Hitler declared: ‘Petersburg – the poisonous nest from which, for so long, Asiatic venom has spewed forth into the Baltic – must vanish from the earth’s surface. The city is already cut off. It only remains for us to bomb and bombard it, destroy its sources of water and power and then deny the population everything it needs to survive.’ The first major Luftwaffe attack on Leningrad destroyed the waterside Badaev warehouses, holding most of the city’s food stocks; melted sugar ran along a neighbouring road, and fires burned for days. The citizens quickly understood their plight. A woman named Elena Skryabina wrote in her diary: ‘We are approaching the greatest horror…Everyone is preoccupied with only one thought: where to get something edible so as not to starve to death. We have returned to prehistoric times. Life has been reduced to one thing – the hunt for food.’
Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman described in his diary how citizens made soup and bread with grass. Once such fare was accepted as a norm, he said, ‘grass cakes found their own price in the market’. A single match cost a rouble, which caused many people to ignite their kindling with magnifying glasses under the sun. One of Brontman’s writer friends was eccentric enough to cling to his household pet, ‘probably the only surviving dog in Leningrad’. Bicycles provided the sole means of civilian transport. Since water supplies now depended on hydrants, women washed clothes in the street while passing military vehicles weaved between them. Every vestige of vacant soil was tilled for vegetables, each plot marked with its owner’s name. Fuel was desperately short, because the city was invested before the inhabitants could make their annual pilgrimages to collect firewood from outlying forests.
The Germans removed their tanks to reinforce operations further south. The besiegers, less numerous than the defending Russian troops, dug themselves into bunkers and gun emplacements for the winter. Every movement towards their lines by either attacking soldiers or fleeing civilians was met with annihilating artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire. Captain Vasily Khoroshavin, a thirty-six-year-old Soviet battery commander, wrote to his wife on 25 October: ‘I have received a letter from you and I cannot describe the pleasure it gave. Today is the sixth that I am spending in the cellar of a mason’s shop only accessible by crawling. I sit here directing fire while mines and shells explode around me, shaking the earth. It is impossible to get out for water. Hot tea is our greatest luxury, and rations are brought to us by night. Yesterday a shell exploded between me and a reconnaissance man, shredding the tails of my greatcoat. I was unhurt, except that my gas mask case hit me on the head.’ Khoroshavin was less fortunate three months later, when another German salvo killed him.
‘All our soldiers on the front look like ghouls – emaciated by hunger and cold,’ wrote one of them, Stepan Kuznetsov. ‘They are in rags, filthy, and very, very hungry.’ Thereafter, the saga of Leningrad focused not on the battlefield, but on the struggle for survival among its inhabitants, which many lost. German artillery shelled the city daily, at hours most likely to catch victims in the open: 0800–0900, 1100–1200, 1700–1800, 2000–2100. The bread ration for civilians fell below the level the murderous Professor Zigelemeyer deemed necessary for existence: a daily minimum of a hundred tons of supplies a day had to reach the city across Lake Ladoga, and there was often a shortfall: on 30 November, for instance, only sixty-one tons got through. Loaves were baked with mouldy grain salvaged from a ship sunk in the harbour, from cottonseed oilcake, ‘edible’ cellulose, flour-sack and floor sweepings, horse oats.
Through October and November, conditions worsened steadily: German guns and bombers pounded streets, schools, civic buildings, hospitals. For countless citizens, starvation beckoned: they began to boil wallpaper to extract its paste, to cook and chew leather. As scurvy became endemic, an extract was produced from pine needles to provide vitamin C. There was a plague of thefts of ration cards – mere money had become redundant. Pigeons vanished from the city squares as they were caught and eaten, as too were crows, gulls, then rats and household pets. At an art academy, old Professor Yan Shabolsky sent for his star pupil, eighteen-year-old Elena Martilla. ‘Lena,’ he said, ‘things are getting very bad here. I don’t expect to survive this. But someone must make a record of what is happening. You are a portrait artist – so draw pictures of Leningrad’s people under siege – honest pictures, showing how they are suffering in these diabolical circumstances. We must preserve this for humanity. Future generations must be warned of the absolute horror of war.’
Thereafter Elena Martilla roamed the streets, making such quick sketches as cold and weakness allowed of faces stretched, drawn, sunken, hollowed by deprivation no other modern European civilisation had experienced on such a scale. She noticed that many adults responded by closing down emotionally, becoming passive and withdrawn, apparently sleepwalking. Children, however, became unnaturally alert: a small boy delivered a vivid, witty running commentary on a Luftwaffe attack to his terrified adult companions in a shelter. She wrote: ‘It was as if that boy had aged fifty years in as many days – his face looked so old, and through this unnatural ageing I felt that he had been robbed of the innocence of childhood. It was horrifying to hear his natural curiosity welded to the ghastly machinery of war…I looked more closely into his face – and saw an uncanny wisdom in it. What I glimpsed in that moment shook me: I realised that a little child could look like a sage old man. Amid the agony we were suffering, something extraordinary had briefly come to life.’
Most Leningraders, deprived of power, heat, light and employment, eked out a hibernatory existence amid mounting snow and rubble; their lives and metabolic processes slowed like the fading of an old clockwork gramophone. In Svetlana Magaeva’s apartment building, an old woman named Kamilla grew steadily more enfeebled, though neighbours burned furniture in her stove to preserve a flicker of life. One morning, she suddenly rose from her bed and embarked upon a frenzied search of every cupboard and crevice for food. Frustrated, she took plates and dishes from her cabinet and dropped them one by one on the floor. Then she fell on her hands and knees, and searched the fragments for breadcrumbs. Soon afterwards, Kamilla died.
By December, the outside temperature had dropped to –30 degrees Celsius, and starvation was killing tens of thousands. The bread ration shrank to 125 grams. Some people mechanically continued their work: at the city’s Zoological Institute, fifty-year-old beetle expert Axel Reichardt worked on his magnum opus The Fauna of the Soviet Union, until one day he was found lying dead on a mattress in his office. Sasha Abramov, an actor at the Musical Comedy Theatre, where the cast were almost too weak to walk to performances, expired during an interval, wearing his costume as one of Dumas’s three musketeers. Elena Skryabina wrote: ‘People are so weak with hunger that they are completely indifferent to death; they perish as if they are falling asleep. Those half-dead people who are still around do not even pay any attention to them.’ Stiffened corpses lay in the streets until they were piled onto sledges for disposal in shell craters. German intelligence, monitoring the city’s agony with clinical fascination, calculated that 200,000 people had died in three months.
Yet the privileged escaped most of the suffering. Zhukov was recalled to Moscow when it became plain that there would be no battle, leaving Leningrad in the hands of party officials who ate prodigiously throughout the siege. It became a characteristic of Russia’s war that corruption and privilege persisted, even as tens of millions starved and died. Some functionaries were evacuated by air, as was the city’s most famous resident, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who completed