In some places the snow had been cleared away down to the ground, in others work hadn’t begun. There were crowds of people — more than we had seen together in one place for a long time. Those who couldn’t work simply sat on stools, having been helped outdoors to enjoy the sun. Everyone worked happily and eagerly. Groups of the weakest dragged great boulders of snow and ice off to the Karpovka on huge sheets of plywood with ropes attached. All the dirt and snow was being dumped into the river.26
Aleksandr Boldyrev, still indefatigably doing the round of institutes in search of lunch passes and back pay, heard about the campaign two days in advance. It was sure, he thought, to finish off many, but officialdom’s reasoning was ‘better a few hundred housewives and dependants dead now, than several thousand in an epidemic in a month’s time’. Summoned to help clear the grounds of the Hermitage, he put in two hours’ work on the 28th (‘slave-owner shouting from Ada and others’) and another hour on the 29th before crying off with the excuse that he had hurt his knee (‘The stench from the half-melted chocolate snow is disgusting. When you crack it with a pick thousands of droplets splash on to your clothes and face’). The next day he really did injure himself, slicing off the top of his thumb while chopping wood. A chit from a sympathetic doctor (thanked with a gift of art books) got him off further labour duty, but others were not so fortunate. ‘Prushevskaya’, he wrote on Easter Saturday, ‘died in the Hermitage’s recuperation clinic today. Though an extreme, text-book dystrophic, the day before yesterday she was still working clearing snow. Now Ada Vasilyevna comforts herself with the idea that [Prushevskaya] “was already mentally ill when she entered the clinic”.’27 Altogether, Hermitage staff cleared the complex of thirty-six tonnes of snow, ice, splintered wood, fallen plaster and broken glass.28
The March — April clean-up campaign is one of the set pieces of the siege, quoted as a turning point in almost every survivor interview, and credited with miraculously preventing epidemics of the three classic famine diseases — dysentery, typhoid fever and typhus. In reality, this was not quite true. Though the overall death rate fell from March onwards, in April numbers of dysentery and typhoid cases per thousand head of population were five to six times higher than a year earlier, and of typhus, twenty-five times higher. Quoting these numbers in a private letter to Zhdanov in mid-May, the head of the Leningrad garrison angrily blamed inadequate medical services and washing facilities. Half the city’s public bathhouses, he pointed out, still weren’t working; only 7 per cent of flats had running water and 9 per cent sewerage, and up to a third of households still suffered serious lice infection. Many courtyards were still covered in human waste. Typhus ‘hotspots’ included recuperation clinics, children’s homes, railway stations and evacuation points, and unless urgent measures were taken, would soon include army barracks.29 Dysentery — known as ‘hunger diarrhoea’ — also figures frequently in diarists’ accounts; it was often what finished off the already starving. Boldyrev managed to joke about it. Forced, on his way to a meeting with Hermitage administrators, to ‘do the unmentionable’ in an empty gallery — the one that normally housed Raphael’s
As spring turned to summer and hopes that the siege would be lifted faded, attention turned to avoiding a repeat of the mass-death winter. Riding a tram again for the first time in months, Dmitri Lazarev noticed that the previous year’s public notices — ‘Expose whisperers and spies!’ ‘Death to provocateurs!’ — had now been replaced by more practical exhortations:
Fifteen hundredths of a hectare will produce 800kg of cabbage, 700kg of beets, 120kg of cucumbers, 130kg of carrots, 340kg of swedes, 50kg of tomatoes and 200kg of other vegetables! This is more than enough for an entire family for the whole year. Save ashes from the stove for your vegetable patch!30
The gardening drive was enthusiastically taken up by Leningraders, who with the help of government- organised distributions of seeds and equipment — hoes and wheelbarrows were specially manufactured — created thousands of vegetable patches in parks, squares and on waste ground. At the Hermitage, staff grubbed up the lilacs and honeysuckle of Catherine the Great’s rooftop ‘hanging garden’ in favour of carrots, beets, dill and spinach. The Boldyrevs planted onions in a window box (‘Oh I long for onion!’); the Likhachevs grew radishes in an upturned kitchen table. Altogether, according to
The city also continued to requisition large quantities of food from collective farms within the siege ring. As well as making their usual deliveries, via their collectives, to the state, peasants were obliged to provide animals and seed corn to refugees in their areas, to subscribe funds to a tank column (dubbed the ‘Leningrad Collective Farmer’) and to ‘donate’ grain from their personal stores to the Red Army. District Party committees were instructed to rely on the Statistics Department rather than the farms themselves for harvest forecasts, and committees that failed to come up with their allotted quotas were accused of giving comfort to ‘anti-collective elements’. In a rare concession to market forces, it was decided to offer underclothes, soap, thread, tobacco and vodka in exchange for deliveries of wild mushrooms and berries.32
An NKVD report on the public mood in villages around the town of Borovichi, east of Novgorod, illustrates the resentment these measures provoked. A series of public meetings had been held to raise funds for the ‘Collective Farmer’ tank column, duly raising three million roubles amidst patriotic speeches. ‘We should help the Red Army chase these two-legged beasts from our land’, a loyal
Elsewhere villagers were more outspoken, emboldened by the sound of German guns actually to threaten their bosses. Scolded for bad work by the chairman of her village soviet, one woman spat back
I can’t wait for Soviet rule to end. It has bankrupted the peasants, left us hungry and barefoot, and now you’re stripping us naked. But I’m not going to bow down before you fine gentlemen. Your reign’s coming to an end. You sent all the good people out of the village, but just you wait, it’ll be your turn next.
A fifty-year-old member of the ‘Unity’ collective was equally bold: ‘Our time’s coming, and we’ll take what’s ours. I may not be able to read or write but I’ll be the first to turn the bosses in. I’ll be believed. Then we’ll repay you. And we won’t just take a lamb from each of you; we’ll flay a pair of belts off each of your backs.’ (This ‘counter-revolutionary activity’, the report noted, had been documented in preparation for arrest.) There was also a widespread rumour that America and Britain, in exchange for opening a second front, were demanding that the collectives be broken up and the land given back to its peasant owners.33
In the city, new drives were launched against food theft and black-market trading. But although hundreds of food shop and food distribution agency staff were arrested (520 in July, 494 in August), and substantial amounts of ill-gotten property confiscated (sixty-two gold watches in September), both continued to flourish.34 The outdoor markets, when shut down in one part of town, simply reappeared in another, and factory workers continued to complain that bosses and kitchen staff colluded to skim their rations. At the Sudomekh shipyard, the crackdown sparked a showdown between the factory’s management and its Party organisation. ‘The senior and junior managers are all drinking spirits’, Party member Vasili Chekrizov confided to his diary.
You see the bastards tipsy more and more often. If they’re going to get drunk, I wish that at least they’d do it behind doors. They stuff their faces, give cover to all the thieving in the canteens, and have eliminated workers’ control, since it gets in their way. There are lots of bosses like that — not just here, but everywhere. . At meetings they declare their support for the gardening drive, and at weekends sometimes even go and inspect the allotments. But in private all they talk about is how to grab whatever they can for themselves. The inventory managers have got twenty ration cards each. Where are the NKVD? Can they really not catch them?
