Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (35 page)

 

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The system was admired by Hitler, who planned to install a loudspeaker in every Ukrainian village. They would not broadcast news, but ‘cheerful music', giving Ukrainians ‘plenty of opportunities to dance'.

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Svyazi

A not quite translatable word meant a great deal in the Soviet Union:
svyazi
, or ‘connections’ – the combination of string-pulling, exchange of favours and bribery by means of which citizens were able to work their way round the state’s monopoly on goods and employment to get themselves everything from jobs, telephones and university places to a bucket of potatoes or a new pair of shoes. In peacetime, astute use of
svyazi
improved one’s standard of living; during the siege it meant the difference between life and death.

If the typical Leningrader’s first line of defence against starvation was immediate family, the second was his or her network of friends. Especially among the city’s close-knit intelligentsia families, friendships – based on several generations of connection by marriage, education and profession, plus shared experience of fear and impoverishment – could be both extensive and remarkably strong. Not unusual was the experience of widowed, childless Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, who was given small but heartening presents of food by old colleagues from her late husband’s chemical research institute. ‘My friend Petr Yevgenevich visited today’, she wrote on New Year’s Day 1942. ‘He brought a handful of oatmeal for
kisel
[a thickened fruit drink], and Ivan Yemelyanovich brought three sprats.’ The pair reappeared a few weeks later, this time with 200 grams of bread, dried onion, mustard powder, ‘a tiny piece of meat, four dried white mushrooms, and four frozen potatoes (the first we’ve seen since the autumn). This is priceless treasure, and I was extremely grateful, especially since for the past week all we’ve had to eat is seaweed . . . A celebration!’
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Similarly loyal were the retired railway clerk Ivan Zhilinsky and his wife Olga, who looked after an old friend whose family had departed into evacuation. They invited him to share wine and
duranda
at New Year – painstakingly cleaning their room and clothes beforehand, and giving him a wash and shave on arrival – took him in when his flat was made uninhabitable by shelling, and finally traded bread so as to give him a proper grave. If Olga had not also died of starvation, and Ivan been arrested by the NKVD, they would have adopted his children. Smaller acts of kindness could make all the difference, too: one siege survivor
remembers the teenage girl next door bringing firewood filched from her job at a lumberyard – ‘Not a lot of it, but for us it was everything.’
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On a different level, Olga Grechina – aged nineteen and living completely alone – found human comfort in brief, heartfelt conversations with strangers on the street, who in January and February tended to walk together in pairs for fear of mugging:

It was interesting to observe people’s contradictory impulses: on the one hand you fear that your most valuable possession, your ration card, might be stolen; on the other you want, even just for the short walk home, to be with someone who will listen. Never since have I experienced such an odd, uncontrollable desire to tell a complete stranger everything about myself . . .

Saying goodbye, each would thank the other for their company and wish that they might live to see victory. There was a new etiquette in this farewell, for the form of words was almost always exactly the same, whether spoken by a simple person or an educated one. The simple women, having heard my unhappy story, would commiserate with me and comfort me, saying that I was young and that everything would come again – home, education, friends. In these naive but sincere good wishes I found the vitamin I needed to live. And that was why I, like everyone else, in reply to my companion’s story would tell my own.
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Leningraders’ second and most important ring of
svyazi
derived from their workplaces. Having a job not only meant getting a worker’s ration card, but with luck, access to off-ration meals, to firewood, to food parcels from affiliated organisations in the unoccupied Soviet Union, and to a bed in one of the hundred-odd recuperation clinics, or
statsionary
, opened from December onwards on the orders of the city soviet. (Though many
statsionary
were little better than dumping grounds for the dying, others saved lives simply by providing patients with food without making them queue.) Not all workplaces were equal. Among factories the best supplied were the large, prestigious defence plants, though their staff’s chances of survival were pulled down to the civilian average by the physical demands of their work, by targeted bombardment and by the fact that even after call-up most defence workers were quicker-to-starve men. At the Stalin Metal Works the fatality rate was around 35 per cent, and in the Kirov Works, situated in the vulnerable southern suburbs, somewhere between 25 and 34 per cent.

During the production push of the autumn going absent without leave had meant criminal punishment and loss of the worker’s ration, but in the midst of mass death the rules ceased to be enforced. Employees who failed to appear at work were automatically listed as sick and kept their cards, so that in January 1942 837,000 Leningraders were still registered as workers despite the fact that 270 factories had been officially closed and most of the rest hardly functioned.
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Among the many Leningraders with a purely notional job was Yelena Skryabina. ‘Friends’, she wrote on 15 January 1942, ‘have found me a position in a sewing workshop. This puts me on first category rations. The workshop does very little – there’s no light or fuel – but they hand out the ration just the same. Thus I get a little more bread, and at the moment every crumb is vital.’
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One of the most sought-after intelligentsia ‘survival enclaves’ – as one historian calls siege-winter workplaces – was the Radio House, whose director organised fair distribution of food that he regularly smuggled back to the office from the Smolniy’s fabled Canteen no. 12. Though the amounts involved were small – a few lumps of sugar, a couple of meat patties, a bowl of
kasha
– the ‘tremendous moral effect it had on us’, as Olga Berggolts’s lover Yuri Makogonenko recalled, ‘is difficult even to describe’.
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Radio House staff also received at least two special deliveries of food from Moscow, the first arranged by Berggolts’s indomitable sister Mariya, who personally escorted a lorry-full of supplies over the Ladoga ice at the end of February. ‘She took a roundabout route’, Berggolts wrote admiringly, ‘alone with the driver, in trousers and a short fur coat, armed with some sort of pistol . . . She slept in the lorry, chatted up the commandants, passed through villages just liberated from the Germans, collecting letters and packages for Leningraders along the way . . . I am proud of her, amazed by her – my wonderful quarrelsome Muska!’
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A second delivery was organised by Berggolts herself, who collected food and medicines for air transport to Leningrad while in Moscow giving readings of her
February Diary
. She would have been able to send more if it had not been for the Leningrad authorities, who mistrusted non-Party initiatives, did not want their own failings shown up and possibly feared public anger if some institutions were noticeably better supplied than others. ‘Zhdanov’, Berggolts wrote furiously on 25 March, ‘has just sent a telegram forbidding the despatch of individual packages to Leningrad organisations. This apparently has “bad political consequences”. Thanks to this idiotic telegram we can hardly send anything to the Radio Committee.’ Pleading was useless:

Today I had an appointment with Polikarpov, president of the All-Union Radio Committee. It left a very unpleasant impression. I addressed him badly, shyly – I would probably have done better to be rude. I asked his permission to send the food package to our Radio Committee, and in reply this smooth bureaucrat, obviously uncomfortable in my presence, uttered stinking commonplaces: ‘Leningraders themselves object to these packages’; ‘The government knows who to help’ and similar rubbish. ‘Leningraders’ – this is Zhdanov!
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Employment at the Radio House nonetheless enabled Berggolts, though jaundiced and swollen with oedema, not only to survive herself but to help friends. One beneficiary was the half-grateful, half-resentful Mariya Mashkova, who more than once found herself unable to tear herself away from the fried bread and coffee on offer in Berggolts’s warm, well-lit flat in order to return to crying children and dying mother-in-law in the darkness and cold of her own. Berggolts gave her
sukhari
, oranges, biscuits, soup powder and onions out of the first Radio House delivery from Moscow, and bread, biscuits, soup powder, rice, buckwheat, sausages, chocolates, vodka, tobacco and packets of vitamin C out of the second. ‘I list all this in such detail’, Mashkova wrote in her diary after a celebratory supper, ‘because it’s such a rarity – magical, unbelievable . . . To sit with friends next to a cheerful samovar, to see bread lying sliced on a plate in the normal way, to see the children eating as much as they want . . . Not to worry about the diminishing loaf, to speak about something other than food – is this not happiness?’
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Another enviable enclave was the Writers’ Union, run by the novelist Vera Ketlinskaya. In January she applied to Zhdanov’s deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov for permission to send a fleet of lorries, specially equipped with stoves and insulated with felt and plywood, over the Ice Road to the ‘mainland’. On the way out they were to carry writers’ families into evacuation, and on the way back, to buy 100,000 roubles’ worth of food from collective farmworkers, who in return were to be entertained with ‘modern literature’ and ‘literary evenings’. ‘We are aware that all unscheduled trips are cancelled’, she wheedled in a letter, ‘but beg you to make an exception to this rule. Even in the most difficult times the Party and Soviet government have always taken particular care of literature. We remember Lenin’s conversation with Gorky, about how our writers and scientists must be fed.’
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Her lobbying worked and by early spring – well before other institutions returned to normal – the Union’s canteen daily served barley soup, borscht,
kasha
and dessert.
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The Writers’ Union also received special food deliveries from its Moscow headquarters; Vera Inber got a share of one in March: ‘I was bewildered when I saw everything they had sent us. I grabbed a tin of condensed milk in each hand; I couldn’t let them go.’
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Lidiya Ginzburg cites these food parcels as an example of the Soviet hierarchy in action ‘with unusual clarity and crudity’. Containing chocolate, butter, rusks and preserves, they were, she claims, divided according to work rate and seniority rather than need. Writers active in Union affairs got two kilos each, the less active a kilo and the inactive nothing at all.
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One of several who loathed Ketlinskaya was Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, head of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, who fruitlessly begged her to admit his starving members since they had no clubhouse or canteen of their own.
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Though wrung out by dysentery, which prevented him from making a meeting with city soviet chairman Popkov, he did manage to obtain eleven extra first-category ration cards, as well as three beds in a recuperation clinic
set up in the Astoria hotel. He was then faced with the horrible task of allocating them:

I receive many acutely painful appeals. I was especially upset by a phone call from L. A. Portov, who several times, in a pleading voice, entreated me ‘Do it. Do it now. If you wait a week, it will be too late. I won’t survive.’

All the same I could only promise him a place on the waiting list, together with the much weakened Rubtsov and Peisin, since Rabinovich (long ill from tuberculosis), Deshevov (already hardly able to move) and Miklashevsky are all in an even worse state. When it comes to saving human life you can’t make choices. The life of every Soviet person must be saved. But you do nonetheless have to choose, in the sense of deciding priorities. You mustn’t be guided by judgements of each person’s creative or practical ‘worth’ (these can only be subjective), but by objective indicators of how closely they are threatened by death.
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By the end of February, twenty-one out of the Union’s eighty members had died of what Bogdanov-Berezovsky in his official report called ‘exhaustion’.
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So had his own mother, sister, brother-in-law, father-in-law and niece.

Workplace solidarity also often broke down. The acting director of Pushkin House, Dmitri Likhachev records, behaved cruelly, dismissing female staff – which amounted to a death sentence since it condemned them to dependants’ rations – stealing the ration cards of the dying and finally throwing them out so as not to have to dispose of their corpses:

I remember the death of Yasinsky. He had once been a tall, slim, very handsome old man, who reminded me of Don Quixote. During the winter he moved to the Pushkin House library, sleeping on a folding bed, behind the book stacks . . . His mouth wouldn’t close and saliva trickled from it; his face was black, making an eerie contrast with his completely white, unkempt hair. His skin was taut over his bones . . . His lips became thinner and thinner and failed to cover his teeth, which protruded and made his head look like a tortoise’s. Once he emerged from the stacks with a blanket over his shoulders and asked ‘What’s the time?’ Then he asked if it was day or night (dystrophics’ voices became slurred, as the vocal chords atrophied). He couldn’t tell because in the lobby all the windows were boarded up. A day or two later our deputy director, Kanailov, drove away everyone who had tried to settle down to die in Pushkin House, so as not to have to remove their bodies. Several of our ancillary staff – porters, caretakers, cleaning women – died like this. They had been drafted in, torn from their families, and then when they no longer had the strength to get home they were thrown out in thirty degrees of frost. Kanailov kept a close eye on all those who weakened, and not a single person died on the premises.
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