Leningrad

by Anna Reid

  Today I had an appointment with Polikarpov, president of the All-Union Radio Committee. It left a very unpleasant impression. I addressed him badly, shyly – I would probably have done better to be rude. I asked his permission to send the food package to our Radio Committee, and in reply this smooth bureaucrat, obviously uncomfortable in my presence, uttered stinking commonplaces: ‘Leningraders themselves object to these packages’; ‘The government knows who to help’ and similar rubbish. ‘Leningraders’ – this is Zhdanov!8

  Employment at the Radio House nonetheless enabled Berggolts, though jaundiced and swollen with oedema, not only to survive herself but to help friends. One beneficiary was the half-grateful, half-resentful Mariya Mashkova, who more than once found herself unable to tear herself away from the fried bread and coffee on offer in Berggolts’s warm, well-lit flat in order to return to crying children and dying mother-in-law in the darkness and cold of her own. Berggolts gave her sukhari, oranges, biscuits, soup powder and onions out of the first Radio House delivery from Moscow, and bread, biscuits, soup powder, rice, buckwheat, sausages, chocolates, vodka, tobacco and packets of vitamin C out of the second. ‘I list all this in such detail’, Mashkova wrote in her diary after a celebratory supper, ‘because it’s such a rarity – magical, unbelievable . . . To sit with friends next to a cheerful samovar, to see bread lying sliced on a plate in the normal way, to see the children eating as much as they want . . . Not to worry about the diminishing loaf, to speak about something other than food – is this not happiness?’9

  Another enviable enclave was the Writers’ Union, run by the novelist Vera Ketlinskaya. In January she applied to Zhdanov’s deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov for permission to send a fleet of lorries, specially equipped with stoves and insulated with felt and plywood, over the Ice Road to the ‘mainland’. On the way out they were to carry writers’ families into evacuation, and on the way back, to buy 100,000 roubles’ worth of food from collective farmworkers, who in return were to be entertained with ‘modern literature’ and ‘literary evenings’. ‘We are aware that all unscheduled trips are cancelled’, she wheedled in a letter, ‘but beg you to make an exception to this rule. Even in the most difficult times the Party and Soviet government have always taken particular care of literature. We remember Lenin’s conversation with Gorky, about how our writers and scientists must be fed.’10 Her lobbying worked and by early spring – well before other institutions returned to normal – the Union’s canteen daily served barley soup, borscht, kasha and dessert.11

  The Writers’ Union also received special food deliveries from its Moscow headquarters; Vera Inber got a share of one in March: ‘I was bewildered when I saw everything they had sent us. I grabbed a tin of condensed milk in each hand; I couldn’t let them go.’12 Lidiya Ginzburg cites these food parcels as an example of the Soviet hierarchy in action ‘with unusual clarity and crudity’. Containing chocolate, butter, rusks and preserves, they were, she claims, divided according to work rate and seniority rather than need. Writers active in Union affairs got two kilos each, the less active a kilo and the inactive nothing at all.13 One of several who loathed Ketlinskaya was Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, head of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, who fruitlessly begged her to admit his starving members since they had no clubhouse or canteen of their own.14 Though wrung out by dysentery, which prevented him from making a meeting with city soviet chairman Popkov, he did manage to obtain eleven extra first-category ration cards, as well as three beds in a recuperation clinic set up in the Astoria hotel. He was then faced with the horrible task of allocating them:

  I receive many acutely painful appeals. I was especially upset by a phone call from L. A. Portov, who several times, in a pleading voice, entreated me ‘Do it. Do it now. If you wait a week, it will be too late. I won’t survive.’

  All the same I could only promise him a place on the waiting list, together with the much weakened Rubtsov and Peisin, since Rabinovich (long ill from tuberculosis), Deshevov (already hardly able to move) and Miklashevsky are all in an even worse state. When it comes to saving human life you can’t make choices. The life of every Soviet person must be saved. But you do nonetheless have to choose, in the sense of deciding priorities. You mustn’t be guided by judgements of each person’s creative or practical ‘worth’ (these can only be subjective), but by objective indicators of how closely they are threatened by death.15

  By the end of February, twenty-one out of the Union’s eighty members had died of what Bogdanov-Berezovsky in his official report called ‘exhaustion’.16 So had his own mother, sister, brother-in-law, father-in-law and niece.

  Workplace solidarity also often broke down. The acting director of Pushkin House, Dmitri Likhachev records, behaved cruelly, dismissing female staff – which amounted to a death sentence since it condemned them to dependants’ rations – stealing the ration cards of the dying and finally throwing them out so as not to have to dispose of their corpses:

  I remember the death of Yasinsky. He had once been a tall, slim, very handsome old man, who reminded me of Don Quixote. During the winter he moved to the Pushkin House library, sleeping on a folding bed, behind the book stacks . . . His mouth wouldn’t close and saliva trickled from it; his face was black, making an eerie contrast with his completely white, unkempt hair. His skin was taut over his bones . . . His lips became thinner and thinner and failed to cover his teeth, which protruded and made his head look like a tortoise’s. Once he emerged from the stacks with a blanket over his shoulders and asked ‘What’s the time?’ Then he asked if it was day or night (dystrophics’ voices became slurred, as the vocal chords atrophied). He couldn’t tell because in the lobby all the windows were boarded up. A day or two later our deputy director, Kanailov, drove away everyone who had tried to settle down to die in Pushkin House, so as not to have to remove their bodies. Several of our ancillary staff – porters, caretakers, cleaning women – died like this. They had been drafted in, torn from their families, and then when they no longer had the strength to get home they were thrown out in thirty degrees of frost. Kanailov kept a close eye on all those who weakened, and not a single person died on the premises.17

  In January 1942 Kanailov arranged his own evacuation across Lake Ladoga, offering friends places in his lorry if they carried his cases, which he stuffed with antique carpets and other valuables. The cases themselves – beautiful old ones in yellow leather – weren’t his either, being part of a bequest from a book-loving illegitimate son of Alexander III. More Pushkin House valuables were stolen by sailors from a nearby submarine, who were allowed to move in – and appropriate Turgenev’s sofa and Blok’s bed – in exchange for supplying Kanailov’s (slightly less corrupt) replacement with soup and electric light. ‘In the spring’, Likhachev remembered, ‘when the Neva thawed, the sailors left the Institute one fine day without any warning, taking with them as much as they could carry. After they had gone I found on the floor a gilded plaque: Chaadayev’s clock. The clock itself had disappeared. On what ocean floor does it rest now?’18

  By far the best organisations to be connected to, to escape starvation, were the armed services, the food processing and distribution agencies, or Party headquarters at the Smolniy.

  Front-line life, for soldiers in the trenches around Leningrad, was extraordinarily hard. They were brutally and capriciously disciplined, made to march long distances in filthy footcloths and ill-fitting boots, gouged ditches and dugouts out of the frozen ground with crowbars and pickaxes, slept outdoors on the snow wrapped in their greatcoats, waged a constant war against rats and lice, and during offensives went without hot food for days. Nonetheless their ration, even at its lowest, included a daily 500 grams of bread. Though in some units food was systematically stolen by the upper ranks, the full ration was possible to live on, and in general enough food circulated within the military so as to support not only servicemen and women but also their dependants.

  Wives and girlfriends of officers stationed in the city itself
were noticeably better off than the average, earning the resentful nickname ‘defence ladies’. One such lived next door to Georgi Knyazev in the Academicians’ Building. Wife of a military engineer, she traded small quantities of bread, sugar and rice for her neighbours’ tablecloths, towels, carpets and lamps. Though the food was useful, it also proved, Knyazev wryly noted, that ‘even in starving Leningrad, there are some well-fed types!’19 In early February 1942 a smooth-faced, smartly uniformed officer appeared at Yelena Skryabina’s door to serve her with evacuation papers. He seemed like a member of an alien species, ‘literally a creature from another world who had accidentally landed on our planet . . . For the hundredth time you reflect on how differently situated those with power or advantage are, from ordinary people who have nothing but their ration cards.’20 Servicemen also feature as the heroes of what siege historiographers call ‘saviour stories’ – the accounts, related by numerous survivors, of kind strangers turning up at the eleventh hour with life-saving gifts of food. Though part of siege mythology – one historian even likens them to the Great War’s Angel of Mons21 – many of these stories are undoubtedly true. Igor Kruglyakov remembers that ‘just before or just after New Year we had a knock on the door from a young, rosy-cheeked pilot. He brought two boxes, from Father. One contained butter and flour, the second was full of sukhari. This saved us.’ Skryabina’s family was rescued by a completely unknown soldier who appeared one day on her doorstep with a pail of sauerkraut.22

  Trips to the front itself were also highly prized, since they often involved being treated to what felt like lavish meals. An actress entertaining troops in mid-December wonderingly recorded the menu of a ‘banquet’ to celebrate the ‘140 Heroes of the Patriotic War’ – 100 grams of alcohol per person, two glasses of beer, 300 grams of bread and one white roll, fifty grams of salted pork fat, two meat patties with buckwheat and gravy, a glass of cocoa with milk, sunflower seeds, a pack of Belomor cigarettes and a box of matches. She was also able to take 400 grams of boiled sweets back home.23 Vera Inber joined a delegation that visited the Volkhov front in February 1942, bearing shaving kits, guitars and five automatic rifles inscribed with the words ‘For the best exterminators of the German occupiers’. At breakfast she was thrilled to be served porridge, bread and a large chunk of butter. ‘What a marvellous thing! Next time I shall without fail bring a spoon.’ About a hundred workers’ delegations made similar trips in November and December.24 Other civilians managed to attach themselves to the warships moored around the city. Jobs aboard a submarine and a minelayer saved the engineers Chekrizov and Lazarev, and numerous writers and academics – like Boldyrev – earned themselves vital meals by giving readings or lectures to sailors. Visits home by front-line soldiers, in contrast, were forbidden, and doubly dangerous since a man walking alone through the streets in the small hours with a knapsack on his back made a tempting target for mugging or murder.

  One of the surest survival techniques was to get employment in food processing or distribution. Leningraders with these sorts of jobs, unsurprisingly, seldom died of starvation. All 713 employees of the Krupskaya sweet factory survived; so did all those at the no. 4 bakery and at a margarine manufacturer. At the Baltika bakery, only twenty-seven out of what grew from 276 to 334 workers died, all the victims being men.25 Canteen waitresses and bread-shop salesgirls were notoriously ‘fat’, as were orphanage staff – a friend of Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s, spotting ‘Rubenesque’ young women in a newly reopened public bathhouse in the spring, automatically assumed that they worked in bakeries, soup kitchens or children’s homes.26 Menstruation having ceased for most during the winter, women who gave birth in 1942 were also assumed to have worked in a food plant or dining hall. (The only two pregnant women Chekrizov saw during the whole of the siege were both waitresses in his shipyard’s cafeteria.)

  A measure of such women’s buying power was the fact that on the black market the most saleable items were not those of practical value, but fashionable women’s clothes. Skryabina traded dress fabric and a chiffon blouse for bread and rice with her former maid, now the squirrel-jacketed mistress of a warehouse manager.27 Boldyrev bribed the ‘tsaritsa of the kitchen’ at the Scholars’ Building with a lace handkerchief and yellow silk pompoms. Likhachev’s wife sold two dresses at the Sitny market for a kilo of bread and 1,200 grams of cattle cake.28 Despite a crackdown in the summer of 1942, theft and corruption continued to thrive within the food distribution system throughout the siege. As one Leningrader complained in a private letter (intercepted by the NKVD) in September of that year: ‘There are people who don’t know what hunger is, who’ve been positively spoiled. Look at the salesgirl in any shop, and you’ll see a gold watch on one wrist and a bracelet on the other.’ This was only one, the security men gloomily reported, of 10,820 similar complaints picked up in just ten days.29 Whistle-blowing was pointless: when Lazarev’s wife complained that the children in the paediatric hospital where she worked were getting less than half their allotted milk, she found herself despatched out of town to spend twelve hours a day digging the hospital’s vegetable plot.30

  Likeliest to survive – and most resented – of all were the apparatchiks at Party headquarters. ‘I saw bread being delivered to the Smolniy myself’, an informer heard a woman hiss to her neighbour in a queue in late January. ‘They’re not hungry there. If they had to do without bread for a couple of days maybe they’d sit up and take notice, pay a bit more attention to us.’ ‘They’re stuffing their faces’, said another. ‘We starve, and watch their fat mugs being driven about in automobiles. It’s not fair.’31

  Rank-and-file Party members – mostly ordinary workers – were not very much better off than ordinary citizens. Seventeen thousand Party members – 15 per cent of the total – are estimated to have starved to death in the first half of 1942. Though this was half or less of the overall civilian mortality rate of 30–40 per cent, the comparison is not direct, since the membership’s demographic – mostly men, relatively few old people, no children – differed from that of the general population.32 Food supply was unquestionably better, however, for the bureaucrats employed at Party headquarters. It is often said that Zhdanov ate ordinary workers’ rations during the siege, but given the meals on offer in the Smolniy this seems highly improbable. Visitors came away with tantalising hints of abundant food – to Likhachev, attending a meeting about a book commission, it ‘smelled like a dining room’, and a Red Army supply officer remembered delivering smoked ham, sturgeon and caviar, left over from a shipment out of the city to officials’ evacuated families.33

  The best (and unique) first-person account of what Leningrad’s elite actually ate comes from Nikolai Ribkovsky, an official in the Profsoyuz, the Party-sponsored trades union. Aged thirty-eight at the start of the war, Ribkovsky came from a peasant family, was a fervent Stalinist and a member of the generation of functionaries who did well out of the Terror, stepping swiftly into the shoes of their purged seniors. Prior to landing a job in the Smolniy in early December 1941, he lived like any Leningrader, worrying about his wife and son in evacuation (‘I’ve saved a few bars of chocolate to send to Serezhenka’), queuing for the ordinary rations and becoming ordinarily emaciated: ‘Is this my body or did it get swapped for somebody else’s without me noticing? My legs and wrists are like a growing child’s, my stomach has caved in, my ribs stick out from top to bottom.’ His Smolniy post, as an instructor in the ‘cadres department’ of the city soviet, was a passport to a different world. ‘For breakfast in the mornings’, he wrote on his fourth day into the job,

  macaroni or spaghetti, or kasha with butter, and two glasses of sweet tea. Lunch – first course soup, second course meat. Yesterday for example, I had vegetable soup with sour cream, followed by a mince patty with vermicelli. Today for the first course, soup with vermicelli, for the second, pork with steamed cabbage. In the evening, for those still at work, free bread and butter with cheese, a bun, and a couple of glasses of sweet tea. Not bad. They only cut coup
ons for the bread and meat; everything else is off-ration. This means that with your spare coupons you can go to the shops and buy grain, butter and anything else available, and take a bit home.

  Though many Smolniy staff were coming down with diarrhoea, the building was warm, clean and light, and its sewerage and running water worked normally. Other Leningraders, he noted, ‘go to the bathroom right in their flats, and then empty it just anywhere, and don’t wash their hands before eating . . . Meeting such people – and you meet them quite often – is unpleasant.’

  In March 1942 Ribkovsky was sent to the city soviet’s ‘Rest House’ – effectively a hotel – in a dacha village to the north of the city:

  The surroundings are lovely. Little two-storey dachas with covered porches, surrounded by soaring pines, reaching right up to the sky . . . After a walk in the cold, tired and a little hazy in the head from the forest smells, you come home to a warm, cosy room, sink into a soft armchair and gratefully stretch out your legs.

  The food here is like in a good peacetime Rest House: varied, delicious, high-quality. Every day there’s meat – lamb, ham, chicken, goose, turkey and sausage. For fish – bream, Baltic herring and smelt – fried, poached or in aspic. Caviar, smoked sturgeon, cheese, pirozhki, cocoa, coffee, tea, 300 grams of white bread and of black bread every day, thirty grams of butter and to top it all off, fifty grams of wine and good port with lunch and dinner . . . We eat, drink, spend time outdoors, sleep or just do nothing while listening to the Pathephone, swapping jokes and playing dominoes or cards . . . I am almost unaware of the war, which reminds us of its presence only by the distant bang of guns, though we are only a few dozen kilometres from the front.