relieved themselves on the marble main staircase, turning it into a ‘yellow ice mountain’. They set up a black market in the second-floor restaurant, and mugged the orderlies — many, like Marina and her sister, gently reared ‘Turgenev girls’ — carrying food along the dark corridors.
On 4 January, having been working fifteen-hour days carrying buckets of hot water up four flights of ice- covered stairs, Marina collapsed with stomach pains. A kind nurse put the girls and their mother into what had been one of the hotel’s cheaper bedrooms, on the top floor. Its grey-painted walls were covered with fernlike swirls of hoarfrost, the indoor temperature being eleven degrees below freezing. What allowed them to make the room habitable was Marina’s mother’s discovery of a half-litre bottle of alcohol in the hotel’s former pharmacy. With one half of it she bought
The little boy had reached the last stage of starvation. He was all oedema — the liquid had swelled his body so much that it seemed as if his skin wouldn’t hold. . We somehow pulled him together, gave him something to eat. Like a stuck record, he kept repeating and repeating that he would die within a week, his mother maybe sooner, and so on and so on. And we sat and listened, but our feelings were so blunted. . We lived only in order to live. Thought and emotion somehow came to a standstill.
All over the city, public institutions — schools, factories, banks, post offices, police stations, university departments — similarly ground to a halt, though employees with strength enough continued to turn up for warmth, companionship and the chance of obtaining a plate of watery soup in the canteen. ‘In the mornings’, Lazarev wrote of his Optical Institute, ‘we sat round the stove in silence, heads bowed. We sat for hours, not moving, not talking. When there was no more firewood the stove went out. Though there was a big pile of wood in the courtyard nobody had the strength to chop it and carry it up the stairs. Instead, we sat out the wait until lunch in the cold. After lunch we went home.’ The first to die (as in Georgi Knyazev’s Academicians’ Building and Olga Grechina’s apartment block) were the Institute’s ancillary staff. ‘The old cleaning lady has just died of hunger’, he wrote on 25 December. ‘Only the day before yesterday she was dusting my desk. I’m told that she went home, lay down on her bed, stretched out her arms, sighed and died. Today, entering the lab, I saw the corpse of our recently deceased security guard in the next room.’
Unlike the cleaning lady, Lazarev had access to the Scholars’ Building, a clubhouse for academics splendidly housed a few doors down from the Hermitage on the Neva. Through September
a long queue winds up the marble staircase. People stand and wait in silence. Almost everyone carries a document case over their shoulder, with hidden inside it a container for carrying food back home to the family. The wait feels endless. It’s especially cold standing next to the massive marble banisters — a perceptible wave of cold streams off them. At last our turn comes, and we enter the canteen. Frozen, in fur coats and hats, we sit down at the free tables. After some time a desultory conversation begins. A zoologist — tall and formerly overweight — complains that people of different sizes are all given the same food. ‘Mark my words, bigger men. .’ But nobody listens to him, since Katyusha is approaching our table with her scissors and the matchbox for coupons. She is our favourite waitress — it seems to us that she serves up faster, and that her portions are a little bigger. People come to the canteen with their own plates and spoons. The respectable grey-haired professor licks his plate clean before hiding it in his gas-mask bag.19
Lazarev himself fell gravely ill in the spring, and was reprieved only by a providential secondment to a minelayer, which as well as providing him with proper meals allowed him to pass his ration cards to his wife and daughter.
The Leningrad Party Committee officially closed 270 factories over the winter, but most of the rest hardly functioned and even what remained of the defence plants managed only a little erratic repair work.20 Olga Grechina, orphaned by her mother’s death in January, stood guard duty at night in her semi-shut missile factory. Alone in the empty workshops she kept fear at bay by reading H. G. Wells’s
Out of the 270 workers of Workshop 15 of Vasili Chekrizov’s Sudomekh shipyard, 47 had died by the end of January. ‘How many will die in February nobody knows. Only seventy appear for roll-call, or at the canteen. All the others are lying down. . Skilled, qualified workmen, the backbone of the shop, have died. . Only a few people are working on repairs, and you can’t really call it work — in truth they’re just marking time.’21 The usual draconian punishments for absenteeism ceased to have any effect. At the Marti shipyard, a report to Zhdanov of early February complained,
hundreds of people fail to appear for work, and nobody pays any attention. Every day the number absent without leave rises. . After the district Party Committee told the management that their behaviour sheltered truants, in the course of two days they brought proceedings against seventy-two absentees. But this was not the end of [the management’s] mistakes. Of the 72 cases half had to be sent back again, for lack of evidence.22
Academic life kept going for a remarkably long time. The Persianist Aleksandr Boldyrev was still taking tutorials in the Hermitage in late December (and scolding his students for turning in poor work). Nikolai Punin was doing the same until late November. At the Erisman Hospital the pathologist Vladimir Garshin lectured through the air raids, and held exams as usual at the end of the winter term, even as his students died in their hostels. (The single men, he noticed, collapsed first; girls and married couples lasted longer.) The only way to keep going, he thought, was to keep working:
So we invent things for the laboratory assistants to do, just to keep them occupied. If you stop working, lie down, it’s bad — there’s no guarantee you’ll get up again. One of the assistants died in the lab itself. She was found in the morning curled up in a ball underneath a warm shawl, wearing new brown felt boots. She hadn’t gone home, it was too far. Another assistant’s husband was killed in the street during an artillery barrage. She took two days’ absence and then returned to work, her dropsy-swollen face even puffier from tears. She is silent. Does work go on? Yes it does, somehow. The important thing is not to give up. The examinations are happening, and I’m taking the orals — their presentations aren’t bad! The lectures sank in after all! And the examiner, my assistant, grills them thoroughly but gently. Where do they get their strength from?23
Inber watched another Erisman doctor defend his thesis in the hospital’s air-raid shelter; the toasts afterwards were drunk in diluted spirits.24
The higher-profile institutions especially persisted in a defiant, almost surreal facsimile of normal life right through the winter’s worst days. On 9 February Inber attended a two-day Conference of Baltic Writers, organised by the Writers’ Union. To prepare she darned extra gloves and stockings, swapped four canteen meals for two eggs and a small piece of dried-up cheese, and dipped into her private food stock for a bar of chocolate. The walk
