Leningraders’ second and most important ring of svyazi derived from their workplaces. Having a job not only meant getting a worker’s ration card, but with luck, access to off-ration meals, to firewood, to food parcels from affiliated organisations in the unoccupied Soviet Union, and to a bed in one of the hundred-odd recuperation clinics, or statsionary, opened from December onwards on the orders of the city soviet. (Though many statsionary were little better than dumping grounds for the dying, others saved lives simply by providing patients with food without making them queue.) Not all workplaces were equal. Among factories the best supplied were the large, prestigious defence plants, though their staff’s chances of survival were pulled down to the civilian average by the physical demands of their work, by targeted bombardment and by the fact that even after call-up most defence workers were quicker-to-starve men. At the Stalin Metal Works the fatality rate was around 35 per cent, and in the Kirov Works, situated in the vulnerable southern suburbs, somewhere between 25 and 34 per cent.
During the production push of the autumn going absent without leave had meant criminal punishment and loss of the worker’s ration, but in the midst of mass death the rules ceased to be enforced. Employees who failed to appear at work were automatically listed as sick and kept their cards, so that in January 1942 837,000 Leningraders were still registered as workers despite the fact that 270 factories had been officially closed and most of the rest hardly functioned.4 Among the many Leningraders with a purely notional job was Yelena Skryabina. ‘Friends’, she wrote on 15 January 1942, ‘have found me a position in a sewing workshop. This puts me on first category rations. The workshop does very little — there’s no light or fuel — but they hand out the ration just the same. Thus I get a little more bread, and at the moment every crumb is vital.’5
One of the most sought-after intelligentsia ‘survival enclaves’ — as one historian calls siege-winter workplaces — was the Radio House, whose director organised fair distribution of food that he regularly smuggled back to the office from the Smolniy’s fabled Canteen no. 12. Though the amounts involved were small — a few lumps of sugar, a couple of meat patties, a bowl of kasha — the ‘tremendous moral effect it had on us’, as Olga Berggolts’s lover Yuri Makogonenko recalled, ‘is difficult even to describe’.6 Radio House staff also received at least two special deliveries of food from Moscow, the first arranged by Berggolts’s indomitable sister Mariya, who personally escorted a lorry-full of supplies over the Ladoga ice at the end of February. ‘She took a roundabout route’, Berggolts wrote admiringly, ‘alone with the driver, in trousers and a short fur coat, armed with some sort of pistol. . She slept in the lorry, chatted up the commandants, passed through villages just liberated from the Germans, collecting letters and packages for Leningraders along the way. . I am proud of her, amazed by her — my wonderful quarrelsome Muska!’7
A second delivery was organised by Berggolts herself, who collected food and medicines for air transport to Leningrad while in Moscow giving readings of her February Diary. She would have been able to send more if it had not been for the Leningrad authorities, who mistrusted non-Party initiatives, did not want their own failings shown up and possibly feared public anger if some institutions were noticeably better supplied than others. ‘Zhdanov’, Berggolts wrote furiously on 25 March, ‘has just sent a telegram forbidding the despatch of individual packages to Leningrad organisations. This apparently has “bad political consequences”. Thanks to this idiotic telegram we can hardly send anything to the Radio Committee.’ Pleading was useless:
Today I had an appointment with Polikarpov, president of the All-Union Radio Committee. It left a very unpleasant impression. I addressed him badly, shyly — I would probably have done better to be rude. I asked his permission to send the food package to our Radio Committee, and in reply this smooth bureaucrat, obviously uncomfortable in my presence, uttered stinking commonplaces: ‘Leningraders themselves object to these packages’; ‘The government knows who to help’ and similar rubbish. ‘Leningraders’ — this is Zhdanov!8
