Leningrad

alongside his wife, drew sketches of a fiery angel, of Christ — his skull-shaped head resembling those of the starving — and of the Virgin spreading her protective veil over the well-like courtyard of a blacked-out apartment block.38 Old Believers and Seventh Day Adventists continued, as they had done since 1938, to hold services in secret, in their homes. The mother of one such family (whose husband, a priest, was already in prison) made her six children kneel for long hours on the floor, praying. When they became emaciated she let them kneel on pillows (two out of the six died).39 Muslims and Buddhists also had to worship in secret, despite the fact that thousands were serving on the Leningrad front, and that the city possessed both a mosque and a magnificent Buddhist temple, built during the reign of Nicholas II and the tethering point of the barrage balloon that served as its wartime radio mast.

In sum, religious faith remained a private, risky source of consolation during the siege. Stalin’s relaxation of the rules was opportunistic and temporary, and Leningraders knew it. A ten-year-old girl, taken into one of ninety-eight new orphanages that opened between January and March 1942, woke one night to see her class teacher kneeling, head bowed, at the dormitory window. The teacher whispered that she was praying for her son, who had gone missing at the front — and begged the girl not to tell anybody what she had seen.40

*The system was admired by Hitler, who planned to install a loudspeaker in every Ukrainian village. They would not broadcast news, but ‘cheerful music’, giving Ukrainians ‘plenty of opportunities to dance’.

13. Svyazi

A not quite translatable word meant a great deal in the Soviet Union: svyazi, or ‘connections’ — the combination of string-pulling, exchange of favours and bribery by means of which citizens were able to work their way round the state’s monopoly on goods and employment to get themselves everything from jobs, telephones and university places to a bucket of potatoes or a new pair of shoes. In peacetime, astute use of svyazi improved one’s standard of living; during the siege it meant the difference between life and death.

If the typical Leningrader’s first line of defence against starvation was immediate family, the second was his or her network of friends. Especially among the city’s close-knit intelligentsia families, friendships — based on several generations of connection by marriage, education and profession, plus shared experience of fear and impoverishment — could be both extensive and remarkably strong. Not unusual was the experience of widowed, childless Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, who was given small but heartening presents of food by old colleagues from her late husband’s chemical research institute. ‘My friend Petr Yevgenevich visited today’, she wrote on New Year’s Day 1942. ‘He brought a handful of oatmeal for kisel [a thickened fruit drink], and Ivan Yemelyanovich brought three sprats.’ The pair reappeared a few weeks later, this time with 200 grams of bread, dried onion, mustard powder, ‘a tiny piece of meat, four dried white mushrooms, and four frozen potatoes (the first we’ve seen since the autumn). This is priceless treasure, and I was extremely grateful, especially since for the past week all we’ve had to eat is seaweed. . A celebration!’1 Similarly loyal were the retired railway clerk Ivan Zhilinsky and his wife Olga, who looked after an old friend whose family had departed into evacuation. They invited him to share wine and duranda at New Year — painstakingly cleaning their room and clothes beforehand, and giving him a wash and shave on arrival — took him in when his flat was made uninhabitable by shelling, and finally traded bread so as to give him a proper grave. If Olga had not also died of starvation, and Ivan been arrested by the NKVD, they would have adopted his children. Smaller acts of kindness could make all the difference, too: one siege survivor remembers the teenage girl next door bringing firewood filched from her job at a lumberyard — ‘Not a lot of it, but for us it was everything.’2 On a different level, Olga Grechina — aged nineteen and living completely alone — found human comfort in brief, heartfelt conversations with strangers on the street, who in January and February tended to walk together in pairs for fear of mugging:

It was interesting to observe people’s contradictory impulses: on the one hand you fear that your most valuable possession, your ration card, might be stolen; on the other you want, even just for the short walk home, to be with someone who will listen. Never since have I experienced such an odd, uncontrollable desire to tell a complete stranger everything about myself. .

Saying goodbye, each would thank the other for their company and wish that they might live to see victory. There was a new etiquette in this farewell, for the form of words was almost always exactly the same, whether spoken by a simple person or an educated one. The simple women, having heard my unhappy story, would commiserate with me and comfort me, saying that I was young and that everything would come again — home, education, friends. In these naive but sincere good wishes I found the vitamin I needed to live. And that was why I, like everyone else, in reply to my companion’s story would tell my own.3

Leningraders’ second and most important ring of svyazi derived from their workplaces. Having a job not only meant getting a worker’s ration card, but with luck, access to off-ration meals, to firewood, to food parcels from affiliated organisations in the unoccupied Soviet Union, and to a bed in one of the hundred-odd recuperation clinics, or statsionary, opened from December onwards on the orders of the city soviet. (Though many statsionary were little better than dumping grounds for the dying, others saved lives simply by providing patients with food without making them queue.) Not all workplaces were equal. Among factories the best supplied were the large, prestigious defence plants, though their staff’s chances of survival were pulled down to the civilian average by the physical demands of their work, by targeted bombardment and by the fact that even after call-up most defence workers were quicker-to-starve men. At the Stalin Metal Works the fatality rate was around 35 per cent, and in the Kirov Works, situated in the vulnerable southern suburbs, somewhere between 25 and 34 per cent.

During the production push of the autumn going absent without leave had meant criminal punishment and loss of the worker’s ration, but in the midst of mass death the rules ceased to be enforced. Employees who failed to appear at work were automatically listed as sick and kept their cards, so that in January 1942 837,000 Leningraders were still registered as workers despite the fact that 270 factories had been officially closed and most of the rest hardly functioned.4 Among the many Leningraders with a purely notional job was Yelena Skryabina. ‘Friends’, she wrote on 15 January 1942, ‘have found me a position in a sewing workshop. This puts me on first category rations. The workshop does very little — there’s no light or fuel — but they hand out the ration just the same. Thus I get a little more bread, and at the moment every crumb is vital.’5

One of the most sought-after intelligentsia ‘survival enclaves’ — as one historian calls siege-winter workplaces — was the Radio House, whose director organised fair distribution of food that he regularly smuggled back to the office from the Smolniy’s fabled Canteen no. 12. Though the amounts involved were small — a few lumps of sugar, a couple of meat patties, a bowl of kasha — the ‘tremendous moral effect it had on us’, as Olga Berggolts’s lover Yuri Makogonenko recalled, ‘is difficult even to describe’.6 Radio House staff also received at least two special deliveries of food from Moscow, the first arranged by Berggolts’s indomitable sister Mariya, who personally escorted a lorry-full of supplies over the Ladoga ice at the end of February. ‘She took a roundabout route’, Berggolts wrote admiringly, ‘alone with the driver, in trousers and a short fur coat, armed with some sort of pistol. . She slept in the lorry, chatted up the commandants, passed through villages just liberated from the Germans, collecting letters and packages for Leningraders along the way. . I am proud of her, amazed by her — my wonderful quarrelsome Muska!’7

A second delivery was organised by Berggolts herself, who collected food and medicines for air transport to Leningrad while in Moscow giving readings of her February Diary. She would have been able to send more if it had not been for the Leningrad authorities, who mistrusted non-Party initiatives, did not want their own failings shown up and possibly feared public anger if some institutions were noticeably better supplied than others. ‘Zhdanov’, Berggolts wrote furiously on 25 March, ‘has just sent a telegram forbidding the despatch of individual packages to Leningrad organisations. This apparently has “bad political consequences”. Thanks to this idiotic telegram we can hardly send anything to the Radio Committee.’ Pleading was useless: