From “Sunlight at Midnight”
St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia
by W. Bruce Lincoln

 
      If anything seemed out of the ordinary in Leningrad on the morning of Sunday, June 22, 1941, it was the weather. It had rained for most of the previous week, an unwanted continuation of a damp, cold spring. Then, just the day before — on the shortest of the White Nights, the longest day of the year — a breeze from the south had blown away the clouds, and the weather had turned warm. That evening, crowds celebrating the summer solstice and the end of classes at the university had flowed across the Neva's bridges and filled Nevskii Prospekt. Many Leningraders never went to bed that night, preferring the midnight sunlight to the crowded rooms and apartments they called home. Those who caught a few winks got up to find the Sunday sun already high in the sky, an irresistible invitation to spend the day in the country, where the smell of lilacs and wild cherry blossoms blended so magically with the pungent tartness of the still damp pine woods.
      With picnic baskets and rucksacks full, young couples hurried toward the Vitebsk Station to catch trains for Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk, where the huge parks of the imperial palaces had long since been made into picnic sites for Leningrad's masses. Others headed in the opposite direction—to the Baltic Station for trains that would take them to the seaside palace grounds at Peterhof and Oranienbaum on the Finnish Gulf. Some carried accordions or seven-stringed Russian guitars. Many licked at ice cream cones or nibbled eskimo pies as they pushed their way onto the crowded trains that left the stations every thirty minutes. On such a Sunday, few thought about the week ahead. For now, it was enough to know that the day was theirs to enjoy until the factory whistles called them back the next morning.
      Elena Iosifovna Kochina, a chemist at one of Leningrad's research institutes was well ahead of the crowds that Sunday. She and her husband Dima had gone to the country a few days earlier and had rented rooms in a dacha, a summer cottage, where they planned to spend their vacation. After a late breakfast, Elena had just taken their infant daughter into the garden, when the woman who owned the cottage came running to say that they had just announced on the radio that the Germans had invaded Russia. There had been fighting in the outskirts of Petrograd in the fall of 1917, and again two years later. Then there had been the war with Finland, finished just less than a year ago. And so Elena knew what war meant. "I am thirty-four years old," she told herself grimly, "[and] this is the fourth war of my life."
      In addition to putting loved ones in harm's way, war to Leningraders meant too little food, too little heat, and too many difficulties in meeting the needs of everyday life. That very afternoon, housewives started to buy up sugar, lard, butter, sausage, kasha, matches, and anything else that could be stored. "I bought four and one-half pounds of millet," Kochina wrote, "[and] I hate porridge made from millet." Those who didn't think of food first went to the banks, withdrew their savings, and headed for the commission shops that sold pre-Soviet jewellery and antiques. Diamonds and emeralds from Siberia, oil paintings from everywhere, gold coins from the reign of Nicholas II, gold watches—anything that had real value — was what they wanted. Who knew what paper rubles would be worth in a week? A month? Or a year?
      Connected to radio stations all across the Soviet Union, loudspeakers mounted high on building cornices and telephone poles broadcast a speech by Commissar of Foreign Affairs Viacheslav Molotov right after noon that day. In the flat, expressionless tone that had made him one of Stalin's favorite bureaucrats, Molotov announced that the armies of Nazi.
      Germany had attacked the Soviet Union without provocation. He promised that Russia would be victorious, but people wondered. Could Soviet Russia overcome Hitler's huge fighting machine? What did Stalin think? Midnight came and went and still no word from Stalin. Some people wondered about that, too.
      In June 1941, the population of Leningrad numbered 3,544,000, with another 3,200,000 living in the region around it. Machine tools, locomotives, generators, turbines, chemicals, field artillery, light T-28 tanks, workhorse T-34 tanks, the Red Army's new sixty-ton monster KV tanks, radio transmitters, shoes, and textiles—the list of vital goods that Leningrad produced went on and on, for the city accounted for more than an eighth of all the Soviet Union's industrial output. It boasted the largest machinery plant in the country—the Red Putilov, now renamed the Kirov Works—and the largest number of skilled machinists and tool-and-die makers. The Red Army depended on Leningrad. So did the Red Fleet.
      In peace or war, Soviet Russia needed Leningrad. But the city was even more precariously situated than it had been in imperial times. In 1939, the Finnish frontier had stood a scant fifteen miles to the northeast, with the Estonian border barely a hundred miles to the west. Neither country was particularly fond of the Soviet Union. Territory won that year and the next in the Russo-Finnish War had enlarged Leningrad's cushion of territory to the north, but only at the cost of making the Finns bitter enemies. When war began in 1941, the Finns joined the Germans. Nearby Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were sympathetic, too. Forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940, all three offered the Germans good staging areas from which to attack Leningrad. In these countries, a holiday atmosphere prevailed while the people awaited the arrival of Hitler's armies. In Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, almost no one paid any attention to the freshly printed Soviet posters that urged them all "to stand as one in defense of freedom." Instead Tallinners sipped cocktails and coffee in the city's outdoor cafes and waited for the Germans. "They looked like angels when they came," one woman remembered of the first SS units to arrive. "Later on they acted like devils."
      Some people in Leningrad felt the same way. Who could forget the tens of thousands of men and women who had been dragged from their beds and workbenches never to return? What of the Putilov and Obukhov men who had been lost in the purges? What of the professors? The poets? The people from the ballet and the opera? What of the men and women who had devoted their lives to the Party and the Communist cause and been declared "enemies of the people" anyway? Even once-staunch Communists remembered these losses as the Germans advanced, and some asked themselves if the Nazis offered a chance to be freed of Stalin's yoke. Would Hitler be a greater tragedy for Russia than Stalin? Or might it be the other way around?
      Only too happy to look forward to Stalin's fall, many of Leningrad's intellectuals thought about these questions seriously. But they also had to ask if Stalin's overthrow was worth the death of the city they loved. Well before summer's end they knew what Germany's High Command had been told at the beginning of July. "It is the Ftihrer's firm decision to level . . . Leningrad and make . . . [it] uninhabitable, so as to relieve us of the necessity of feeding the population during the winter," Hitler's Chief of Staff had written in a secret memorandum. "The city will be razed by the Air Force," he went on. "Tanks must not be used for that purpose." Thinking that their city's obliteration was too high a price to pay for getting rid of Stalin, Leningraders embraced the words of the poet Olga Berggolts. "No, I have forgotten nothing," this woman who hated Stalin wrote that first Sunday of the war. "My Motherland with the crown of thorns. With the dark rainbow above your head. ... I love you—I cannot do otherwise."
      Even knowing that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland all might help the Germans, the men in Moscow had done little to prepare for Leningrad's defense. There were not enough weapons, not enough ammunition, and military units defending the city were under strength. The High Command had not yet recovered from the shattering purges of 1938 and 1939. Nor had Leningrad's officials and factory managers done so. Worst of all, the purges had made everyone afraid of telling the truth. As in the fairy tale, no one dared to say that the emperor had no clothes when it came to defending and supplying the city.
      The truth was that civil defense training in Leningrad had been slipshod and superficial. Firefighting units had not been trained to deal with the massive fires incendiary bombs would ignite, tank traps and trenches had not yet been dug, and the supply system was totally unready to face the strains of a siege. Leningrad had little more than a thirty-day reserve of food when the war began, and its stockpiles of fuel were designed only for peacetime needs. But its people and factories needed 13,000 tons of kerosene every month, 60,000 tons of fuel oil, and 2,240 tons of gasoline. For heat and cooking, Leningraders consumed nearly two million cubic feet of firewood every year, and millions of tons of food. Even after rationing began on September 2, Leningrad's bakeries and shops required 2,000 tons of flour a day, the equivalent of almost three-quarters of a million tons a year. By no stretch of the imagination was Leningrad ready for a siege when the fighting began. Nor was it ready when the Nazi ring closed around it two and a half months later. Even when the German bombardment began, people in charge of the city's defense believed that the blockade, somehow and in some way, would be broken before winter set in. Only gradually did they come to realize that it would not.
      As the Germans advanced in July and August, the people of Leningrad tried to slow them down by digging row upon row of ditches and tank traps, some as far away as the Luga line, more than seventy miles to the south. Many of the men had already joined the army—over 200,000 in just the first week of fighting—so most of the workers were older people, young teenagers, and women, especially women, their kerchiefs flashing like so many bright flowers in the fields. Factory workers dug ditches after their regular shifts were over. Students went to dig after classes. Curators at the Hermitage, librarians from Leningrad's many libraries, professors from the university and technological institutes all went to help with the digging.
      Tens of thousands who could be spared from their regular duties worked with picks and shovels all day, every day. "We have worked for 18 days without a break, 12 hours a day," one 57-year-old woman wrote to a newspaper. "One had to work a lot with a pick," she went on. "The dry clay was hard as rock." Leningraders worked in the summer heat, and in the rain when it came. Sometimes they had to go without food, for no one had told them how much to bring with them or how long they'd need to be away. German planes attacked every day, diving, bombing, strafing. Elena Kochina was nearly hit. Later, she remembered the bullets from the Nazi fighter's machine guns "rustling like small metallic lizards" as they struck the ground nearby.
      Before the first of September, Leningraders had dug nearly 16,000 miles of open trenches, 340 miles of anti-tank ditches, and laid 400 miles of barbed wire entanglements. They had felled tens of thousands of trees and piled them up as barriers stretching 190 miles, and they had built 5,000 wooden or concrete firing points. In the meantime, Russia's fighting men fell back. "We're digging well enough," one old woman told a Red Army general that summer, "but you guys are fighting badly." That wasn't quite fair. On the Russian side, tanks and artillery were in short supply. So was air cover. "We start our attack," a soldier told his commander, "and the Germans start to run. Then out of nowhere their tanks and planes hit us.. . . We have no planes, no tanks, just infantry. How can we stand up against that kind of force?" By late August, the Germans were at the edge of Leningrad's suburbs. At the same time, the Finns had retaken most of the Karelian peninsula and regained the frontiers of 1939.
      As the Germans advanced, Leningraders tore apart the plants that produced optical instruments, aircraft, and tanks, crated up the machines, and loaded them onto trains that carried them to safer places in Siberia. Before the end of August, 164,320 workers were sent along with them. Still others packed up the city's treasures. They piled sandbags high and thick around Falconet's Bronze Horseman and took down smaller statues and buried them in the Summer Gardens. Windows had to be covered with plywood or crisscrossed with tape. From the Public Library, 7,000 incunabulae, the second oldest surviving Greek text of the New Testament, Voltaire's personal library, a prayer book belonging to Mary Queen of Scots, a Gutenberg Bible, and 360,000 other precious items out of a collection of 9,000,000 volumes all were crated up and sent away, along with precious historical archives containing two hundred years of Leningrad's history, the letters of Pushkin, manuscripts of Dostoevskii, secrets of the ancient East, and information about tens of thousands of other topics. Then came the most stupendous task of all: the evacuation of a million and a half priceless treasures from the Hermitage.
      When rumors of a German attack had begun to circulate early that spring, the museum's director, Iosif Orbeli, had begun to stockpile packing materials including fifty tons of wood shavings, three tons of cotton wadding, and sixteen kilometers of oilcloth in the Hermitage's basement and a couple of key warehouses. The moment Molotov made his announcement on Sunday, Orbeli ordered forty of the museum's most valuable paintings to be taken to the steel-lined vaults that housed the famous Scythian gold collection. Then on Monday, the Hermitage staff started to pack, working for six days and nights and sleeping only when exhaustion drove them to it. They placed smaller paintings in large wooden crates, separating one from the other with cloth-padded dividers, while many of the larger paintings had to be taken from their stretchers and rolled up. Rembrandt's huge Descent from the Cross had to be packed in that way, de-spite the danger of cracking its surface. His somewhat smaller Prodigal Son, still eight and a half by nearly seven feet, was crated by itself. Some worried that it might be too large to fit into a railroad car.
      All the Scythian gold and the imperial jewels were packed. So were the madonnas of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. Huge crates held the Holy Family by Andrea del Sarto, the Titians, the Giorgiones, the Tintorettos, the Van Eycks, the Van Dycks, and the works of Velazquez, Murillo, and El Greco that made the Hermitage the rival of the Prado in its collection of Spanish paintings. The one-and-a-half-ton sarcophagus of Prince Aleksandr Nevskii, made by Petersburg silversmiths in the middle of the eighteenth century from some of the first silver to be taken from newly discovered mines in Siberia's Altai, had to be taken apart and packed, and Michelangelo's Crouching Boy was fitted into a specially made double-walled crate. Fragile Oriental and European porcelain, porcelain from factories founded by the empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, Roman and Greek intaglios, some three hundred thousand rare coins from all historical periods and places, and Carlo Rastrelli's wax figure of Peter the Great, dressed in the Tsar's own clothes, all had to be dismantled and packed away along with Houdon's marble statue of Voltaire and the fabulous Chertomlyk silver vase dating from the fourth century B.C. Museum workers who helped with the packing bent over so many times that their noses bled. "You'd lie down and rock your head until the bleeding stopped," one woman remembered, "and then [you'd] rush back to the boxes."
      On the ninth day of the war, trucks carrying the packed treasures left the Hermitage for the railyard behind the Moscow Railway Station, two miles up the Nevskii Prospekt. Gradually a special train was loaded, the workers watching anxiously as the huge crate holding The Prodigal Son finally squeezed through the doorway. Then the rest of the treasures— more than a thousand boxes containing half a million items—were carried aboard, and by the early hours of July 1 the train was ready to leave. Preceded by a pilot engine to check the tracks, it was pulled by two locomotives. Then came an armored car with the rarest works of art, followed by a flat car with a battery of anti-aircraft guns pointed skyward to drive away any German planes that might attack. After that came four Pullman cars with other valuable paintings and artifacts, twenty-two freight cars, two passenger cars, and another flat car with more antiaircraft guns. Three weeks later, a second train left with another three-quarters of a million artworks to join the first at Sverdlovsk, formerly called Ekaterinburg, where Nicholas, Aleksandra, and their children had been killed during that same month in 1918. A third train, packed and ready, could not get away in time. When the Germans cut the last railway connection between Leningrad and the rest of the Soviet Union on August 30, these final 351 crates stayed behind in the city along with the treasures that could not be packed. These included the fresco Fra An-gelico had painted for the San Domenico monastery in the 1440s. Because it was too fragile to be moved, Hermitage curators built a breastwork of sandbags thirteen feet high and almost ten feet wide to protect it in case bombs fell nearby.
      While director Orbeli and his staff worried about moving the Hermitage treasures, the Leningrad City Council searched for ways to get 392,000 children out of the city. From the first, the evacuation mixed terror with desperation, as parents tried to balance the need for safety against their children's fears of loneliness. Elena Kochina thought the children looked "like frightened little animals" as they moved toward the railroad station—the "demarcation line of their childhood," she called it—because "on the other side life without parents would begin." The little travelers carried small khaki knapsacks with a few clothes, some food, and some money. A few lucky ones carried notes to friends or acquaintances their parents hoped they might stay with when they reached their destinations. Kochina remembered how trucks took the youngest ones to the station, "their little heads stuck out of the body of the vehicles like layers of golden brown mushrooms." The image couldn't have been more unfortunate. Babushkas—those "grannies" of indeterminate age (one hardly knew if a babushka was forty-five or sixty)—muttered that fall that the many mushrooms growing in the parks of Leningrad meant many deaths. In the coming weeks, this would prove to be tragically true. Some parents like Kochina couldn't let their children go, intending to keep them just a few days more. Then it was too late. When the Germans cut the last rail line between Leningrad and the rest of Russia, only a few more than half of the city's children had been sent away.
      After Nazi forces took the Imperial palaces at Oranienbaum, Peterhof, Gatchina, Pavlovsk, and Tsarskoe Selo (renamed Pushkin by the Soviets), their offensive ground to a halt. Uncertain about storming Leningrad's defenses, Hitler's generals decided to destroy the city by aerial bombardment and artillery, beginning on September 1 with a handful of long-range 240mm guns that killed 53 people and wounded another 101 in the first barrage. Then they closed their ring around the city, not as tightly as they had first hoped, but tight enough for regular heavy artillery to fire with telling effect. The German vise had caught nearly three million people in its jaws, and the men who manipulated it intended to let none escape. "I wrote a deposition . . . [saying that] it was essential not to let a single person through the front line," one of Germany's leading experts on nutrition told a Russian officer after the war. "The more of them that stayed there [in Leningrad]," he went on to explain, "the sooner [I thought] they'd die, and we'd enter the city without . . . losing a single German soldier!"
      Despite such recommendations, the Germans pounded Leningrad with bombs and artillery while they waited for its people to starve. Using the biggest guns in Europe they fired 5,364 shells into the city in September, 7,590 in October, 11,230 in November, and 5,970 in December. Fired from a distance of nearly seventeen miles, some of their high-explosive projectiles weighed close to a ton. Others were smaller and were fired from positions nearer the city against which the Red Army's artillery could retaliate. But the firing continued for a long time, inflicting tremendous damage. Even worse, the Luftwaffe dropped more than a hundred thousand bombs on Leningrad during the fall and early winter of 1941. Sometimes as many as six hundred planes took part in a single raid, and to see two or three hundred at a time was commonplace. These were the days, Akhmatova wrote, when the "dragon's shriek" of falling bombs was everywhere. People were also killed by mines, rifle bullets, and bullets fired from airplane machine guns. Bombs with delayed fuses killed them, too, although these were sometimes disarmed in time. One such bomb— weighing over a ton and painted blue with yellow spots—landed near the big Erisman Hospital. With hundreds of anxious wounded soldiers looking on, it took three days to defuse it and a week more to haul it away.
      Leningrad in late August and early September 1941 saw none of the unsettled gray turbulence that so often precedes the coming of what the Russians call bab'e leto, or Indian summer. The grass in the parks stayed green until well into September, while the lindens turned brilliant shades of purple and gold, the birches a vivid yellow, and the maples a shining scarlet to mark the onset of autumn. With the Germans continuing their artillery barrages and bomber attacks, key buildings in the city—the Winter Palace, the General Staff, Smolnyi, even the needle spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress Cathedral—had to be covered with camouflage nets that mimicked these colors. In winter the nets would have to be changed, and changed again in the spring if the city stood that long. Unable to be rigged for camouflage, the huge Admiralty spire had to be painted dirty gray by amateur Alpinists. The idea was to give German pilots the fewest possible reference points as they flew their bombing runs over the city.
      From the beginning, Leningraders worried about enemy agents. "Spy mania," Kochina wrote, was "like an infectious disease" in that it touched everyone and left a mark that lasted for decades. Even in the 1970s, it was still forbidden in Leningrad to take photographs from the dome of St. Isaac's Cathedral or take pictures of ships anchored in the Neva River. During the first days of the siege everyone was on the lookout for spies who might be collecting information for the Germans, charting map coordinates, or plotting sabotage. People wearing foreign clothes, beards, or strange hats got arrested by security patrols. So did men and women who limped, carried cameras, or asked directions to military headquarters or police stations. On August 27, the authorities forbade anyone from being on the city streets between 10 P.M. and 5 A.M. without a special pass. Everyone was on edge, and no one knew what to expect, for no city of this size had ever before been placed under siege. Leningrad covered sixty-five thousand acres, had over five hundred miles of tram and bus lines, and held three million people. What it faced at the beginning of September 1941, one of the best observers of wartime Russia wrote, was "the greatest and longest siege ever endured by a modern city."
      That fall, no one knew if Leningrad could hold out. With the German armies crowding up against their suburbs, Leningraders threw themselves into the task of building more defenses, on which nearly 100,000 men, women, and teenagers worked every day in September, with the number rising to an average of 113,000 each day in October. They built 17,000 embrasures in buildings, through which snipers could fire at the enemy, and 4,126 pillboxes. The Egorov factory turned out hundreds of steel "hedgehogs" weighing one and a half tons each, and these were put in the city streets to slow down enemy tanks. When Iudenich's White Army had approached in 1919, Trotskii had called for the workers of Petrograd to make their city a fortress in which "every house will become an enigma, a threat, or a mortal danger." That had not been needed after Iudenich's advance had collapsed unexpectedly, and it had been more than a year since an assassin acting on Stalin's orders had killed Trotskii in Mexico. But what Trotskii had called for in 1919 happened in 1941.
      Every section of Leningrad had its workers' squads, companies, and battalions. Every open area into which German airborne troops might drop— the Haymarket, Theater Square, Mars Field, and a score of other locations—had machine gun emplacements set up and ready. Anti-aircraft guns, artillery, and antitank guns were everywhere, all camouflaged so as not to be seen from the air. No one knew how long the city could hold out, but Leningraders were ready to make the Germans fight for every building and street. Hoping to lose any attackers in the maze of city streets, they painted out all the street signs and house numbers. "In the southern part of Leningrad, every house had, in effect, been turned into a fortress, with the principal machine-gun nests and anti-tank strongholds set up in the basements and ground floors of large buildings dominating crossroads and main thoroughfares," one war correspondent wrote. "This network of little fortresses—cemented, sandbagged, and propped up with masses of steel girders and wooden walls nine, ten, twelve logs thick," he continued, "extended with varying degrees of density across the whole of Leningrad."
Along with German bomber raids and artillery barrages, Leningraders faced the problem of food. Rationing had been imposed only eight days after the war began, but food consumption remained near normal until early September. Restaurants and cafes stayed open. Meat and fish continued to be sold, and so did sweets and other products that were more luxuries than necessities. Then, Nazi victories started to take a toll, and not just because their armies were closer to Leningrad. The West Russian and Ukrainian lands seized by the Germans during the first four months of fighting had produced nearly two-fifths of the Soviet Union's grain in 1940, more than four-fifths of its sugar, two-thirds of the coal, cast iron, and aluminum, almost two-fifths of the cattle and two-thirds of the hogs, so the quantity of food available for the entire country was cut dramatically before winter set in. Then, when the Germans closed their siege, the authorities in Leningrad discovered that they had just more than a month's reserves in their warehouses. On September 2, they cut workers' rations to a little more than a pound of bread a day, gave office workers a little less, and children only half. Still it was enough to survive, but only barely. Any further cuts, if continued for any length of time, would start to claim lives.
      In Moscow at the beginning of September, the State Defense Committee decided to appoint Dmitrii Pavlov as Leningrad's Chief of Food Supply, effective immediately. Honest, straightforward, hard-headed, and fair, Pavlov at age thirty-six was one of the best supply experts in the Soviet Union. The moment his Douglas DC-3 touched down at Leningrad airport on September 9, he began demanding hard facts—no propaganda, no lies, and no excuses—and he found that the situation was worse than the Leningrad authorities had reported. Too many loopholes in the distribution system had cut the city's reserves by half in a week. Knowing that shortages of boats and dock facilities would make the water route across Lake Ladoga on which Moscow's planners had counted impractical until the lake froze hard enough to bear the weight of trucks, Pavlov set out to do the best he could with the little he had.
      The day before Pavlov landed in Leningrad, the Germans dropped phosphorus and napalm bombs on the Badaev Warehouses, which lay in the city's main freight yards just south of Vitebsk Station and the Obvod-nyi Canal. The fires went on for several days over an area of more than four acres, the huge flames lighting the sky at night in a way that had not been seen since the Shchukin Arcade and Apraksin Market had burned almost eighty years before. Built of wood at the beginning of the century and set too close together, the warehouse buildings were firetraps, but several of them were empty and others only partly full. Before the flames were put out, they consumed some three thousand tons of flour and another twenty-five hundred of sugar, and people began to talk about how "the streets had run with melted chocolate" the first night they burned In the larger scheme of things, these were minor losses (three thousand tons of flour amounted to a day and a half's consumption based on the September 2 ration), but the psychological impact of the days and nights filled with flames and the smell of burning meat, sugar, and flour was immense. Almost everyone thought that the Badaev losses had brought the city to the brink of disaster. "It's the end—famine," the babushkas muttered. This time, many people believed them. The story spread that the city had lost enough food to last for several years. That was not true, but the belief persisted long after the war had ended.
      Fears of food shortages became self-fulfilling prophecies long before supplies ran out. People bought canned vegetables and, whenever possible, canned crabmeat and canned caviar. Generals, high-ranking Party people, and even correspondents had access to special stores where the pickings continued to be good for several weeks more. The wife of the head of the Leningrad Writers' Union bought an enormous can of caviar "just in case," but her husband made her take it back because he thought it set a bad example. "Oh, Lord! Didn't we regret it afterwards," he told a British correspondent who visited the city in the fall of 1943. "Throughout the months of the famine we were haunted by the memory of that eight-kilo tin of caviar. It was like Paradise lost!"
      Pavlov needed to get Leningrad's food supplies and rationing system under control quickly. Knowing that potatoes were waiting to be harvested in the fields that lay between the city's suburbs and the German outposts, he sent factory workers and office clerks to help bring them in. "They gathered the potatoes mostly at night, creeping over the fields on hands and knees, hiding in shell holes, lying prone to dig the potatoes up and pile them in heaps," he remembered. Apples were picked and cabbages cut, but there were only enough for something less than nine pounds a person to last the entire winter. Bread, the staff of life for all Russians, concerned Pavlov most of all. He sent agents to comb every warehouse in the city and had them check freight cars on railroad sidings and the holds of barges that had been caught in the harbor. In the middle of September he began to dilute the flour with oats, barley, soy, and malt. Later, he would order the addition of flax cake, cottonseed-oil cake, bran chaff, hemp, and hydrolyzed cellulose, all the while cutting the daily bread ration until it slipped below half a pound per person.
      By November, Pavlov was using anything that had any possible food value, and some things that didn't. Floors at breweries and flour warehouses were torn up, and the residue that lay beneath them collected. That winter, scientists at the Academy of Sciences discovered how to extract yeast and yeast milk from cellulose to make soup, and it was served in many of the factory and office cafeterias in which most Leningraders received part of their daily rations. By boiling two thousand tons of sheep guts that had been found in the hold of a ship in the harbor, a meat jelly was made, but oil of cloves had to be added to disguise its stench. Pavlov's scientists also saved two tons of oil each day by substituting a mixture of soap stock, water, and oil for the vegetable oil that was used to grease bread-baking pans at the city's bakeries. Some of these products, in Pavlov's own words, were "revolting." But anything that could be eaten was preferable to things that could not. By the end of 1941, most of the pets, rats, birds, and mice in the city had long since disappeared, and Leningraders were scraping the flour paste from wallpaper and the glue from book bindings to make soup. Soon they grew more desperate. "I remember coming home and so wanting to eat!" one woman wrote many years later. "I took a [pine] log [that lay by the stove] . . . and began to gnaw.. .. Resin oozed out," she went on. "The fragrance of resin gave me a sense of enjoyment."