One such was Semen Putyakov, a thirty-six-year-old infantryman stationed at an aerodrome on a quiet sector of the Finnish front, just to the north-west of Leningrad. From call-up onwards he confided to his diary a long series of grumbles — lack of training, ‘museum exhibit’ rifles, his lieutenant (‘so dim that even the least educated soldiers are surprised at his orders’), senior officers’ rudeness and use of military vehicles to transport their girlfriends. In early December he noticed for the first time that the officers were stealing the men’s food, ordering cookhouse staff to divide rations for six among eight and taking the surplus for themselves. By the end of the month he was permanently consumed by hunger, and getting into trouble for making complaints:
Yesterday, while collecting lunch, I asked one of the political workers why we weren’t getting our full portions. I thought he was a fair man, and would want the full norm to reach our stomachs. But he began to shout that it wasn’t in the regulations for us to check the norms. So I asked where in the regulations it says that they can give us less than we’re supposed to get. After that he went berserk. I must find out his surname. And his ugly mug looks healthier than it should.7
Putyakov celebrated New Year’s Eve by shaving, looking at a photograph of his wife and children, and remembering meals from family gatherings past. By 8 January he had difficulty walking: ‘Gnawed on horse-bones during wood-chopping. Hunger, hunger. My swollen face isn’t going down. They say there’ll be ration increases, but I don’t believe it. . The devil knows what I’m writing, or what for.’ Furiously, he raved against his platoon’s corrupt sergeant and junior lieutenant — ‘They’re not men, they’re beasts in human form.’ Other soldiers in the unit had already died of hunger — ‘disgusting starvation deaths. . it would be better to die in battle with the fascists’. A few days after he tried to make an official complaint to an army doctor he was arrested. Accused of ‘expressing disappointment at the food supply of the Red Army’, he was executed on 13 March 1942.
Total mortality from starvation within the Leningrad armies is impossible to estimate, but Putyakov’s experience was no isolated instance. Soldiers told similar stories in their letters home: ‘We’re horribly hungry’, wrote one. ‘We don’t want to perish from hunger. Some comrades have already been sent to hospital. Some have died. What’s going to happen? What good are deaths like these to the Motherland?’ ‘We get weaker every day’, wrote another. ‘We don’t get any meat or fat, and 300 grams of bread. There’s not a single grain in the soup, no potato, no cabbage — it’s just muddy saltwater . . We’ve lost a lot of weight — we look like shadows. We gnaw on oilseed cake, which is being fed to the horses in place of oats. We fill ourselves up with water.’ A third had had ‘enough of life. Either I’m going to die of hunger or shoot myself. I can’t bear it any more.’8 Vasili Churkin, on the front line just south of Ladoga with his artillery battery, complained that although his fellow soldiers were in some cases almost too weak to stand, a lazy politruk made them build him an extra-comfortable bunker at each new stop, while they slept outside on the snow. The man was ‘good for nothing — just pointless extra weight’.9 Inside the city, Leningraders were shocked at the extreme emaciation of the soldiers they saw in the hospitals or marching along the streets.10
Like Leningrad’s starving civilians, some soldiers resorted to cannibalism. Hockenjos came across what he called a ‘man-eaters’ camp’ in the woods behind Zvanka, the stripped limbs confirming the statements of two young Red Army nurses who had been taken prisoner and given jobs in his battalion’s field hospital. Vasili Yershov (the same man who claimed to have seen children handing out anti-government leaflets at a checkpoint) was senior supply officer to the 56th Rifle Division of the 55th Army, stationed at Kolpino, just to Leningrad’s south. Among his responsibilities was provisioning an army hospital. Housed in the former Izhorsky Works, its two to three thousand sick and wounded lay on straw in glass-roofed, cement-floored workshops, and the two hundred or more who died each day were buried in the factory yard. Medical personnel were numerous but unqualified and painfully thin, despite in theory receiving the military ‘rear norm’. ‘One day’, Yershov relates,
Sergeant Lagun noticed that an army doctor, Captain Chepurniy, was digging in the snow in the yard. Covertly watching, the sergeant saw him cut a piece of flesh from an amputated leg, put it in his pocket, re-bury the leg in the snow and walk away. Half an hour later Lagun walked into Chepurniy’s room as if he had something to ask him, and saw that he was eating meat out of a frying pan. The sergeant was convinced that it was human flesh. . So he raised the alarm and in the course of the ensuing investigation it became clear that not only were the hospital’s sick and wounded eating human flesh, but so too were about twenty medical personnel, from doctors and nurses to outdoor workers — systematically feeding on dead bodies and amputated legs. They were all shot on a special order of the Military Council.
Their executioner was a jolly, vulgar Captain Borisov of the Special Department, the army wing of the NKVD, to whom Yershov issued the special vodka ration handed out to firing squads (600 grams, a third before and two-thirds afterwards). ‘I have to point out’, Yershov adds, ‘that Captain Borisov shot 50–60 per cent of people personally. . He couldn’t live without alcohol every day and so tried to carry out as many executions as possible himself.’11
Yershov also recorded the murder, by starving soldiers, of the carriers who twice daily toted insulated canisters of soup, strapped on to their backs with leather harnesses, from the field kitchens up to the front line:
In early January 1942 the divisional commander started getting urgent calls from regimental and battalion commanders, saying that this or that group of soldiers hadn’t been fed, that the carrier hadn’t appeared with his canteen, having apparently been killed by German snipers. Thorough checks revealed that something unbelievable was happening: soldiers were leaving their trenches early in the morning to meet the carriers, stabbing them to death, and taking the food. They would eat as much as they could, then bury the murdered carrier in the snow and hide the canteen before returning to their trenches. The murderer would go back to the place twice a day, first finishing off the contents of the canteen and then cutting off pieces of human flesh and eating those too. To give you some idea of the numbers I can tell you that in my division in the winter of 1941–2, on the front line alone — taking no account of units in the rear — there were about twenty such cases.12
Despite his Leningrad armies’ dreadful state, Stalin included them in a general late winter offensive, planned while still in the midst of November and December’s battle for Moscow. Vastly overambitious, it was designed to recapture Smolensk, the Ukrainian Donbass and the Crimea as well as to liberate Leningrad, and more broadly to deny the Germans breathing space in which to prepare for new assaults in the spring.13