Asya moved in with us after her mother died. . When she died, too, to my despair I couldn’t use her ration cards, because a friend of hers had disappeared with them two days before. Card theft is frightening and commonplace. . In shops and on the streets one often hears a piercing, tearing scream — and you know that someone’s cards have been stolen, or that a piece of bread has been ripped from someone’s hands. It is unbearably depressing, and what saves you is bestial indifference to human suffering.1
What was it like to live through this? Many diaries peter out in January or February, their authors either too weak to write or at a loss for words. Others condense into curt records of relatives’ deaths and of food obtained and consumed. Yet others, like the poet Olga Berggolts’s, become more prolix — long, repetitive outpourings of despair, disbelief, guilt, anger and terror. Ask one of the dwindling number of siege survivors today how they remember those months, and the reply will likely be the words ‘kholod, golod, snaryady, pozhary’ — ‘cold, hunger, shells, fires’ — a set phrase whose long, rhyming syllables are both a shorthand and a litany.
Most obviously, the siege winter meant a narrowing of existence to the iron triangle of home, bread queue and water source — and to immediate family and neighbours. Sequestered in their dark and freezing flats, reliant on sleds, home-made lamps and scavenged fuel, Leningraders compared themselves to cavemen, to Robinson Crusoe and to polar explorers. Pre-war life, which at the time had felt so disorganised, now seemed to Lidiya Ginzburg’s ‘Siege Man’ like ‘a fairy tale’:
Water in the taps, light at the press of a switch, food in the shops. . From that former time, an engraving hung above the bookshelf and a Crimean clay jug sat on the shelf — a gift. The woman who had given it was now in unoccupied Russia, and the memory of her had become a pale and unnecessary thing. . In that winter’s enveloping chaos it felt as though the jug and even the bookshelves were something in the nature of the Pogankiniy Chambers or the ruins of the Colosseum, in that they would never have any practical significance again.2
With narrowing of the physical world came narrowing of the emotions. Survivors describe themselves as having been ‘like wolves’ or even more commonly ‘like stones’ — automata drained of feeling or interest except that of prolonging their own survival. The sight of a stranger collapsing on the street, which in November and December had presented itself as a moral dilemma — should one stop and help, and risk failing to bring home food for one’s own family, or pass on by? — in January and February hardly registered. On 13 January, setting out to the Scholars’ Building for ‘soy soup’, Aleksandr Boldyrev heard that a neighbour, ‘grown completely old and dilapidated in the last couple of months’, had collapsed outside on the pavement and been dragged indoors by passing soldiers. ‘He’s still there, in the stairwell, apparently dying. But I didn’t go in, and went to get lunch. The journey there and back uses up all my strength, my little daily reserve. Golovan was also on his way to lunch, but his reserve was insufficient.’3 Janitors, another diarist noted, asked people who sat down to rest on their buildings’ doorsteps to move on, knowing that if they died there it would be their responsibility to drag the corpse to the morgue. If the person was well-dressed, however, the janitor would ‘be more courteous, even offer a chair, because he knows that afterwards, he can take their clothes’.4 The same shrivelling of the emotions occurred within families, the deaths of beloved husbands or parents provoking only relief at obtaining an extra ration card or anxiety about how to dispose of a corpse.
For almost everyone, it was impossible to think about anything except food. Obtaining it, preparing it, saving it, calculating how long it could be made to last — all became universal obsessions, as did memories of meals past. ‘As he walked along the street’, Ginzburg wrote of her ‘Siege Man’,
he would slowly go over everything he had eaten that morning or the day before; he would ponder what he was going to eat that day, or busy himself with calculations involving ration cards and coupons. He found in this an absorption and tension which he had previously known only when thinking through and writing about something very important. . What was it so sickeningly like? Something from the previous life? Ah yes — being unhappily in love.5
Others became seized by ‘bread mania’, imagining themselves dipping slice after slice in sunflower oil, or nibbling an endless supply of buttered rolls. (Varlam Shalamov, starving in the Kolyma goldmines at the same time, wrote that ‘we all had the same dreams of loaves of ryebread, flying past like meteors or angels’.) New etiquettes grew up around food. Some families ate everything they had obtained for the day in one go; others spread it out into three ‘meals’. Food could be pooled and divided equally or according to need, or each family member could eat ‘according to his ration’. Food preparation was spun out into elaborate rituals. The Zhilinskys, having reused their tea leaves several times, mixed them with salt and ate them with a spoon. Boldyrev’s four-year-old daughter threw tantrums unless the table was laid to an exact plan, and ‘meals’ accompanied with a set form of words: ‘The tea is so cold that flies and mosquitoes skate and sled on it, and you can drink without a cup, without a spoon, straight from the saucer.’ (‘This’, wrote her father, ‘is said about five times with every cup, in a weird, almost sickly tongue-twister. . A childish reaction to the surrounding chaos.’)6 Traditions of hospitality, inevitably, evaporated. ‘I know she’s hungry’, wrote Klara Rakhman of a schoolfriend’s just widowed, lice-ridden mother who came to beg for duranda: ‘But she should understand that at such times it’s embarrassing to ask.’ (Rakhman’s own father, her ‘darling papochka’, died in March.)7
At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.) On sale in the street markets was ‘Badayev earth’, dug from underneath the remains of the burned Badayev warehouses and supposedly impregnated with charred sugar. Together with another little boy, Igor Kruglyakov slipped past guards to dig some up:
I found what I thought was a piece of sugar, and put it in my mouth. I sucked it all the while we were walking home. It didn’t dissolve but it tasted sweet. When we got home I spat it out into my hand, and it was just an ordinary stone. . Mama scolded us of course, but not wanting to hurt my feelings, pretended there was some sugar there. She mixed it with water and it was as though we drank sweet tea.8
Denying oneself food so as to give it to others — as hundreds of thousands of Leningraders managed to do — became an act of supreme self-control and shining charity.
In January Yelena Kochina and her husband moved in with friends. Revisiting her own flat on 1 February, Kochina found the door open and the furniture in pieces. ‘“Why are you chopping up our furniture?” I asked the woman next door. “We’re cold,” she answered laconically. What could I say to that? She has two children. They really are cold.’ Returning four days later she found a corpse on her bed, ‘so flat that the bedspread was slightly raised only by its head and feet. After chopping the leg off a chair I left, without inquiring whose body it was.’ Two days later it had been joined by two more. ‘Evidently the neighbours have set up a morgue in my room. Let them — dead bodies don’t bother me.’9