But the diaries and memoirs, almost by definition, come from the families that managed to hold on, and hold together. Very many did not, and the descriptions of those who gave up the fight — the unanswered door; darkness, stink and cold; still figures under heaped blankets; muttered ravings — are numerous and near-identical. With a mixture of disgust and pity Mariya Mashkova recorded the disintegration of neighbouring families in number 18 Sadovaya Street — most, like her, employees of the Public Library. One neighbour, until recently head of a ‘strong, alert, energetic’ household, having seen her husband leave for the army, her parents fall to quarrelling and stealing as they died, and her daughter taken away to a children’s home, ceased to care about anything except food: ‘[Her] overwhelming craving is to eat, to eat without end, savour and enjoy. . Her husband’s visits home frighten her — he might take her portion of bread. I recognise this state of mind — it’s in me, in Olga, in everybody.’16 Another turned on her ten-year-old son after he lost his ration card:
What never ceases to amaze me is the metamorphosis that has taken place in this loving mother, who we always used to tease for fussing so much about her Igoryok. . Now she has turned into a wolf, stripped of humanity by hunger. Her only care is to snatch a piece of food from Igor, and her only fear that he will take a crumb of bread from her, or steal a spoonful of soup made from her grain. When I went to talk to her about getting help for Igor she didn’t even listen to what I was saying. She was tormented by one fear — that he would get his hands on her card, or eat her bread. She categorically stated, ‘I’m hungry, I want to live. I don’t care about Igor and his hunger. He lost his card, let him deal with it himself.’ She’s not going to give him anything. She must survive and she’s not interested in anything else. She hates and envies anybody who’s still on their feet. . Igor just stood there, not saying anything, and devouring a piece of bread which the neighbours had given him out of pity. She was shouting angrily, ‘Don’t believe his complaints! Look what a huge piece of bread he’s stuffing down his throat, while I lie here hungry and weak!’ Igor, despite the horror and tragedy of their situation, is calm and never complains. He may no longer be of sound mind.17
For those living in communal flats, whose kitchens, bathrooms and hallways were shared, neighbours’ breakdowns could be very close indeed. Igor Kruglyakov, kept alive by the iron discipline of his mother and grandmother (no talk of death was allowed, and he and his sister were forced to stand outdoors in the snow for ten minutes each day to get light and air), heard the couple in the next-door room first quarrelling, then fighting, then thumps on the wall as the wife killed their baby.18
A consummate siege survivor was the Persianist Aleksandr Boldyrev. Good-looking, egotistical and possessed of a mordant wit, he had dodged the purges of 1936–7 by spending long spells in hospital with ulcers, or on research trips to remote parts of Central Asia. When war broke out he avoided the draft with the help of his lover, a colleague at the Hermitage, who interceded for him with the museum’s director via her long-suffering husband. Though not a Party member, Boldyrev continued indefatigably to work his contacts through the siege, inscribing himself at the Scholars’ Building and the Eastern Institute as well as at the Hermitage, and eating a daily ‘lunch’ at each. From the Hermitage he also managed to squeeze a manual worker’s card and, remarkably, 1,417 roubles in compensation for his lost summer holiday. He also delivered historical lectures — on ‘Peter’s Fleet’, ‘The Literature of the Fraternal Peoples of Central Asia’ and ‘Today’s Afghanistan’ — to sailors on Leningrad’s ice-bound ships. Sometimes these commissions meant a long walk across the city for no return, but usually they earned him a meal and a few Little Star cigarettes. His siege diary reads like an ever-changing to-do list of officials to be petitioned, debts to be called in and barter deals to be followed up — shifts he describes as like ‘leaping from tussock to tussock through a bog’.19 He managed, too, not to lose hope (the siege was always about to be lifted; England always about to open a second front) or his sense of humour. ‘All the time’, he wrote on 10 February, ‘sitting, standing or lying, I am reminded of my extreme emaciation. Especially striking is the disappearance of my buttocks, the one really distinguished aspect of my person, of which I was very proud. Now I have no bottom at all; my pelvis and hip bones clink against the chair.’
