Efforts to stop people disposing of faeces outdoors, or relieving themselves in the common parts of their apartment blocks, had begun back in January, and got nowhere. ‘At the entrance of no. 47 Sovetsky Prospekt’, a policeman reported, ‘a notice has been posted saying that anyone found disposing of human waste outside the building will be prosecuted. But in the courtyard there’s not a single drain or cesspit into which waste could be poured away, and a latrine that was set up is so soiled that you can’t get near it.’ A woman who he caught emptying a slop bucket riposted: ‘Prosecute away! Where else can I pour it? Over my head?’ It was the yardman and building manager, she added, who ought to be prosecuted — thanks to them the pipes had frozen and she had to haul water from half a kilometre away. After several false starts, the clean-up campaign finally got going on 28 March. The first day was disappointing — people turned up late or not at all, transport was inadequate, there were not enough crowbars and 450 of the shovels distributed lacked handles. Though many labour-exempt — old people, war-wounded and children — voluntarily reported for duty, others tried to evade it. A housewife was heard to mutter, ‘Let them feed us first, and then we’ll work’; a female factory worker flatly declared, ‘We don’t want to, that’s all’. A man who snapped ‘I don’t intend to work for the Soviet government’ had his details passed to the NKVD.24 Two days later, nonetheless, turnout had risen to 290,000. ‘The entire population of the city’, wrote Vera Inber,
is out cleaning the streets. It’s like putting a soiled North Pole in order. Everything’s a mess — blocks of ice, frozen hills of dirt, stalactites of sewage. . When we see a stretch of clean pavement we are moved. To us, it’s as beautiful as a flower-strewn glade. A yellow-faced, bloated woman, wearing a soot-blackened fur coat — she can’t have taken it off all winter — leant on a crowbar, gazing at a scrap of asphalt she had just cleared. Then she started digging again.25
To Olga Grechina, sent with her civil defence team to clear Lev Tolstoy Square, the scene resembled the ‘excavation of some ancient city’:
In some places the snow had been cleared away down to the ground, in others work hadn’t begun. There were crowds of people — more than we had seen together in one place for a long time. Those who couldn’t work simply sat on stools, having been helped outdoors to enjoy the sun. Everyone worked happily and eagerly. Groups of the weakest dragged great boulders of snow and ice off to the Karpovka on huge sheets of plywood with ropes attached. All the dirt and snow was being dumped into the river.26
Aleksandr Boldyrev, still indefatigably doing the round of institutes in search of lunch passes and back pay, heard about the campaign two days in advance. It was sure, he thought, to finish off many, but officialdom’s reasoning was ‘better a few hundred housewives and dependants dead now, than several thousand in an epidemic in a month’s time’. Summoned to help clear the grounds of the Hermitage, he put in two hours’ work on the 28th (‘slave-owner shouting from Ada and others’) and another hour on the 29th before crying off with the excuse that he had hurt his knee (‘The stench from the half-melted chocolate snow is disgusting. When you crack it with a pick thousands of droplets splash on to your clothes and face’). The next day he really did injure himself, slicing off the top of his thumb while chopping wood. A chit from a sympathetic doctor (thanked with a gift of art books) got him off further labour duty, but others were not so fortunate. ‘Prushevskaya’, he wrote on Easter Saturday, ‘died in the Hermitage’s recuperation clinic today. Though an extreme, text-book dystrophic, the day before yesterday she was still working clearing snow. Now Ada Vasilyevna comforts herself with the idea that [Prushevskaya] “was already mentally ill when she entered the clinic”.’27 Altogether, Hermitage staff cleared the complex of thirty-six tonnes of snow, ice, splintered wood, fallen plaster and broken glass.28
