First there is the malicious secretary, who speaks in a loud voice, in studied tones of rejection, gently restraining her administrative triumph. Then there is the languid secretary, with beautiful, heavily made-up eyes, not yet dressed siege-fashion… She regards you without malice—her only desire is to rid herself of bother—and rejects your request lazily, even a little plaintively… Finally there is the businesslike secretary, who… prizes the official process itself. She turns you down majestically, with sermonising and reasons. And although the secretary is only interested in what she herself is saying, the applicant, who will likely be dead in a few days without a ration card, is comforted for a moment by these reasons.{30}
In December also, cards were made exchangeable only at designated stores. Since some stores were markedly better than others, getting registered at the store of one’s choice became another life and death fight with bureaucracy. (The diarist Ivan Zhilinsky, despairing of his local Shop no. 44—dishonestly run and overrun with ‘granny-hooligans’—managed to swap to a more orderly Gastronom by bribing the manager with his fur hat.{31})
It is unrealistic to be too critical. No rationing system could have saved the whole population of Leningrad: the mouths were simply too many, the food supply too small. Nor was the system a fiasco: food was collected, distributed and queued for, in circumstances which could reasonably have been expected to cause complete social breakdown. It did, however, unarguably have serious and avoidable defects, costing uncountable thousands of lives. As the siege progressed, one of the most widespread frauds became concealment of the death of a relative so as to be able to go on using his or her ration card until it expired at the end of the month. Husbands, as Zhilinsky recorded of his neighbours in a subdivided wooden house in Novaya Derevnya, thus posthumously supported their widows and children. ‘[The families] store them away in the cold’, he wrote in January 1942, ‘and carry on getting bread with their cards. That’s what’s happened to Serebryannikov and Usachov—they’re being kept in the laundry room. So are Syropatov and Fedorov. This is going on all over the city—so many more are dead, but hidden.’{32}
9. Falling Down the Funnel
In September still, golden days had alternated with autumn gales. In October the last of the summer came to an end. The first snow fell, unusually early, on the 15th, and ice, grey-white under the granite embankments and darkly transparent at its outer perimeter, began to creep across the canals.{1} Georgi Knyazev, wheeling himself along the Vasilyevsky Island embankment each morning, saw the military bustle that had invaded his ‘small radius’ fade away. The files of marching sailors, helmets strapped to their knapsacks, disappeared; so did the speeding, mud-spattered army lorries and the soldiers camped out with their horses on the yellowing grass of Rumyantsev Square. Shelling had ravelled the overhead tram wires along the Nicholas Bridge, and a warship blocked his view of the Senate House, her three funnels painted winter-camouflage white. Next to the still unsandbagged Luxor sphinxes a truck stood on chocks, two of its wheels missing. The sphinxes themselves looked like ‘a couple of miserable naked pups, thrown out into the bitter frost’.{2}
This period—from September to the end of December 1941—was, as the historian Sergei Yarov puts it, when Leningraders ‘fell down the funnel’. Over the course of three months, the city changed from something quite familiar—in outward appearance not unlike London during the Blitz—to a Goya-esque charnel house, with buildings burning unattended for days and emaciated corpses littering the streets. For individuals the accelerating downward spiral was from relatively ‘normal’ wartime life—disruption, shortages, air raids—to helpless witness of the death by starvation of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and children—and for many, of course, to death itself.
So swift was the transition, so anomalous its backdrop, that grapevine news of hunger deaths was at first greeted with incredulity. Lidiya Ginzburg wrote her forensic memoir of the blockade in the guise of an anonymous, composite ‘Siege Man’. For him famine belonged ‘in the desert, complete with camels and mirages’. He ‘didn’t believe that the inhabitants of a large city could die of hunger… On hearing of the first cases of death amongst their acquaintances, people still thought: Is this the one I know? In broad daylight? In Leningrad? With a master’s degree? From starvation?’{3}
Yelena Skryabina, whose first reaction to the announcement of war had been to rent a holiday cottage at a knockdown price, similarly found the idea of death by starvation ‘demeaning and absurd’. Though responsible for four dependants—her mother, two sons and an elderly former nanny—she returned to the city only in mid-August and thus began stocking up with food very late. On 15 September she made a trip to the city outskirts, to barter with villagers: ‘I had cigarettes, my husband’s boots, and some women’s shoes… Everywhere I had to beg, literally implore. The peasants are already overloaded with valuable things; they don’t even want to talk.’ A few days later she managed, at the cost of endless queuing, to buy vodka, which she traded for potatoes with a ‘drunk old woman… Lucky for us that there are still such old women around.’{4} Another lucky contact was a Tartar pedlar, who sold her chocolate and horsemeat for cash (‘completely unbelievable these days, since money’s worth nothing any more’) and a bottle of red wine. Not all the inhabitants of her communal apartment, she noted in early October, were as fortunate:
People turn into animals before our eyes. Who would have thought that Irina, always such a quiet, lovely woman, would be capable of beating her husband, who she has always adored? And for what? Because he wants to eat all the time and can never get enough. He just waits for her to bring something home, and then throws himself on the food…
The most grisly sight in our apartment is the Kurakin family. He, back from exile and emaciated by years in prison, is already beginning to bloat. It’s simply horrible! Of his wife’s former love, there is little left. She is constantly irritated and argumentative. Their children cry and beg for food. But all they get is beatings. However, the Kurakins are no exception. Hunger has changed almost everyone.
Two lifelines helped prevent Skryabina’s family from going the same way. The first was a pass to her military engineer husband’s mess, from which she was able to bring home small but regular amounts of soup and porridge. The second was a fictitious job, arranged by a friend, for her fifteen-year-old son Dima, which allowed him an adult worker’s ration. But though her younger son, five-year-old Yura, continued happy and lively, ‘helping’ the yardman to chop firewood and sweep snow, for teenage Dima even this was not enough:
He has lost interest in everything. He won’t read or talk… he’s even indifferent to bombing. The only thing that rouses him is food. He’s hungry all day long and rattles through the cupboards, looking for something to eat. When he can’t find anything he chews on coffee grounds or those abominable oil cakes which used to be fed only to cattle… Even in September he used to walk around the city looking for things to buy, took an interest in the military communiqués, met friends. Now he’s like an old man, constantly freezing. He spends whole days standing next to the stove in his winter jacket, pale, with deep blue circles under his eyes. If he goes on like this he will die.{5}