For Vladimir Garshin — cultivated, fifty-four-year-old chief pathologist at the Erisman Hospital and a conquest of Anna Akhmatova’s — the way back to some sort of normality was work. In March he got undressed for the first time in three months: ‘They put this strange bony body into the water and lifted it out again. The body couldn’t get out of the heavenly water by itself. Warm!. . It’s somebody else’s body, not mine. I don’t know it; it works differently from how it did before. It produces different excreta; everything about it is new and unfamiliar.’ His personality was new, too. By good luck he had not lapsed into indifference during the mass death, nor into hatred and rage. (This was true — a bag of oats he gave the family with whom Akhmatova stayed before evacuation saved their lives.21) Yet things were altered, he was ‘not quite right’. He had to search inside himself, ‘study this new body and this new soul, explore their hidden corners, as though I had moved into a new, unfamiliar flat’. He also literally dissected bodies in the Erisman’s mortuary. As was to be expected, they carried no fat, but the most astonishing thing about them was their organs:
Here’s a liver — it has lost almost two-thirds of its weight. Here’s a heart — it has lost more than a third, sometimes nearly half. The spleen has shrunk to a fraction of its normal size. We looked at the medical histories of these people. Some had been eating quite adequately for a while before they died, but they still didn’t recover — they had already been damaged beyond repair. This is ghastly Stage 3 dystrophy, which is irreversible. . Having used up its supplies of fat the body starts to destroy its own cells, like a ship which, having run out of fuel, is broken up to feed its own boilers. We knew all this in theory, but now we could see it with our own eyes, touch it with our hands, put it under the microscope.
Peering down through the lens at his specimens — ‘the thinnest possible slices of human tissue — neat, colourful, prettily dyed’ — he discovered within himself two contradictory emotions — the first that of greedy scientific enquiry, the second a burning desire to blame: ‘These beautiful specimens scream of tragedy, of the fight the body puts up. They tell of destruction, of the crushing of the fundamental structures of living things. . Because this “experiment” wasn’t staged by life, not by life. Hatred for those who did stage it, that’s what I feel.’ Exactly who he thought those people were he did not specify.22
The government’s first priority, when winter began to turn into spring, was to prevent outbreaks of disease. One urgent task was to collect the thousands of unburied corpses emerging from the snow or thawing out in basements and storage rooms; another to clear away the five months’ worth of human waste — genteelly referred to as ‘dirt’ — clogging side streets and courtyards. While Garshin struggled to maintain detachment at his lab bench, outside his window pale, puffy-faced orderlies, their layers of coats bound tight with string, cleared the hospital grounds with picks and shovels. ‘They can’t work’, Garshin wrote; ‘All they’re able to do is sit by a stove and drink tea. Yet they do work. . It’s a sort of survival instinct.’ In mid-April 52 corpses were collected from the Erisman, 730 from the Kuibyshev Hospital, 114 from a children’s hospital, 378 from a psychiatric hospital, 204 from Finland Station, 70 from the People’s House and 103 from a cellar-turned-mortuary underneath the library at the Millionnaya Street end of the Hermitage. In the cemeteries, the winter’s mass graves sank and stank, and had to be reworked.23
