The city also continued to requisition large quantities of food from collective farms within the siege ring. As well as making their usual deliveries, via their collectives, to the state, peasants were obliged to provide animals and seed corn to refugees in their areas, to subscribe funds to a tank column (dubbed the ‘Leningrad Collective Farmer’) and to ‘donate’ grain from their personal stores to the Red Army. District Party committees were instructed to rely on the Statistics Department rather than the farms themselves for harvest forecasts, and committees that failed to come up with their allotted quotas were accused of giving comfort to ‘anti-collective elements’. In a rare concession to market forces, it was decided to offer underclothes, soap, thread, tobacco and vodka in exchange for deliveries of wild mushrooms and berries.32
An NKVD report on the public mood in villages around the town of Borovichi, east of Novgorod, illustrates the resentment these measures provoked. A series of public meetings had been held to raise funds for the ‘Collective Farmer’ tank column, duly raising three million roubles amidst patriotic speeches. ‘We should help the Red Army chase these two-legged beasts from our land’, a loyal traktoristka declared. ‘My three sons have gone to the front. One has been killed, but our money will give the others the weapons they need to defeat the enemy.’ Many, however, openly refused to donate — at least initially. ‘I don’t have any money so I’m not going to sign up’, one forty-year-old woman said. ‘There’s nobody for me to borrow from, and if there were, they wouldn’t have any money to lend me.’ By the end of the meeting, however, she had been swayed, going home to fetch a subscription of 300 roubles. At the ‘Red Ploughman’ collective a rash Estonian, having initially refused to subscribe, ‘seeing the high spirits of the other members, signed up for 1,000 roubles and donated the sum in cash’.
Elsewhere villagers were more outspoken, emboldened by the sound of German guns actually to threaten their bosses. Scolded for bad work by the chairman of her village soviet, one woman spat back
I can’t wait for Soviet rule to end. It has bankrupted the peasants, left us hungry and barefoot, and now you’re stripping us naked. But I’m not going to bow down before you fine gentlemen. Your reign’s coming to an end. You sent all the good people out of the village, but just you wait, it’ll be your turn next.
A fifty-year-old member of the ‘Unity’ collective was equally bold: ‘Our time’s coming, and we’ll take what’s ours. I may not be able to read or write but I’ll be the first to turn the bosses in. I’ll be believed. Then we’ll repay you. And we won’t just take a lamb from each of you; we’ll flay a pair of belts off each of your backs.’ (This ‘counter-revolutionary activity’, the report noted, had been documented in preparation for arrest.) There was also a widespread rumour that America and Britain, in exchange for opening a second front, were demanding that the collectives be broken up and the land given back to its peasant owners.33
In the city, new drives were launched against food theft and black-market trading. But although hundreds of food shop and food distribution agency staff were arrested (520 in July, 494 in August), and substantial amounts of ill-gotten property confiscated (sixty-two gold watches in September), both continued to flourish.34 The outdoor markets, when shut down in one part of town, simply reappeared in another, and factory workers continued to complain that bosses and kitchen staff colluded to skim their rations. At the Sudomekh shipyard, the crackdown sparked a showdown between the factory’s management and its Party organisation. ‘The senior and junior managers are all drinking spirits’, Party member Vasili Chekrizov confided to his diary.
You see the bastards tipsy more and more often. If they’re going to get drunk, I wish that at least they’d do it behind doors. They stuff their faces, give cover to all the thieving in the canteens, and have eliminated workers’ control, since it gets in their way. There are lots of bosses like that — not just here, but everywhere. . At meetings they declare their support for the gardening drive, and at weekends sometimes even go and inspect the allotments. But in private all they talk about is how to grab whatever they can for themselves. The inventory managers have got twenty ration cards each. Where are the NKVD? Can they really not catch them?
At a Party meeting at the end of August he (fruitlessly) stood up and made a public complaint: ‘I was pleased with what I said, though I know that Kalinovsky [Sudomekh’s director], Derevyanko and others will not forgive me. They can go to the devil. I said out loud what everyone in the hall was thinking. . I won’t sell myself for lentil soup, though I’m hungry every day.’
As well as trying to fulfil what was turning into a deluge of near-impossible production orders, Chekrizov was also put in charge of demolishing fourteen wooden buildings south of the Alexander Nevsky monastery, part of a government campaign to lay in supplies of firewood. Some were taken apart by hand, with saws and axes; others were slung round with a hawser attached to a tractor and pulled to the ground. Though Chekrizov accepted that the work was necessary he found it depressing, because the buildings were well constructed (with traditional cinders under the floorboards for insulation) and because their inhabitants had not yet been rehoused. To force one family to leave, he had to order his team to strip off their roof. Most, though, were resigned. ‘We’re wrecking their homes, which they’ve lived in for decades. They’re not angry, they realise that the city needs firewood. They just sit there on their bundles and suitcases, waiting for transport.’35
An engineer to whom Vera Inber chatted on her way home from giving a talk at a factory told her that he had just been to see his family in Novaya Derevnya (the old working-class suburb, just north of Yelagin Island, where the Zhilinskys had lived). When he arrived his house had disappeared, nothing left of it except rubble and bits of broken furniture. Picking over the debris he found some family photographs. ‘Now’, he ruefully told Inber, ‘my whole home fits in my pocket. I can carry it about with me.’36 Olga Grechina, standing guard over a newly demolished house until a truck arrived, was timidly approached by an old woman who presented her with a small turnip and asked permission to drag away a plank. After an hour of standing watch Grechina had traded herself ‘a whole dinner — several turnips and carrots’.37 The demolition campaign, which continued all through the autumn, transformed the appearance of the city’s village-like northern and eastern outskirts — doing more damage, Leningraders observed, than all the Germans’ shelling and bombing.
The summer’s gardening, food requisitioning, anti-corruption and demolition drives were accompanied by another mass evacuation over Lake Ladoga. Designed to remove all non-working Leningraders from the city, it was theoretically obligatory, though many — like Boldyrev and the painter Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva — managed to evade it: Boldyrev because he calculated he was better off where he was, Ostroumova-Lebedeva (offered a flight out and lodgings with the sister of a friend) because she wanted to stay where she belonged:
To live and suffer in Leningrad for such a long time, and now, just before liberation, to leave!. . I pictured myself in Kazan, in a warm room, safe from bombs and hunger — and I pictured myself in the role — not of sponger, but also not of tenant: an old woman who nobody needs. And I made the decision not to go anywhere. Nowhere!38
The classicist Olga Fridenberg tried to leave with her blind, eighty-year-old mother, but gave up when their overcrowded train stopped without explanation for four days on the way to Osinovets. Bribing a guard with her last loaf of bread, she managed to disembark mother and luggage and get them back to their emptied, disordered flat, where they remained for the rest of the war.