Employment at the Radio House nonetheless enabled Berggolts, though jaundiced and swollen with oedema, not only to survive herself but to help friends. One beneficiary was the half-grateful, half-resentful Mariya Mashkova, who more than once found herself unable to tear herself away from the fried bread and coffee on offer in Berggolts’s warm, well-lit flat in order to return to crying children and dying mother-in-law in the darkness and cold of her own. Berggolts gave her
Another enviable enclave was the Writers’ Union, run by the novelist Vera Ketlinskaya. In January she applied to Zhdanov’s deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov for permission to send a fleet of lorries, specially equipped with stoves and insulated with felt and plywood, over the Ice Road to the ‘mainland’. On the way out they were to carry writers’ families into evacuation, and on the way back, to buy 100,000 roubles’ worth of food from collective farmworkers, who in return were to be entertained with ‘modern literature’ and ‘literary evenings’. ‘We are aware that all unscheduled trips are cancelled’, she wheedled in a letter, ‘but beg you to make an exception to this rule. Even in the most difficult times the Party and Soviet government have always taken particular care of literature. We remember Lenin’s conversation with Gorky, about how our writers and scientists must be fed.’10 Her lobbying worked and by early spring — well before other institutions returned to normal — the Union’s canteen daily served barley soup, borscht,
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:
