For most people at the time, cannibalism was similarly a matter of second-hand horror stories rather than direct experience. ‘On Pokrovskaya Square’, wrote the geography teacher Aleksei Vinokurov, ‘I ran into a crowd of people silently staring at the clumsily butchered corpse of a plump young woman. Who did this and why? Is this proof of the persistent rumours of cannibalism?’20 When a ‘rather healthy’ acquaintance of Dmitri Likhachev’s failed to return home after setting off to a strange address in search of a barter deal, he wondered if she had been murdered by the sinister traders who offered anonymous mince ‘cutlets’ for sale in the Haymarket.21 Visiting her factory to collect her pay, Olga Grechina noticed that metal shavings had piled up around the lathes, and asked what had happened to an old cleaning lady, affectionately known as Auntie Nastya. Told that Nastya had been executed, she at first thought it must be a joke: ‘But no, it’s true! She ate her daughter — hid her under the bed and cut bits off her. The police shot her. These days you don’t go before a court.’22
The city leadership was kept fully informed by the NKVD, which detailed its first nine cases of ‘the use of human meat as food’ in its situation report of 13 December 1941. A mother had smothered her eighteen-month-old daughter in order to feed herself and three older children; a twenty-six-year-old man, laid off from his tyre factory, had murdered and eaten his eighteen-year-old room-mate; a metalworker (a member of the Party) and his son had killed two woman refugees with a hammer and hidden their body parts in a shed; an unemployed plumber had killed his wife in order to feed their teenage son and nieces, hiding her remains in the toilets of the Lenenergo workers’ hostel.23 Ten days later thirteen more cases were reported: an unemployed eighteen-year-old had murdered his grandmother with an axe, boiling and eating her liver and lungs; a seventeen-year-old had stolen an unburied corpse from a cemetery and put the flesh through a table-top mincer; a cleaner had killed her one-year-old daughter and fed her to her two-year-old.24 Also among the first to resort to eating human meat were the criminally neglected pupils of the
the pupils were left to themselves. They had no supervision, and no ration cards were provided for them for December. Through December they ate the meat of slaughtered cats and dogs. On 24 December pupil Kh. died of malnutrition, and his corpse was partially used by the other pupils for food. On 27 December a second pupil, V., died, and his corpse was also used for food. Eleven people have been arrested for cannibalism, all of whom have admitted guilt. School director Leimer and commandant Plaksina, guilty of abandoning this group of pupils without provisions or supervision, have been subjected to criminal prosecution.25
Altogether, police only arrested twenty-six people for cannibalism in December, but the number shot up to 356 in January and 612 in February. It halved to 300 in March and April, then rose again slightly in May before falling off steeply through June and July.26 By December 1942, when the phenomenon finally tailed off, 2,015 ‘cannibals’ had been arrested in total.27
