simple mugging. Yelena Kochina, returning home from a bread shop in mid-December 1941, saw a teenage boy dressed in the uniform of one of the city’s trade schools running towards her. She stood aside but he grabbed her bread and ran on, leaving her staring in horror at her empty hands. Back at home, a neighbour scolded her for not hiding the bread under her coat. Four days later Yelena’s husband got in a fight with another trade-school boy over a spilled crust:
Today [Dima] ran into some sleds loaded with bread. An armed guard of five men accompanied them, and a crowd followed behind, staring spellbound at the loaves. Dima followed along with everyone else. Near the bread shop the sleds were unloaded, and the crowd fell on the empty boxes, picking out the crumbs. Dima found a large crust trampled in the snow. But a boy tore the crust out of his hands. He chewed it, this horrendous brat, smacking his lips and drooling saliva. Dima went mad. He grabbed the boy by his collar and began to shake him, not realizing what he was doing. The boy’s head wobbled on his thin neck like a rag doll’s. But he kept on hurriedly chewing with his eyes closed. ‘It’s gone, it’s gone! Look!’ he shouted suddenly and opened his mouth wide.2
Cited as thieves in dozens of similar accounts,3 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 —
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.5
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.6 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.7 ‘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.8
In response, more police were posted outside shops and delivery vehicles were instructed to vary their routes and provided with guards.9
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.’10
Murder for food or ration cards also became frequent, with 1,216 such arrests in the first half of 1942.11 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.12
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.13 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.14 Other anecdotal evidence is of widespread corruption and summary justice. ‘If they discovered that bread had been stolen’, a post-war emigre recalled, ‘they would round up five people and shoot them for it, whether they had been involved or not.’15
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
