I found what I thought was a piece of sugar, and put it in my mouth. I sucked it all the while we were walking home. It didn’t dissolve but it tasted sweet. When we got home I spat it out into my hand, and it was just an ordinary stone. . Mama scolded us of course, but not wanting to hurt my feelings, pretended there was some sugar there. She mixed it with water and it was as though we drank sweet tea.8
Denying oneself food so as to give it to others — as hundreds of thousands of Leningraders managed to do — became an act of supreme self-control and shining charity.
In January Yelena Kochina and her husband moved in with friends. Revisiting her own flat on 1 February, Kochina found the door open and the furniture in pieces. ‘“Why are you chopping up our furniture?” I asked the woman next door. “We’re cold,” she answered laconically. What could I say to that? She has two children. They really are cold.’ Returning four days later she found a corpse on her bed, ‘so flat that the bedspread was slightly raised only by its head and feet. After chopping the leg off a chair I left, without inquiring whose body it was.’ Two days later it had been joined by two more. ‘Evidently the neighbours have set up a morgue in my room. Let them — dead bodies don’t bother me.’9
The point at which Leningraders most often broke out of their ‘caves’ and realised the scale of the tragedy overwhelming their city was when they had to arrange the burial of a relative. When his crabby, wood-chopping father died in March, Dmitri Likhachev washed him with toilet water, covered his eyes with eighteenth-century rouble coins, sewed him into a sheet and tied him to a wide double sled, fashioned from two smaller ones joined by a piece of plywood. First he and his wife dragged the corpse to the Vladimir Cathedral, where a priest said the burial service and sprinkled it with earth, adding a second handful on behalf of a woman whose son had gone missing at the front. Next they took it to a newly opened ‘mortuary’ in the grounds of a concert hall, where thousands of bodies lay piled in the open. When a lorry arrived to remove bodies for burial, Likhachev tried to persuade the driver to include his father in his first load. Otherwise, he feared, his shroud would be torn open and his gold teeth pulled. The driver refused.10
Olga Grechina’s mother died at home on 24 January. Determined to give her the best possible funeral, Olga and her younger brother Vovka bought a coffin, for bread and two hundred roubles, from their building’s yardman. Though it was slightly too short for lack of wood, they did their best to make it presentable, lining it with a sheet and edging it with lace unpicked from one of their mother’s shawls. Olga was even able to buy a bunch of decorative maidenhair fern, from an otherwise empty florist on the Nevsky. ‘The coffin looked good’, she remembered:
I was pleased with my work, never thinking about what it was for. . It was just very strange seeing this white figure under the sheet. Why, who is this? I took a look and it wasn’t Mama, it was Death herself — a skull covered in skin, bones, hands that looked like chicken’s claws. (I couldn’t gut a chicken again for twenty-five years, I was so haunted by this memory.) Since it isn’t her, I need to get rid of it as quickly as possible, then things will be all right again. With a sort of happy energy I began to organise. I arranged a grave, called our relatives. .
The gathering was spoiled by her uncle Serezha, who arrived oddly dressed and whined like a child, endlessly repeating that he wanted soup (he died a few weeks later). With the help of the yardman’s son, they dragged the coffin on a sled from Mayakovsky Street to Suvorovsky Prospekt, past the Smolniy and over the Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge to the Bolsheokhtinskoye cemetery. As they approached the cemetery gates, they more and more often passed ‘mummies’, wrapped in bedlinen or old curtains, left at the side of the road. One coffin had been improvised out of a sofa, and decorated with a wreath made from curly ink-dyed woodshavings; a child lay in the case of an old-fashioned clock. Olga’s mother got a ‘real grave, dug to order but not very deep’, and a cross made from planks, her name and dates inscribed in indelible crayon.11
Survivors of the siege have an irresistible urge to find a pattern to the deaths, a rationale behind who lived and who died. In one version the best — the ‘noble, restrained, scrupulous’ true Petersburgers — died first, elbowed aside in a Darwinian free-for-all. In the other (commoner) analysis restraint and scrupulosity were lifesavers: to survive it was vital to stay active, and to maintain certain standards — to wash one’s hair, shave, sweep the room, lay the table for ‘meals’, brush one’s teeth with charcoal, not eat the cat, not lick one’s plate and not let the slop bucket overflow or throw faeces out of the window. As one
These disciplines also applied to children. Yelena Kochina and her husband moved in with a colleague’s extremely well-regulated family at the end of January, in (immediately disappointed) hope of a warmer room. His children, ‘pale as potato shoots’, spent the days sitting motionless side by side,
as saturated with obedience as a sponge with water. N.A.’s wife Galya and her nanny work as if they were wind-up clocks. N.A. sets them going every morning, giving them their assignments for the day. . He listens keenly to the work of his domestic machine, strengthening or weakening the load, increasing or decreasing the ration at just the right moment. He keeps the bread in his desk, weighing it out three times a day and handing to each their corresponding portion.13
Likhachev and his wife made their four-year-old daughters memorise poetry. They learned by heart excerpts from
Crowded into a communal apartment on the Petrograd Side, Dmitri Lazarev’s extended family was equally mutually supportive. Though two members of the household — a family friend and his father-in-law — died over the winter, the flat became (like Marina Yerukhmanova’s room in the Yevropa) an ‘ark’. He and his wife distracted the children — a six-year-old daughter and nine-year-old niece — by reading aloud pre-revolutionary detective stories and by playing charades. The one their daughter remembered was the word
But the diaries and memoirs, almost by definition, come from the families that managed to hold on, and hold together. Very many did not, and the descriptions of those who gave up the fight — the unanswered door; darkness, stink and cold; still figures under heaped blankets; muttered ravings — are numerous and near- identical. With a mixture of disgust and pity Mariya Mashkova recorded the disintegration of neighbouring families in number 18 Sadovaya Street — most, like her, employees of the Public Library. One neighbour, until recently head of a ‘strong, alert, energetic’ household, having seen her husband leave for the army, her parents fall to quarrelling and stealing as they died, and her daughter taken away to a children’s home, ceased to care about anything except food: ‘[Her] overwhelming craving is to eat, to eat without end, savour and enjoy. . Her husband’s visits home frighten her — he might take her portion of bread. I recognise this state of mind — it’s in me, in Olga, in everybody.’16 Another turned on her ten-year-old son after he lost his ration card:
What never ceases to amaze me is the metamorphosis that has taken place in this loving mother, who we always used to tease for fussing so much about her Igoryok. . Now she has turned into a wolf, stripped of humanity by hunger. Her only care is to snatch a piece of food from Igor, and her only fear that he will take a crumb of bread from her, or steal a spoonful of soup made from her grain. When I went to talk to her about
