Leningrad

Leningraders also had to master village skills. They learned that birch wood burned well and aspen badly, that dried maple leaves could substitute for tobacco, and how to light the resulting cigarette, rolled in newspaper, by holding a lens up to the sunlight, or by striking metal against stone. Oddly, few tried to ice-fish, probably because they lacked the necessary lines and drills. One man, a theatre producer, likened it to being in a time machine. The blockade had hurled Leningrad back to the eighteenth century — but worse, because people no longer owned fur coats, there weren’t wells at every corner any more, and water had to be carried home in kettles instead of with buckets and yokes.9 In most apartment buildings the water supply failed by degrees, starting with the top floor. When the last tap dried residents resorted first to neighbouring buildings, then to broken pipes and ice holes, cut by the fire brigade, on the frozen canals and river. Over time, spillages turned into icy hillocks, up which one had to push oneself and one’s receptacle on hands and knees. Dmitri Likhachev was able to collect water from a fire hydrant, dragging it home on a sled in a zinc baby’s bath. Less sloshed out on the way, he discovered, if he floated a few sticks in it first. His elderly father (‘the most inconsistent and short-tempered man I ever knew’) turned out to be unexpectedly good at chopping wood, being a veteran, like the burzhuiki, of the Civil War. Zoologists, Likhachev remarks, survived the siege, because they knew how to catch rats and pigeons. Impractical mathematicians died.

As the official ration dwindled and private stocks ran out, Leningraders also sought out their own, increasingly desperate, substitute foods. The commonest of these were zhmykh and duranda — the husks of linseed, cotton, hemp or sunflower seeds, pressed into blocks and normally fed to cattle. Grated and fried in oil, they could be turned into ‘pancakes’, the elaborate preparation of which helped give the comforting impression of a real meal. Also near-universally eaten was joiner’s glue, made from the bones and hooves of slaughtered animals. Likhachev found eight sheets of it at Pushkin House, which his wife soaked in several changes of water then boiled with bay leaves to make a foul-smelling jelly, which they forced down with the help of vinegar and mustard. They also cooked up the semolina used to clean their daughters’ white sheepskin jackets: ‘It was full of strands of wool and grey with dirt, but we were all glad of it.’ An art teacher searched the flats of evacuated friends: ‘I rummaged in all the cupboards and took rusks of any kind — green, mouldy, anything. . Altogether I collected a small bagful. I was extremely pleased to have got quite a good amount. Later one of my students brought me oilcake — three blocks this size. That was something tremendous — three blocks of oilcake!’10 He also ate linseed oil and fish glue, used for mixing paints and priming canvases.

Substitutes were often dangerous. Even if not poisonous in themselves, they could cause diarrhoea and vomiting, or damage thinned stomach linings. Anything, though, was better than nothing. Glycerine contained calories, Leningraders discovered, as did tooth powder, cough medicine and cold cream. Factory workers ate industrial casein (an ingredient in paint), dextrine (used to bind sand in foundry moulds), tank grease and machine oil. At the Physiological Institute Pavlov’s slavering dogs were eaten; at another, scientists shared out their stocks of ‘Liebig extract’ — a dried meat broth made from the embryos of calves and used as a medium for growing bacteria. One father brought home the maggoty knee of a reindeer, an air-raid casualty at the zoo.11

Eaten also were the vast majority of household pets. ‘All day long’, a wife wrote to her husband at the front, ‘we’re busy trying to find something to eat. With Papa we’ve eaten two cats. They’re so hard to find and catch that we’re all looking out for a dog, but there are none to be seen.’12 One family, to save themselves embarrassment in front of neighbours, referred to cat meat by the French chat. Others swapped pets so as not to have to eat their own animal, or bartered them for other necessities. A teacher brought a handwritten advertisement, which she had found pasted up in the street, into her staff room. Reading ‘I will trade 4.5 metres of flannel and a primus for a cat’, it sparked a ‘long argument — Is it moral to eat cats or not?’13 Such squeamishness soon faded. ‘Not all parents’, a siege survivor remembered of her astronomer father’s colleagues at the Pulkovo observatory,

love their children as much as Messer and his wife loved their big pointer Graalya. Tender tears used to well in Yelizaveta Alekseyevna’s eyes as she watched the dog frisking on the grass. During the hunting season, Messer would take his darling prize-winner out every Sunday, setting off proudly and ceremoniously, with proper Germanic formality.

In January 1942 they ate her. Messer cut her throat while Yelizaveta Alekseyevna held her down. The dog was strong; they couldn’t manage it on their own, so asked Pimenova for help, promising a piece of meat in return. But at the end of the whole operation all they gave her was the intestines.14

This was the period, also, when private stocks of food or tradeables started to mean the difference between life and death. One family unearthed a suitcase full of ‘fossilised’ rusks, laid in twenty years earlier during the Civil War. Another, a ten-year-old diarist recorded, came upon a box of candles, which they were able to sell for 625 roubles — they had cost only eight kopeks apiece when his father bought them back in 1923. The classicist Olga Fridenberg kept herself and her mother going on a package of tinned food that they had earlier prepared for her brother prior to his departure for the Gulag. Another woman traded her dead husband’s clothes, bought on a pre-war visit to America. The trip had cost him his life — he had been shot as a capitalist sympathiser during the Terror — but the good-quality suits and jackets helped to save his family.

When there was no food to be had, fantasies took its place. Igor Kruglyakov, eight years old at the time of the siege, remembers going through the family box of Christmas decorations with his sister, looking for walnuts: ‘Their insides were dry and shrivelled, but we ate them, they felt like food. We picked all the crumbs out of the cracks in our big, dirty kitchen table — again, they seemed like food. I can’t say that it cheered us up, it was just a way to pass the time.’ At the end of November his grandfather died of ‘hunger diarrhoea’ — possibly, Kruglyakov’s mother agonised, because she had in desperation given him diluted potassium permanganate — the bright purple, all-purpose disinfectant known as margantsovka — to drink. The children, who not long before had been running round the streets collecting shrapnel, now stayed huddled in bed, leafing through a nineteenth-century book of birds and Madame Molokhovyets’s Gift to Young Housewives, with its recipes for aspics, mousses, Madeira cake and suckling pig. ‘For the first time in my life I read the words “Rum Baba”. It had pictures too — quite simple ones, but they gave us pleasure.’15 One of the most devastating documents on display in Petersburg’s Museum of the Defence of Leningrad is an imaginary menu penned by a hungry sixteen-year-old, Valya Chepko. ‘Menu’, he neatly writes, ‘for after starvation, if I’m still alive. First course: soup — potato and mushroom, or pickled cabbage and meat. Second course: kasha — oatmeal with butter, millet, pearl barley, buckwheat, rice or semolina. Meat course: meatballs with mashed potatoes; sausages with mashed potatoes or kasha. But there’s no point in dreaming about this, because we won’t live to see it!’ He didn’t, dying in February.

Sadder, perhaps, even than physical breakdown, was the way in which hunger destroyed personalities and relationships. Increasingly preoccupied with food, individuals gradually lost interest in the world around them, and at the extremity, with anything except finding something to eat. ‘Before the war’, wrote Yelena Kochina as early as 3 October, ‘people adorned themselves with bravery, fidelity to principles, honesty — whatever they liked. The hurricane of war has torn off those rags: now everyone has become what he was in fact, and not what he wanted to seem.’

Her diary — written in the margins of old newspapers, on scraps of wallpaper and on the backs of printed forms — charts, with searing honesty, the gradual breakdown of her marriage. Immediately pre-war her mood is joyous, delighting in her new baby and doting husband. ‘Dima is on holiday’, she writes on 16 June, while watching him change a nappy. ‘All day he’s busy with our daughter: bathing her, dressing her, feeding her. His well-kept, sensitive designer’s hands manage all this with amazing skill. His hair blazes in the sun, lighting up his happy face.’ Six days later the young family was hit, like millions of others, with the announcement of invasion: ‘I carried Lena out into the garden with her coloured rattles. The sun already ruled the sky. A cry, the sound of broken dishes. The woman who owns our dacha ran past the house. “Yelena Iosifovna! War with the Germans! They just announced it on the radio!”’ Two weeks into the war the couple had their first serious quarrel, over whether or not Yelena should leave for Saratov with her institute. Yelena decided not to evacuate, and the closure of the siege ring trapped the whole family in Leningrad. Through September, Dima had hardly any sleep, firewatching with the local civil defence team at night and digging potatoes in an abandoned vegetable patch after work. Every morning, Yelena walked along the Neva embankment to the paediatric hospital which distributed the infant ration of soya milk: