.

In Leningrad there was someone who “stocked up” on food: he did not eat all the bread he received, but he kept a few crumbs for times of emergency. One evening a child felt the presence of a mouse in the box of  the “stocks”. What to do? Killing  and eating it? He chose to release it: even the mouse, in its way, was a victim and it was suffering hunger as he was. The children in Leningrad under siege,  thought in this way.
Sometimes, the presence of a mouse into the house was a kind of good company, as having, in normal times, a dog or a cat. Not only for Vera Imber –who wrote about it– but also for many inhabitants of Leningrad, “Mishkin” and “Mìshkina”, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, became, where everything was dying, presences of life. Someone, every night, left to them a few crumbs.

On the threshold of winter, voices were running about mysteriously missing children and the mothers had more than a reason to be worried. If  everything was being eaten, even the wallpaper and the glue, why not the human flesh? In Herbs Square,  the “cannibals” appeared. They sold some meat, meatballs, in particular. And people buy them,  without asking too many questions. Someone swore he had seen mutilated corpses: the flesh of the thighs and of the shoulders had been certainly removed  by a butcher.

The “cannibals” seemed to prefer the soldiers: they were young and well fed. Some of this soldiers, returned to the city from the frontline  to visit their families, fell victim to mysterious ambushes. Sometimes, however, the soldiers took their revenge. One afternoon three young people, two boys and a girl, went to the market to buy a pair of felt boots, the warm valenkij. They offered, in return, six hundred grams of bread, the currency by which  everything was paid in those days, in Leningrad. A merchant in Herbs Square had them – or, rather, on his stand he had one. He took the bread. “Come with me,” he said, “I will  give you the other one.”
The  young people, tense and on the alert,  followed him up to a house. One of them went upstairs; the others waited on the road. The house was cold. Arrived in front of a closed door, the merchant opened it with these words: ” There is one alive, here.” The young man felt grabbing, but he managed to wriggle out. Arrived on the road, he met some soldiers who were heading the Ladoga Lake. He told them what was happened. The soldiers went down from their truck and went upstairs. Some gunshots were heard. Finally, went out, the soldiers gave back the young people their bread.

Also the earth was being sold in Herbs Square. That one of Badajev stores was in great demand: upon it, indeed, the sugar consolidated by the fire provoked by the Nazi bombing in September, had dripped. The kids – often parentless-  ate frozen cabbage stems  found along the road amid the trash. They ate them without even heating them. One time, inside a bread store, one of them ran on a loaf which a women was about to take. He grabbed  this bread, brought it to his mouth and he began to eat it, not taking care of the blows and the cries of the woman. Another kid, almost dying, continued to move his jaws, as he should eat a titbit.
The queues  for the bread were longer and longer and the roads and the alleyways were more and more crowded. By shadows which  were moving in the darkness. When a woman, an old man or a  weakened man  passed in their vicinity, they mugged him or her for stealing the bread. The punishments for the robberies were very harsh, but the hungry won every fear.

Some urban legends were running. One of these was the legend of the “Gentleman Thief”. One night, a young woman was mugged by a group of men: she was compelled to undress and to give her dresses to the muggers. One of them – the chief, probably – seeing her trembling and scared, took off his jacket, threw it on her shoulders and vanished. Come back home, the young woman found in the jacket pockets a pat of butter and  a loaf.
Sometimes little miracles happened. One evening a poor, hungry and foodless woman, heard knocking at her door. When she opened the door, she saw a young Red Army soldier. In his hand he had a half full bag with cabbage leaves , partly rotten. He offered it to her. The woman took it without a word and she never knew why that soldier had arrived there and why he  had chosen her.

But  the contrary also happened. One evening Vera Imber and her husband, the director of the hospital of Leningrad, were coming back home. They met an old almost blind woman, who asked them for help to find her ration book which had slipped out of her hand and fallen who knows where. It was too dark, said the old woman, and she never would have been able to find the book, not even if it had been at her feet. The poet burst out: ” What do you want?  Look for your ration book by yourself!” Her husband did not speak either to his wife, or to the old woman: he bowed, found the book, collected it and gave back it to the old woman. Time after, Vera Imber , thinking again about this event, was not able to find an explication to her behaviour.

There was only an explication: in Leningrad they felt at the end. November was a fearful month for the city of Peter. Subjected to the unceasing fire of the German artillery, annihilated by the hunger, it seemed about to give up. There were more than ten thousand deaths, the most part of them because of starvation and privation. And the terrible Russian winter was coming by leaps and bounds. But in early  December a new miracle happened: Generals Fediuniskij and Meretzkov conquered  Tichvin again. It was a great success. Firstly because the German manoeuvre to tighten a second loop-knot around the neck of Leningrad was frustrated and, secondly, because the way through the Lake Ladoga went back to be practicable.

The sacred bread from Ladoga.

The “Road of Life” through the Ladoga Lake became to work at full speed when on the lake the ice congealed to the point to bear the weight of a lorry. Some attempts had been made also  when the ice was still thin, by sledges towed by horses, but what was carried was like a drop in the bucket.

There was no snow on the iced surface of the lake when the first lorries moved towards Leningrad. More than a lorry-driver felt the  impression to drive over the water. Someone of them sunk when the ice non even fully congealed  cracked under the weigh of the trucks.
At the beginning , the Road of Life worked badly. Very badly. The first time,  six – seven hours were needed to reach the city; then, day after day, the organisation became better and also the travelling times were reduced. In early April 1942, from the shortest part, the distance would have been driven in less  than a hour. But, in the meanwhile, during that terrible winter, in Leningrad bread lacked and people continued to die of starvation.

A woman, standing at the queue in front of the bread store, was murmuring in a low voice. She was swearing at the cold, at the war, at the queue’s length, at that black and hard bread which was being given out. Another woman, in front of her, heard her complaints. She turned towards her and, in a low voice, told her: ” No, this is not black bread. This is white bread: it is bread from Ladoga, it is sacred bread!”
The bread of Ladoga was not white bread: it was a black and hard bread , but it was bread. Not much of it still arrived, because the Germans were not asleep. When they were aware of the “Road of Life”, they intensified their bombing and air raids over the lake. But, travelling with the cover of darkness and with their headlights shielded many lorries were able, following the flags, to make the journey there and back. And at regular intervals, on the lake, some points of support had been established  to provide assistance to drivers, directions, fuel. And protection. Many anti-aircraft guns were installed, in fact: they were built using blocks of ice.

In Leningrad, the winter was darker and darker, colder and colder, more and more deadly. But, in spite of all, the life was continuing. Also the cultural life. The Ermitage’s director, Josif Orbelij, on the day of invasion, had glanced at the calendar and his thought had gone to Napoleon: also the emperor, at his time, had attacked Russia in June, more or less in those days, ad he had failed.
But now Orbelij was not thinking about Napoleon, even if that thought, in that moment, had gladdened himself ; neither he was thinking of the Museum’s treasures( they had already arrived in a safe place): he was thinking about the Uzbek poet Navoj, whose, in that year, was the fifth hundred birth anniversary . And he was thinking how to commemorate worthily the Navoj’s anniversary. And so, in the terrible winter of Leningrad, the verses of the legendary poet echoed again into a cold and mid-empty room in the Ermitage’s Palace on the mouth of famous scholars, summoned, in that occasion, even from the frontline. One of them, finished his account, fell fainted on the table, won by starvation.

The library of Leningrad was open for a long time, at disposal of readers and of scholars. And the radio did not finish broadcasting. When, because of lack of electrical energy, the transmissions were stopped a couple of days, someone commented: ” We would be able to stand  everything, we would be able to stand the cold or the starvation, but we can not remain without radio. If its voice is silent, also our voices will be silent.”

Another voice was about to be heard. Over the roofs of the Leningrad’s houses, some anti aircraft emplacements had been installed and some anti-fire services had been organized. Into one of these emplacement over the roof of the “Artists house”, a man was in service. There was no fire to put out and that man was thinking of other.  In his mind the notes of a symphony for besieged Leningrad were following one another in a relentless whirl; in his mind, one after another, the musical passages to express the pain, the death, the bravery, the despair, the self-sacrifice, the suffering of the people of his city were taking form. And the certainty of the victory.
That man was a musician: his name was Dmitri Shostakovich. On March 29, 1942, his symphony n. 7, the Leningrad symphony, was performed at the Opera Theatre in Moscow. At the end of the concert, Shostakovich, short, tiny, almost defenceless, stood up to get a round of applause.  The woman poet Olga Bergholtz, present in the theatre that evening, thought: “This man is stronger than Hitler.”

The woman poet Anna Achmàtova was in Leningrad. She spoke on the radio and wrote. One day she was taken by surprise, outside, by an aerial attack. She reached a shelter where some children and kids already were. Time after, she will write about one of them, dead into her arms:

Knock with your little fist and I will open.
I have always opened my door.
I am far away now, beyond the high mountain,
Beyond the desert, beyond the wind and the heat
But I will never abandon you . . .
I haven’t heard your last cry.
You haven’t asked for your bread.
Bring me, then, a little branch of maple
Or several stems of green grass,
Like those you brought last spring.
Bring me a little water in your hand,
Pure cold water from our Neva,
And from your small gold head
I will wash all trace of blood.

But Leningrad did not need handful of water: Leningrad needed water in large amounts. When on a terrible winter day , the pumps stopped, the catastrophe was risked. Without water, what would the bread have been kneaded with? The boys and the girls of Communist Youth, mobilized for the occasion, opened holes in the ice of the Neva, formed a human chain and the buckets of the very precious water passed from hand to hand and reached the ovens.

At the beginning of January 1942, the bread rations were still of 125 grams, while the temperature was diving under the zero. Heating lacked. In the streets of the city appeared the sleights: they acted as hearses. Set on the multicoloured sleights, the corpses, enveloped in  a sheet, were taken to the cemetery.
But many, too many corpses remained unburied, in the edges of the streets, into the frozen rooms because of lack of warming, into the schools’ corridors, in the hospitals’ wards, even into the Hermitage’s halls or in the library’s read rooms. The engineers of the Army dug with dynamite mass graves where to bury the corpses. A lot of them were dug, but they were always insufficient.

Some ” protected places” were established: there one ate a little bit better; there a medical assistance, although scarce, was assured. The Communist Youth was committed in the flats’ control and in helping the neediest. Boys and girls, led by their secretary, Ivanov, checked hundreds of abodes, saving many lives. One day, come into an at the first sight empty flat, they found, under a pile of clothes, a few months kid. They immediately sent him to one of the “protected places” which Zdanov had wanted.

This voice begun to run: the Germans have infiltrated a Fifth Column inside the city. Perhaps it was true. Certainly, before and after the siege, the controls became stricter and who, in the past, had shown, even mildly, anti-soviet opinions, began to tremble . And not only because the cold. But the danger did not come from Leningrad, it came from Moscow. It is strange( or perhaps it is not strange); far from Leningrad, despite the situation in which the city was, someone did not forget the “political crimes”.
A women who had been very active during that terrible winter for helping the needy people, was, upon order of Moscow, deported in Siberia with her son, cause of a very doubtful story which was dated back to many years before. An eccentric artist , whose only guilt was wearing an odd head gear, disappeared overnight and nobody knew anything more about him. Whilst in Leningrad one died of starvation and cold, elsewhere, as if nothing had happened, Berjia was working and the justice ( ?) was working, too.

For his part, Stalin seemed he wanted to put an obstacle on Zdanov’s way: he was never satisfied and he was always very critic. At a certain time, he sent to Leningrad the soviet artillery’s prince, Marshal Nicolaji Voronov, not because he would bring, but because he would take off guns to the city. It seemed he would leave Leningrad at her own destiny. True or false, the inhabitants of the Peter’s city were aware of it and they chose Zdanov: his portraits were everywhere, those of Stalin in the public offices only. And not in all of them.

Under the shadow of the statues of Suvorov and Kutusov protected by sacks of sand, unaware of the political game which was being played between Stalin an Zdanov, people were hoping in the victory, but, in particular, they were hoping in the end of that nightmare. They were asking: “When will the siege be listed?” ” Soon”, the militaries answered, without being too convinced, to those who asked them about this issue, Stalin included. But breaking the siege was not easy. Zhukov had tried more and more, in September, after having stopped the Nazi advance. But he had failed. And generals Chozin and Meretzkov had failed, too, when, in January 1942, they launched a new offensive.

” When will the siege be listed ?”

The events at a glance.

November 8. The Germans conquer the town of Tichvin, interrupting the way of supplies from the hinterland to LakeLadoga.

November 15. In the city of Peter, the bread rations are lowered to 175 grams. The rations for combat troops are also reduced .

November 18. Lieutenant Alexei Lebedev dies in combat on board of his the submarine. He was 26 years old and he was one of the most promising poets of Leningrad.

November 20. The bread ration for the non-combatant population comes down to 125 grams.

November 22. The first lorries headed to Leningrad cross the frozen Ladoga. Before, the Soviets had been tried  with horse-drawn sleighs.

Early December. In the city of Peter the sleighs are turned into a system of transportation: they carry sick, injured, dying. And corpses, mostly.

December, 9. The Soviets reconquer  Tichvin. The  traffic over the Ladoga Lake increases.

December 10. InLeningrad the trams stop circulating. At the Ermitage Museum are celebrated the five hundred years of the poet Navoij’s  birthday.

December 25. Zhdanov orders that  the food rations be increased. An offensive to reconquer Mga is about to begin. The offensive fails.

January, 8 1942. The radio is silent during some days in many Leningrad’s districts.

January, 18. For the first time on the “Road of Life”, the quotas fixed for  food transportation are overtaken.

January 20. Some plans for evacuating the population are prepared.

January 24. The food rations are the following: 400 grams of bread for the workers and 250 grams for the not active population.

January 25. The electric Central n. 5 stops working because of lack of fuel. The water which is necessary  to knead the bread is taken off from the frozen Neva by the boys and girls of the Communist Youth.

February 11. The food rations are further increased: 500 grams of bread for the workers and 300 grams for the not active population.

March 8. After many months, the first letters and the first telegrams are delivered.  A whole year will be necessary to deliver all the mail.

March, 15. One begins to clean the city and to bury the corpses.

March 20. The electric centrals resume to operate.

March 29. The 7th Shostakovich’s Symphony (the so called  Leningrad symphony) is performed in Moscow.

You can find the bliography here.