Every day we removed between twenty-five and forty dead. The insides of their clothes were covered in a moving crust of lice. The bodies weren’t marked or labelled in any way — these people were anonymous, nobody noted anything down. We carried them into the yard, where they were loaded on to lorries and taken away somewhere. . And on 3 February I saw that the doors of all the cells in the prison corridor stood open. There was nobody left to lock up.11
The account tallies with a report from the city statistical service on total numbers of deaths in Leningrad prisons, which rose from zero in March 1941 to 1,172 in December, 3,739 in January 1942 and over two thousand in each of the next four months.12 Prisoners were also put to work on the Ice Road and in Gulag enterprises within the siege ring, which included a logging camp, pig farm and power station as well as munitions, chemicals and cable-making factories. There, too, their chances of survival were slim: on 31 December the NKVD asked supply commissar Dmitri Pavlov to raise the bread ration for the 3,578 inmates of its labour camps from 250 grams a day to the manual workers’ 350 grams, pointing out that the existing arrangements led rapidly to ‘exhaustion’ and ‘unfitness for work’.13
Death in prison or a labour camp was probably the fate of the railway clerk Ivan Zhilinsky. Fifty-one years old; decent, intelligent, resourceful and patriotic, he is typical of the thousands of ordinary Leningraders who met their end during the siege at the hands not of the enemy, but of their own government. By midwinter he and his wife Olga were swollen with oedema and walked with sticks, surviving from day to day on the dependant’s ration supplemented with cough drops, glycerine, castor oil, wallpaper paste and carpenter’s glue, washed down with hot water flavoured with orange peel, mustard powder, blackcurrant twigs or salt. To light their freezing rooms they burned splints of wood. Zhilinsky’s undoing, like Vinokurov’s, may have been a connection with photography. Having left his pre-war job when the trams stopped running, and not received his pay (a promised delivery of firewood) at another, in mid-January he started advertising himself as a passport photographer for departing evacuees. The room in which he set up a makeshift studio was also occupied by his dead mother, who lay hidden, dressed in her best clothes with an icon at her head, behind a cupboard and a piano. The scheme worked, earning 100 grams of bread per photograph. But it came too late for Olga, who died in her sleep on 20 March. ‘With Olya’s death’, wrote Zhilinsky, ‘has come the spring thaw, of which she dreamt all winter.’ She also died just too soon to receive a backlog of letters and money orders from relatives in evacuation, by whom the couple had mistakenly felt forgotten and deserted.
Zhilinsky was arrested without warning a week later, possibly at the instigation of hostile neighbours. Again, the police pounced on his diary, in which he had recorded his rather shrewd forecasts for the war. The Germans, he thought, had made a mistake in thinking they could ‘take a stroll, as if in Poland, to the Urals’, since the Russians, though not natural Bolsheviks, had a historic hatred of invaders and the advantages of boundless space, a ‘special psychology — “he’s a fool but he’s our fool”’, and the ability to do without. The Allies were drip-feeding the Soviet Union just enough aid to keep her fighting, but not enough to allow her to launch a major counter-offensive. After the war, they would turn Leningrad into an ‘international port’ and put pressure on the government to allow freedom of speech and religion, ‘in the full sense of those words. . Our lot, of course, will wriggle about just enough so that America and England back off and leave us to stew in our own juice. . In the end, we’ll find ourselves alone again with our Comintern, while the rest of the world remains democratic, parliamentary and capitalist, as we are accustomed to call the other side.’14 On the basis of these comments Zhilinsky was accused of ‘slandering Soviet reality’ and sentenced to death, later commuted to ten years’ imprisonment.
