Russia at war 1941-1945

the body half-way, leaving it to the authorities to deal with it.

[Pavlov, op. cit., pp. 136-7.]

According to another witness:

It was almost impossible to get a coffin. Hundreds of corpses would be abandoned in cemeteries or in their neighbourhood, usually merely wrapped in a sheet... The

authorities would bury all these abandoned corpses in common graves; these were

made by the civil defence teams with the use of explosives. People did not have the strength to dig ordinary graves in the frozen earth... On January 7, 1942 the

Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet noted that corpses were scattered all over the place, and were filling up morgues and cemetery areas; some were being buried any old way, without any regard for the elementary rules of hygiene.

[Karasev, op. cit., p. 189.]

Later, in April, during the general clean-up of the city—which was absolutely essential to prevent epidemics, once spring had come—thousands of corpses were discovered in

shelters, trenches and under the melting snow, where they had been lying for months. As the Secretary of the Leningrad Komsomol wrote at the time: "The job of disposing of these corpses was truly terrifying; we were afraid of the effect it might have on the minds of children and very young people. A dry matter-of-fact communiqué would have read

something like this: 'The Komsomol organisations put in order all trenches and shelters.'

In reality this work was beyond description."

[Ibid., p. 227.]

Hospitals were of very little help to the starving. Not only were the doctors and nurses half-dead with hunger themselves, but what the patients needed was not medicine, but food, and there was none.

In December and January the frost froze water mains and sewers, and the burst pipes all over the city added to the danger of epidemics. Water had to be brought in pails from the Neva or the numerous Leningrad canals. This water was, moreover, dirty and unsafe to drink, and in February, about one and a half million people were given anti-typhoid

injections.

Between the middle of November and the end of December, 35,000 people were

evacuated from Leningrad, mostly by air; on December 6 many people were allowed to

leave the city across the ice of Lake Ladoga, but, up to January 22, this evacuation went on in an unorganised way: thousands simply proceeded across Lake Ladoga on foot, and many died before they even reached the south bank of the lake.

It was not till January 22 that, with the help of a fleet of buses travelling along the new Ice Road, the evacuation across Lake Ladoga started in real earnest.

There is some conflicting evidence about the effect of the famine on people: on the

whole, people just died with a feeling of resignation, while the survivors went on living in hopes: the recapture of Tikhvin and the slight increase in rations on December 25 had a heartening effect. Nevertheless, Karasev talks of numerous cases of "psychological trauma" produced by hunger and cold, German bombing and shelling, and the death of so many relatives and friends. There are no exact figures of the number of children who died of hunger; but the death-rate among these is believed to have been relatively low, if only because their parents would often sacrifice their own meagre rations.

Both local patriotism and an iron discipline, partly enforced by the authorities, account for the virtual absence of any disorders or hunger riots. That the measures taken against

"anti-social" behaviour were extremely drastic may be judged from the statement by Kuznetsov, head of the Leningrad City Party Organisation, who said in April: "We used to shoot people for half-a-pound of bread stolen from the population." There were, inevitably, a few racketeers here and there; but, on the whole, the discipline was good.

Pavlov tells the following significant incident: