In 1941 a fifty-year-old Russian had lived through three major famines — the first of 1891–2, when drought hit the Volga steppe; the second of 1921–2, caused by grain requisitioning and the post-revolutionary Civil War, and the third of 1932–3, when the Bolsheviks violently collectivised peasant farms, condemning to death perhaps seven million people. Though privileged in normal times, Leningrad was particularly vulnerable, having always been dependent on food imports from the more fertile south. The bog-bound village of Myasnoi Bor, or ‘Meat Wood’ (just north of Novgorod and the site of a disastrous wartime encirclement in the spring of 1942), was named for the quantities of cattle which foundered there on their trek north to market in the capital. Though the collectivisation famine largely passed the city by, during the Civil War grass grew in the streets, so many were the Leningraders who fled to the villages in search of something to eat.
Despite all this, the Leningrad authorities went into the siege woefully underprepared. When the last road out of the city was cut on 8 September an estimated 2.8 million civilians were caught within the siege ring, 2.46 million of them in the city, and another 343,000 in its surrounding towns and villages.2 Troops and sailors within the ring numbered about another 500,000, making approximately 3.3 million mouths to feed in all. (The Germans seriously overestimated Leningrad’s population at more than four million, probably because they mistook the movement of families out of the vulnerable southern suburbs for the arrival of new refugees. They thus also overestimated how soon the city would begin to starve.3) On the same day that the city was cut off a junior trade commissar, Dmitri Pavlov, flew in from Moscow and started to make a detailed inventory of all food stocks held in warehouses, factories, army depots and other public institutions. At current consumption levels, he discovered, they would last not much more than a month. On hand were thirty-five days’ worth of grain and flour, thirty days’ worth of buckwheat, rice, semolina and macaroni, thirty-three days’ worth of meat and live cattle, forty-five days’ worth of oil and fats, and sixty days’ worth of sugar and confectionery.4 Planes were not available for a large-scale airlift (none ever seems to have been considered), and though the Leningrad Party had already requested that five trainloads of food be delivered to Lake Ladoga for transfer to the city by barge, there were no port facilities to receive them on the lake’s shallow, sandbank-riddled western shore. (The decision to start building docks and warehouses, at the dacha village of Osinovets, was not taken until 9 September.5) Unless the blockade was broken quickly, Leningrad would have to survive on its own resources.
Failure to lay in adequate stores of food and fuel before the siege ring closed was due to the same lethal mixture of denial, disorganisation and carelessness of human life as the failure to evacuate the surplus civilian population. The most efficient and concerned administration could not have prevented serious shortage — emergency stocks did not exist, the trains were overloaded, the country’s most fertile regions in the process of being overrun — but error, muddle and above all the leadership’s refusal to face reality made the situation even worse than it need have been. Telling is a story that Anastas Mikoyan, the State Defence Committee member in charge of trade and supply, recounts in his memoirs. In the early days of the war a convoy of military supply trains travelling westward in accordance with out-of-date mobilisation plans found themselves unable to reach their destination. Knowing that Leningrad was reliant on grain from the south, Mikoyan ordered that they be diverted to the city:
Assuming that the Leningraders would be only too happy with this decision, I did not consult them in advance. Even Stalin only learned of it when he got a telephone call from Zhdanov. [But] Zhdanov told him that the Leningrad warehouses were packed as full as they could hold, and insisted that no foodstuffs over and above those already designated be despatched to them. . At the time none of us envisaged that Leningrad would be besieged. Consequently, Stalin instructed me not to despatch provisions in excess of agreed quantities without the prior consent of the city authorities.6
Zhdanov had earned points for zeal and successfully asserted himself against a rival; the trains went elsewhere.
Confusion and complacency continued to reign even after the siege had begun. ‘Jurisdiction over food supplies’, Pavlov remembered,
resided with ten different economic agencies. In the absence of instructions from their central offices in Moscow, each continued to issue food according to the usual procedures. . In mid-September the central administration of the sugar industry, located in Moscow, wired its Leningrad office to despatch a number of freight-car loads of sugar from Leningrad to Vologda. Leningrad had been blockaded since the 8th. There were many similar cases.
Though by the time Pavlov arrived in Leningrad the expensive ‘commission shops’ — opened in July so as to provide the reassuring sight of full shelves — had already been closed, off-ration sales through canteens and restaurants continued, constituting a substantial 8 to 12 per cent of all outgoings of oils, butter, meat and sugar. Production of beer and ice cream carried on, as did off-ration sales of luxury goods such as caviar, champagne and coffee.7
Most visibly, the authorities failed to redistribute food stores so as to minimise the risk of loss in air raids. The result was the spectacular Badayev warehouse fire of 8 September, which Leningraders at the time believed to have destroyed almost the whole of the city’s food stocks — the air is described as filled with the smell of burning ham and sugar — and still remember as the trigger for their accelerating slide into starvation. (‘It was when life ended’, as Marina Yerukhmanova put it, ‘and existence began.’) Pavlov hotly disputes, in what is otherwise a rather impersonal account, the fire’s importance, claiming that the warehouses held boxes of old paperwork and spare parts, and that the only foods destroyed were 3,000 tonnes of flour and 2,500 tonnes of lump sugar, most of which was reprocessed into sweets. In terms of public morale, however, the Badayev fire was unquestionably a catastrophe. ‘Soon after’, Yerukhmanova remembered,
we were handed out eight kilograms of lentils, some canned crabmeat and a few other things. Everyone was unhappy that these handouts hadn’t been ordered in advance of the fire, rather than once it had already happened. To give such instructions in those days would probably have needed a lot of courage. But how was it that they didn’t have more foresight?8
Among the more successful of the Leningrad leadership’s initiatives in the autumn of 1941 were its efforts to gather food from inside the siege ring and to devise food substitutes. First came a drive, hampered by lack of transport, to bring in the harvest from the unoccupied countryside to the city’s east and north. For collective farmworkers (who did not qualify for rations) this meant a squeeze almost as severe as that which had caused the collectivisation famine of a decade earlier. A norm of what fell by November to fifteen kilograms of potatoes per person per month could be retained by the peasants themselves; the remainder had to be surrendered to requisitioning parties put together by local soviet executive committees. Peasants who hid their potatoes were ‘held responsible under wartime law’ — in other words, subjected to unspecified criminal punishment.9 Extra hands were also conscripted from the city — and carried home as much produce as they could. ‘On the main roads and on suburban trams’, a memorandum of 16 September complained, ‘hundreds of people can be observed with sacks and baskets. . Failure to take urgent measures to stop this anarchy will mean that the whole harvest is squandered into private hands.’10 The squeeze on the countryside continued, via a mixture of compulsory purchase, requisitioning and ‘donations’, throughout the first siege winter, producing a total 4,208 tonnes of potatoes and other vegetables, livestock representing 4,653 tonnes of meat, over 2,000 tonnes of hay, 547 tonnes of flour and grain and 179,000 eggs. Three-fifths of the flour and grain came from peasants’ private stores, as did over a quarter of the livestock and over half the potatoes.11