The Writers’ Union also received special food deliveries from its Moscow headquarters; Vera Inber got a share of one in March: ‘I was bewildered when I saw everything they had sent us. I grabbed a tin of condensed milk in each hand; I couldn’t let them go.’12 Lidiya Ginzburg cites these food parcels as an example of the Soviet hierarchy in action ‘with unusual clarity and crudity’. Containing chocolate, butter, rusks and preserves, they were, she claims, divided according to work rate and seniority rather than need. Writers active in Union affairs got two kilos each, the less active a kilo and the inactive nothing at all.13 One of several who loathed Ketlinskaya was Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, head of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, who fruitlessly begged her to admit his starving members since they had no clubhouse or canteen of their own.14 Though wrung out by dysentery, which prevented him from making a meeting with city soviet chairman Popkov, he did manage to obtain eleven extra first-category ration cards, as well as three beds in a recuperation clinic set up in the Astoria hotel. He was then faced with the horrible task of allocating them:
I receive many acutely painful appeals. I was especially upset by a phone call from L. A. Portov, who several times, in a pleading voice, entreated me ‘Do it. Do it now. If you wait a week, it will be too late. I won’t survive.’
All the same I could only promise him a place on the waiting list, together with the much weakened Rubtsov and Peisin, since Rabinovich (long ill from tuberculosis), Deshevov (already hardly able to move) and Miklashevsky are all in an even worse state. When it comes to saving human life you can’t make choices. The life of every Soviet person must be saved. But you do nonetheless have to choose, in the sense of deciding priorities. You mustn’t be guided by judgements of each person’s creative or practical ‘worth’ (these can only be subjective), but by objective indicators of how closely they are threatened by death.15
By the end of February, twenty-one out of the Union’s eighty members had died of what Bogdanov-Berezovsky in his official report called ‘exhaustion’.16 So had his own mother, sister, brother-in-law, father-in-law and niece.
Workplace solidarity also often broke down. The acting director of Pushkin House, Dmitri Likhachev records, behaved cruelly, dismissing female staff — which amounted to a death sentence since it condemned them to dependants’ rations — stealing the ration cards of the dying and finally throwing them out so as not to have to dispose of their corpses:
I remember the death of Yasinsky. He had once been a tall, slim, very handsome old man, who reminded me of Don Quixote. During the winter he moved to the Pushkin House library, sleeping on a folding bed, behind the book stacks. . His mouth wouldn’t close and saliva trickled from it; his face was black, making an eerie contrast with his completely white, unkempt hair. His skin was taut over his bones. . His lips became thinner and thinner and failed to cover his teeth, which protruded and made his head look like a tortoise’s. Once he emerged from the stacks with a blanket over his shoulders and asked ‘What’s the time?’ Then he asked if it was day or night (dystrophics’ voices became slurred, as the vocal chords atrophied). He couldn’t tell because in the lobby all the windows were boarded up. A day or two later our deputy director, Kanailov, drove away everyone who had tried to settle down to die in Pushkin House, so as not to have to remove their bodies. Several of our ancillary staff — porters, caretakers, cleaning women — died like this. They had been drafted in, torn from their families, and then when they no longer had the strength to get home they were thrown out in thirty degrees of frost. Kanailov kept a close eye on all those who weakened, and not a single person died on the premises.17
In January 1942 Kanailov arranged his own evacuation across Lake Ladoga, offering friends places in his lorry if they carried his cases, which he stuffed with antique carpets and other valuables. The cases themselves — beautiful old ones in yellow leather — weren’t his either, being part of a bequest from a book-loving illegitimate son of Alexander III. More Pushkin House valuables were stolen by sailors from a nearby submarine, who were allowed to move in — and appropriate Turgenev’s sofa and Blok’s bed — in exchange for supplying Kanailov’s (slightly less corrupt) replacement with soup and electric light. ‘In the spring’, Likhachev remembered, ‘when the Neva thawed, the sailors left the Institute one fine day without any warning, taking with them as much as they could carry. After they had gone I found on the floor a gilded plaque: Chaadayev’s clock. The clock itself had disappeared. On what ocean floor does it rest now?’18
By far the best organisations to be connected to, to escape starvation, were the armed services, the food processing and distribution agencies, or Party headquarters at the Smolniy.
Front-line life, for soldiers in the trenches around Leningrad, was extraordinarily hard. They were brutally and capriciously disciplined, made to march long distances in filthy footcloths and ill-fitting boots, gouged ditches and dugouts out of the frozen ground with crowbars and pickaxes, slept outdoors on the snow wrapped in their greatcoats, waged a constant war against rats and lice, and during offensives went without hot food for days. Nonetheless their ration, even at its lowest, included a daily 500 grams of bread. Though in some units food was systematically stolen by the upper ranks, the full ration was possible to live on, and in general enough food circulated within the military so as to support not only servicemen and women but also their dependants.
Wives and girlfriends of officers stationed in the city itself were noticeably better off than the average, earning the resentful nickname ‘defence ladies’. One such lived next door to Georgi Knyazev in the Academicians’ Building. Wife of a military engineer, she traded small quantities of bread, sugar and rice for her neighbours’ tablecloths, towels, carpets and lamps. Though the food was useful, it also proved, Knyazev wryly noted, that ‘even in starving Leningrad, there are some well-fed types!’19 In early February 1942 a smooth-faced, smartly uniformed officer appeared at Yelena Skryabina’s door to serve her with evacuation papers. He seemed like a member of an alien species, ‘literally a creature from another world who had accidentally landed on our planet. . For the hundredth time you reflect on how differently situated those with power or advantage are, from ordinary people who have nothing but their ration cards.’20 Servicemen also feature as the heroes of what siege 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 sukhari. This saved us.’ Skryabina’s family was rescued by a completely unknown soldier who appeared one day on her doorstep with a pail of sauerkraut.22
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.