Most visibly, the authorities failed to redistribute food stores so as to minimise the risk of loss in air raids. The result was the spectacular Badayev warehouse fire of 8 September, which Leningraders at the time believed to have destroyed almost the whole of the city’s food stocks — the air is described as filled with the smell of burning ham and sugar — and still remember as the trigger for their accelerating slide into starvation. (‘It was when life ended’, as Marina Yerukhmanova put it, ‘and existence began.’) Pavlov hotly disputes, in what is otherwise a rather impersonal account, the fire’s importance, claiming that the warehouses held boxes of old paperwork and spare parts, and that the only foods destroyed were 3,000 tonnes of flour and 2,500 tonnes of lump sugar, most of which was reprocessed into sweets. In terms of public morale, however, the Badayev fire was unquestionably a catastrophe. ‘Soon after’, Yerukhmanova remembered,
we were handed out eight kilograms of lentils, some canned crabmeat and a few other things. Everyone was unhappy that these handouts hadn’t been ordered in advance of the fire, rather than once it had already happened. To give such instructions in those days would probably have needed a lot of courage. But how was it that they didn’t have more foresight?8
Among the more successful of the Leningrad leadership’s initiatives in the autumn of 1941 were its efforts to gather food from inside the siege ring and to devise food substitutes. First came a drive, hampered by lack of transport, to bring in the harvest from the unoccupied countryside to the city’s east and north. For collective farmworkers (who did not qualify for rations) this meant a squeeze almost as severe as that which had caused the collectivisation famine of a decade earlier. A norm of what fell by November to fifteen kilograms of potatoes per person per month could be retained by the peasants themselves; the remainder had to be surrendered to requisitioning parties put together by local soviet executive committees. Peasants who hid their potatoes were ‘held responsible under wartime law’ — in other words, subjected to unspecified criminal punishment.9 Extra hands were also conscripted from the city — and carried home as much produce as they could. ‘On the main roads and on suburban trams’, a memorandum of 16 September complained, ‘hundreds of people can be observed with sacks and baskets. . Failure to take urgent measures to stop this anarchy will mean that the whole harvest is squandered into private hands.’10 The squeeze on the countryside continued, via a mixture of compulsory purchase, requisitioning and ‘donations’, throughout the first siege winter, producing a total 4,208 tonnes of potatoes and other vegetables, livestock representing 4,653 tonnes of meat, over 2,000 tonnes of hay, 547 tonnes of flour and grain and 179,000 eggs. Three-fifths of the flour and grain came from peasants’ private stores, as did over a quarter of the livestock and over half the potatoes.11
Within the city, institutions involved in food processing and distribution were ordered to search their premises for forgotten or defective stocks that could substitute for conventional flours in the production of bread. At the mills, flour dust was scraped from walls and from under floorboards; breweries came up with 8,000 tons of malt, and the army with oats previously destined for its horses. (The horses were instead fed with birch twigs soaked in hot water and sprinkled with salt. Another feed, involving compressed peat shavings and bonemeal, they rejected.) Grain barges sunk by bombing off Osinovets were salvaged by naval divers, and the rescued grain, which had begun to sprout, dried and milled. (The resulting bread, Pavlov admitted, reeked of mould.) At the docks, large quantities of cotton-seed cake, usually burned in ships’ furnaces, were discovered. Though poisonous in its raw state, its toxins were found to break down at high temperatures, and it too went into bread. Altogether these substitutions, together with successive ration reductions, reduced Leningrad’s consumption of flour from over 2,000 tonnes a day at the beginning of September to 880 tonnes a day by 1 November.
