As autumn turned to winter the substitutions became more exotic, and the resulting foodstuffs, distributed in place of the bread, meat, fats and sugar promised on the ration cards, less nutritious. Flax-seed cake found in the freight yards, ordinarily used as cattle food, was used to make grey ‘macaroni’. Two thousand tonnes of sheep guts from the docks, together with calf skins from a tannery, were turned into ‘meat jelly’, its stink inadequately disguised by the addition of oil of cloves. From the end of November onwards bread contained, as well as 10 per cent cotton-seed cake, another 10 per cent hydrolised cellulose, extracted from pine shavings according to a process devised by chemists at the Forestry Academy. Containing no calories, its purpose was solely to increase weight and bulk, making it possible notionally to fulfil the bread ration with a smaller quantity of genuine flour. The resulting loaves, which had to be baked in tins so as not to fall apart, were heavy and damp, with a clayey texture and bitter, grassy taste. To save on the two tonnes of vegetable oil used each day to grease the tins, an emulsion of water, sunflower oil and ‘soapstock’—a by-product of the refinement of edible oils into fuel—was devised. It gave the loaves, Pavlov conceded, an odd orange colour, ‘but the qualitative flaws were quite bearable, and the oil saved went to the canteens’.{12} Another of the Forestry Academy’s inventions was a ‘yeast extract’, made out of fermented birch sawdust, which was distributed to workplace kitchens in sheet form and served up, dissolved in hot water, as ‘yeast soup’.
The key to each person’s fate during the siege, the basic template against which every life unfolded, was the rationing system. Every combatant country had one, and everywhere they were undermined by corruption, black-marketeering and fraud. In blockaded Leningrad, though, these faults were magnified; not only by the extremity of wartime conditions, but also by the brutality and incompetence of the Soviet regime itself. The consequences were magnified, too. Elsewhere, bad planning and weak management meant nagging hunger; dull, too-small meals. In Leningrad, they meant uncountable extra deaths.
Food, in the Soviet Union, had always been a means of coercion and reward, and at the extremes, of eliminating the useless while preserving the useful. As Lenin declared in a speech to an All-Russian Food Conference in 1921, in the midst of the Civil War famine,
It is not only a matter of distributing [food] fairly; distribution must be thought of as a method, an instrument, a means for increasing production. State support in the form of food must only be given to those workers who are really necessary for the utmost productivity of labour. And if food distribution is to be used as an instrument of policy, then use it to reduce the number of those who are not unconditionally necessary, and to encourage those who are.{13}
This philosophy, encapsulated in the slogan ‘You eat as you work’, was trialled in the Soviet Union’s first labour camps, on the White Sea’s Solovetsky Islands. Prisoners were divided into three groups: those fit for heavy work, those fit only for light work and invalids. The first group were allotted 800 grams of bread per day, the second, 500 grams and the third, 400 grams. As predicted, the strongest, relatively well-fed, kept their health, and the weakest, fed exactly half as much, weakened further and died. The system, designed (unsuccessfully) to make the camps self-supporting, was subsequently copied throughout the Gulag.{14}
At the other end of the scale, food served as a means of delineating the hierarchy of Party and establishment. ‘Closed’ shops and restaurants were open only to Party members or employees of particular institutions, and workplace dining facilities more finely graded than those of the most self-important Wall Street bank. The war correspondent Vasili Grossman, in his epic autobiographical novel Life and Fate, describes the six different menus on offer at the canteen of the Moscow Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Physics:
One was for doctors of science, one for research directors, one for research assistants, one for senior laboratory assistants, one for technicians and one for administrative personnel. The fiercest passions were generated by the two highest-grade menus, which differed only in their desserts—stewed fruit, or jelly made from powder.{15}
Another journalist, a British Communist called John Gibbons, spent the war working for Moscow Radio. During the winter of 1941–2, when food shortages were acute throughout the Soviet Union, he resented the fact that his workplace lunches consisted of dry bread and tea without sugar, while his boss, sitting in the same office, had ham and eggs. Though he accepted this as part of the system and ‘no doubt quite right’, it was nonetheless ‘bloody unpleasant to smell the ham and eggs. All the more so as my boss thought it was quite normal, and never offered me even a scrap of ham.’{16}
Leningrad’s rationing system operated similarly to the Gulag’s. Though articulated as giving to each according to his needs, in practice it tended to preserve (just) the lives of those vital to the city’s defence—soldiers and industrial workers—and condemn office workers, old people, the unemployed and children to death. When rationing was introduced in mid-July, initial allocations were the same as those for Muscovites—a generous 800 grams of bread daily for manual workers, 600 grams for office workers and 400 grams for children and the unemployed, plus adequate amounts of meat, fats, cereals or macaroni, and sugar. Astonishingly, the city soviet did not reduce the ration until 2 September, almost a fortnight after the direct railway line to Moscow had been cut. At Pavlov’s insistence, the first reduction was followed by another ten days later, to 500 grams of bread for manual workers, 300 for office workers, 250 for dependants and 300 for children. To make up for the drop, rations of fat and sugar were simultaneously increased, with hindsight a terrible mistake. ‘Looking back’, Pavlov admitted later, ‘it may be said that the fats ration, most clearly, and the sugar ration, should not have been increased in September. The approximately 2,500 tonnes of sugar and 600 tonnes of fats expended in September and October… would have been extremely valuable in December.’ At the time, he added, nobody imagined that the city would remain cut off for that long.{17}
At its lowest, after a final cut on 20 November, the ration fell to 250 grams of bread per day for the 34 per cent of the civilian population classed as manual workers, and 125 grams (three thin slices) for everybody else, plus derisory quantities of meats and fats. For the lower category cardholders, this was officially the equivalent of 460 calories per day—less than a quarter of the 2,000–2,500 per day the average adult requires to maintain weight. Even these 460 calories were only the official figure: in reality bread, as we have seen, was seriously adulterated with ‘fillers’, meat disappeared, and there were days on which no rations were distributed at all. Today’s nutritionists, who use siege survivors to study the long-term effects of foetal and infant malnutrition, estimate that just taking account of ‘fillers’ the real number was closer to 300 calories per day.{18} Had the second ration cut of 12 September been made just six days earlier, Pavlov later admitted, nearly 4,000 tons of flour would have been saved, and the final ration cut avoided.{19}