Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (26 page)

This was the period, also, when private stocks of food or tradeables started to mean the difference between life and death. One family unearthed a suitcase full of ‘fossilised’ rusks, laid in twenty years earlier during the Civil War. Another, a ten-year-old diarist recorded, came upon a box of candles, which they were able to sell for 625 roubles – they had cost only eight kopeks apiece when his father bought them back in 1923. The classicist Olga Fridenberg kept herself and her mother going on a package of tinned food that they had earlier prepared for her brother prior to his departure for the Gulag. Another woman traded her dead husband’s clothes, bought on a pre-war visit to America. The trip had cost him his life – he had been shot as a capitalist sympathiser during the Terror – but the good-quality suits and jackets helped to save his family.

When there was no food to be had, fantasies took its place. Igor Kruglyakov, eight years old at the time of the siege, remembers going through the family box of Christmas decorations with his sister, looking for walnuts: ‘Their insides were dry and shrivelled, but we ate them, they felt like food. We picked all the crumbs out of the cracks in our big, dirty kitchen table – again, they seemed like food. I can’t say that it cheered us up, it was just a way to pass the time.’ At the end of November his grandfather died of ‘hunger diarrhoea’ – possibly, Kruglyakov’s mother agonised, because she had in desperation given him diluted potassium permanganate – the bright purple, all-purpose disinfectant known as
margantsovka
– to drink. The children, who not long before had been running round the streets collecting shrapnel, now stayed huddled in bed, leafing through a nineteenth-century book of birds and Madame Molokhovyets’s
Gift to Young Housewives
, with its recipes for aspics, mousses, Madeira cake and suckling pig. ‘For the first time in my life I read the words “Rum Baba”. It had pictures too – quite simple ones, but they gave us pleasure.’
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One of the most devastating documents on display in Petersburg’s Museum of the Defence of Leningrad is an imaginary menu penned by a hungry sixteen-year-old, Valya Chepko. ‘Menu’, he neatly writes, ‘for after starvation, if I’m still alive. First course: soup – potato and mushroom, or pickled cabbage and meat. Second course:
kasha
– oatmeal with butter, millet, pearl barley, buckwheat, rice or semolina. Meat course: meatballs with mashed potatoes; sausages with mashed potatoes or
kasha
. But there’s no point in dreaming about this, because we won’t live to see it!’ He didn’t, dying in February.

Sadder, perhaps, even than physical breakdown, was the way in which hunger destroyed personalities and relationships. Increasingly preoccupied with food, individuals gradually lost interest in the world around them, and at the extremity, with anything except finding something to eat. ‘Before the war’, wrote Yelena Kochina as early as 3 October, ‘people adorned themselves with bravery, fidelity to principles, honesty – whatever they liked. The hurricane of war has torn off those rags: now everyone has become what he was in fact, and not what he wanted to seem.’

Her diary – written in the margins of old newspapers, on scraps of wallpaper and on the backs of printed forms – charts, with searing honesty, the gradual breakdown of her marriage. Immediately pre-war her mood is joyous, delighting in her new baby and doting husband. ‘Dima is on holiday’, she writes on 16 June, while watching him change a nappy. ‘All day he’s busy with our daughter: bathing her, dressing her, feeding her. His well-kept, sensitive designer’s hands manage all this with amazing skill. His hair blazes in the sun, lighting up his happy face.’ Six days later the young family was hit, like millions of others, with the announcement of invasion: ‘I carried Lena out into the garden with her coloured rattles. The sun already ruled the sky. A cry, the sound of broken dishes. The woman who owns our dacha ran past the house. “Yelena Iosifovna! War with the Germans! They just announced it on the radio!”’ Two weeks into the war the couple had their first serious quarrel, over whether or not Yelena should leave for Saratov with her institute. Yelena decided not to evacuate, and the closure of the siege ring trapped the whole family in Leningrad. Through September, Dima had hardly any sleep, firewatching with the local civil defence team at night and digging potatoes in an abandoned vegetable patch after work. Every morning, Yelena walked along the Neva embankment to the paediatric hospital which distributed the infant ration of soya milk:

The maples burn a feverish red, like dying embers. The leaves fall slowly, dropping straight into my hands. I take them home and put them on the windowsill, new ones every morning. These may be the last leaves of my life. A downpour of artillery shells whips along the embankment, landing on the Academy of Arts and the University. Sometimes shells land quite close and we see people fall.

At the hospital, Lena immediately drinks up her milk. When it is finished she cries bitterly, stretching out her little hands towards the white baby bottles . . . But they don’t give her any more: three and a half ounces is the ration.

Dima, having been transferred to a defence factory where he worked as a lathe operator, received the manual worker’s ration. ‘During the midday break,’ wrote Yelena,

he brings me his lunch: a small meat patty and two spoons of mashed potato. Despite my protests he forces me to eat it all – ‘Eat, please, you have to feed Lena. Don’t worry about me, I’m full.’ But I can see that this isn’t true; all he’s eating is soup. He can’t keep going like this for long, and anyway I have less milk every day.

In early October, though the couple had already broken into their emergency reserves of potatoes and
sukhari
, Yelena’s milk dried up. ‘At night I drink a whole pot of water but it doesn’t help. Lena screams and tears at my breast like a small wild animal (poor thing!). Now we give her all the butter and sugar we get on our ration cards.’ On the 10th Yelena first recorded her suspicion that Dima was secretly eating
sukhari
in her absence. The rusks ran out four weeks later, leaving only fourteen ounces of millet with which to feed the baby (‘Now I curse myself for buying only four and a half pounds at the commercial store. What a fool I was!’). No longer trusting her husband, Yelena started hiding the millet every time she left the apartment – ‘up the chimney, under the bed, under the mattress. But he finds it everywhere.’ On 26 November, returning home unexpectedly, she caught him in the act:

‘Don’t you dare!’ I yelled, losing control of myself.

‘Shut up, I can’t help myself.’

He looked at me despairingly. He didn’t even avoid my eyes as he’s been doing these last few days. I shut up and my anger passed . . . After all, by giving me his lunches, he started going hungry before I did.

The millet ran out on 2 December. Two days later, the kindness of a stranger allowed Yelena to exchange coupons for macaroni. Roaming the streets in search of food for sale, she had spotted a horse-drawn cart laden with boxes:

A crowd dragged along behind the cart as if following a coffin. I joined this peculiar ‘funeral procession’. It turned out that there was macaroni in the boxes, but nobody knew where it was being delivered. The driver remained stubbornly silent. Catching sight of a shop ahead we raced one another there and formed a line, exchanging abuse. We could have been trained animals. But the horse, squinting in our direction with his kind eyes, pulled the cart on past. Breaking away from our places, we ran after it. This happened five times . . .

At last the cart stopped at a shop. There was a long queue outside, looping round the corner . . . Gatekeeper to paradise, the shop manager counted off the ‘faithful souls’, letting them in ten at a time. I stood and gazed mindlessly. I don’t know what was written on my face, but suddenly an old woman waiting in line asked me softly, ‘When is it your turn?’ I answered that I wasn’t queuing, and that to start now would be pointless since there wouldn’t be enough macaroni for everyone anyway. And I added, unusually for me, that I had a small child at home and didn’t know how I was going to feed her.

The woman said nothing, but next time the shop door opened she shoved Yelena forwards, staying outside herself. ‘I was so stunned that even when I had the macaroni there in my hands, which were trembling with excitement, I couldn’t believe that what had happened was real.’

The time bought by this act of charity was short. Though Dima managed, at the cost of enormous physical effort, to make a
burzhuika
out of corrugated iron scavenged from a bomb site, by mid-December he had sunk into apathy and paranoia. No longer going to work or helping with the baby, he got up only to go to the bread shop, eating the makeweight piece, the prized
dovesok
, on the way home. His movements, wrote Yelena, were now those of a ‘broken robot’, his expression ‘fossilised’ and ‘savage’, his eyes rimmed with soot and the skin of his face stretched by oedema to a lacquer shine. Her own face had swollen, too – she looked ‘like the back end of a pig’. Neither could think of anything but food:

I pour four ladles of ‘soup’ [made of joiner’s glue and crumbled bread] for Dima and two for myself. For this I get the right to lick the pot, though the soup is so thin that there’s not really anything to lick. Dima eats his with a teaspoon so as to make it last longer. But today he finished his portion faster than I did. I happened to get a particularly hard piece of crust, which I was pleasurably chewing. I could feel him staring with hatred at my steadily moving jaws.

‘You’re eating slowly on purpose!’ he viciously burst out. ‘You’re trying to torment me!’

‘What do you mean? Why would I do that?’ I blurted, amazed.

‘Don’t try to deny it, please, I see everything.’

He glared at me, his eyes pale with rage. I was terrified. Had he gone mad?
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Vera Inber saw a corpse being dragged on a sled for the first time on 1 December. ‘There was no coffin. It was wrapped in a white shroud, and the knees were clearly discernible, the sheet being tightly bound. A biblical, ancient Egyptian burial. The shape of a human form was clear enough, but one couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.’ By the end of the month this was a common sight. In October, the NKVD reported to Zhdanov towards the end of December, 6,199 people had died ‘in connection with food difficulties’ in Leningrad, a nearly 80 per cent rise on the usual pre-war mortality rate of about 3,500 deaths per month. In November the number had risen to 9,183, and, in the first twenty-five days of December, to 39,073. Each of the past five days, between 113 and 147 corpses had been picked up on the streets. Mortality rates were particularly high among men (71 per cent of the total), over-sixties (27 per cent of the total) and babies (14 per cent). Despite the arrest of 1,524 ‘speculators’, the report also noted, barter prices for food in the officially illegal but in practice tolerated street markets had risen to extraordinary heights. A rabbit-fur coat was worth one pood (sixteen kilograms) of potatoes, a pocket watch one and a half kilos of bread, a pair of felt boots with galoshes four kilos of
duranda
. In the last six days of December another 13,808 people died, bringing the month’s total toll to almost 53,000.
17

Progress was also being monitored in Berlin. Army intelligence and the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence wing of the SS, both regularly reported on conditions inside the city, collating information from informers, deserters and POWs. ‘Illness’, the Sicherheitsdienst reported on 24 November, had ‘started to spread’:

Women in particular are predisposed to serious throat infections, by reason of the insufficiency or complete absence of heating in domestic apartments, and breakage of window glass. The mortality rate amongst children is quite high. There have been cases of abdominal and spotted typhus, although one cannot yet speak of an epidemic. Numerous cases of dysentery have also been noted.
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A fortnight later another intelligence report, from von Küchler’s Eighteenth Army, boasted successful artillery hits on a hospital, a House of Culture, the Mariinsky Theatre, a food warehouse, tram sidings and the offices of
Leningradskaya Pravda
. Casualties, it noted, were no longer being picked up by buses, but by horse-drawn carts – themselves often out of commission thanks to a shortage of forage. What German intelligence devoted most space to, though, was the onset of famine. The civilian ration, it was correctly noted, had been cut five times since the beginning of September, and ‘bad organisation of food distribution’ meant that card holders often got less than their allotment or nothing at all. ‘There have been cases of increasingly weak workers falling unconscious in the workplace. The first starvation deaths have also been recorded. It can be concluded that in the coming weeks we will see further significant deterioration in the food situation of the civilian population of Petersburg.’
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The art historian Nikolai Punin made his last siege-winter diary entry on 13 December, sitting in his dark room overlooking the Sheremetyev Palace. Earlier, he had written of his longing that the churches be opened and filled with prayers and tears and candles, making ‘less palpable this cold iron matter in which we live’. Now, he likened Stalin to the jealous Old Testament God: