«The truth about the Leningrad Blockade will never be published. The Leningrad Blockade has been turned into sentimental joke.» – D.S. Likhachev
🕯 From the memories of academician Likhachev:
- They called this ice road the road of death (and not the “Road of Life,” as our writers later called it in a sweet, fake way).
- Trucks often fell through holes in the ice (they drove at night). They told a story about a mother who went insane. She was in the second truck, her children in the first. The first truck fell through the ice right in front of her. Her truck quickly went around the hole where her children were struggling under the water and went away without stopping.
- How many people died from hunger, were killed, fell through the ice, froze, or disappeared on that road? Only God knows.
- Folklorist A.N. Lozanova lost her husband on that road. She was pulling him on a child’s sled because he couldn’t walk. On the other side of Lake Ladoga, she left him on the sled with their suitcases and went to get cards for bread. When she came back, the sled, her husband, and the suitcases were gone.
- People were robbed. They took suitcases from the weak and pushed them under the ice. There was a lot of robbery. At every step, there was both evil and goodness, self-sacrifice and extreme selfishness, theft and honesty.
- The most terrible thing was the slow firing of staff. By order from Moscow, suggested by our director who lived there and didn’t understand what was happening in Leningrad, they “reduced staff.”
- Every week, they posted orders to fire people. Being fired was terrifying. It was like a death sentence. The fired person lost their food cards and couldn’t get another job. Without cards, they got no food.
- All the ethnographers died. Many librarians died. Many young, talented mathematicians died. But the zoologists survived – many knew how to hunt.
- The director of the Pushkin House didn’t come downstairs. His family was evacuated. He moved to live at the Institute and kept demanding bowls of soup or porridge be brought to his office.
- In the end, he got sick with a stomach problem. He asked me about ulcer symptoms and told me to call a doctor.
- A doctor came from the university clinic. He entered the room where the director lay with a swollen stomach, sniffed the terrible air, and made a face. Leaving, the doctor was angry and cursed: a starving doctor was called to see a director who had eaten too much!
- In winter, the mice starved to death. On cold, quiet mornings, when we were mostly lying in bed, we could hear a dying mouse jumping convulsively by the window and then dying. It couldn’t find a single crumb in our room.
- In the cafeteria, they fed people with special food cards. Many workers didn’t get cards and would come… to lick the plates.
- Meanwhile, food was being quickly taken out of Leningrad. No one tried to spread it out safely, like the British did in London. The Germans were preparing to blockade the city, and we were preparing to surrender it to them.
- They only stopped taking food out when the Germans cut all the railway lines in late August.
- They prepared Leningrad for surrender in another way: they burned archives. Ash flew in the streets.
- Meanwhile, the city filled with people. People from the suburbs ran there. Peasants ran there. Leningrad was surrounded by a ring of peasant carts. They weren’t let into the city.
- The peasants camped with their animals, crying children who started to freeze on cold nights. At first, people from Leningrad went to them for milk and meat – they slaughtered the animals.
- By the end of 1941, all these peasant carts had frozen to death. The refugees they put in schools and other public buildings also froze. I remember one building on Ligovka Street packed with people. Probably no one working there now knows how many people died inside.
- The first to die were also those who were “evacuated inside” from the southern districts. They had no possessions, no supplies.
- The ones who starved were those who couldn’t get food cards: people who came from the suburbs and other cities. They were the first to die. They lived piled on the floors of train stations and schools.
- So, one person might have two ration cards, while others had none. There were countless refugees without cards, but also many people with several cards.
- Orders were indeed given to evacuate children. They recruited women to accompany them. Since leaving the city on your own was forbidden, everyone who wanted to escape attached themselves to the children’s trains…
- Later we learned that many children were sent toward Novgorod – straight toward the Germans.
- They told how in Lyuban, the accompanying “ladies” grabbed their own children and ran, leaving the other children behind. The children wandered hungry, crying. Little children couldn’t say their last names when they were finally gathered up, and they lost their parents forever.
- Some starving people literally crawled to the cafeteria. Others were dragged up the stairs to the second floor where the cafeteria was because they couldn’t climb themselves.
- Others couldn’t close their mouths, and saliva ran from their open mouths onto their clothes.
- In the reception area, several people picked up from the street lay on the floor. They put hot water bottles on their hands and feet. But really, they just needed to be fed, and there was nothing to feed them.
- I asked: What will happen to them next? They told me: “They will die.” — “But can’t they be taken to a hospital?” — “There’s no transport. And there’s nothing to feed them there anyway. You need to feed them a lot because they are in a severe state of starvation.”
- The hospital attendants dragged the corpses of the dead to the basement. I remember one was still very young. His face was black (the faces of the starving got very dark). An orderly explained to me that you have to drag the corpses down while they are still warm. When a corpse gets cold, lice crawl out.
- I remember two black marketeers coming to us. I was lying down, the children too. The room was dark, lit by battery-powered bulbs from flashlights.
- Two young men came in and quickly asked: “Do you have Baccarat crystal, art, cameras?” They asked for other things too. In the end, they bought something from us. This was in February or March.
- They were scary, like grave worms. We were still moving in our dark tomb, and they were already ready to swallow us.
- A special kind of blockade theft developed. Hungry boys, especially teenagers who needed more food, would grab bread and start eating it immediately. They didn’t try to run—they just wanted to eat as much as possible before it was taken.
- They pulled their collars up, expecting to be beaten, lay on the bread, and ate and ate and ate.
- On staircases, other thieves waited and took food, ration cards, and passports from the weak. It was especially hard for the elderly.
- If your cards were taken, you couldn’t get them back. If such a weak person didn’t eat for a day or two, they couldn’t walk. And when the legs stopped working, the end came.
- Usually, families didn’t all die at once. As long as there was one person who could walk and get bread, the others, lying down, were still alive. But if that last person stopped walking or collapsed on the street or stairs (especially hard for those living on high floors), then the whole family died.
- Corpses lay on the streets. No one picked them up. Who were the dead? Maybe that woman has a child still alive, waiting for her in an empty, cold, dark apartment?
- There were many women who fed their children by taking the food they needed for themselves. These mothers died first, and the child was left alone.
- That’s how our co-worker at the publishing house, O.G. Davidovich, died. She gave everything to her child. They found her dead in her room. She was lying on the bed. The child was under the blanket with her, playing with her mother’s nose, trying to “wake her up.”
- A few days later, Davidovich’s “rich” relatives came to her room to take… not the child, but the few rings and jewelry she had left. The child died later in a kindergarten.
- They cut the soft parts off corpses lying in the streets. Cannibalism began! First, they undressed the corpses, then cut them to the bone. There was almost no meat on them. The cut and naked corpses were terrifying.
- That’s how they ate one of the employees of the Academy of Sciences Publishing House- Vavilova. She went to get meat (someone gave her an address where you could trade things for meat) and never returned. She died somewhere near the Sytny Market. She looked relatively well-fed. We were afraid to take the children outside even during the day.
- Our deputy director for housekeeping, Kanailov (what a name!), threw out everyone who tried to stay and die in the Pushkin House—so they wouldn’t have to carry out a corpse.
- Some workers and cleaners who were forced to live at work, separated from their families, died at our place. Now, when many couldn’t walk home, they were thrown out to die in the -30°C frost. Kanailov watched carefully for anyone getting weak. Not a single person died in the Pushkin House.
- One cleaner was still quite strong, and she took food cards from the dying for herself and Kanailov.
- I was in Kanailov’s office. A dying worker came in (Kanailov and the cleaner thought he couldn’t get out of bed anymore). He looked terrible (saliva ran from his mouth, his eyes bulged, his teeth seemed to stick out). He appeared in the doorway like a ghost, like a half-rotted corpse, and just said one word hoarsely: “Cards! Cards!”
- Kanailov didn’t understand at first, but when he realized the man wanted his cards back, he got terribly angry, cursed him, and pushed him. The man fell. I don’t remember what happened next. He was probably thrown out into the street too.
- Now Kanailov works in Saratov, seems to be a member of the City Council – “holds a position.”
- A woman took the children of dead factory workers to her room. She got food cards for them but… didn’t feed them. She locked the children up. The weakened children couldn’t get out of bed; they lay quietly and quietly died.
- Their bodies remained there until the start of the next month, while she could still get cards for them. In spring, this woman left for Arkhangelsk. This was also a form of cannibalism, but the most terrible kind.
- I think real life is hunger. Everything else is an illusion. In hunger, people showed themselves, were laid bare, freed from all pretense. Some turned out to be wonderful, unparalleled heroes. Others—villains, scoundrels, murderers, cannibals. There was no middle ground.
- The Modzalevsky family left Leningrad, abandoning their dying little daughter in a hospital. This saved the lives of their other children.
- The Eikhenbaum family fed only one of their daughters, because otherwise both would have died.
- In spring, the Saltykov family, leaving Leningrad, left their mother tied to a sled on the platform of the Finland Station because the sanitation inspection wouldn’t let her through.
- People abandoned the dying: mothers, fathers, wives, children. They stopped feeding those it was “useless” to feed. They chose which child to save. They left them in hospitals, on train platforms, in freezing apartments, to save themselves.
- They robbed the dead—searched them for gold items. They pulled out gold teeth. They cut off fingers to get wedding rings from their dead husband or wife. They stripped corpses on the street to take their warm clothes for the living.
- They cut the last dried skin from corpses to make soup for children. They were ready to cut meat from their own bodies for children.
- Those who were abandoned remained silent, wrote diaries and notes so that later, at least someone would know how millions died.
- Were the German air attacks scary? Who could they scare? There were no well-fed people left.
- Only a person dying of hunger lives a real life. They can commit the greatest evil or the greatest self-sacrifice, not fearing death.
- And the brain dies last: when conscience, fear, the ability to move and feel have died in some, and when selfishness, self-preservation, cowardice, and pain have died in others.
The truth about the Leningrad Blockade will never be published.
D.S. Likhachev
