historiographers call ‘saviour stories’ — the accounts, related by numerous survivors, of kind strangers turning up at the eleventh hour with life-saving gifts of food. Though part of siege mythology — one historian even likens them to the Great War’s Angel of Mons21 — many of these stories are undoubtedly true. Igor Kruglyakov remembers that ‘just before or just after New Year we had a knock on the door from a young, rosy-cheeked pilot. He brought two boxes, from Father. One contained butter and flour, the second was full of
Trips to the front itself were also highly prized, since they often involved being treated to what felt like lavish meals. An actress entertaining troops in mid-December wonderingly recorded the menu of a ‘banquet’ to celebrate the ‘140 Heroes of the Patriotic War’ — 100 grams of alcohol per person, two glasses of beer, 300 grams of bread and one white roll, fifty grams of salted pork fat, two meat patties with buckwheat and gravy, a glass of cocoa with milk, sunflower seeds, a pack of Belomor cigarettes and a box of matches. She was also able to take 400 grams of boiled sweets back home.23 Vera Inber joined a delegation that visited the Volkhov front in February 1942, bearing shaving kits, guitars and five automatic rifles inscribed with the words ‘For the best exterminators of the German occupiers’. At breakfast she was thrilled to be served porridge, bread and a large chunk of butter. ‘What a marvellous thing! Next time I shall without fail bring a spoon.’ About a hundred workers’ delegations made similar trips in November and December.24 Other civilians managed to attach themselves to the warships moored around the city. Jobs aboard a submarine and a minelayer saved the engineers Chekrizov and Lazarev, and numerous writers and academics — like Boldyrev — earned themselves vital meals by giving readings or lectures to sailors. Visits home by front-line soldiers, in contrast, were forbidden, and doubly dangerous since a man walking alone through the streets in the small hours with a knapsack on his back made a tempting target for mugging or murder.
One of the surest survival techniques was to get employment in food processing or distribution. Leningraders with these sorts of jobs, unsurprisingly, seldom died of starvation. All 713 employees of the Krupskaya sweet factory survived; so did all those at the no. 4 bakery and at a margarine manufacturer. At the Baltika bakery, only twenty-seven out of what grew from 276 to 334 workers died, all the victims being men.25 Canteen waitresses and bread-shop salesgirls were notoriously ‘fat’, as were orphanage staff — a friend of Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s, spotting ‘Rubenesque’ young women in a newly reopened public bathhouse in the spring, automatically assumed that they worked in bakeries, soup kitchens or children’s homes.26 Menstruation having ceased for most during the winter, women who gave birth in 1942 were also assumed to have worked in a food plant or dining hall. (The only two pregnant women Chekrizov saw during the whole of the siege were both waitresses in his shipyard’s cafeteria.)
A measure of such women’s buying power was the fact that on the black market the most saleable items were not those of practical value, but fashionable women’s clothes. Skryabina traded dress fabric and a chiffon blouse for bread and rice with her former maid, now the squirrel-jacketed mistress of a warehouse manager.27 Boldyrev bribed the ‘tsaritsa of the kitchen’ at the Scholars’ Building with a lace handkerchief and yellow silk pompoms. Likhachev’s wife sold two dresses at the Sitny market for a kilo of bread and 1,200 grams of cattle cake.28 Despite a crackdown in the summer of 1942, theft and corruption continued to thrive within the food distribution system throughout the siege. As one Leningrader complained in a private letter (intercepted by the NKVD) in September of that year: ‘There are people who don’t know what hunger is, who’ve been positively spoiled. Look at the salesgirl in any shop, and you’ll see a gold watch on one wrist and a bracelet on the other.’ This was only one, the security men gloomily reported, of 10,820 similar complaints picked up in just ten days.29 Whistle-blowing was pointless: when Lazarev’s wife complained that the children in the paediatric hospital where she worked were getting less than half their allotted milk, she found herself despatched out of town to spend twelve hours a day digging the hospital’s vegetable plot.30
Likeliest to survive — and most resented — of all were the apparatchiks at Party headquarters. ‘I saw bread being delivered to the Smolniy myself’, an informer heard a woman hiss to her neighbour in a queue in late January. ‘They’re not hungry there. If they had to do without bread for a couple of days maybe they’d sit up and take notice, pay a bit more attention to us.’ ‘They’re stuffing their faces’, said another. ‘We starve, and watch their fat mugs being driven about in automobiles. It’s not fair.’31
Rank-and-file Party members — mostly ordinary workers — were not very much better off than ordinary citizens. Seventeen thousand Party members — 15 per cent of the total — are estimated to have starved to death in the first half of 1942. Though this was half or less of the overall civilian mortality rate of 30–40 per cent, the comparison is not direct, since the membership’s demographic — mostly men, relatively few old people, no children — differed from that of the general population.32 Food supply was unquestionably better, however, for the bureaucrats employed at Party headquarters. It is often said that Zhdanov ate ordinary workers’ rations during the siege, but given the meals on offer in the Smolniy this seems highly improbable. Visitors came away with tantalising hints of abundant food — to Likhachev, attending a meeting about a book commission, it ‘smelled like a dining room’, and a Red Army supply officer remembered delivering smoked ham, sturgeon and caviar, left over from a shipment
The best (and unique) first-person account of what Leningrad’s elite actually ate comes from Nikolai Ribkovsky, an official in the Profsoyuz, the Party-sponsored trades union. Aged thirty-eight at the start of the war, Ribkovsky came from a peasant family, was a fervent Stalinist and a member of the generation of functionaries who did well out of the Terror, stepping swiftly into the shoes of their purged seniors. Prior to landing a job in the Smolniy in early December 1941, he lived like any Leningrader, worrying about his wife and son in evacuation (‘I’ve saved a few bars of chocolate to send to Serezhenka’), queuing for the ordinary rations and becoming ordinarily emaciated: ‘Is this my body or did it get swapped for somebody else’s without me noticing? My legs and wrists are like a growing child’s, my stomach has caved in, my ribs stick out from top to bottom.’ His Smolniy post, as an instructor in the ‘cadres department’ of the city soviet, was a passport to a different world. ‘For breakfast in the mornings’, he wrote on his fourth day into the job,
macaroni or spaghetti, or
Though many Smolniy staff were coming down with diarrhoea, the building was warm, clean and light, and its sewerage and running water worked normally. Other Leningraders, he noted, ‘go to the bathroom right in their flats, and then empty it just anywhere, and don’t wash their hands before eating. . Meeting such people — and you meet them quite often — is unpleasant.’
In March 1942 Ribkovsky was sent to the city soviet’s ‘Rest House’ — effectively a hotel — in a dacha village to the north of the city:
The surroundings are lovely. Little two-storey dachas with covered porches, surrounded by soaring pines, reaching right up to the sky. . After a walk in the cold, tired and a little hazy in the head from the forest smells, you come home to a warm, cosy room, sink into a soft armchair and gratefully stretch out your legs.
The food here is like in a good peacetime Rest House: varied, delicious, high-quality. Every day there’s meat — lamb, ham, chicken, goose, turkey and sausage. For fish — bream, Baltic herring and smelt — fried, poached or in aspic. Caviar, smoked sturgeon, cheese,
