Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (23 page)

Most visibly, the authorities failed to redistribute food stores so as to minimise the risk of loss in air raids. The result was the spectacular Badayev warehouse fire of 8 September, which Leningraders at the time believed to have destroyed almost the whole of the city’s food stocks – the air is described as filled with the smell of burning ham and sugar – and still remember as the trigger for their accelerating slide into starvation. (‘It was when life ended’, as Marina Yerukhmanova put it, ‘and existence began.’) Pavlov hotly disputes, in what is otherwise a rather impersonal account, the fire’s importance, claiming that the warehouses held boxes of old paperwork and spare parts, and that the only foods destroyed were 3,000 tonnes of flour and 2,500 tonnes of lump sugar, most of which was reprocessed into sweets. In terms of public morale, however, the Badayev fire was unquestionably a catastrophe. ‘Soon after’, Yerukhmanova remembered,

we were handed out eight kilograms of lentils, some canned crabmeat and a few other things. Everyone was unhappy that these handouts hadn’t been ordered in advance of the fire, rather than once it had already happened. To give such instructions in those days would probably have needed a lot of courage. But how was it that they didn’t have more foresight?
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Among the more successful of the Leningrad leadership’s initiatives in the autumn of 1941 were its efforts to gather food from inside the siege ring and to devise food substitutes. First came a drive, hampered by lack of transport, to bring in the harvest from the unoccupied countryside to the city’s east and north. For collective farmworkers (who did not qualify for rations) this meant a squeeze almost as severe as that which had caused the collectivisation famine of a decade earlier. A norm of what fell by November to fifteen kilograms of potatoes per person per month could be retained by the peasants themselves; the remainder had to be surrendered to requisitioning parties put together by local soviet executive committees. Peasants who hid their potatoes were ‘held responsible under wartime law’ – in other words, subjected to unspecified criminal punishment.
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Extra hands were also conscripted from the city – and carried home as much produce as they could. ‘On the main roads and on suburban trams’, a memorandum of 16 September complained, ‘hundreds of people can be observed with sacks and baskets . . . Failure to take urgent measures to stop this anarchy will mean that the whole harvest is squandered into private hands.’
10
The squeeze on the countryside continued, via a mixture of compulsory purchase, requisitioning and ‘donations’, throughout the first siege winter, producing a total 4,208 tonnes of potatoes and other vegetables, livestock representing 4,653 tonnes of meat, over 2,000 tonnes of hay, 547 tonnes of flour and grain and 179,000 eggs. Three-fifths of the flour and grain came from peasants’ private stores, as did over a quarter of the livestock and over half the potatoes.
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Within the city, institutions involved in food processing and distribution were ordered to search their premises for forgotten or defective stocks that could substitute for conventional flours in the production of bread. At the mills, flour dust was scraped from walls and from under floorboards; breweries came up with 8,000 tons of malt, and the army with oats previously destined for its horses. (The horses were instead fed with birch twigs soaked in hot water and sprinkled with salt. Another feed, involving compressed peat shavings and bonemeal, they rejected.) Grain barges sunk by bombing off Osinovets were salvaged by naval divers, and the rescued grain, which had begun to sprout, dried and milled. (The resulting bread, Pavlov admitted, reeked of mould.) At the docks, large quantities of cotton-seed cake, usually burned in ships’ furnaces, were discovered. Though poisonous in its raw state, its toxins were found to break down at high temperatures, and it too went into bread. Altogether these substitutions, together with successive ration reductions, reduced Leningrad’s consumption of flour from over 2,000 tonnes a day at the beginning of September to 880 tonnes a day by 1 November.

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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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 ‘death’.
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.’
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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’.
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