Four days later, at half past ten on a golden autumn morning, a huge bomb landed, but mercifully failed to explode, in the grounds of the Erisman, burying itself next to the fountain in the hospital’s central courtyard. ‘The strange thing’, wrote Inber, ‘is that I hardly felt the impact. My first thought was that a heavy door had banged.’ She spent the tense ten days it took sappers to defuse it reading to wounded soldiers:
I was sitting on a stool in the middle of the ward, reading aloud a story by Gorky. Suddenly the sirens began to wail; the sound of anti-aircraft fire seemed to fill the entire sky, a bomb crashed, the windows rattled.
I sat on my stool, unable to lean back, as there was nothing to lean back against… surrounded by windows, and by the wounded—helpless people, all looking at me, who alone was healthy and mobile. I summoned up all my will-power. I let the drone of the aeroplanes go past, and read on, anxious that my voice might shake with fear. When I got home I felt so weak that I had to go and lie down.{11}
Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht’s heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. Worst affected were the factories to the south of the city, including the massive Kirov defence works and Elektrosila power plant, both situated just behind the front at the end of tramline no. 9. To the end of November the Elektrosila’s buildings were hit seventy-three times. Fifty-four thousand residents and the whole or part of twenty-eight factories were moved northwards out of immediate firing range, into buildings emptied by evacuation. The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention.
The danger from overhead was not all that occupied Leningraders, of course, for mid-September was also when the city seemed likeliest to fall. Though people could now hear the thump of artillery fire for themselves, most still did not know exactly where the fighting was going on. Sovinform’s reports were as vague as ever: more reliable, the joke went, were the news agencies OBS—‘Odna Baba Skazala’, or ‘One Gossip Said’, and OMS—‘One Major Said’. That the front was very close was obvious, both from the shells landing in the streets and from the hundreds of peasant families camping out, together with their livestock, around the railway stations. More would have reached the city centre had the railway administration not been ordered to prevent them from boarding suburban trains.
One source of news was the thousands of civilian volunteers still building defence works in the outskirts of the city, among them seventeen-year-old Olga Grechina. After an unhappy stint bookkeeping in a munitions factory, where she had been bullied for her gentility and innocence (‘You’re like something out of a museum’, her boss told her), she went back to trench-digging, this time in the north-eastern suburbs, near the present-day Piskarevskoye siege memorial. Conditions were much harder than in July, and the mood more sombre:
It quickly began to get cold, and though it was only the beginning of September we woke up to frosts. The food was poor—one bucketful of soup, mostly lentils, to feed everyone… Our women got no letters from their children in evacuation, nor from their husbands at the front.
One evening we were sitting in our landlady’s room, listening to her only record, ‘Little Blue Scarf’. Everyone started weeping inconsolably. This banal song, popular before the war, brought back so many memories. For each of the women its subject—separation from loved ones—had suddenly become very real.
Twice we were allowed to go home to wash, since many of us were infested with lice from the dirt and cold. It was the first time this had happened to me and I was alarmed and disgusted. I borrowed half a litre of kerosene from a neighbour (it was already unobtainable in the shops), and rubbed it into my hair, then spent until almost 2 a.m. trying to wash it out again with barely warm water…
After visits home people returned to the trenches in a sullen mood. It was getting even colder and we were digging horribly heavy blue clay. Lifting just one shovelful was hard. And even when stupid Tanka started modelling penises from this clay, it wasn’t funny any more, and people began to get annoyed with her.
Stupid Tanka, though, gave sheltered, slightly snobbish Grechina what was to be the first of many lessons on the virtues of the Socialist Republic’s working class. On Tanka’s initiative the two girls dodged guards to steal two sackfuls of potatoes from an abandoned field. Together they lugged their booty to the nearest tramstop and caught a ride into the city. Chatting to Tanka on the way, Grechina was amazed to discover that she supported a widowed mother and crippled sister. A burning factory brought the tram to a halt, and they had to get out and walk. ‘I was exhausted’, Grechina remembered, ‘and about to drop my sack, but Tanka said, “Have you gone mad?” and hoisted it on to her back… And then I began to understand how crude my judgement of other people had been before.’
On 14 September the brigade was ordered to stop digging and return to Leningrad. Grechina visited the university’s languages faculty, where she had been due to start a degree. But academia now felt self-indulgent and naive. ‘How on earth can you discuss abstract concepts with fires and bombing all around? I felt like a working person who suddenly finds herself in the company of the leisured.’ Slipping out of a lecture early, she went to the faculty canteen and swapped ration coupons for horsemeat and kasha.{12}
Even official news sources now acknowledged that the city was in peril. On 16 September, a day of horizontal rain and the day on which Pushkin was abandoned, Leningradskaya Pravda ran a near-hysterical editorial, written by Zhdanov himself, titled ‘The Enemy is at the Gates! We Will Fight for Leningrad to Our Last Heartbeat!’ ‘Each must firmly look the danger in the eye’, it urged, ‘and declare that if today he does not fight bravely and selflessly in defence of the city then tomorrow he will lose his honour, freedom and his native home, and become a German slave!’ Next day’s lead carried the clunking headline ‘Leningrad—To Be or Not to Be?’{13} Factory militias were being trained in suicidal street fighting. ‘Destruction of a tank’, a manual promised,
is first and foremost achieved by presence of mind, bravery, and decisiveness. One must not procrastinate, but display swiftness and dash… The fighter, having taken suitable cover [lamp posts, bollards and advertising pillars were suggested] should let the tank approach within 10–15 metres (at this distance the fighter will be in dead space; the tank will not be able to fire at him), swiftly break cover, throw the bundle of grenades under its caterpillar tracks, and just as swiftly take cover again. Exactly the same technique is used with inflammable bottles, the only difference being that the bottle is thrown at the rear part of the tank.
In the absence of grenades or Molotov cocktails, the manual blithely continued, tanks were to be disabled ‘by the decisive and dextrous use of bayonet, rifle butt, knife, crowbar or axe’.{14} More convincing were the barricades being built—using steel ‘hedgehogs’ and concrete ‘dragon’s teeth’ as well as steel joists, cobblestones and tram cars filled with sand—across the principal thoroughfares, and the bricking up of windows so as to turn them into firing points. Georgi Knyazev’s Academicians’ Building was filled with hurrying sailors carrying sandbags. He and his wife moved into his office in the Academy of Sciences, where they slept on camp beds under a bust of Lenin.