Russia at war 1941-1945

conditions, with eight degrees of frost in the workshops, and fourteen degrees of frost in this office where you are sitting now. Oh, we had stoves of sorts, little stoves that warmed the air a couple of feet around them. But still our people worked. And, mind you, they were hungry, terribly hungry..."

Semyonov paused for a moment and there was a frown on his face. "Yes," he said, "to this day I cannot quite understand it. I don't quite understand how it was possible to have all that will-power, that strength of mind. Many of them, hardly able to walk with hunger, would drag themselves to the factory every day, eight, ten, even twelve kilometres. For there were no trams. We used all sorts of childish expedients to keep the work going.

When there were no batteries, we used bicycle pedals to keep the lathes turning."

"Somehow, people knew when they were going to die. I remember one of our elder

workers staggering into this office and saying to me: 'Comrade Chief, I have a request to make. I am one of your old workers, and you have always been a good friend to me, and I know you will not refuse. I am not going to bother you again. I know that today or

tomorrow I shall die. My family are in a very poor way— very weak. They won't have

the strength to manage a funeral. Will you be a friend and have a coffin made for me, and have it sent to my family, so that they don't have the extra worry of trying to get a coffin?

You know how difficult it is to get one.' That happened during the blackest days of

December or January. And such things happened day after day. How many workers came

into this office saying: 'Chief, I shall be dead today or tomorrow.' We would send them to the factory hospital, but they always died. All that was possible and impossible to eat, people ate. They ate cattle-cake, and mineral oils—we used to boil them first—and

carpenter's glue. People tried to sustain themselves on hot water and yeast. Out of the 5,000 people we had here, several hundred died. Many of them died right here... Many a man would drag himself to the factory, stagger in and die... Everywhere there were

corpses. But some died at home, and died together with the rest of their family and, in the circumstances, it was difficult to find out anything definite... And since there was no transport, we weren't usually able to send people round to enquire. This went on till about February 15. After that, rations were increased and the death-rate dropped. Today it hurts me to talk about these things..."

One of the Leningrad memories that stands out most clearly in my mind is the afternoon I spent in September 1943 at the great Kirov Works, where work continued even then

under almost constant shelling from the German lines barely two miles away. For here, even in 1943, one had a glimpse of Leningrad's darkest and grimmest days; to the Kirov workers these were not a memory of the past; they were continuing to live here through a peculiar kind of hell. Yet to these people, to be a Kirov worker, and to hold out to the end, had become like a title of nobility. The workers here were not soldiers; sixty-nine per cent were women and girls—mostly young girls. They knew that this was as bad as

the front; in a way it was worse: you did not know the thrill of direct retaliation. The great revolutionary tradition of the Putilov, now the Kirov Works, had much to do with it.

The day before, in a children's rest home in Kamenny Island, I had talked to a girl called Tamara Turanova:

She was a little girl of fifteen, very pale, thin and delicate, obviously run down. On her little black frock was pinned the green-ribboned medal of Leningrad:

"Where did you get that?" I asked. A faint smile appeared on her pale little face. "I don't know what he was called," she said. "An uncle with spectacles came to the works one day and gave me this medal." "What works?" "Oh, the Kirov Works, of course," she said.

"Does your father work there, too?" "No," she said, "father died in the hungry year, died on the 7th of January. I have worked at the Kirov Works since I was fourteen, so I

suppose that's why they gave me this medal. We're not far away from the front." "Doesn't it frighten you to work there?" She screwed up her little face. "No, not really; one gets used to it. When a shell whistles, it means it's high up; it's only when it begins to sizzle that you know there's going to be trouble. Accidents do happen, of course, happen very often; sometimes things happen every day. Only last week we had an accident; a shell landed in my workshop and many were wounded, and two Stakhanovite girls were

burned to death." She said it with terrible simplicity and almost with the suggestion that it wouldn't have been such a serious matter if two Stakhanovite girls hadn't lost their lives.