by Anna Reid
Getting on to a lorry to cross the lake, he took some time to work out, required more bribery:
I waited, hungry and unfed like everyone else (despite the fact that in Leningrad we had been promised three meals a day and given the appropriate coupons). At about 5 p.m. I found the man in charge but he fobbed me off with some meaningless nonsense or other, and I realised I wouldn’t be going anywhere soon. The lorries came and went, but the people in charge chose who to let on themselves, not following any sort of list or queue . . . I approached the boss once again, telling him that I was ill and that I was going to join my son, a decorated soldier.
Shortly afterwards he was approached by an overseer, who settled on 500 grams of tobacco in exchange for a place on the first closed lorry to come along. Four hours later Kulyabko was aboard, having cannily refused to hand over the bribe until he was actually seated inside with his luggage. ‘The same system of bribery, but much pettier, pertained in the lorry itself. The driver constantly asked for cigarettes, which he was given. Otherwise the lorry went slowly, or things went wrong all the time. A cigarette given at just the right moment made all these problems disappear.’ Having spent three hours stuck in a jam with food trucks heading the other way, the lorry finally arrived on the ‘mainland’ at five the next morning.
Though Kulyabko had now escaped the siege ring, this was far from the end of his difficulties. First he had to queue three hours for kasha and soup, for which evacuees were expected to produce their own plate and spoon – he got round the problem by giving the waitress fifty roubles and his passport as security for a bowl. When a train arrived, it was mobbed by the frantic crowd. Paying thirty roubles to a soldier to carry his luggage, Kulyabko managed to climb into a goods wagon with some emaciated engineering students, who refused him space round its hay-stoked stove. Five sleepless nights and days later, punctuated by long queues for food, petty thefts and the death of one of the students, whose friends pushed his corpse out of the train window, he reached Cherepovets:
I crawl out of the wagon, fall over of course, drag down my three bundles and call out, ‘Help me carry these to the station’. Nobody pays any attention. I try to drag them myself, but they are heavy and I fall over again. I stand there in despair. Finally I spot a street urchin and ask him to carry my things to the station. He says, ‘Will you give me a smoke?’ and I say that I will . . . We get to the station; I see a policeman and ask him, ‘How do I get to this address?’ He replies that there are horse-drawn cabs on the square. Stupidly, I go to the square, give the boy a cigarette and stand looking for the cabs. But there aren’t any, and never have been. I appeal to this person and that for help, but nobody responds. So I start dragging my things to the left-luggage office, which thankfully isn’t far. I push the suitcase over the snow with my feet, and carry everything else. I go for a metre, a metre and a half, and stop to rest. I stand there on the brink of tears. How will I get to Borya?
His saviour was a young soldier, who, refusing all thanks, picked up his bags and walked him to Borya’s hospital, giving him an army ration rusk to eat on the way.19 Kulyabko travelled when the mass-evacuation programme had been in progress for little more than a week, but conditions remained chaotic all the way through to mid-April, when the spring thaw brought the lorries – by now swishing axle-deep through meltwater – to a halt.20
How many people did the Ice Road save altogether? Officially 11,296 evacuees made it across in January 1942, 117,434 in February, 221,947 in March and 163,392 in April, making an impressive, plan-beating total of 514,069 in less than four months.21 This takes no account, however, of those who died on the way, either during the crossing itself or in the trains that took evacuees onwards into unoccupied Russia. In the crowded, toiletless freight cars, as experienced by Kochina, stomach disorders raged:
Whenever someone ‘feels a need’ the whole ‘public’ of the car usually takes part in its realisation. It works as follows: the door is opened by common effort and the cause of the commotion drops his trousers and sticks his rear into the wind. Several people hold him by the hands and under the arms. [During halts] we all crawl out of the train and squat next to the wagons, side by side – men, women and children. The locals crowd around, staring at us with horror . . . But we’re indifferent to all that. We don’t experience shame or any other feelings . . . The sick ride with us until they die. Then we simply throw them out of the moving train.22
That evacuees received inadequate care even after they had reached the ‘mainland’ is confirmed by an NKVD report of 5 March, which complains of ‘irresponsible and heartless’ treatment of evacuees by staff at a reception point, and ‘inhuman’ conditions on the trains. From one, seventeen corpses had been removed at Volkhov station, twenty at Babayevo, seven at Cherepovets and seven more at Vologda. From another, twenty-six had been removed at Volkhov, thirty-two at Tikhvin, four at Babayevo and six at Vologda.23 A wartime mass grave at Vologda, filled mostly with fleeing Leningraders, is estimated to contain 20,000 dead.
For those who survived the initial evacuation journey there remained the problem, if not attached to an institution or within reach of relatives, of finding a local authority prepared to supply ration cards and accommodation. Since there were displaced people and chronic food shortages everywhere (even in Moscow, beggars died on the streets in the winter of 1941–2), this was extremely difficult. Skryabina, who crossed the Ice Road in February, first watched her mother die in a chaotic so-called hospital in Cherepovets, then spent weeks journeying with her emaciated sons from one railway town to another in search of a sympathetic official. When she eventually found one it was thanks to svyazi: her old family doctor had become a senior Party official in Gorky (now Nizhni Novgorod).
His name worked like magic . . . The clerk pushed the people standing ahead of me aside and amiably invited us to follow him. He led us straight to the office of the Gorky Party Committee . . . In ten minutes I was out again with three documents in my hands – two for extra rations and one for a special transport headed for the Caucasus.
The rejections Skryabina had endured up to that point were predictable, as much a product of general wartime shortage and upheaval as of bureaucratic negligence. But she experienced them as malign and personal: ‘I think’, she wrote, ‘that Robinson Crusoe was a lucky man. He knew quite well that he was on an uninhabited island and had to fend for himself. But I am among human beings.’24
15
Corpse-Eating and Person-Eating
Another aspect of the siege that has no place in the traditional Soviet story is crime. Leningraders, claims supply commissar Dmitri Pavlov, were too ‘high-minded’ to grab loaves that spilled from a bread truck hit by a shell, and ‘jealously protected’ the trees in the public parks from being cut down for firewood. Their example refuted the ‘foreign writers who assert that man loses his morals and becomes a predatory beast when hunger affects him powerfully. If this were true, anarchy should have reigned in Leningrad.’1
Anarchy did not reign in Leningrad during the siege, but the city did suffer a crime wave, especially of theft and murder for food and food cards, and, most notoriously, of cannibalism. The commonest of violent crimes was simple mugging. Yelena Kochina, returning home from a bread shop in mid-December 1941, saw a teenage boy dressed in the uniform of one of the city’s trade schools running towards her. She stood aside but he grabbed her bread and ran on, leaving her staring in horror at her empty hands. Back at home, a neighbour scolded her for not hiding the bread under her coat. Four days later Yelena’s husband got in a fight with another trade-school boy over a spilled crust:
Today [Dima] ran into some sleds loaded with bread. An armed guard of five men accompanied them, and a crowd followed behind, staring spellbound at the loaves. Dima followed along with everyone else. Near the bread shop the sleds were unloaded, and the crowd fell on the empty boxes, picking out the crumbs. Dima found a large crust trampled in the snow. But a boy tore the crust out of his hands. He chewed it, this horr
endous brat, smacking his lips and drooling saliva. Dima went mad. He grabbed the boy by his collar and began to shake him, not realizing what he was doing. The boy’s head wobbled on his thin neck like a rag doll’s. But he kept on hurriedly chewing with his eyes closed. ‘It’s gone, it’s gone! Look!’ he shouted suddenly and opened his mouth wide.2
Cited as thieves in dozens of similar accounts,3 these trade-school boys, like the peasant refugees in the suburbs, were one of Leningrad’s most vulnerable social groups. Greatly expanded just before the war, the trade schools – remeslennye uchilishchya – were low-prestige boarding institutions, designed to train up teenagers from the villages as factory hands. When the siege ring closed their pupils found themselves cut off from their families and at the mercy of often negligent or unscrupulous school managers. The commissar sent from Moscow to oversee mass evacuation over the Ice Road, Aleksei Kosygin, noticed their worse than average emaciation and was prompted personally to inspect Trade School no. 33. The boys, he discovered, were lice-ridden and sleeping two or three to a bed, without sheets or pillowcases or any isolation of sick from healthy. Even more shamefully, kitchen staff were systematically pilfering their food, leaving them with half or less of their proper ration. A pupils’ representative, he wrote furiously to Zhdanov, should be allowed directly to oversee the kitchens, and managers and staff should be arrested and put on trial. The overall mortality rate in the trade schools is unknown, but has been estimated at a staggering 95 per cent.4
Theft by Leningrad’s thousands of other abandoned children was reduced by the opening and subsequent evacuation of ninety-eight new orphanages, but these usually only took in children aged up to thirteen. ‘The position of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds left without parents’, a report to Zhdanov noted, ‘is especially difficult. They are not accepted into children’s homes, and crowd near shops and bakeries, snatching bread and food from buyers’ hands.’ City education department staff, it went on, refused even to send younger children to orphanages unless they were clean, free of infection and in possession of all the correct papers.5
Of more concern to police was the threat that angry bread-shop crowds would get out of control, or descend into outright looting. Though food distribution was never seriously disrupted there were some near-riots, especially in January and February 1942, when Leningraders were queuing from the small hours, often to receive no bread at all. Late one January evening Dmitri Lazarev went to look for his wife, who had gone out to queue at seven that morning. He found her standing in line outside a bread shop on Bolshoi Prospekt:
People were being allowed into the shop ten at a time. At one point, when the next ten were being allowed in, everyone behind rushed forward and started trying to break down the doors. A pair of policemen tried to hold back the crowd. Finally they began telling lies, promising that people would be let in as soon as the crowd took a few steps back. When the crowd did so they locked the doors and announced that the shop was closed and everyone could go home. There were shouts, complaints – some had not eaten for two days, others had starving children.
Order was only restored after Lazarev and some of the other men went round to the back of the shop and persuaded the manager to release rations for another seventy people.6 Altogether, the NKVD lists seventy-two such ‘attacks’ by members of the public on food shops, carts and sleds in the first twenty-seven days of January. Though in one case looters threw bricks at shop staff, most consisted simply of queuers pushing their way behind the counter, or of small groups (sometimes of armed deserters, but more often of women or trade-school boys) knocking over delivery sleds or handcarts and making off with their loads.7 ‘In Bread Shop no. 318’, states a typical report of early January,
the crowd burst in, incited by a person unknown, and dragged away 100kg of bread. We managed to arrest a few people. At Bread Shop no. 399 about 50kg of bread were looted by the crowd, but not one looter was arrested. A group fell upon Bread Shop no. 318’s cart, which had been bringing in the new delivery. On the night of 7 January two people were discovered hiding under the shop counter. They were found to be carrying knives. The same day Shop no. 20 on Gas Prospect was robbed. Similar incidents took place in the Smolniy and other districts.8
In response, more police were posted outside shops and delivery vehicles were instructed to vary their routes and provided with guards.9
One of very few diarists who admit to benefiting from food theft is Yelena Kochina. Her oedema-swollen husband Dima started stealing in mid-December, using a sharpened walking stick to spear loaves in a lightless bread shop. On one occasion a fellow queuer saw him steal, followed him out of the shop and threatened to report him:
‘Give me half or I’ll turn you in’, she whispered, grabbing him by the sleeve . . . They went into a doorway, and Dima thrust the bread into the woman’s face with the words, ‘Here, stuff yourself!’ The woman grabbed the bread, sat down on the step, and began greedily to cram it into her mouth. For a short while Dima watched her in silence. Then he sat down beside her and began to eat his half. Thus they sat and ate, now and then cursing one another, until all the bread was gone.
A sackful of buckwheat, purloined from a factory food store in mid-January, enabled the Kochins to start regaining weight, which they hid from neighbours by deliberately not washing. Bread-shop staff, Yelena noted in self-justification, were no less dishonest, and ‘round as buns’: ‘In return for bread they have everything they want. Almost all of them, without any shame at all, wear gold jewellery and expensive furs. Some even work behind the counter in luxurious sable and sealskin coats.’10
Murder for food or ration cards also became frequent, with 1,216 such arrests in the first half of 1942.11 What Leningraders feared were attacks by strangers on a lonely street, but the cases detailed by the NKVD are of people killing family members, colleagues and neighbours. Again, both perpetrators and victims were often disadvantaged adolescents. A typical, pathetic, example is that of an eighteen-year-old who killed his two younger brothers with an axe, and was arrested while trying to kill his mother. Questioned, he explained that he had lost his job, and with it his worker’s ration card, when caught in a petty theft, and that he wanted to use his brothers’ coupons. Another two teenage boys, aged eighteen and fifteen, attacked and severely wounded their neighbours, a mother and her six-year-old daughter, and were arrested while trying to exchange their cards for bread. Yet another boy, a sixteen-year-old machinist, was murdered in his hostel by a workmate after he boasted of having managed to exchange several days’ worth of coupons for food.12
More crime must have gone unrecorded, since in the depths of the winter the police themselves partially ceased to function. On 10 February the head of the Leningrad NKVD, P. N. Kubatkin, asked his superiors in Moscow for a thousand new men to guard the city’s factories, since of the 2,800 men of his existing brigade, 152 had died of ‘exhaustion’, 1,080 were in hospital and at least a hundred reported in sick each day.13 The Pavlovsk curator Anna Zelenova, one of whose jobs was to take privately owned antiques into official safekeeping, once emerged from a (reportedly grateful) collector’s flat to find the policeman who had accompanied her dead on a chair on the landing.14 Other anecdotal evidence is of widespread corruption and summary justice. ‘If they discovered that bread had been stolen’, a post-war émigré recalled, ‘they would round up five people and shoot them for it, whether they had been involved or not.’15
But overall, the impression given by survivors of the first siege winter is less of fear of muggers and murderers, more of silence, emptiness and isolation. Eleven-year-old Anzhelina Kupaigorodskaya lived through it alone in her family’s flat on the Fontanka, her chemical engineer parents having been forced to move into their workplaces. Seven decades later, she credits her survival to a list of rules written down for her on a piece of paper by her father: she was to wash and empty her slop bucket daily, never to collect more than one day’s ration at a time, and regularly to visit the post office in case relative
s had wired money. Going outdoors, she remembers, was frightening, but not because she feared crime – indeed, she only learned that there was any long after the war, by reading about it. At the time she felt ‘alone in the city, absolutely alone. I would walk to the shop and back, enter our courtyard, climb the stairs and go in my door. If anybody had wanted to they could have pushed me over with their little finger. But I never met a soul.’16 Kochina, waiting for her husband to return from his bread-thieving expeditions, used to go out on to the landing to listen for his arrival: ‘From below silence rose like steam, condensing on the staircase. I spat into the stairwell and listened to how the spittle smacked resoundingly below. I stood in the darkness for a long time, spitting and listening.’17
Most notorious of the crimes that flourished during the siege – and most symptomatic of Leningraders’ desperation – was cannibalism. The poet Olga Berggolts first heard of it from a psychiatrist friend:
Not long ago Prendel told us that corpse-eating is on the rise. In May [1942] his hospital dealt with fifteen cases, compared with eleven in April. He had to – and still has to – give expert advice on whether cannibals are responsible for their actions. Cannibalism – a fact. He told us about a cannibal couple who first ate the small corpse of their child, then entrapped three more children – killed them and ate them . . . For some reason I found what he was saying funny – genuinely funny, especially when he tried to exonerate them. I said, ‘But you didn’t eat your grandmother!’ And after that I just couldn’t take his cannibal stories seriously. It’s all so disgusting – cannibals, roofs with holes in them, blown-out windows, pointlessly destroyed cities. Oh yes, the heroism and romance of war!18