Pencil on chalk-coated paper '/> After the Alert. Entrance to the Second and Third Air Raid Shelters
Pencil on chalk-coated paper
From September onwards, with the start of the siege and systematic air raids, members of the Hermitage staff lived in the basements, as did other academics, museum workers and cultural figures from Leningrad. Lists of 916 people occupying the shelters have survived, but according to Boris Piotrovsky’s memoirs up to 2,000 actually lived there.
Natalia Davydovna Flittner
(1879–1957)
The Hermitage staff lived in the 2nd and 3rd shelters. They included Anna Sultan-Shakh of the Oriental Department with her mother and sisters; Professor Natalia Flittner, author of a History of the Art of the Ancient East; Yevgeny Lisenkov, keeper of drawings; Alfred Cube, acting head of the Department of the History of Western European Art; Vladislav Glinka of the Department of the History of Russian Culture that had been formed just before the war and his family; Olimpiada Dobroklonskaya with her husband, Mikhail, and other members of staff who had not left for Sverdlovsk with the two Hermitage trains. Mikhail Dobroklonsky performed the duties of director from late March 1942, after Iosif Orbeli’s departure to Yerevan as an evacuee, and until his return in July 1944.
There were also members of staff living there who had been taken on when the siege was already underway – the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory artist Mikhail Mokh and the translator and specialist in Turkmenian and Persian literature Nikolai Lebedev. Iosif Orbeli enrolled both of them so that they would be able to obtain workers’ ration cards – they transported bricks, blocked up the windows of the basement rooms, carried planks, and in the time left over from those labours they engaged in their primary occupation. Mokh was additionally a member of the air raid protection team.
Alexander Sergeyevich Nikolsky
1884, Saratov – 16 July 1953, Leningrad
Architect, Full Member
of the Academy of Architecture (1939)
The shelters’ occupants also included members of various creative unions, including architects. Alexander Nikolsky, who lived in the basement with his wife during the siege, kept an illustrated diary. His drawings served as visual support to Academician Orbeli’s accusatory speech at the Nuremberg Trials.
Sergei Mikhailov
The Artist Ivan Varakin in an Air Raid Shelter in the Hermitage
1941
Pencil on paper
Among those in the 5th air raid shelter was Vasily Nikitich Kuchumov, who in 1942, on an assignment from the Committee for Artistic Matters, produced a series of drawings of the Hermitage’s deserted halls. Living in that same shelter were the architect and graphic artist Ivan Ivanovich Varakin with his wife, the artist Sergei Mikhailovich Mikhailov, and also the graphic artist Alexei Fyodorovich Pakhomov and his wife. Pakhomov remained in the beleaguered city throughout, and his work resulted in a celebrated series of lithographs – Leningrad during the Siege.
People lived in the air raid shelters and continued to engage in academic work – writing scholarly papers, dissertations, books. Boris Piotrovsky stated that academic work made a hard life easier; people had a high regard not only for their own researches, but also for their colleagues’ efforts. After the war those who remained alive published the works of their fellows who had perished.
Fighting Leaflet No4 of the Hermitage wall newspaper
Leningrad, USSR
1 January 1942
The staff saw in 1942 in the basements. The archive even possesses a small wall newspaper produced for the occasion. The denizens of the shelters greeted Iosif Orbeli with ceremony and presented the heavy smoker with a valuable gift – a whole tray of matchboxes. On the New Year table there was a dish of something like gruel made from crumbled bread and millet and a little dish of joiner’s paste. Rebecca Rubinstein wrote: “We saw in the New Year uneasily: what will it bring us? How much more does our land have to suffer? Still, we were firmly convinced of victory. If only we might live to see it…”
At the end of February 1942, when the decision was taken to “mothball” the museum, a Hermitage-wide order was issued, signed by Orbeli, forbidding people to live in the basements. All the museum staff left without housing were lodged temporarily in rooms on the premises of houses number 30, 31 and 32 on Palace Embankment.
Sickbay
Sickbay poster
1 February – 1 May 1942
“January and February 1942 set a record for the number of deaths from starvation,” Rebecca Rubinstein, a tutor at the Herzen Institute, recalled. “Dystrophy decimated us.” When, in January 1942, the number of patients exceeded the “authorized number of beds” in the hospitals, it was decided that sickbays should be opened attached to various organizations to tend to those suffering from dystrophy.
On 23 January a meeting was held at the Hermitage where it was decided to open a sickbay with 100 places for staff of the Hermitage, Museum of the Revolution, Lenin Museum, Ethnographic Museum and Russian Museum. The Hermitage allotted rooms below the Pavilion Hall providing 85 places, while the Museum of the Revolution, which was then housed in the Winter Palace, gave premises for 15 more.
Practically all the staff members who were then in besieged Leningrad became involved in the organization of the sickbay. They worked each day in teams of 5–10 people. They winterized the rooms, installed stoves and sinks.
Ada Vasilyevna Vilm
(1898—1970)
The sickbay was opened on 1 February 1942. Ada Vilm, the Hermitage’s academic secretary, was designated its head, while Orbeli appointed Natalia Rogova-Semiz, the mother of Milena Semiz of the Hermitage’s Oriental Department and one of Russia’s first female surgeons, to be its doctor.
Immediately 64 people were brought into the sickbay, 48 of them no longer able to stand. The average time spent in the sickbay was 10–12 days, but even in that brief time with enhanced nutrition those laid low with dystrophy were able to get up again and continue to live and work.
As for the patients, under an order issued by the Hermitage Director on 3 February 1942, all members of staff undergoing a 10-day course of treatment were exempted from work.
To provide them with something to pass the time, all available chess, draughts and dominoes sets were collected, a supply of books and newspapers was organized, and a map of the USSR acquired to mark up events on the different fronts.
Medications (vitamin C, glucose, fish oil, capsules for dysentery and antibacterial drugs) were provided by the health departments of the Dzerzhinsky District Executive Committee.
The main remedy, though, was of course enhanced nutrition. Thanks to the notes left by Ada Vasilyevna Vilm as head of the sickbay we know that the menu included coffee, sprats, raspberry kissel (a starchy jelly), curds, meatballs, rassolnik (soup with pickled cucumbers), braised cabbage, semolina and boiled rice.
There was plenty of work in the sickbay, not only caring for the patients. By March, the decision was taken to decommission the museum, which meant shutting down all the utilities – electricity, heating, sewerage – and reducing staffing levels to a minimum. The premises needed to be constantly disinfected, the floors had to be washed, firewood chopped for the stoves, the glass smashed by blast waves or shrapnel replaced, the rooms insulated and so on.
All this was carried out by the few female members of the museum staff who remained in Leningrad and had acquired second jobs as nurses, orderlies, labourers and stokers. Yet all these people, totally exhausted both mentally and physically, still had to also preserve the collections that remained in the museum, keep watch on the roofs in air raid protection teams and perform many other duties.
The sickbay attached to the Hermitage operated for 89 days, from 1 February to 1 May 1942. Over that time, 313 people passed through it and only 18 of them died. Almost all members of the Hermitage staff rebuilt their strength there at one time or another, and it saved many of their lives.
The walls of the Hermitage air raid shelters witnessed many dramatic events, but one story became the basis for a play written by Polina Barskova –Tableaux Vivants. It tells of the great personal tragedy of Antonina Izergina, who lived in the Hermitage shelter with her common-law husband, the artist Moisei Vakser, a postgraduate at the Academy of Arts. His entire year of fellow students went off to the front, but he was rejected for service due to extreme eczema. In August the pair were contemplating evacuation, either with the Academy to Samarkand or with the Hermitage to Sverdlovsk, but they ended up staying and moved into the Hermitage basements. The tragic story of their love, their constant touching care for one another, was preserved in letters and Vakser’s brief siege-time diary. Totya (as Antonina was known to those close to her) fell ill. Moisei grew weak, although he continued to work for the TASS Windows organization (which produced war posters). His strength was fading fast. Vakser decided to seek treatment at the sickbay attached to the Academy of Arts. On 6 February, the Orientalist Alexander Boldyrev recorded in his diary: “Totya’s friend has also gone – a highly talented young artist who set off to the sickbay with his knapsack, lay down and died.”
The play Tableaux Vivants had its premiere at the Theatre of Nations in Moscow in 2016.
On 27 January 2024, marking the 80th anniversary of the complete lifting of the siege, it will be staged in the Hermitage Theatre.
From the memoirs of Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky
The biggest task, though, was preparing the air raid shelters in the basement, which needed to be turned into living accommodation, making and arranging the beds, bricking up the windows, organizing a sewerage system.
When the systematic German air raids began in September, there were 2,000 people living in the Hermitage and Winter Palace shelters, remaining members of the museum staff with their families, academics, museum workers, cultural figures and others, again with their families. The museum accepted for safekeeping not only certain valuables from the suburban palaces and museums, whose main stocks were kept in St Isaac’s and the Kazan Cathedral, and also in the basements of the Russian Museum, but also individual items belonging to private citizens.
Within the shelter there was a little room with a telephone and two beds – for the head of the firefighting team ([Alexander] Boldyrev) and me, his deputy. When woken by a telephone call announcing an alert, we would look at the calendar to see whether it was an odd or even date, and whoever’s turn it was to go on duty would get up, while the other went back to sleep. In the event of an alert, you had to wake up the members of the team sleeping in the general shelter, and, in order to avoid making noise, we did so by pulling on their legs. Those on duty took up their assigned posts, and in the evenings that meant running through the pitch-black halls of the Hermitage and Winter Palace along routes, some of which were very long, over two kilometres. Yet they were so familiar with those routes that they could even have run them with their eyes closed.
1941 was coming to an end. On the night of the New Year, [Iosif] Orbeli gave a talk at the radio centre on Manege Square, and I accompanied him there. … When we were on our way back to the Hermitage, an artillery bombardment began. One shell exploded not far in front of us, near the Russian Museum. We were going that way and instinctively slowed our pace. The next blast was already behind us, and we hastened to get to the Moika. Once we had crossed the river we were no longer in danger, since that side of the embankment was not exposed to the guns. By the time we got back to the Hermitage it was 1942. The denizens of the shelter near which Orbeli had his workroom, greeted Iosif Abgarovich with ceremony and presented a valuable gift – a tray full of boxes of matches. I hurried into the shelter, where my mother was living, and wished everyone a happy New Year that had already begun.
At the conference devoted to Navoi, [Nikolai] Lebedev was only half alive physically when he spoke. He could barely move from exhaustion, yet he had to be reined back over the excessive number of poems he had selected to read. After the second session, on 12 December, he took to his bed and was no longer able to get up. Yet while he was slowly dying on his bunk in the bomb shelter, despite his physical weakness, he shared his plans for future works and recited his translations and poetry. Even when he lay dead, covered with a colourful Turkmenian rug, it seemed as if he was still whispering his verses.
From the memoirs of Alexander Sergeyevich Nikolsky
31 December 1941. There has been no [electric] light in the shelter for week and a half. There’s no heating. We are sitting in the dark with wick lamps. Still, we feel quite good and intend to see in the New Year of 1942. I pasted together a small festive tree from imitation Whatman paper and am making decorations for it from gilt paper. The best thing would be to hang it from the ceiling…
From the memoirs of Rebecca Ionovna Rubinstein
I quite often went to the Hermitage basement where many of my friends lived. They had set up a real “encampment” there. In the compartments beneath the vaults each family had arranged its own little corner, curtained off with whatever they had to shield themselves from prying eyes. Effectively all the staff members who had stayed in Leningrad migrated to the basement. Very few remained in their homes. Natalia Davydovna, of course, did not move away from her cats and lived with them in her flat on Palace Embankment. People entered the basement from outside through the service entrance by the Winter Canal.
You went through a corridor and vestibule into the Twenty-Column Hall, where a little lamp was burning by the entrance, from there across a little hall with a mosaic by the window into the next, where another lamp stood. From there you went out into the courtyard and from the courtyard was the entrance to the basement. Showing through the curtains from every corner comes the light of “migasiki” – wicks placed in a tin containing some sort of fuel. Later Orbeli managed to get an electric cable run from a ship anchored in the Neva right by the Hermitage. There was no great hubbub in the basement, only a sort of hum of muted life in that refuge. People were saving themselves from the bombing, and indeed generally it was easier to bear it all along with everyone else, rather than on your own. Sadly, though, very many were not spared a death from starvation.
I saw in 1942 there together with the Piotrovskys. Besides Sofya Alexandrovna and Boris, his brother Kostya also came… and someone else as well. We pooled all our rations, got out candles instead of a “migasik”. I brought beer, which I had unexpectedly been issued in exchange for some kind of coupons. Kostya made the richest contribution – he was in the forces and our rations could not compare to his. We saw in the New Year uneasily: what will it bring us? How much more does our land have to suffer? Still, we were firmly convinced of victory. If only we might live to see it. It was there that the uncertainty lay.
January and February 1942 set a record for the number of deaths from starvation. The most surprising thing is that despite the frosts, despite people’s organisms being weakened by hunger, there were no epidemics, not even of the common cold. Dystrophy decimated us. Things became easier towards the middle of February, when they opened the “Road of Life”. Lorries carrying food ran across the ice on Lake Ladoga, and on they return journey they took out children, the elderly and the weakest. Orbeli flew off to Yerevan. Boris [Piotrovsky] went with him. The “Road of Life” was a very dangerous route. They bombed it from the air and shelled it with long-range artillery. Still, the lorries kept going day and night, saving Leningraders.
I was helped to survive by my constantly remembering that I had three people who would be done for without me. After all, I didn’t know what had become of Kolya [the Orientalist and Egyptologist Nikolai Sholpo]… That is why, no matter how hard it was, I found the strength not to eat the whole ration at once, but to divide it into three parts…
From Moisei Vakser’s diary
7/1-42
Today, after emerging from beneath the blanket by about 11 o’clock, I spent over an hour busying myself with a new little tin with a wick (a piece of cottonwool. I blotted all my arms and hands, and the table with pomade, but something’s not working, there’s no neat clarity. I took the gouache off the table (to the foot of the trestle-bed) and gathered up the books, freeing space on which to put the saucepans etc. In brief, I messed around so much that I was only able to leave at half past one.
We breakfasted around 11. I had a sip of fish oil and 2 tablets of vitamin B; Totya had two teaspoons of extract. A luxury we can permit ourselves, considering that we have 132.5 cereal coupons left for this 10-day period.
The shades in the underworld were frightening people from morning with tales of a blizzard. Nonsense! A wonderful day, no more than 10–12 degrees of frost and it’s not slippery – I didn’t fall once on the way there. By the Staff I turned my collar down and resolved not to put it up any more – you feel far more manoeuvrable. I am stepping out quite well today, briskly even, although, to be honest, the muscular weakness is desperate. …
I ate “vegetable” soup and 4 oil-cake-casein droppings. I washed them down with vinegar. It tasted sharp – thanks be for small mercies. I am taking 4 cakes back for Totya in a tobacco tin. That will be her lunch tomorrow, as we don’t have enough coupons for soup.
I got home quickly and only fell once, but when I had passed the Hermitage service corridor, the hall of vases and the rest, I went flying four times, twice in the courtyard. I will clean myself up (since I’m covered in cobwebs) outside tomorrow.
Totya has curled up on my trestle-bed and doesn’t even react much to my lateness. There’s some redheaded woman by her.
She’s not well at all, worn out by her cold. My life is no life, yet she is bothering to see that I get warm, and is trying to heat up the rusks that have been dried for me (we have an abundant day today!). The bread is lukewarm and there is no coffee as the stove has long since ceased to burn, but it is delightfully tasty to eat nonetheless – to hell with the hot course.
The bitterest minutes come at the end of the “feast”…
10/1-42
I broke off because Totya called. Yesterday she mainly rested in bed.
Yesterday was a grim day. I sensed that I wasting away. A desperate physical weakness. I spent the day at the Academy and it’s terribly hard to get up the stairs and move around and so on.
Yelena Ivanovna is dead. Volodya Abramov, half-dead himself, informed me of it. Talka is absolutely frantic left on her own. I am powerless to do anything – this is what is taking away the last remnants of strength and willpower – this is more painful than anything. I cannot write about it. I wanted to go there despite everything, but Totya categorically refuses to let me.
Yesterday evening I became totally apathetic – Shura gave us some wine. I slept a lot. I recovered a little towards morning, but it was awfully hard to get up. I ate with Totya… soup and blood sausage. A meeting with the radiant Nikolsky: “Now he’s my postgraduate. We ought to work on the collection…” Totya goes on about it too. Is this really Paris right now? I can’t even work for TASS! …
In the evening Totya and I ate the last of the millet. At the Academy I made a swap with a Red Army man – 30 grammes of salted pork fat for a pack of Nord cigarettes and 20 roubles.
Alexander Nikolsky
Sickbay of the Academy of Arts. Morning of 31 January
1942
Pencil on chalk-coated paper
13/1-42
Yesterday, it seems, it was absolute zero.
The depths.
A hard cold, beautiful, with rime, and a foggy haze.
I barely dragged myself to the Academy. At the Academy I got froze to the bone. A sense of dreadful physical weakness. I sat in the studio by the cold stove, looked at architecture abroad… everyday scenes, but there it was sunny and warm, people built and ate, wrote and ate, and weren’t freezing. I bought a handful of melted sugar, it’s basically the same – 100 grammes for Belamor [cigarettes] and 50 roubles and for two 200-gramme packets of bread.
In the evening (twilight) the laborious way back home – the most terrible part. The flattened ruts from a car when crossing the road and coming down from the bridge. I came down with a terrible bang on one hip near the Hermitage itself.
In the evening I recovered a bit – Totya warmed up the bread. We ate the sugar, drank coffee (and on the whole I was “full up” from the intake, but the physical weakness!). I couldn’t move. Totya mixed the fish oil remelted with more of the same and put the oil-lamp in the briefcase without closing it up. All the paraffin spilt out and soaked five packs of cigarettes. We grumbled at each other – poor kiddo!
All in all that was the depths, or the height, of mental and physical marasmus. I barely managed to undress. I wanted to sleep… but my arm wouldn’t let me. I got under a blanket and overcoat but couldn’t get comfortable. My legs didn’t thaw out the whole night.
In the night I woke around 4 – couldn’t sleep, felt a bit queasy because of the fish oil. All in all, I was not very confident (for the first time) that we would get through this.
Then (this was of course not later, but prepared by Totya) I pulled myself together.
I woke at 9, did some gymnastics beneath the blanket, got my muscles working. Totya came, heated coffee and we ate sugar. She helped me get up – in general the day began in a completely different way.
I fell almost as soon as I got out, again on the same hip, and barely plodded on. My glasses in my pocket, a scarf wrapped round my nose. The air is empty, a pink fog with the bright orange patch of the sun, hoarfrost. The Admiralty and St Isaac’s are fantastic. People drag themselves along like in Jack London. You need to choose somewhere a car has just driven over. Again I fell on that same spot!
At the Academy it smells of life I was given a cup of cocoa (nice!), a slice of processed cheese, a saucer of fruit butter. I ate the lot (apart from the fruit butter, which I put in a tin). A ray of light! I felt robust. In the studio, Ulyash asked me to do a pastel picture and I drew with one hand. Marduk handed me things and moved them around. I was all but drawing with my nose. The pastel spilt on me. I got tired from the tension caused by shading, but I took heart. My spirit soared and I felt I was back in the saddle!
Giddy-up! Off we go!
Lunch was some wretched slush made of cereal and a little porridge, but with bread. I got a good-sized slice in exchange for 2 packs of Zvezdochki from a militiaman. Dinner!
People are talking about me and Popkov’s speech. It’s pie in the sky, of course, but pleasing.
No, we will survive!
Art is a grand thing, worth living for! Kiddo and I talked, not about food, but about what will be “afterwards”.
The materials were gathered and made available by Yelena Yuryevna Solomakha, deputy head of the Research Archive of Manuscripts and Documentary Fund.