The 900 Days (59 page)

Many were going into the nearby countryside, looking for cabbage or potatoes or beets. They found little. They stood in the queues through airraid alarms unless forced by the ARP squads or police to take shelter. Most stores and even the movie houses continued to operate despite the alarms, but many establishments had permanently shut their doors. Even the soft-drink and fruit-juice stands had quit. About the only nonrationed products sometimes available were coffee and chicory.

One day Yevgeniya Vasyutina stood in line from ten in the morning to three in the afternoon to get two kilos (five pounds) of beet sugar. Yelena Skryabina blessed the good fortune that had enabled her to acquire twenty or thirty pounds of coffee in August. Now it kept her family going. An old Tatar servant turned up one day with four chocolate bars. Fortunately he was willing to take money for them. Usually, now, food was traded only for gold, jewels, furs or vodka.

Two days later Yelena Skryabina made an entry in her diary. The husband of an old friend had died on October i. The cause: hunger. He lay down one evening to sleep. In the morning he was dead.

A week or so later Kochetov and his wife Vera were walking on the Nevsky near his newspaper office. In front of a pharmacy between the Yusupov Gardens and the Haymarket they saw an old man lying on the sidewalk, face down. His hat had fallen off and his long matted hair flowed over his shoulders like a wig. Kochetov turned the man over. The man protested feebly, “Don’t bother, I beg of you.” Kochetov tried without success to get the man to his feet. Then he went into the pharmacy and berated the middle-aged clerk for not doing something to help.

“What do you think, young man, that this is a first-aid station?” she said sourly. “Hunger is a terrible condition. Your old man has collapsed from hunger. And I might collapse any day myself—I’m getting more and more swollen.”

Kochetov saw how puffed her legs were and realized that she looked very bad.

He next sought out a policeman. “It’s just impossible,” the officer said. Kochetov saw that he, too, was thin and hungry. He returned to the old man. First aid was no longer necessary. He was dead.

This was the first death from hunger which Kochetov had seen. It would not be the last.

The impact of Pavlov’s rigid ration control fell most heavily on dependents and upon children. For the time being, workers and state employees got enough food to maintain their strength. But not the rest of the city—not those who were not making a direct and vital contribution to the war effort.

Nonworkers and children, as of October i, received one-third of a loaf of poor-quality bread a day. For
the month
they got one pound of meat, a pound and a half of cereals or macaroni, three-quarters of a pound of sunflower-seed oil or butter and three pounds of pastry or confectionery. That was all. In addition to the slender bread distribution, they were expected to maintain life on a total of five and a quarter pounds of food a month—a little more than a pound a week. Moreover, almost immediately distribution of the nonbread items fell below schedule. Fish or canned good were substituted for meat. The “pastry” was so full of substitutes it had little nourishment. Candy might be substituted for oil or fat. As time went on, bread—such as it was—more and more often was the only food issued. A boy of sixteen and an infant of five got the same ration. The deaths which occurred in late September and October, surprising and shocking to the Leningraders who knew of them, occurred among people subjected to this radically reduced diet and who had no personal food reserves to fall back on.

Dmitri V. Pavlov, the energetic young civil servant who became Leningrad’s food dictator September 8, drove relentlessly to muster every ounce of food for the city. The task was endless. He knew that, but he went ahead regardless. New ration cards were issued October 1 and rules were tightened.

The reissue brought the total down to 2,421,000, 97,000 less than in September, but still a very large number. Pavlov banned special rations of all kinds—there had been 70,000 special cards issued in September. Many had gone to children who had been evacuated, persons not living in Leningrad. Extra rations had been issued by factories to their office workers. All this came to a halt. Officials were warned they would be brought before military tribunals for violation of ration-card rules. One woman who worked in the printing shop where the cards were turned out was found with a hundred in her possession. She was shot. Armed guards were stationed in the print shop. A metal barrier was set up and not even the plant director was permitted in the area.

Precautions, Pavlov knew, were imperative. Every kind of device was being tried to obtain extra rations. Rackets sprang up. Swindlers painstakingly forged cards with ink and paper stolen from state supplies. In the dim light of flickering kerosene lanterns clerks could not detect forgeries.

Pavlov went further. He persuaded Zhdanov to issue a special decree October 10 which provided that every ration card in the city must be reregistered between October 12 and October 18. He feared that large numbers of forged ration cards might be introduced by the Germans.
²
It was an enormous task. Three thousand Party workers were enlisted to make the check. Thousands of man-hours were spent. Every citizen had to present his card and documentary proof that he was the individual to whom it was assigned. No food could be obtained after October 18 without cards stamped “reregistered.” Cards not reregistered were confiscated after that date. Hard rules, but they cut bread ration cards by 88,000, meat cards by 97,000, cards for fats by 92,000. It was vital if Pavlov was to come anywhere near to fulfilling his job.

On the other side of the coin, Pavlov was gathering food from the most unexpected sources. He collected 2,352 tons of potatoes and vegetables from the suburban regions by September 20, often under German fire. Another 7,300 tons were brought in before the fields froze iron-hard. Eight thousand tons of malt were salvaged from the closed breweries and mixed with flour for bread. Five thousand tons of oats were seized from military warehouses. It went into bread. The horses starved or were slaughtered. Some were saved by substitute food—bundles of twigs, stewed in hot water and sprinkled with cottonseed cake and salt. Another horse-food substitute was made of compressed-cottonseed cake, peat shavings, flour dust, bone meal and salt. The horses didn’t care much for it. A scientific team, headed by V. I. Sharkov of the Wood Products Institute, worked out a formula for edible wood cellulose made from pine sawdust. In the middle of November it was added to the bread, and nearly 16,000 tons were consumed in the blockade days.

On September 15 Pavlov ordered bread baked according to the following formula: rye flour 52 percent, oats 30, barley 8, soya flour 5, malt 5. By October 20 the barley was exhausted. The formula was changed to: rye 63 percent, flax cake 4 percent, bran 4, oats 8, soya 4, malt 12, flour from moldy grain 5.

“The flavor of this bread was impaired,” Pavlov conceded. “It reeked of mold and malt.”

Food was brought in by barge and ship across Lake Ladoga. Zhdanov told the sailors the fate of Leningrad depended on them. Forty-nine barges were assigned to this service. Some were sunk with their grain cargoes, but 2,800 tons of grain, sprouting and not very appetizing, were salvaged from the lake bottom. That gave the bread its moldy flavor.

Yet Leningrad lived at the edge of disaster. On October 1 the city had on hand only a fifteen-to-twenty-day supply of flour—20,052 tons, to be precise.

The struggle to find substitute food never ended. A stock of cottonseed cake was found in the harbor. It had been destined to be burned in ships’ furnaces. Such cake had never been used as human food before because it contained some poisons. However, Pavlov found that high-temperature treatment removed the poisonous essences. He added the cake—4,000 tons of it—to the food supplies. At first the cake made up only 3 percent of the bread formula, then it was raised to 10 percent.

“We are eating bread as heavy as cobblestones and bitter with cottonseed cake,” Yevgeniya Vasyutina said. “This cottonseed cake ought to be given out on some kind of cattle ration.”

Every nook and cranny was explored for food. A search of the warehouses of Kronstadt turned up 622 tons of rye flour, 435 tons of wheat, 3.6 tons of oats and 1.2 tons of cooking oil. In the Stepan Razin brewery a cellar full of grain was uncovered. By sweeping out warehouses, elevators and railroad cars 500 tons of flour were reclaimed. A recheck of supplies disclosed that flour reserves had been understated by 32,000 tons.

As October wore on, the shortages of food were felt more deeply. Sometimes, Yevgeniya Vasyutina went home and cried all evening. She was hungry and cold, and the news was too bad to think about. Feverish trading sprang up in the city. Vodka was No. 1 in trading goods. Next came bread, cigarettes, sugar and butter. People began to talk more and more about a new cut in the rations. Others said the rations would be lifted, that plentiful supplies were coming in over Lake Ladoga.

The mood of the city grew more grim. Luknitsky, nervous, worried about his elderly father, his cousins, his close friend Lyudmila, all more or less dependent on him, went to the Writers’ House, just off the Neva embankment on Ulitsa Voinova. The last time he had been there with Vera Ketlinskaya it had been almost empty. That was three weeks ago. Now in mid-October it was overflowing with people. Only 130 meals could be served in the restaurant. That was all the food there was. Many writers went away hungry. An old translator hysterically cried that she would cut her throat with a razor that minute if she were not permitted to eat. Finally, she was quieted. But she got no food. Dinner consisted of watery soup with a little cabbage, two spoons of kasha, two bits of bread and a glass of tea with a piece of candy.

Luknitsky walked home along the Neva embankment. The
Petropavlovsk
spire was silhouetted against the sky. So were the formidable shapes of the Baltic warships standing guard, their guns elevated, their masts a fretwork against the darkening clouds.

Now another of the Nazis’ allies moved into Leningrad: cold . . . winter ... snow. . . . The first flakes fell at eleven in the morning on the fourteenth of October. The thermometer dropped. It was below freezing. “Ski day,” the day the snow cover reached ten centimeters (about four inches), came October 31—an unprecedentedly early date. Always in Leningrad the first snow marked a holiday. This was the winter capital, the capital of snow and ice, the sparkling city of frost. But now the cold and snow brought forbidding thoughts. What about the water pipes? There was hardly any heat in the buildings. Most people got only a ration of 2.5 liters of kerosene in September. Now there was none. Nor would there be any until February. It was cold in the great stone buildings along the Neva. And it was growing colder. Luknitsky noticed ice on the sidewalks in the morning.

Autumn had ended, such an autumn as Leningrad had never known. Winter was setting in. Perhaps, he thought, it would help Russia—as it had against Napoleon. He did not then know how right he was. Winter would help Russia. But it would come near to destroying Leningrad.

He noticed a change in himself. He was constantly on the move between Leningrad and the front, now in Leningrad for four or five days, then at the front for a week. At the front he lived on army rations. The troops still were fed fairly normally—800 grams of bread, almost two pounds, a day, 150 grams of meat, 140 of cereals, 500 of vegetables and potatoes. For a day or two after coming back from the front he did not feel hungry. Then hunger overwhelmed him. From morning until late night he wanted to eat. The evening dab of cereal or macaroni did not satisfy him. He went to bed hungry and woke up hungry after five or six hours.

All over the city this was happening.

People grew thinner while you looked at them. And they grew more like beasts. Yelena Skryabina had a friend, Irina Klyueva, a beautiful, elegant, quiet woman, who adored her husband. Now she fought and even beat him. Why? Because he wanted to eat. Always. Constantly. Nothing satisfied him. As soon as she prepared food he threw himself on it. And she was hungry herself. Before October ended Irina Klyueva’s husband had died of hunger. She did not even pretend to grieve.

Each person tried to make the ration go further. Yelena Skryabina’s mother divided each piece of bread into three portions. She ate one in the morning, one at noon, one at night. Madame Skryabina ate her whole portion in the morning with her coffee. That gave her strength to stand in food queues for hours or hunt about the city for food. In the afternoon she usually felt so weak she had to lie down. She worried about her husband. He had a military rear-area ration, but it was not much better than that of the civilians. He got a cup of cereal with butter in the morning. But he saved it for their son, Yuri. The food queues grew so long that it was almost impossible to get into a store before the small supply was exhausted. Finally, her husband got their ration cards registered with a military facility where the family received eight bowls of soup and four bowls of cereal every ten days. By this time speculators were getting 60 rubles for a small loaf of bread, 300 rubles for a sack of potatoes and 1,200 rubles for a kilo of meat.

Yevgeniya Vasyutina sat at home like a troglodyte. There was no heat. She wore her greatcoat and felt boots, removing the boots only when she slept. But not the coat. She covered herself with the mattress and pillows, but when she rose her body was stiff and sore. She heated her tea and food on a tiny grill set between two bricks. Thin shavings provided the fuel. There was no electricity. A
burzhuika, a
little potbellied stove (the name
burzhuika
had come from their use by the “former people” during the cold and famine of Petrograd’s 1919 and 1920), was beyond her dreams. More than anything in the world she just wanted a simple tea—tea with sugar and a roll. But this was impossible. She divided her ration of bread into three pieces, each the size of a chocolate bar. She put a little butter or oil on each. One she ate for breakfast, one for lunch, and the third she hid in her lamp shade, the one with a little dancing girl on it. She liked to spin the shade so that the dancer twirled in a rosy whirl. Now the electricity didn’t work. No one would think, she devoutly believed, of looking there for food.