Efforts to stop people disposing of faeces outdoors, or relieving themselves in the common parts of their apartment blocks, had begun back in January, and got nowhere. ‘At the entrance of no. 47 Sovetsky Prospekt’, a policeman reported, ‘a notice has been posted saying that anyone found disposing of human waste outside the building will be prosecuted. But in the courtyard there’s not a single drain or cesspit into which waste could be poured away, and a latrine that was set up is so soiled that you can’t get near it.’ A woman who he caught emptying a slop bucket riposted: ‘Prosecute away! Where else can I pour it? Over my head?’ It was the yardman and building manager, she added, who ought to be prosecuted — thanks to them the pipes had frozen and she had to haul water from half a kilometre away. After several false starts, the clean-up campaign finally got going on 28 March. The first day was disappointing — people turned up late or not at all, transport was inadequate, there were not enough crowbars and 450 of the shovels distributed lacked handles. Though many labour-exempt — old people, war-wounded and children — voluntarily reported for duty, others tried to evade it. A housewife was heard to mutter, ‘Let them feed us first, and then we’ll work’; a female factory worker flatly declared, ‘We don’t want to, that’s all’. A man who snapped ‘I don’t intend to work for the Soviet government’ had his details passed to the NKVD.24 Two days later, nonetheless, turnout had risen to 290,000. ‘The entire population of the city’, wrote Vera Inber,
is out cleaning the streets. It’s like putting a soiled North Pole in order. Everything’s a mess — blocks of ice, frozen hills of dirt, stalactites of sewage. . When we see a stretch of clean pavement we are moved. To us, it’s as beautiful as a flower-strewn glade. A yellow-faced, bloated woman, wearing a soot-blackened fur coat — she can’t have taken it off all winter — leant on a crowbar, gazing at a scrap of asphalt she had just cleared. Then she started digging again.25
To Olga Grechina, sent with her civil defence team to clear Lev Tolstoy Square, the scene resembled the ‘excavation of some ancient city’:
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 Madonna Conestabile — he was delighted to find it conveniently provided with a spade and large pile of fire-fighting sand.
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 Pravda, 25,000 tonnes of vegetables were grown on individual allotments in 1942, and 60,000 tonnes the year after. This made them twice as productive, in terms of weight per acre, as 633 new ‘auxiliary farms’ attached to institutes, schools and factories.31