Leningrad

alone in her family’s flat on the Fontanka, her chemical engineer parents having been forced to move into their workplaces. Seven decades later, she credits her survival to a list of rules written down for her on a piece of paper by her father: she was to wash and empty her slop bucket daily, never to collect more than one day’s ration at a time, and regularly to visit the post office in case relatives had wired money. Going outdoors, she remembers, was frightening, but not because she feared crime — indeed, she only learned that there was any long after the war, by reading about it. At the time she felt ‘alone in the city, absolutely alone. I would walk to the shop and back, enter our courtyard, climb the stairs and go in my door. If anybody had wanted to they could have pushed me over with their little finger. But I never met a soul.’16 Kochina, waiting for her husband to return from his bread-thieving expeditions, used to go out on to the landing to listen for his arrival: ‘From below silence rose like steam, condensing on the staircase. I spat into the stairwell and listened to how the spittle smacked resoundingly below. I stood in the darkness for a long time, spitting and listening.’17

Most notorious of the crimes that flourished during the siege — and most symptomatic of Leningraders’ desperation — was cannibalism. The poet Olga Berggolts first heard of it from a psychiatrist friend:

Not long ago Prendel told us that corpse-eating is on the rise. In May [1942] his hospital dealt with fifteen cases, compared with eleven in April. He had to — and still has to — give expert advice on whether cannibals are responsible for their actions. Cannibalism — a fact. He told us about a cannibal couple who first ate the small corpse of their child, then entrapped three more children — killed them and ate them. . For some reason I found what he was saying funny — genuinely funny, especially when he tried to exonerate them. I said, ‘But you didn’t eat your grandmother!’ And after that I just couldn’t take his cannibal stories seriously. It’s all so disgusting — cannibals, roofs with holes in them, blown-out windows, pointlessly destroyed cities. Oh yes, the heroism and romance of war!18

Until the publication of police records in 2004, evidence as to the use of human meat for food during the siege was anecdotal: the rumours, believed by Leningraders at the time, of children kidnapped on the street, and diary reports of corpses stripped of thighs and buttocks as well as clothing. A lurid description of a young couple lured into an apartment-turned-slaughterhouse, related as fact by Harrison Salisbury in his The 900 Days, on closer inspection turns out to have been drawn from a novel published, presumably under the auspices of Nazi propagandists, in occupied Ukraine.19

For most people at the time, cannibalism was similarly a matter of second-hand horror stories rather than direct experience. ‘On Pokrovskaya Square’, wrote the geography teacher Aleksei Vinokurov, ‘I ran into a crowd of people silently staring at the clumsily butchered corpse of a plump young woman. Who did this and why? Is this proof of the persistent rumours of cannibalism?’20 When a ‘rather healthy’ acquaintance of Dmitri Likhachev’s failed to return home after setting off to a strange address in search of a barter deal, he wondered if she had been murdered by the sinister traders who offered anonymous mince ‘cutlets’ for sale in the Haymarket.21 Visiting her factory to collect her pay, Olga Grechina noticed that metal shavings had piled up around the lathes, and asked what had happened to an old cleaning lady, affectionately known as Auntie Nastya. Told that Nastya had been executed, she at first thought it must be a joke: ‘But no, it’s true! She ate her daughter — hid her under the bed and cut bits off her. The police shot her. These days you don’t go before a court.’22

The city leadership was kept fully informed by the NKVD, which detailed its first nine cases of ‘the use of human meat as food’ in its situation report of 13 December 1941. A mother had smothered her eighteen-month- old daughter in order to feed herself and three older children; a twenty-six-year-old man, laid off from his tyre factory, had murdered and eaten his eighteen-year-old room-mate; a metalworker (a member of the Party) and his son had killed two woman refugees with a hammer and hidden their body parts in a shed; an unemployed plumber had killed his wife in order to feed their teenage son and nieces, hiding her remains in the toilets of the Lenenergo workers’ hostel.23 Ten days later thirteen more cases were reported: an unemployed eighteen-year- old had murdered his grandmother with an axe, boiling and eating her liver and lungs; a seventeen-year-old had stolen an unburied corpse from a cemetery and put the flesh through a table-top mincer; a cleaner had killed her one-year-old daughter and fed her to her two-year-old.24 Also among the first to resort to eating human meat were the criminally neglected pupils of the remeslennye uchilishchya. At Trade School no. 39 on Mokhovaya Street,

the pupils were left to themselves. They had no supervision, and no ration cards were provided for them for December. Through December they ate the meat of slaughtered cats and dogs. On 24 December pupil Kh. died of malnutrition, and his corpse was partially used by the other pupils for food. On 27 December a second pupil, V., died, and his corpse was also used for food. Eleven people have been arrested for cannibalism, all of whom have admitted guilt. School director Leimer and commandant Plaksina, guilty of abandoning this group of pupils without provisions or supervision, have been subjected to criminal prosecution.25

Altogether, police only arrested twenty-six people for cannibalism in December, but the number shot up to 356 in January and 612 in February. It halved to 300 in March and April, then rose again slightly in May before falling off steeply through June and July.26 By December 1942, when the phenomenon finally tailed off, 2,015 ‘cannibals’ had been arrested in total.27

The Russian language makes the morally vital distinction between trupoyedstvo — ‘corpse-eating’ — and lyudoyedstvo — ‘person-eating’, or murder for cannibalism. The gruesome cases of intra-family killing highlighted by the police notwithstanding, the former was overwhelmingly more common (of the 300 ‘users of human meat for food’ arrested in April 1942, for example, only forty-four were murderers).28 Organised gangsterism was extremely rare: the NKVD reports mention only one such case — that of six young men, three of them railway workers, who lured a series of thirteen victims, mostly picked up outside bread shops, with offers of barter to a flat, where they were despatched with an axe- blow to the back of the head.29 Cannibalism was also significantly less common in the city centre than in the suburbs, which were poorer, worse policed and hosted the overflowing cemeteries. (The largest numbers of arrests were made in the outlying Primorsky and Krasno Gvardeisky districts and on the industrial Vyborg Side; the smallest in the Smolniy district, home to Party headquarters.30) On 22 December police patrolling the Serafimovskoye cemetery in Novaya Derevnya stopped two women carrying sacks, whch were found to contain the bodies of three infants. Questioning revealed that one woman was the wife of a soldier away at the front, the other that of a janitor, and that they had planned to feed the meat to their daughters, aged eighteen months and sixteen. Two more bodysnatchers — a factory worker and a carpenter — were arrested at the Serafimovskoye the following day; they too had planned to use the contents of their sacks to feed their children.31 A forty-three-year- old unemployed man, his wife and thirteen-year-old son were caught ‘systematically stealing’ corpses from a hospital morgue, and a twenty-four-year-old nurse was arrested for scavenging amputated limbs from an operating room.32

Other easily accessible corpses were those of colleagues or relatives who had died of starvation. Typical of the kind of cooperative action this sort of trupoyedstvo often engendered were a clutch of cases in January and February. At the First of May Factory a group of nine men, all of whom lived in the same hostel, shared the corpse of a workmate.33 At the Lenin Factory a woman worker shared the corpse of her eleven-year-old son with two female friends. A cleaner shared the body of her husband with her unemployed neighbour; the electrician and the deputy manager of a public bathhouse together ate its dead boilerman.34 Three members of a civil defence team, one a Party member, shared a corpse they discovered while making safe a bomb-damaged building.35

The optical engineer Dmitri Lazarev gives a first-hand account of being invited to join such an enterprise:

Valentina Antonovna (a friend of Nina’s [Lazarev’s wife]) came round. Trembling with emotion, she recounted how yesterday a woman tried to drag her into a horrible business. Earlier in the day some civil defence workers had been crushed to death by falling beams, while dismantling a building on Krestovsky [Island]. Their bodies had been taken to an empty shed next to the flat in which this woman lives alone. She proposed to Valentina Antonovna that they take the corpse of one of the girls to her flat, prepare the meat, eat some and salt the rest for future use. She said she had firewood, but couldn’t manage everything on her own. As an inducement