A second order of 2 February instructed district soviets to come up with a daily total of sixty lorries with trailers, for the collection of corpses from morgues and hospitals. Five-tonne trucks were to transport one hundred corpses per trip, three-tonne trucks sixty corpses, and one and a half-tonne trucks forty. Drivers were incentivised with extra rations — 100 grams of bread and fifty of vodka for every second and subsequent delivery. As a result, the Burial Trust reported, for several days in February ‘six to seven thousand bodies were delivered daily to the Piskarevskoye Cemetery alone. . Five-tonne trucks piled high with corpses could be seen driving through town, their poorly covered loads reaching as high again as the sides of the vehicle, with five or six workers sitting on top.’ Since the corpses were frozen stiff, to pack in the maximum number collection teams could use the same technique as for logs, some standing vertically so as to form a fence holding in the remainder.36 At the cemeteries the excavators could not keep up with deliveries, creating enormous backlogs. The number of unburied corpses at the Piskarevskoye, the Trust estimated, reached 20,000–25,000 at its February worst, stacked in rows two hundred metres long and two metres high.

Though the conversion of brick kilns to crematoria in March, combined with decreasing mortality, gradually brought the situation under control, mass burial continued up to the end of May. At the Piskarevskoye (the largest of the sites) a total of 129 trenches were dug, filled and re-covered from 16 December to 1 May. The biggest six — four to five metres deep, six metres wide and up to 180 metres long — contained, the Trust estimated, about 20,000 bodies each. At the Bogoslovskoye a disused sandpit was filled with 60,000 corpses over five or six February days, an anti-tank ditch with 10,000, and bomb craters with another 1,000. Eighteen anti-tank ditches on the northern edge of the Serafimovskoye cemetery accommodated another 15,000. Altogether, the Trust reported, 662 mass graves were dug and filled in the city, not counting the use of pits, craters and trenches. How many dead they contained in total is still disputed, but the best estimate for the number of civilians who died during Leningrad’s first siege winter is around half a million.37

12. ‘We Were Like Stones’

On 17 February 1942 Mariya Mashkova, head of acquisitions at the Public Library, a handsome, grey-blue, neo-classical building that curves round the corner of Aleksandrinskaya Square and the Nevsky, sat down to write:

Day after day passes, and it already feels late to be starting a diary. Unrepeatable, terrifying things happen and are forgotten. The rest, the trivia, remain in the memory. A packet of letters arrived today and reminded me that away from Leningrad there’s a different life going on, and people who can’t imagine even a hundredth of what we’re going through.

Outside I can hear shelling. It didn’t use to bother me, but now I think numbly, ‘Somewhere a building is collapsing, people are being crushed.’ But what’s this compared to everything that’s happened already? We are all ill. Olga Fedorovna [Mashkova’s mother-in-law] is very bad — no surprise, since from room to room there are dead people, a corpse for every family. It has been almost a month since Anna Yakovlevna Zveinek died from starvation. She’s still lying there in her freezing, dirty room — black, dried-up, teeth bared. Nobody is in any hurry to clean her up and bury her; everyone is too weak to care. Two rooms away lies another corpse — her daughter Asya Zveinek, who also died of starvation, outliving her mother by twelve days. Asya died two steps from my bed, and Vsevolod [Mashkova’s husband] and I dragged her away because it was too warm in our room for a dead body. .

Almost in front of my eyes N. P. Nikolsky died, a friend of Vsevolod’s and a [former] deputy to the Supreme Soviet. He was brought in on a sled, with the idea of placing him in a recuperation clinic so as to get him back on his feet. . He fell into a coma and quickly died, in Vsevelod’s office. He stayed there, on the sofa, for twelve days, since nobody could cope with burying him. Altogether, the Library has lost at least a hundred people. .

People’s attitude to death, and death itself and burial, have greatly simplified. At first it was very difficult. Make a coffin — it’s hard to get one, 500–700 roubles — dig a grave, that has to be paid for in bread. . Then rentable coffins appeared, and after that people were taken to the morgues on sleds, just wrapped in sheets and blankets. Thus I buried V. F. Karyakin, Zinaida Yepifanova’s husband. . and even my deadened nerves were barely able to handle everything I saw. .