From 27 November residential buildings were banned from using electricity between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., by which time it was anyway supplied very erratically or not at all. For light and heat, Leningraders turned instead to the technologies of the village. Various sorts of home-made lamp were devised — an improvised ‘bat’ or storm lantern and the koptilka, or ‘smoker’, which consisted of a wick suspended in a small bottle, tin cup or upturned kettle lid. Both types burned dirtily, covering faces, hands and walls in sticky black soot. When kerosene ran out — a final two and a half litres per person was distributed in September — camphor, stain-remover, machine oil, eau-de-cologne and insecticide were burned instead. All rapidly disappeared from the shops and fetched increasingly outlandish prices in the street markets. The second vital piece of siege equipment was a small, usually home-made metal stove, or burzhuika, its pipe leading outdoors via a boarded-up or cushion-stuffed casement window. Into it went wood scavenged from bomb sites, furniture (in the street markets, wardrobes fetched more chopped up than whole), graveyard crosses, books and parquet tiles. Georgi Knyazev was advised by the Tartar wife of the Academy boilerman to feed his with dried faeces, as practised on the steppe. The burzhuika nickname — from the Russian for ‘bourgeois’ — came from the stoves’ tubby shape, or from their greediness for fuel, or from the fact that it was the old middle classes who had resorted to them during the Civil War. (Metalworking equipment used to make burzhuiki, a crime report of January 1942 noted, was being stolen from factories and sold on the black market.) Third — and today most powerfully symbolic of the blockade of all — came the sanki, or child’s sled, vital for transporting firewood, water and, finally, corpses.
Leningraders also had to master village skills. They learned that birch wood burned well and aspen badly, that dried maple leaves could substitute for tobacco, and how to light the resulting cigarette, rolled in newspaper, by holding a lens up to the sunlight, or by striking metal against stone. Oddly, few tried to ice-fish, probably because they lacked the necessary lines and drills. One man, a theatre producer, likened it to being in a time machine. The blockade had hurled Leningrad back to the eighteenth century — but worse, because people no longer owned fur coats, there weren’t wells at every corner any more, and water had to be carried home in kettles instead of with buckets and yokes.9 In most apartment buildings the water supply failed by degrees, starting with the top floor. When the last tap dried residents resorted first to neighbouring buildings, then to broken pipes and ice holes, cut by the fire brigade, on the frozen canals and river. Over time, spillages turned into icy hillocks, up which one had to push oneself and one’s receptacle on hands and knees. Dmitri Likhachev was able to collect water from a fire hydrant, dragging it home on a sled in a zinc baby’s bath. Less sloshed out on the way, he discovered, if he floated a few sticks in it first. His elderly father (‘the most inconsistent and short-tempered man I ever knew’) turned out to be unexpectedly good at chopping wood, being a veteran, like the burzhuiki, of the Civil War. Zoologists, Likhachev remarks, survived the siege, because they knew how to catch rats and pigeons. Impractical mathematicians died.
As the official ration dwindled and private stocks ran out, Leningraders also sought out their own, increasingly desperate, substitute foods. The commonest of these were zhmykh and duranda — the husks of linseed, cotton, hemp or sunflower seeds, pressed into blocks and normally fed to cattle. Grated and fried in oil, they could be turned into ‘pancakes’, the elaborate preparation of which helped give the comforting impression of a real meal. Also near-universally eaten was joiner’s glue, made from the bones and hooves of slaughtered animals. Likhachev found eight sheets of it at Pushkin House, which his wife soaked in several changes of water then boiled with bay leaves to make a foul-smelling jelly, which they forced down with the help of vinegar and mustard. They also cooked up the semolina used to clean their daughters’ white sheepskin jackets: ‘It was full of strands of wool and grey with dirt, but we were all glad of it.’ An art teacher searched the flats of evacuated friends: ‘I rummaged in all the cupboards and took rusks of any kind — green, mouldy, anything. . Altogether I collected a small bagful. I was extremely pleased to have got quite a good amount. Later one of my students brought me oilcake — three blocks this size. That was something tremendous — three blocks of oilcake!’10 He also ate linseed oil and fish glue, used for mixing paints and priming canvases.
