Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (39 page)

Cited as thieves in dozens of similar accounts,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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‘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.
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In response, more police were posted outside shops and delivery vehicles were instructed to vary their routes and provided with guards.
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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.’
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Murder for food or ration cards also became frequent, with 1,216 such arrests in the first half of 1942.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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 relatives 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.’
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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.’
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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!
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Until the publication of police records in 2004, evidence as to the use of human meat for food during the siege was anecdotal: the rumours, believed by Leningraders at the time, of children kidnapped on the street, and diary reports of corpses stripped of thighs and buttocks as well as clothing. A lurid description of a young couple lured into an apartment-turned-slaughterhouse, related as fact by Harrison Salisbury in his
The 900 Days
, on closer inspection turns out to have been drawn from a novel published, presumably under the auspices of Nazi propagandists, in occupied Ukraine.
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For most people at the time, cannibalism was similarly a matter of second-hand horror stories rather than direct experience. ‘On Pokrovskaya Square’, wrote the geography teacher Aleksei Vinokurov, ‘I ran into a crowd of people silently staring at the clumsily butchered corpse of a plump young woman. Who did this and why? Is this proof of the persistent rumours of cannibalism?’
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When a ‘rather healthy’ acquaintance of Dmitri Likhachev’s failed to return home after setting off to a strange address in search of a barter deal, he wondered if she had been murdered by the sinister traders who offered anonymous mince ‘cutlets’ for sale in the Haymarket.
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Visiting her factory to collect her pay, Olga Grechina noticed that metal shavings had piled up around the lathes, and asked what had happened to an old cleaning lady, affectionately known as Auntie Nastya. Told that Nastya had been executed, she at first thought it must be a joke: ‘But no, it’s true! She ate her daughter – hid her under the bed and cut bits off her. The police shot her. These days you don’t go before a court.’
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The city leadership was kept fully informed by the NKVD, which detailed its first nine cases of ‘the use of human meat as food’ in its situation report of 13 December 1941. A mother had smothered her eighteen-month-old daughter in order to feed herself and three older children; a twenty-six-year-old man, laid off from his tyre factory, had murdered and eaten his eighteen-year-old room-mate; a metalworker (a member of the Party) and his son had killed two woman refugees with a hammer and hidden their body parts in a shed; an unemployed plumber had killed his wife in order to feed their teenage son and nieces, hiding her remains in the toilets of the Lenenergo workers’ hostel.
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Ten days later thirteen more cases were reported: an unemployed eighteen-year-old had murdered his grandmother with an axe, boiling and eating her liver and lungs; a seventeen-year-old had stolen an unburied corpse from a cemetery and put the flesh through a table-top mincer; a cleaner had killed her one-year-old daughter and fed her to her two-year-old.
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Also among the first to resort to eating human meat were the criminally neglected pupils of the
remeslennye uchilishchya
. At Trade School no. 39 on Mokhovaya Street,

the pupils were left to themselves. They had no supervision, and no ration cards were provided for them for December. Through December they ate the meat of slaughtered cats and dogs. On 24 December pupil Kh. died of malnutrition, and his corpse was partially used by the other pupils for food. On 27 December a second pupil, V., died, and his corpse was also used for food. Eleven people have been arrested for cannibalism, all of whom have admitted guilt. School director Leimer and commandant Plaksina, guilty of abandoning this group of pupils without provisions or supervision, have been subjected to criminal prosecution.
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