Substitutes were often dangerous. Even if not poisonous in themselves, they could cause diarrhoea and vomiting, or damage thinned stomach linings. Anything, though, was better than nothing. Glycerine contained calories, Leningraders discovered, as did tooth powder, cough medicine and cold cream. Factory workers ate industrial casein (an ingredient in paint), dextrine (used to bind sand in foundry moulds), tank grease and machine oil. At the Physiological Institute Pavlov’s slavering dogs were eaten; at another, scientists shared out their stocks of ‘Liebig extract’ — a dried meat broth made from the embryos of calves and used as a medium for growing bacteria. One father brought home the maggoty knee of a reindeer, an air-raid casualty at the zoo.11
Eaten also were the vast majority of household pets. ‘All day long’, a wife wrote to her husband at the front, ‘we’re busy trying to find something to eat. With Papa we’ve eaten two cats. They’re so hard to find and catch that we’re all looking out for a dog, but there are none to be seen.’12 One family, to save themselves embarrassment in front of neighbours, referred to cat meat by the French
love their children as much as Messer and his wife loved their big pointer Graalya. Tender tears used to well in Yelizaveta Alekseyevna’s eyes as she watched the dog frisking on the grass. During the hunting season, Messer would take his darling prize-winner out every Sunday, setting off proudly and ceremoniously, with proper Germanic formality.
In January 1942 they ate her. Messer cut her throat while Yelizaveta Alekseyevna held her down. The dog was strong; they couldn’t manage it on their own, so asked Pimenova for help, promising a piece of meat in return. But at the end of the whole operation all they gave her was the intestines.14
This was the period, also, when private stocks of food or tradeables started to mean the difference between life and death. One family unearthed a suitcase full of ‘fossilised’ rusks, laid in twenty years earlier during the Civil War. Another, a ten-year-old diarist recorded, came upon a box of candles, which they were able to sell for 625 roubles — they had cost only eight kopeks apiece when his father bought them back in 1923. The classicist Olga Fridenberg kept herself and her mother going on a package of tinned food that they had earlier prepared for her brother prior to his departure for the Gulag. Another woman traded her dead husband’s clothes, bought on a pre-war visit to America. The trip had cost him his life — he had been shot as a capitalist sympathiser during the Terror — but the good-quality suits and jackets helped to save his family.
When there was no food to be had, fantasies took its place. Igor Kruglyakov, eight years old at the time of the siege, remembers going through the family box of Christmas decorations with his sister, looking for walnuts: ‘Their insides were dry and shrivelled, but we ate them, they felt like food. We picked all the crumbs out of the cracks in our big, dirty kitchen table — again, they seemed like food. I can’t say that it cheered us up, it was just a way to pass the time.’ At the end of November his grandfather died of ‘hunger diarrhoea’ — possibly, Kruglyakov’s mother agonised, because she had in desperation given him diluted potassium permanganate — the bright purple, all-purpose disinfectant known as
