Inferno - Max Hastings [112]
By December, the temperature had dropped to minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit, and starvation was killing tens of thousands. The bread ration shrank to 4.5 ounces. Some people mechanically continued their work: at the city’s Zoological Institute, fifty-year-old beetle expert Axel Reichardt worked on his magnum opus, The Fauna of the Soviet Union, until one day he was found lying dead on a mattress in his office. Sasha Abramov, an actor at the Musical Comedy Theatre, where the cast were almost too weak to walk to performances, expired during an interval, wearing his costume as one of Dumas’s three musketeers. Elena Skrjabina wrote: “People are so weak with hunger that they are completely indifferent to death; they perish as if they are falling asleep. Those half-dead people who are still around do not even pay any attention to them.” Stiffened corpses lay in the streets until they were piled onto sledges for disposal in shell craters. German intelligence, monitoring the city’s agony with clinical fascination, calculated that 200,000 people had died in three months.
Yet the privileged escaped most of the suffering. Zhukov was recalled to Moscow when it became plain that there would be no battle, leaving Leningrad in the hands of party officials who ate prodigiously throughout the siege. It became a characteristic of Russia’s war that corruption and privilege persisted, even as tens of millions starved and died. Some functionaries were evacuated by air, as was the city’s most famous resident, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who completed elsewhere his Seventh Leningrad Symphony, which became a symbol of the experience. For the dignitaries who stayed, bread, sugar, meatballs and other cooked food remained readily available at a canteen in the Smolny Institute; they also had access to a private heated cinema. Rumours circulated about the party’s shameless cynicism and privileges: an anonymous pamphleteer signing himself “the Rebel” printed a leaflet that was found in the streets: “Citizens, down with the regime that lets us die of starvation! We are being robbed by scoundrels who deceive us, who stockpile food and leave us to go hungry. Let us go to the district authorities and demand more bread. Down with our leaders!” The NKVD devoted immense effort to identifying “the Rebel,” and in December 1942 extracted a confession from a fifty-year-old factory worker named Sergei Luzhkov, who was dispatched to his inevitable fate before a firing squad.
At the end of 1941, the freezing of Lake Ladoga opened a more resilient link to the outside world: the legendary six-lane ice highway created by 30,000 civilian workers. Four thousand lorries were soon shuttling along this “Road of Life,” but few of the incoming supplies—initially 700 tons a day—reached ordinary citizens. On Stalin’s orders, a renewed attack was launched to break the German encirclement, which failed with the usual heavy losses. A radio operator on the Volkhov Front east of the city, Nikolai Nikulin, wrote: “I learned what war was really like. One quiet night I was sitting in my icy hole, unable to sleep because of the cold, scratching my lice-infested body, crying from weakness and misery … In an empty German dugout I found some potatoes, frozen hard as stones, made a fire and boiled them in my helmet. With food in my stomach, I gained spirit. I started to change after that night, developing defence mechanisms, an instinct for self-preservation, staying power. I learned how to find grub … Once a horse that was pulling a sledge near us was killed by a shell. Twenty minutes later, little was left of it save the mane and guts, because smart guys like me dismembered it. The driver hadn’t even recovered from the shock—he just sat on his sledge clutching the reins.” Twenty Soviet divisions were destroyed in attempts to relieve Leningrad;