He and his wife were lying in cold and complete darkness, in the underground hell of the basement (shelter no. 3). He recognised me by my voice, and grabbed me like a drowning man clutching at a straw. They gave me 250 roubles, imploring me to buy bread and candles for them in the market. . His last words to me were ‘How I want to live, Sandrik, how I want to live!’ He spoke with that amazing, melodious voice of his, with which he so inimitably read his marvellous, musical translations. . At that point I was too squeezed myself to give real help, and couldn’t buy him anything. Rather Galya, who did occasionally go to the market, didn’t make it, not having the strength. And bread was hardly being sold for money anyway.28
Also celebrated as a manifestation of the defiant Leningrad spirit is the fact that some of its dozens of theatres and concert halls continued to function. The Musical Comedy Theatre — the Muzkomediya — stayed open almost throughout the winter, and concerts continued to be held under the crystal-less chandeliers of the Philharmonia into December. (Of the string players, an audience member noted, only the double bassists could wear sheepskin coats. The rest wore padded cotton jackets, which allowed freer movement of the arms.) It is claimed that altogether, Leningraders enjoyed over twenty-five thousand public performances of different kinds in the course of the blockade, and the image of artists flinging themselves into war work — Shostakovich on the roof of the Conservatoire, Akhmatova standing guard duty outside the Sheremetyev Palace, prima ballerinas sewing camouflage nets — is one of the key tropes of the siege.
At the time, however, many Leningraders were cynical. As one diarist noted of a concert given by the great violinist David Oistrakh (flown in from Moscow for the occasion), the audience were not the usual intelligentsia types, and appeared unusually healthy. He and his wife were by far the most ‘dystrophic-looking’ present.29 Even a fervent Stalinist, watching crowds jostle for tickets to an operetta (A Sailor’s Love) in March 1942, was reminded of bread and circuses.30 One of the bitterest siege diary entries must be the following, written by Vera Kostrovitskaya, the dance teacher at the Mariinsky ballet schooclass="underline"
Since in April it became necessary to portray the rebirth of the city at the hands of the half-dead, L.S.T. [the school’s director] got the vain idea that our school — or to be more accurate, what was left of it — would give the first [springtime] public performance at the Philharmonia.
Some of the girls had stayed relatively healthy, thanks to fortunate conditions at home, but they all had scurvy. The most talented of them, Lyusa Alekseyeva, couldn’t dance the classics — her legs, covered with blue blotches, gave way and wouldn’t obey.
I informed L.S.T. of the situation.
In reply there came a furious shout and threats to deny those who refused to dance their ration coupons for the next month. .
The performance took place. We even had the ‘dying swan’ and other balletic nonsense. Petya, made up by me to look like a living person, ‘danced’ two numbers. To keep him going, the girls had brought him bread and kasha. I led him on stage and tried not to watch as he ‘danced’. During the break he collapsed into my arms and vomited the kasha he had eaten.
There was no public audience at the concert, for there was none in the city. The first two rows were taken by arts administrators and representatives from the Smolniy and Party organisations. With her hair dyed red and dressed up like a model, L.S.T. shone during the entr’acte, accepting greetings and unnaturally loudly recounting her love for the children, whose lives she had been busy saving all through the winter.
Petya died soon afterwards, in an orphanage, and L.S.T. — one Lidiya Semenovna Tager — continued to flaunt a succession of new hats and fur coats, bought with food that she was able to obtain in her position as wife of the Leningrad Front’s head of provisioning.31
Oddest, viewed from a utilitarian perspective, of the institutional stories is perhaps that of the Leningrad Zoo, a small and charming establishment, dating back to the 1860s, located behind the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Petrograd Side. The zoo had evacuated fifty-eight of its more valuable animals to Kazan before the siege ring 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, duranda and potatoes if it was first soaked in a little blood or bone broth, but for fussier tigers, owls and eagles it had to be sewn into the skins of rabbits or guinea pigs. When the zoo reopened the following summer the survivors — Verochka the black vulture, Sailor the Nilgai antelope and Grishka the bear — turned into celebrities. Undisputed star was the hippopotamus Krasavitsa, or ‘Beauty’. The only hippo in the Soviet Union, she had been nursed through the winter by her devoted keeper Yevdokiya Dashina, who daily washed her with forty buckets of warm water hauled by hand from the Neva, and rubbed her baggy grey skin with camphor oil to stop it cracking.32 A photograph from 1943 shows Krasavitsa and Dashina standing together in a muddy enclosure. Dashina holds out a piece of greenery; the hippo rests with her chin on the ground, squinting at the camera with a small, lashed eye. Behind the massive animal, on a railing, sit a row of large-kneed, shaven-headed children.
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: