Leningrad полностью

Another aspect of the siege that has no place in the traditional Soviet story is crime. Leningraders, claims supply commissar Dmitri Pavlov, were too ‘high-minded’ to grab loaves that spilled from a bread truck hit by a shell, and ‘jealously protected’ the trees in the public parks from being cut down for firewood. Their example refuted the ‘foreign writers who assert that man loses his morals and becomes a predatory beast when hunger affects him powerfully. If this were true, anarchy should have reigned in Leningrad.’1

Anarchy did not reign in Leningrad during the siege, but the city did suffer a crime wave, especially of theft and murder for food and food cards, and, most notoriously, of cannibalism. The commonest of violent crimes was simple mugging. Yelena Kochina, returning home from a bread shop in mid-December 1941, saw a teenage boy dressed in the uniform of one of the city’s trade schools running towards her. She stood aside but he grabbed her bread and ran on, leaving her staring in horror at her empty hands. Back at home, a neighbour scolded her for not hiding the bread under her coat. Four days later Yelena’s husband got in a fight with another trade-school boy over a spilled crust:

Today [Dima] ran into some sleds loaded with bread. An armed guard of five men accompanied them, and a crowd followed behind, staring spellbound at the loaves. Dima followed along with everyone else. Near the bread shop the sleds were unloaded, and the crowd fell on the empty boxes, picking out the crumbs. Dima found a large crust trampled in the snow. But a boy tore the crust out of his hands. He chewed it, this horrendous brat, smacking his lips and drooling saliva. Dima went mad. He grabbed the boy by his collar and began to shake him, not realizing what he was doing. The boy’s head wobbled on his thin neck like a rag doll’s. But he kept on hurriedly chewing with his eyes closed. ‘It’s gone, it’s gone! Look!’ he shouted suddenly and opened his mouth wide.2

Cited as thieves in dozens of similar accounts,3 these trade-school boys, like the peasant refugees in the suburbs, were one of Leningrad’s most vulnerable social groups. Greatly expanded just before the war, the trade schools — remeslennye uchilishchya — were low-prestige boarding institutions, designed to train up teenagers from the villages as factory hands. When the siege ring closed their pupils found themselves cut off from their families and at the mercy of often negligent or unscrupulous school managers. The commissar sent from Moscow to oversee mass evacuation over the Ice Road, Aleksei Kosygin, noticed their worse than average emaciation and was prompted personally to inspect Trade School no. 33. The boys, he discovered, were lice-ridden and sleeping two or three to a bed, without sheets or pillowcases or any isolation of sick from healthy. Even more shamefully, kitchen staff were systematically pilfering their food, leaving them with half or less of their proper ration. A pupils’ representative, he wrote furiously to Zhdanov, should be allowed directly to oversee the kitchens, and managers and staff should be arrested and put on trial. The overall mortality rate in the trade schools is unknown, but has been estimated at a staggering 95 per cent.4

Theft by Leningrad’s thousands of other abandoned children was reduced by the opening and subsequent evacuation of ninety-eight new orphanages, but these usually only took in children aged up to thirteen. ‘The position of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds left without parents’, a report to Zhdanov noted, ‘is especially difficult. They are not accepted into children’s homes, and crowd near shops and bakeries, snatching bread and food from buyers’ hands.’ City education department staff, it went on, refused even to send younger children to orphanages unless they were clean, free of infection and in possession of all the correct papers.5

Of more concern to police was the threat that angry bread-shop crowds would get out of control, or descend into outright looting. Though food distribution was never seriously disrupted there were some near-riots, especially in January and February 1942, when Leningraders were queuing from the small hours, often to receive no bread at all. Late one January evening Dmitri Lazarev went to look for his wife, who had gone out to queue at seven that morning. He found her standing in line outside a bread shop on Bolshoi Prospekt: