People were being allowed into the shop ten at a time. At one point, when the next ten were being allowed in, everyone behind rushed forward and started trying to break down the doors. A pair of policemen tried to hold back the crowd. Finally they began telling lies, promising that people would be let in as soon as the crowd took a few steps back. When the crowd did so they locked the doors and announced that the shop was closed and everyone could go home. There were shouts, complaints — some had not eaten for two days, others had starving children.
Order was only restored after Lazarev and some of the other men went round to the back of the shop and persuaded the manager to release rations for another seventy people.6 Altogether, the NKVD lists seventy-two such ‘attacks’ by members of the public on food shops, carts and sleds in the first twenty-seven days of January. Though in one case looters threw bricks at shop staff, most consisted simply of queuers pushing their way behind the counter, or of small groups (sometimes of armed deserters, but more often of women or trade-school boys) knocking over delivery sleds or handcarts and making off with their loads.7 ‘In Bread Shop no. 318’, states a typical report of early January,
the crowd burst in, incited by a person unknown, and dragged away 100kg of bread. We managed to arrest a few people. At Bread Shop no. 399 about 50kg of bread were looted by the crowd, but not one looter was arrested. A group fell upon Bread Shop no. 318’s cart, which had been bringing in the new delivery. On the night of 7 January two people were discovered hiding under the shop counter. They were found to be carrying knives. The same day Shop no. 20 on Gas Prospect was robbed. Similar incidents took place in the Smolniy and other districts.8
In response, more police were posted outside shops and delivery vehicles were instructed to vary their routes and provided with guards.9
One of very few diarists who admit to benefiting from food theft is Yelena Kochina. Her oedema-swollen husband Dima started stealing in mid-December, using a sharpened walking stick to spear loaves in a lightless bread shop. On one occasion a fellow queuer saw him steal, followed him out of the shop and threatened to report him:
‘Give me half or I’ll turn you in’, she whispered, grabbing him by the sleeve. . They went into a doorway, and Dima thrust the bread into the woman’s face with the words, ‘Here, stuff yourself!’ The woman grabbed the bread, sat down on the step, and began greedily to cram it into her mouth. For a short while Dima watched her in silence. Then he sat down beside her and began to eat his half. Thus they sat and ate, now and then cursing one another, until all the bread was gone.
A sackful of buckwheat, purloined from a factory food store in mid-January, enabled the Kochins to start regaining weight, which they hid from neighbours by deliberately not washing. Bread-shop staff, Yelena noted in self-justification, were no less dishonest, and ‘round as buns’: ‘In return for bread they have everything they want. Almost all of them, without any shame at all, wear gold jewellery and expensive furs. Some even work behind the counter in luxurious sable and sealskin coats.’10
Murder for food or ration cards also became frequent, with 1,216 such arrests in the first half of 1942.11 What Leningraders feared were attacks by strangers on a lonely street, but the cases detailed by the NKVD are of people killing family members, colleagues and neighbours. Again, both perpetrators and victims were often disadvantaged adolescents. A typical, pathetic, example is that of an eighteen-year-old who killed his two younger brothers with an axe, and was arrested while trying to kill his mother. Questioned, he explained that he had lost his job, and with it his worker’s ration card, when caught in a petty theft, and that he wanted to use his brothers’ coupons. Another two teenage boys, aged eighteen and fifteen, attacked and severely wounded their neighbours, a mother and her six-year-old daughter, and were arrested while trying to exchange their cards for bread. Yet another boy, a sixteen-year-old machinist, was murdered in his hostel by a workmate after he boasted of having managed to exchange several days’ worth of coupons for food.12
