Leningrad Read online

  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

  The allotments were also deadly in their crudeness, particularly as regards older children and adolescents. Children under twelve all fell into the same category, meaning that an eleven-year-old received no more than a toddler. From twelve to fourteen they were classed as ‘dependants’, even if in practice working and despite their fast-developing bodies’ more than adult needs. A child turning twelve between the two ration cuts of 12 September and 1 October thus found that his or her bread ration actually dropped, from 300 grams per day to 250. The classifications, Pavlov admitted, were ‘unjustified’, but ‘the situation made it impossible to feed them better’.20 Equally unfairly classed as ‘dependants’ were non-working mothers, upon whom fell the physical burdens of queuing at bread stores, bartering and hauling fuel and water. Tellingly, ‘dependants’ were also allotted fewer non-food necessities: they received one box of matches, for example, as compared to workers’ two. The nickname for the dependant’s card was the smertnik, from the word smert, or ‘deat
h’.21

  Diversion of rations from the productive to the unproductive was prevented by rules forbidding workers from taking food home to their families. An army surgeon, who had been forced to move into the hospital where she worked and thus leave her elderly mother living alone, asked permission to take home some of her own relatively generous ration. The request was turned down, but she nonetheless managed to smuggle her mother food via an orderly. ‘I was ordered to report to the commissar’, she wrote later, ‘and he attempted to persuade me that I had no right to undermine my health, to deprive myself of food. I agreed, didn’t protest, but told him that I couldn’t do otherwise, that my sacred responsibility was to save my mother.’22 Though in many workplaces, as here, the rules were not strictly enforced, in others employees’ bags were searched as they left the premises.

  The authorities did make some exceptions to their ruthless utilitarianism. On hearing that many of the city’s elderly scholars were dying, Zhdanov is said to have personally ordered that a list be drawn up of the most prominent and that they be sent extra food parcels by municipal trade organisations.23 One beneficiary was the artist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, who on 20 January 1942 was astonished to open her door to a woman in a white coat carrying a box filled with butter, meat, flour, sugar and dried peas. ‘This is Comrade Zhdanov’, she wrote in her diary, ‘who has noticed my age and taken it upon himself to send me food. I calculate that it amounts to roughly what one would get in a month on a worker’s card.’24 The delivery fed her and her maid Nyusha for ten days, but did not soften her attitude to the system as a whole. The dependant’s card, she thought, was a death sentence and a ‘disgrace’, designed to rid Leningrad of old people and housewives – all ‘superfluous mouths’.25

  The biggest, inevitable, weakness of the rationing system was its vulnerability to corruption. The most romanticised Soviet accounts do not admit this at all, picturing the entire city, save for a few weak souls and saboteurs, as selflessly devoted to resisting the enemy. Even the more realistic ones, such as Pavlov’s (published during Khrushchev’s short-lived ‘Thaw’), greatly understate the level of breakdown, detailing the measures taken to prevent forgery and ration-card fiddles on the part of the general population, but glossing over theft and bribe-taking within the food distribution network itself. Though ‘egotists’ and ‘locusts’ attempted to undermine the system, Pavlov concludes,

  the measures taken by the city Party organisation made it possible to protect the population from speculators, swindlers and spongers. The inhabitants’ confidence in the established system of food distribution was maintained. There was little food, but each individual knew that his ration would not be given to anyone else. He would receive whatever he was supposed to receive.26

  This picture, as both private and official records make clear, is far too rosy. Leningraders did not receive what they were supposed to receive – on the contrary, they queued for hours in the dark and cold, often to get far short of the designated ration, or nothing at all. Nor did they believe that the system was fair: every diarist complains of corrupt bosses and rosy-cheeked canteen workers and shopgirls; every diarist describes wangling extra rations themselves when possible, and trading on the black market.

  The Party files, too, are stuffed with corruption cases. The chairman and deputy chairman of the Petrograd district soviet, one note records, instead of ‘maintaining iron order’ arranged regular off-ration food distributions for themselves and colleagues. ‘Comrade Ivanov, moreover, converted his office into a bedroom for himself and his colleague Comrade Volkova, thus laying himself open to accusations of having sexual relations with a subordinate.’27 There were similar goings-on in the Primorsky district Party Committee, twelve of whose members, led by its First Secretary and the district soviet chair, took special deliveries direct from the local Canteen Trust. ‘Before the 7 November [Revolution Day] festivities’, an NKVD investigator reported,

  the Trust issued the district committee with ten kilos of chocolate and eight kilos of caviar and tinned goods. On the 6th the committee telephoned the Trust demanding more chocolate . . . Altogether, 4,000 roubles-worth of food were misappropriated in November . . . Canteen no. 13 had cigarettes for all the committee members – 1000 packs – but Secretary Kharytonov told the canteen not to hand them out, saying ‘I will smoke them all myself’.

  Nikita Lomagin, the historian who has worked most extensively in Petersburg’s security service archive, concludes from the fact that the report was not made until the end of December that the police had previously been taking a cut themselves. None of the Party officials involved, he also points out, lost his job.28

  Instead of punishing dishonest officials, the leadership concentrated on preventing the public from cheating the system. One of Pavlov’s first moves was to clamp down on unauthorised and duplicate ration cards. Record-keeping, he discovered on arrival in the city in September, had failed to keep up with the enormous population movements of the past two months, allowing Leningraders to take out cards in the names of friends and relatives who had gone into evacuation or to the front. Stricter checks and penalties cut the number of cards issued for October to 2.42 million, down 97,000 from the previous month. It was not enough, and on 10 October the city soviet passed a resolution, proposed by Zhdanov, to re-register all cards. Between 12 and 18 October Leningraders had personally to present proofs of identity at building managers’ offices or workplaces, and would receive a ‘re-registered’ stamp on their ration cards in exchange. Unstamped cards would thereafter be confiscated on presentation. The measure cut the number of bread cards in circulation by another 88,000, meat cards by 97,000 and cards for oil and butter by 92,000.

  Applications for replacement cards immediately started to rise. All the applicants, Pavlov remembered, ‘told more or less the same story – “I lost my cards while taking cover from bombing or artillery fire.” . . . Or if their building had been destroyed – “The card was in my flat when the building was hit.”’29 In response, it was ordered that replacement cards should be issued only by the central ration card bureau, and then only in the best-attested cases. For petitioners, this turned the application process from a familiar dreary tussle with petty officialdom into a fight literally for life – a ‘weird combination’, as Lidiya Ginzburg put it, of ‘old (bureaucratic) form and new content (people dying of hunger)’:

  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