At a Party meeting at the end of August he (fruitlessly) stood up and made a public complaint: ‘I was pleased with what I said, though I know that Kalinovsky [Sudomekh’s director], Derevyanko and others will not forgive me. They can go to the devil. I said out loud what everyone in the hall was thinking. . I won’t sell myself for lentil soup, though I’m hungry every day.’
As well as trying to fulfil what was turning into a deluge of near-impossible production orders, Chekrizov was also put in charge of demolishing fourteen wooden buildings south of the Alexander Nevsky monastery, part of a government campaign to lay in supplies of firewood. Some were taken apart by hand, with saws and axes; others were slung round with a hawser attached to a tractor and pulled to the ground. Though Chekrizov accepted that the work was necessary he found it depressing, because the buildings were well constructed (with traditional cinders under the floorboards for insulation) and because their inhabitants had not yet been rehoused. To force one family to leave, he had to order his team to strip off their roof. Most, though, were resigned. ‘We’re wrecking their homes, which they’ve lived in for decades. They’re not angry, they realise that the city needs firewood. They just sit there on their bundles and suitcases, waiting for transport.’35
An engineer to whom Vera Inber chatted on her way home from giving a talk at a factory told her that he had just been to see his family in Novaya Derevnya (the old working-class suburb, just north of Yelagin Island, where the Zhilinskys had lived). When he arrived his house had disappeared, nothing left of it except rubble and bits of broken furniture. Picking over the debris he found some family photographs. ‘Now’, he ruefully told Inber, ‘my whole home fits in my pocket. I can carry it about with me.’36 Olga Grechina, standing guard over a newly demolished house until a truck arrived, was timidly approached by an old woman who presented her with a small turnip and asked permission to drag away a plank. After an hour of standing watch Grechina had traded herself ‘a whole dinner — several turnips and carrots’.37 The demolition campaign, which continued all through the autumn, transformed the appearance of the city’s village-like northern and eastern outskirts — doing more damage, Leningraders observed, than all the Germans’ shelling and bombing.
The summer’s gardening, food requisitioning, anti-corruption and demolition drives were accompanied by another mass evacuation over Lake Ladoga. Designed to remove all non-working Leningraders from the city, it was theoretically obligatory, though many — like Boldyrev and the painter Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva — managed to evade it: Boldyrev because he calculated he was better off where he was, Ostroumova-Lebedeva (offered a flight out and lodgings with the sister of a friend) because she wanted to stay where she belonged:
To live and suffer in Leningrad for such a long time, and now, just before liberation, to leave!. . I pictured myself in Kazan, in a warm room, safe from bombs and hunger — and I pictured myself in the role — not of sponger, but also not of tenant: an old woman who nobody needs. And I made the decision not to go anywhere. Nowhere!38
The classicist Olga Fridenberg tried to leave with her blind, eighty-year-old mother, but gave up when their overcrowded train stopped without explanation for four days on the way to Osinovets. Bribing a guard with her last loaf of bread, she managed to disembark mother and luggage and get them back to their emptied, disordered flat, where they remained for the rest of the war.
Forced hastily to convert as many of their belongings as possible into cash or food, evacuees set up bric- a-brac tables on the pavements and inside the windows of ground-floor flats (it was astonishing, thought Grechina, how many old and beautiful things people had left to sell). Dmitri Likhachev, stripped of his residence permit and given three days’ notice to depart following interrogation at the Big House, watched a stream of prospective purchasers go over the contents of his family flat: ‘At bargain prices they bought chandeliers, carpets, the bronze writing set, malachite boxes, leather armchairs, the sofa, the standard lamp with the onyx base, books, postcards of town views — every single thing that my father and mother had gathered together before the Revolution.’ Altogether the sale raised only 10,000 roubles, 2,000 of which went on six sacks of potatoes.39
The departures reduced Leningrad’s civilian population to that of a small provincial city. Three and a half million before the war, it had fallen to about a million by April 1942, to 776,000 by the end of August and 637,000 by the end of the year.40 Air raids and shelling fell off over the summer, leaving the atmosphere quiet and domestic, almost rural. In the parks, women in headscarves hoed rows of floppy-leaved cabbages. Boys fished along the embankments, sailors bicycled wildly down the middle of the streets, upturned iron bedsteads fenced off bomb craters and allotments. At the Hermitage, staff carried silk-upholstered furniture outside into the sunshine, brushing it clean of furry layers of sulphur-green mildew. The portico of St Isaac’s, where Pavlovsk’s treasures were stored, looked ‘like a Naples backstreet’, tapestries and carpets hanging from washing lines slung between polished granite pillars. In the courtyard of the Yusupov Palace scurvy-blotched hospital patients sunbathed in their underwear, oblivious to sexuality or embarrassment. Some found the quiet comforting, a reminder of holidays in grandparents’ villages. Others, such as Vera Inber, newly returned from a trip to keyed-up Moscow, found it oppressive and desolate: ‘The city is quiet and deserted to an extent that is shattering. . How can one write in such a city! Even during the bombing it was easier.’41 For Olga Fridenberg, writing to her cousin Boris Pasternak, it was ‘cleaner than any city has ever been’ — ‘sterilised’, ‘holy’ — but also ‘without a germ of life in it. No pregnant women, no children’s voices. . A bell jar out of which all the air has been pumped.’42
Leningrad had also turned into a city of women, who now made up three-quarters of the population and the majority of workers in every manufacturing sector except weapons production and shipbuilding.43 (The laying of a fuel pipe under Lake Ladoga, completed in June, allowed power stations and factories to resume limited production.) The Hermitage’s head of security complained that whereas before the war he had had 650 guards, he now had 64, ‘a mighty troop composed mostly of elderly ladies of fifty-five or more, plus some in their seventies. Many are cripples who used to serve as room attendants. . at any one time at least a third of them are in hospital.’44 Chekrizov unwillingly took on a batch of eighteen women, formerly clerks and bookkeepers, at his Sudomekh shipyard — they would be of no use, he grumbled, except to tidy up. A couple of months later he was eating his words, having successfully trained more than a hundred housewives as lathe operators, metalworkers and welders. They not only worked, he admitted, but ‘worked well’.45 The yard also employed over two hundred children under the age of eighteen, all either orphaned or without a parent in the city.
With more food available and fewer mouths to feed, most Leningraders now ate, by Soviet standards, almost normally (‘A fairly well-organised system of under-nourishment’, as Ginzburg sardonically put it). In addition to bread, meat, fats and sugar, coupons became exchangeable for tiny amounts of salt, wine, dried onion, dried mushrooms, cranberries, salted fish, coffee and matches. In works canteens, people no longer licked their plates, though they still ran a finger round the edge of the bowl and followed the waitresses with hungry eyes. The death rate, though still several times higher than before the war, fell steadily, and heart failure (an after-effect of severe malnutrition) took over from ‘dystrophy’ as the single biggest killer.46
The mental adjustment took longer. It was a continual surprise to encounter no queues at food shops — ‘like a man who braces himself to pick up a heavy suitcase’, wrote Ginzburg, ‘and finds it empty’. The words ‘I’m hungry’, recently so charged with desperation and despair, only slowly reverted to their old function of expressing an ordinary desire for lunch. Most Leningraders were still extremely weak — their recovery as fragile, as Boldyrev put it of his family, as a spider’s web that might at any moment be ripped apart by a passing tractor. When Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s surviving fifteen-year-old nephew came to visit her at the end of May she was shocked to see him ‘corpse-pale, dragging his feet, unbelievably thin, using a walking stick, hair fallen out and head covered in a white fuzz’. (True to form, she set him to painting, and he completed ‘a good study of trees, sky, and parts of the Anatomy Department’.)47 The genuinely healthy still stood out, especially in the newly reopened public bathhouses. Berggolts saw a smooth-skinned, full-breasted young woman mobbed by blotched and bony fellow bathers, who slapped her bottom, hissing that she must be a canteen manager’s mistress or thieving orphanage worker, until the girl dropped her water basin and fled.48
In the midst of recovery, also, a minority of people continued to die of starvation, either because their bodies had been pushed beyond recovery or because they fell outside the rationing system. From the spring, although ration levels gradually increased, getting a card was made harder. Another general re-registration in April reduced the number of cards in circulation, rules excluding those without residence permits were more harshly enforced and cards were withdrawn from the unemployed so as to push them into evacuation.49 ‘It’s not
