Judging from the amount of traffic in the Moscovsky Terminal, a significant amount of supplies was getting in and out. Karen saw it with her own eyes. She also watched important refugees board outgoing trains to safety. Refugees like Dmitri Shostakovich.
She no longer resented the composer. She no longer blamed him for abandoning her and her father. If she had been offered the chance to evacuate, she would have taken it in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t anyone?
It was why she had come to the rail terminal herself. It was why she watched the trains load and unload. She needed to see the operation. She needed to learn how it worked, because she was certain that soon she, too, would be motoring across the ice to safety.
Two days later, Leningrad’s mayor addressed the citizens over the public-announcement speakers that had been strung throughout the streets. Mayor Popkov reassured his people that the worst was behind them. The mayor announced the creation of the Second Shock Army and the beginning of a major winter offensive that would break the German siege and rescue Leningrad from starvation. In the meantime, they merely had to survive. He admitted that food had become scarce, but he blamed the black market. He warned Leningraders that profiteers would be harshly punished.
The mayor’s words rang hollow. Everyone participated in the black market now. They had to if they wanted to survive. Two hundred grams of bread, the current ration, were clearly not enough to survive on, especially since the bread was cut with sawdust. Those who did somehow manage to survive had to drag the bodies of their loved ones on sledges to mass burial pits. They braved the cold and exhausted themselves in the journey because they knew what would happen to the corpses if they didn’t make the trip—cannibals would eat them. The very thing that had happened to Karen’s father.
Despite the mayor’s words of encouragement, an attitude of rebellion surged through the city. In the weeks that followed, Karen constantly overheard criticism of the government. The Communist Party was accused of hoarding food. Mayor Popkov himself was suspected of purposefully causing the shortage so he could profit. Karen even found anonymous pamphlets brazenly tacked to bulletins that encouraged open revolt. “We need not fear the NKVD,” the pamphlets insisted. “Nor the army. They are our fathers, brothers, and sons. They cannot be compelled to fire on us!”
Karen was less convinced by the revolutionary sentiment of the pamphlet than she was by the mayor’s speech. Meanwhile, the State police, the NKVD, was feared, and with good reason, because it had done far worse than fire on women and children during its brief history. NKVD agents were everywhere in Russia, spying on citizens, noting and recording subversive sentiment or activity. They might not massacre demonstrators in the street, but you could be sure they would round up the organizers afterward and make them disappear, never to be seen or heard from again.
Despite the NKVD, people grumbled in despair and openly criticized their leaders, which was rare in Russia. It indicated a new level of desperation. But that didn’t mean people were willing to march on the Smolny, the seat of the city’s government. For one, they were far too weak to march. Starving citizens make poor revolutionaries.
Things only got worse when the State-run bakeries began to shut down. City officials claimed that it wasn’t a lack of food but a lack of water that caused the closures. Leningrad’s last pumping stations had failed, and without water, the bakeries couldn’t make bread. In an act of remarkable solidarity, cold, starving, and exhausted civilians once again emerged from their homes. They stood in long lines that stretched from the city’s various bakeries to the Neva River. The lines became bucket brigades, passing water hand over hand, delivering it to the bakeries to keep the ovens working. Winter still gripped the city. The temperature was well below zero, and each hand that passed the bucket also had to break the ice forming on its lip to prevent the water from freezing solid before it arrived at the bakery ovens. It was exhausting work. But the purpose it gave to the citizens of Leningrad was also invigorating.
Until she joined those lines, Karen wouldn’t have believed that so many ordinary men and women still survived in Leningrad. And although the work was hard, it kept her warm, as did the body heat of the men and women standing on either side of her. Karen no longer felt alone. For once she felt a part of a greater community, part of a family working together for a greater good.
Everyone else felt the same. Spirits had risen. Somewhere in line a man began to sing. He had a deep, booming voice well suited to patriotic songs. But he wasn’t singing a patriotic song. He was singing a love song. It was a popular show tune intended for a line of chorus girls, so the man’s baritone rendition sounded almost comical. Others immediately joined in, men and women alike. Soon the whole line was singing together. Karen added her own voice, trying to learn the words as she went. But the words weren’t important. The song wasn’t important. The singing was.
Everyone sang louder and louder, and other voices began to echo the song, from other lines, and from Russian soldiers in their trenches. The Germans could hear them now; Karen was sure of it. The Germans could hear and, upon hearing, would know that Russians still breathed in Leningrad, that their strategy of starvation had failed.
It was one of the happiest moments of Karen’s life. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to flee, after all. Perhaps she could survive in Leningrad, if everyone could work together, if everyone could just keep the bakeries open. And as public sentiment swung from despair to optimism, Mayor Popkov made another announcement: the Second Shock Army was enjoying remarkable success. Soon they would link up with the Leningrad defenders at the Nevsky Bridgehead. The ice road across Lake Ladoga was still secure. So tomorrow the bread ration would be increased from two hundred to four hundred grams daily.
The city was ecstatic. Karen was ecstatic. Their nightmare seemed to be over. Soon their heroes in the Red Army would liberate them.
But despite the bucket brigades, despite the individual sacrifice of Red Army soldiers, despite the promises of the mayor, the next morning, on January 24, the State-run bakeries closed. It wasn’t about the water, after all. City officials had lied. There was no more flour. The rationing was over because there was nothing left to ration.
There was no public outcry, no riot in the streets. Starving people are too weak for that. All that was left now was to lie down and conserve their strength—to try to preserve what little energy they had left, to try to simply survive until the trucks brought more flour over the Road of Life.
The end of rationing in early 1942 was a great tragedy for Leningrad. But it was, from a selfish point of view, fortuitous for Karen. With the closure of the bakeries, her potatoes became that much more valuable. In addition to the potatoes, she had two extra ration cards. They weren’t as valuable now that the bakeries were closed, but so long as people still believed the bakeries would eventually reopen, they were still worth something. And, of course, she still had her aunt’s seeds. She no longer needed a garden—not where she was going—so everything she had, all the possessions that might mean the difference between survival and starvation in this city, were on the auction block.
She didn’t want anything physical in return. There was nothing physical, other than food or the means to produce food, that was worth anything in Leningrad, anyway. But the two things Karen needed most weren’t objects. She needed access, and she needed information.