closed, and others had been killed in the early air raids. The city soviet, instead of ordering the slaughter and consumption of the remainder, then allocated the zoo a special ration of hay and root vegetables, with which, by dint of extraordinary dedication and ingenuity, staff kept eighty-five animals alive through the winter. Foxes, ermines, raccoons and vultures, they discovered, could be persuaded to eat a ‘vegetable mince’ of bran,
Achievements such as these, though, were specks of light in a vast darkness. More indicative of the state of the city as a whole were the activities of the Burial Trust, the agency in charge of morgues and cemeteries.33 For the first few months of the war its 250-odd staff, twelve motor vehicles and thirty-four horses had coped with their increased workload fairly well. Some 3,688 burials — not much above the pre-war number — took place in July 1941, 5,090 in August, 7,820 in September, 9,355 in October and 11,401 in November. Though two out of eight designated new burial sites — pre-prepared in expectation of mass air-raid casualties — ended up on the wrong side of the front line, 80 to 85 per cent of bodies delivered to morgues were positively identified by family members and buried individually in the usual way. The rest were registered and photographed by the police.
From December, however, procedures broke down completely, as ‘mummy’-laden sleds began to fill the main streets leading to the big suburban cemeteries. Inside the cemetery gates, Trust staff (forty-six of whom died during the winter) were overwhelmed, leaving an opening for ‘cemetery wolves’ who brought their own crowbars and offered to dig individual graves in exchange for bread or money. Coffins could be had for temporary hire, as could actual graves, in which corpses were briefly deposited before being slung into trenches with the rest. One woman, depositing her dead father at the Serafimovskoye cemetery in March, could not afford an individual burial, but agreed with workers that for twenty-five roubles they would place him on the edge rather than in the middle of a mass grave, having first removed him from his coffin. On her way out she noticed a grotesque piece of graveyard humour: a corpse propped vertically with a cigarette in its mouth, pointing trenchwards with an outstretched, frozen arm.34
Increasingly, relatives only made it as far as the new temporary morgues, opened in each of the fifteen city districts in part so as to shorten the funeral caravans on the streets, which as the Trust remarked made ‘a bad impression on the population’. One such morgue is graphically described by the optical engineer Dmitri Lazarev, disposing of his dead father-in-law in late January:
The building manager wrote down the address on a scrap paper — Glukhaya Zelenina [‘Lonely Green’] Street. He gave us a sled, and warned us that unless they are in coffins corpses can now only be transported through the streets after 8 p.m. Even for the time of year it was unusually cold — 35 degrees below zero. Nina, Nika and I tied Vladimir Aleksandrovich to a board with towels, and with great difficulty lowered him down the dark stairs. Nina stayed at home to put the children to bed; Nika and I dragged the sled to Glukhaya Zelenina. . We pulled together at first, then took turns, so that the other person could turn his back to the wind and warm up his face and hands a little. The trip — in reality a fairly short distance — seemed never-ending. Finally we reached the gates of the morgue, previously a woodstore. The woman on the door, also half-dead from cold, was getting ready to go home, and in a martyred voice told us to hurry. We dragged the sled along a narrow cleared path through the yard to a big shed. Opening its door wide, in the moonlight we saw a mountain of corpses, half- dressed or sewn into sheets, and dumped in a heap like firewood. Impatiently, the woman indicated that the new delivery should be thrown on top of the mountain. . There was nobody else there and she stood on the sidelines, clearly not intending to help. We untied the body from the boards and tried to lift it, but without success — our wasted muscles didn’t have the strength. There was nothing for it except to try and drag it up the pile. The easiest way, it turned out, was to take it by the legs. Stumbling we began to climb, treading on slippery, frozen-solid stomachs, backs and heads. Despite the cold there was a suffocating stench. When, exhausted, we came to a halt, the head and shoulders of poor Vladimir Aleksandrovich still lay outside. The woman pushed at his head with the shed door, seeing if it would close. We needed to climb higher but couldn’t. At last, in desperation, we gave a jerk and the body moved sideways, its head swinging to one side. At the same time the door closed, and something rattled. It was the woman fussing with the door latch, seeing if it would hold shut. For several minutes we stood in complete darkness, afraid to move. . The door opened. Carefully, holding each other by the hand, we descended into the open, and all three of us sighed with relief. The woman (could she have been the morgue manager?) carelessly stuffed the paperwork into her pocket and the funeral was over.35
Sixteen more such morgues opened in April, several of them in disused churches, including the Trinity Cathedral and the chapel of the Alexander Nevsky monastery.
On 15 January the city soviet ordered the digging of more, bigger trenches at the Bolsheokhtinskoye cemetery (just across the river from the Smolniy), the Serafimovskoye cemetery in Novaya Derevnya, the old Lutheran cemetery on Decembrists’ Island, and at the Piskarevskoye and Bogoslovskoye cemeteries in the far north-eastern suburbs. Though each of the fifteen district soviets was supposed to find four hundred workers to man new burial teams, only one actually did so, and the job was turned over to NKVD troops and civil defence units. The ‘Komsomolets’ excavators with which they started work proved unable to break the ground, which had frozen to a depth of one and a half metres, so instead explosives were used, together with heavier AK diggers.
A second order of 2 February instructed district soviets to come up with a daily total of sixty lorries with trailers, for the collection of corpses from morgues and hospitals. Five-tonne trucks were to transport one hundred corpses per trip, three-tonne trucks sixty corpses, and one and a half-tonne trucks forty. Drivers were incentivised with extra rations — 100 grams of bread and fifty of vodka for every second and subsequent delivery. As a result, the Burial Trust reported, for several days in February ‘six to seven thousand bodies were delivered daily to the Piskarevskoye Cemetery alone. . Five-tonne trucks piled high with corpses could be seen driving through town, their poorly covered loads reaching as high again as the sides of the vehicle, with five or six workers sitting on top.’ Since the corpses were frozen stiff, to pack in the maximum number collection teams could use the same technique as for logs, some standing vertically so as to form a fence holding in the remainder.36 At the cemeteries the excavators could not keep up with deliveries, creating enormous backlogs. The number of unburied corpses at the Piskarevskoye, the Trust estimated, reached 20,000–25,000 at its February worst, stacked in rows two hundred metres long and two metres high.
Though the conversion of brick kilns to crematoria in March, combined with decreasing mortality, gradually brought the situation under control, mass burial continued up to the end of May. At the Piskarevskoye (the largest of the sites) a total of 129 trenches were dug, filled and re-covered from 16 December to 1 May. The biggest six — four to five metres deep, six metres wide and up to 180 metres long — contained, the Trust estimated, about 20,000 bodies each. At the Bogoslovskoye a disused sandpit was filled with 60,000 corpses over five or six February days, an anti-tank ditch with 10,000, and bomb craters with another 1,000. Eighteen anti-tank ditches on the northern edge of the Serafimovskoye cemetery accommodated another 15,000. Altogether, the Trust reported, 662 mass graves were dug and filled in the city, not counting the use of pits, craters and trenches. How many dead they contained in total is still disputed, but the best estimate for the number of civilians who died during Leningrad’s first siege winter is around half a million.37
12. ‘We Were Like Stones’
