Overall, 64 per cent of those arrested for ‘use of human meat as food’ were female, 44 per cent unemployed or ‘without fixed occupation’ and over 90 per cent illiterate or in possession of only basic education. Only 15 per cent were ‘rooted inhabitants’ of Leningrad and only 2 per cent had a criminal record.37 The typical Leningrad ‘cannibal’, therefore, was neither the Sweeney Todd of legend nor the bestial lowlife of Soviet history writing, but an honest, working-class housewife from the provinces, scavenging protein to save her family.
Remarkably, Leningrad’s medical authorities made at least one attempt to have those driven to eating human meat classified as mentally ill. On 20 February 1942 the head of the Leningrad Front’s medical services called a special meeting of seven senior psychiatrists — academics, the head of a psychiatric hospital, the chief court psychiatrist and a representative of the army medical service — to decide whether or not corpse-eaters should be held criminally responsible for their actions. The doctors’ verdict, from the judicial point of view, was contradictory: corpse-eaters were sane, but also not incurably criminal. One dissenter argued that no mentally healthy person, by definition, could resort to cannibalism, but that they should nevertheless stand trial: ‘These are inadequate and socially dangerous people! We need to deal with them strictly!’ In conclusion it was decided that most cannibals were mentally healthy, but ‘primitive, of a lower moral and intellectual level’. Though all were dangerous, ‘periods of isolation’ should be determined individually, taking into account the circumstances of the crime (‘active or passive corpse-eating’) and the offender’s personality.38
In practice, however, all cannibals — sane, insane, murderers or harmless ‘corpse-eaters’ — were treated as criminals. Since no provision for cannibalism existed in the Criminal Code it was included under the catch-all clause of ‘banditry’ (the Code’s article 59–3). By the time the psychiatrists convened, 554 ‘special category bandits’ had already gone before military tribunals, and of these 329 had been shot and 53 given ten-year gaol sentences. At least another forty-five had died (presumably of starvation) in custody.39 But although no official distinction was made between murderers and corpse-eaters, variations in sentencing suggests that in practice the latter got off relatively lightly. Of the 1,913 cannibals whose cases had been processed by early June, military tribunals sentenced 586 to execution and 668 to prison terms of five to ten years.40 What happened to the remaining 659 is unclear. They may simply have awaited sentencing, but it is perhaps not wishful thinking to discern — in police reports’ habitual observation that a particular ‘user of human meat for food’ was an unsupported woman with dependent children and no previous convictions — coded pleas for clemency. It would be good to know that they were answered.
An incongruous reminder of peacetime life, for people making their way down the Nevsky in the winter of 1941–2, was a series of flyers advertising a film comedy that had been due to open at the beginning of the war. Its title, pasted up on lamp-posts in large black letters, was
How angry were Leningraders, and why did their anger never break out into open revolt? On one level this is a frivolous question — Leningraders, like other Soviet citizens, felt loyalty to their country if not to Bolshevism, hated and feared the Germans and were too exhausted and emaciated to do more than strive for their own bare survival. On another, it is a conundrum. Hundreds of thousands had already directly experienced repression and impoverishment at the hands of their government before the war; now almost all were either close to death from starvation themselves, or watching helplessly as family and friends died around them. The hypocrisies and inequalities of Soviet life, moreover, were sharper than ever. People could see with their own eyes that the lights in government buildings stayed on, that corruption was rife, that their bosses’ children ate while their own starved. Moscow was cut off, the rank-and-file police in almost as desperate a plight as themselves — what did they have left to lose? Bread shortages, a disastrous war and fury at government incompetence had sparked the February Rising in 1917. Why didn’t they do the same a quarter of a century later?
