From her I do know that civilians distilled survival into one word: kartochki. They were printed on one large sheet of paper, these ration cards, a month’s worth of square coupons with an official stamp, the recipient’s name and signature, and a stern warning—CARDS NOT REPLACEABLE—because corruption and counterfeiting ran rampant. Lost your kartochki? Good luck surviving.
At seven years of age my mother was a kartochki veteran. She was the one dispatched to trade them at stores while Dedushka Yankel dug his trenches and Liza and Yulia minded baby Sashka. The most crucial kartochki were for khleb (bread). One morning long before opening time Larisa joined hundreds of puffy-eyed, red-nosed people outside the bakery door. She tried not to gulp and swallow cold air too hard when the bread truck arrived and two men carted the aromatic, thick-crusted dark bricks inside. Behind the counter severe women in splotchy blue robes over shapeless padded coats weighed each ration of bread to the last milligram. They stomped their feet to keep warm and wore fingerless gloves so they could easily snip off the right coupon.
As her turn in the line neared, Mom felt a slight panic. Back in the house a power outage had prevented her from sorting through the ration books. It was the first of the month. All the coupon sheets—for grain, sugar, bread, meat for each family member—sat folded in the pocket of the blue princess coat Naum had brought from Sweden. Now she could barely feel them there; she couldn’t even feel her own hands from the cold.
Why did she put all the cards on the counter when her turn came? But how else to sift through the rationing sheets with people behind pushing and barking? Why panic so completely, so utterly at the invasion of arms? Arms, hands, mittens and gloves, smelly coat armpits, anxious breath. Fingers swarming the counter like tentacles—gnarled, blackened digits; gaunt fingers with white anemic nails; red swollen fingers. The kartochki were gone from the counter. The saleslady gave a bleak grin and a wag of a nail-bitten finger.
Standing outside the bread store, Mother imagined what she’d always imagined ever since she remembered imagining anything. She saw Naum coming back home. He’d be dressed in the gray civilian suit he wore at the station for Leningrad; she could almost smell the lavanda cologne on his cap. “Lizochka, I’m home!” he would shout, peering at the thin, shoddy figures in the warehouse room. Then he’d spy them. Arms open, he’d rush over. And what would he find? Liza, Dedushka, and Sashka—and Larisa and Yulia, pale and majestically beautiful in their identical fur-trimmed princess coats. All silent and motionless on their striped mattress, like Katya’s small baby. Dead, all of them.
Dead is what happened to people who lost their rationing cards on the first of the month. Dead from golod (starvation), from thirty whole days without kasha or bread or the tiny ration of milk for the baby. Would Naum wail like Dasha their neighbor did when she opened her funeral letter? Or would he find a new wife, one who didn’t shriek and convulse in hysterics like Liza surely would when Larisa came home without bread and without rationing cards.
Going home wasn’t an option. And so Mother went to the only place in the city where electricity always shone brightly and where a sprit of cozy, prosperous happiness wafted through every beautiful room. She went there often, to that traditional wooden two-story house up the street from their warehouse. She came to escape from the sight of her pitiful dedushka peeling warty potatoes, from the catastrophic Voice on the radio. The house was untouched by all this. Here the mother, Maria Alexandrovna, never yelled at her children. She played the grand piano while everyone had tea from a samovar in the living room. There were six kids in the house, but the apple of everyone’s eye was a boy called Volodya. Larisa liked to examine his baby picture, a brim of blond curls fringing his high, stubborn forehead. As a student Volodya had a proud, focused expression and a shrewd direct gaze. He got the best grades in his class. He never lied to his parents. He fought for justice and truth. Volodya’s attic bedroom with its patterned beige wallpaper was where Mom often sat daydreaming in the wooden chair between the boy’s small, neat desk and his bookshelf filled with volumes by Pushkin, Turgenev, and Gogol. Lucky Volodya got to sleep alone in bed, unlike Larisa and Yulia. He had such a nifty map of the world on his wall. The green lamp on his desk was so hypnotic, so peaceful.
“Devochka, little girl, wake up, time to go.” Someone was clutching Larisa’s shoulder, shaking her gently.
“The Lenin House Museum closes at five,” said the attendant.
Back at her own house Larisa sat with her arms closed around Liza, stroking the sharp shoulder blade under her mother’s coarse woolen dress. They sat like this a long while. About the lost kartochki Liza said nothing. She remembered too well her own childhood loss of a ration in the twenties: a loaf of bread yanked out of her hand by a bearded giant who gorged on the entire half pound in front of her eyes.
Salvation came from Katya, of all people, the prostitutka and black marketeer.
“Liza, you fool—you have the sunduk!”
So every few days Liza and Katya went to the black market on the outskirts of Ulyanovsk to trade Naum’s spiffy shirts, suits, and ties from inside the blue trunk. His best suit went for a sack of millet that they ate for the rest of the month. Millet for thin, watery breakfast gruel. Millet soup for lunch, flavored with herring heads. Best was millet baked for supper in a cast-iron pot inside the clay Russian stove in their warehouse. Russian war survivors fall into two categories: those who idolize millet and those who can’t stand it. But they all agree: millet was life.
The Nazi invasion caught Stalin’s Soviet Union with yet another food supply crisis looming. Two years of below-average harvests had combined with the drain of the 1940 war with Finland and mammoth defense spending. But if the Soviets had scant grain reserves, they had even scantier strategies for handling wartime supply problems.
The Reich, however, had a strategy: Hungerplan, the “Hunger Plan.” Brainchild of corpulent, gourmandizing Hermann Göring and the Reich’s Food Ministry, the Hunger Plan was possibly history’s most sinister and cynical blueprint. The “agricultural surplus” of the Ukraine—which the Nazis intended to capture immediately—would be diverted to feed only Wehrmacht soldiers and Germany’s civilians. Thirty million Russians (a sixth of the population), mainly in cities, would be left without food. In other words: genocide by programmatic starvation.
By late fall of 1941, Hitler controlled half of the Soviet grain acreage. Crucially, however, he had not yet achieved the lightning victory he was so sure of. Despite staggering initial losses and blunders, the Soviet forces resisted. Moscow shuddered, bled, but didn’t yield. Russian generals regrouped. Instead of swollen Ukrainian granaries and willing slave labor, the advancing Wehrmacht usually found only burnt crops and demolished farm equipment, as per Stalin’s scorched earth policy. (“All valuable property, including non-ferrous metals, grain, and fuel which cannot be withdrawn, must without fail be destroyed,” instructed the Leader in early July.)
Then winter descended and it was the Germans whose poor planning was brutally exposed. Counting on three months of blitzkrieg at most, the Reich hadn’t provided warm clothes to the men at its front. The war lasted four long years, much of the duration bitterly cold.
Soviet citizens got their first rationing cards in July of 1941. Average kartochki allotments, though symbolic and crucial, were nowhere near adequate for survival. Daily, it was only a bit more than a pound of bread; monthly, about four pounds of meat and under three pounds of flour or grain. Substitutions became the norm: honey for meat, rotten herring instead of sugar or butter. Under the slogan “All for the Front, All for the Victory,” supplies and rail transport were prioritized for the Red Army, which often fought in a state of near-starvation. How did Stalin’s state manage the food supply for civilians? By temporarily encouraging near-NEP conditions. Economic ideology was suspended and centralization loosened, meaning local authorities and citizens were left to fend for themselves. Schools and orphanages, trade unions and factories, all set up ad hoc green plots. Even in cities, people foraged, learning to digest birch buds, clover, pine needles, and tree bark. At the front, chronically hungry soldiers ate not just fallen horses but saddles and straps—anything made of leather that could be boiled for hours with some aromatic twigs to stun the tar smell.