Siege

Do you have any idea what 900 days is?

It is almost three years. Not a long stretch of time, so it seems. But now imagine being deprived of all the basic necessities of life for those three years.

Could you live for three years without water, food, indoor plumbing, electricity, public transport, telephones and everything which you are used to?

There is no question it can be done.

For this is how the inhabitants of Leningrad lived from 1941 to 1944.

On a beautiful summer night in June 1941, the Great Patriotic War began.

No one in Leningrad could have imagined that, by September, war would reach the city of the Revolution.

The first bombing raid on Leningrad took place on the night of June 23, 1941. Soon, the evening bombings became more frequent, started fires and, worst of all, destroyed food supply warehouses. The war proceeded unexpectedly quickly ... Germans seized the last rail line connecting Leningrad with the rest of Russia and, on September 8, 1941, the horrifying word “blockade” was first pronounced.

Three months after the start of the war, the city was ringed by German troops.

For the military, the blockade of Leningrad was a strategic maneuver. But for Leningrad’s residents, the blockade meant that food, water, arms, clothing, construction materials, etc., no longer flowed into the city.

For three years – until January 27, 1944 – a hungry nightmare ensued. The door was slammed shut and the key was lost for 900 days.

There is a fairy tale by Odoyevsky, “Town in a Snuff Box,” in which the town in question can only be observed through a tiny keyhole. Similarly, almost everything we know about life in Leningrad during the blockade we know from the tales of those who lived in the closed city.

These stories are graphic, dramatic and very concrete. Each is about a hero, and therefore a bit unreal. The immeasurable tragedy becomes almost surreal when we try to understand what “normal” life was like under the blockade. What was daily subsistence like for those who wore the mantle of heroes?

Take for example my grandmother and her friends. They were 17 years old. They falsified the dates of birth on their passports so that they could get into the army (for which you had to be 18). Or they stayed in encircled Leningrad in order to work in factories and hospitals.

But soon it was no longer important how old you were. Everyone was called up, except those trapped in Leningrad, surrounded by the enemy. They had no choice but to fight any way they could.

It is said that, when Soviet troops were taking Berlin, Russian army commanders were shocked when boys and girls of the Hitler Youth came out to fight against them. But the Germans had themselves met with this kind of resistance during the blockade of Leningrad. During the second and third winters of the blockade, it was Pioneers – boys and girls – who, with one rifle for every six, rode the trolleys to the front line. The war, which had already claimed so many grown-ups, was that close to their everyday lives ...

These boys and girls stood guard on the rooftops, tossing incendiaries down on those who were bombarding the city. Meanwhile, they continued to attend schools, which, despite the hunger, cold and chaos, remained open.

What kind of life was this? How can one adequately describe it in a short journalistic article with words alone?

Well, words is all we have. So let us consider three “blockade words”: hunger, cold and bombings.

hunger

The essence of life under the blockade was that everyone was constantly hungry. In order to eat, you had to work. But working was very difficult ... because everyone was constantly weak from hunger.

When the Badayevsky warehouse (which held the city’s emergency food reserves) was destroyed by bombing in the spring of 1941, the city had no option but to introduce ration cards. Food could only be obtained with a ration card, and cards were handed out at workplaces. Yet there was not enough work for all. It is rumored that the Badayevsky warehouse was actually empty when it was hit, because of the ineptitude of city administrators. But many blockade survivors recount how they took buckets to the smoking remains of the warehouse and gathered up ashes and earth that was saturated with sugar and butter. And they ate it.

One of the most persistent blockade myths is that there was hunger in the city because some wanted to surrendered it, and therefore took all the food out of the city prior to the blockade. Dreadful stories arose that some in the city were well-fed, that city bosses were flying in pears and that they were baking pastries at Smolny. The NKVD dealt harshly with the purveyors of such unpatriotic rumors, summarily executing those who sowed panic. They also dealt swiftly with cases of cannibalism and with those who held romantic notions toward the Germans, such as: “Let them in, at least they will bring food.”

But the facts speak for themselves: 97% of Leningraders went hungry.

What can a hungry person eat? The blockade menu included such things as leather belts, carpenter’s glue, weeds and grasses. Without exception, the food was low in calories and without vitamins. There were huge variations in the rationed norms allotted residents day by day. In the most critical winter months, rations were cut to 125 grams of bread (about two slices) per person per day. And for that share you had to stand in line for six hours.

Hunger was perhaps the most horrible trial, and those who lived through the blockade related to food differently the rest of their lives. During my carefree childhood, my grandmother persistently harangued us to completely clean off our plates and, even more so, to always gather up the breadcrumbs from the table – in memory of the blockade.

Imagine: the power of this massive fear of hunger is such that it survives even after 60 years.

cold

Unabating cold was a central fear of the three blockade winters. Furnaces did not work.

If the first sign of war in the city was the crosses of paper glued to windows, to protect inhabitants from shattered glass during bombings, then the second sign was narrow tubes sticking out of these same apartment windows. Handy people crafted small, crude stoves – burzhuykas – and sold them. People would sell their family heirlooms to buy such a stove. They were small, fit in one room, and would burn up whatever you had. First firewood, then furniture, then books.

Windows blown out by bombs were covered with blankets. But what good does a blanket do over the window, when it is -30^o outside? You would light up the burzhuyka and sleep in your coat. Everyone who was still among the living would sleep together in the room with the stove. It was warmer that way. When people could no longer find the energy to climb the stairs, they moved to evacuated apartments on lower floors, or moved in with neighbors. Those who had enough strength took turns emptying the waste water – the drains also did not work.

There was no water. The water pipes were as broken as everything else. When you wanted water, you went to the Neva.

Here was a typical picture: while her mother is at work, a young girl tows a bucket of water on a sled. To get the water in winter, she had to descend an icy precipice to the water hole, stand in a long line, ladle the water into a pail, haul that pail back up the icy cliff, empty it into her larger bucket, then get in line again. The entire procedure could take several hours.

In spring, it was a bit easier. The sun appeared and the ice melted. People found the strength to remove the corpses and trash from the streets. In the spring, in the very center of the city, on Nevsky Prospekt by Kazan Cathedral, gardens were laid in. Life became a bit easier ... until the next winter (and there were three of them).

bombings

Fear was the third element in blockade life. Hunger and cold deadened the nerves. But fear resounded with the cry of air raid sirens and the whines of falling bombs and shells.

Your home could simply disappear in a regular bombing raid. There were 10 per day.

The city had bomb shelters, some built before the war. Basements were then added to the list of shelters. There were, for example, 12 bomb shelters in the basements of the Hermitage, which, early in 1942, became the permanent home for 2,000 people. It was safer in the shelters, but what if, because of hunger, one lacked the energy to descend underground?

Gradually, Leningraders became accustomed to the close proximity of the front lines. As it happens, the house where my parents live sits on what was then the front line. In my childhood, we loved to play in the trenches – they had not yet been filled in. Then, in 1941-43, soldiers rode the trolleys to the front. The grandmother of one of my friends was a war correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda and rode the trolley every day to her work on the front lines – to write her reports from the battlefield. That’s the kind of work she had: each morning she rode off to war.

German troops advanced into the city as far as the Kirov factory. Today it is 20 minutes from there to the center of the city. Decisive battles took place here, directly in the factory. On one production line, they were assembling shells, while on another a battle was taking place. This factory, which in peacetime constructed tractors, was converted to production of tanks. Daily, the tanks would drive out the factory gates and head directly to the front. But, after the blockade began, there was not enough material; deliveries of steel were halted. At one point, all the artists and stage hands from the Mariinsky theater who were still living and in the city were summoned to the factory. Their task was top secret: they were to construct a tank division ... out of cardboard. In just a few days, tanks filed out of the factory gates one after another, in the plain light of day. The entire intent was that the stage-managed division should be seen by German surveillance. It is said that this trick delayed a German attack on the city for several weeks.

People have five senses: smell, hearing, sight, taste and touch. During those 900 days in the middle of the last century, all possible laws for normal human existence were destroyed. Every one of the five senses was assaulted with a fatal dose of “blockade poison.” For 900 days, the customary smells were of blood, urine, fire and decomposition. Touch your face and you will feel nothing – just skin and bones and you can’t get warm. Look about you, and you don’t recognize your city: buildings are destroyed; cupolas and spires of churches are covered with dark paint and camouflage netting; sculptures are buried and any intact windows are glued over with paper.

The body of the city was suffering. Yet a sound remained. It was like the beating of a heart. It was the sound of a metronome.

Radio was the only link to the outside world and the only possible source of information in the blockaded city. And, during those times when there was nothing to be announced or when there was no strength to carry on a broadcast, the sound of a metronome was broadcast over the radio, counting off the seconds. The dying city was dark, cold and hungry, but still the heart was beating. As long as there was this beating, it meant there was life. Perhaps not visible without, but it was there within.

Truly, life is surprising.

Humans can do anything. If they are without food, heat and light, they will drink spirits and eat grass. They will listen to the radio and tell jokes. The reason is simple: humans love life, even if it means enduring 900 days of horror.   RL