The heartbreaking diary of twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva, who died of malnutrition in 1944, survives; in a childlike hand, she recorded the terrible fate of her family on seven sheets of paper:
Zhenya died Dec. 28 at 12:30 A.M. 1941. Grandmother died Jan. 25 at 3 P.M. 1942. Lyoka died March 17 at 5 A.M. 1942. Uncle Vasya died Apr. 13 at 2 A.M. 1942. Uncle Lyosha May 10 at 4 P.M. 1942. Mama May 13 at 7:30 A.M. 1942. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya remains.
The real Petersburgers—noble, restrained, scrupulous—died first as a rule: it was harder for them to adjust to the inhuman conditions of existence, to the struggle for survival. The artist Pavel Filonov died in his studio on December 3,1941—he had been on hunger rations even before the blockade; his exhausted body did not last long.
Children suffered in particular from hunger, turning into wizened little beings very quickly. Like the adults, they thought and talked about food constantly. One Leningrad woman recalled her son, fiveyear-old Tolya:
He was so skinny that he rarely got out of bed, and he kept saying, “Mama! I could eat a whole bucket of porridge and a whole sack of potatoes.” I tried to distract him. I tried telling him stories, but he kept interrupting, “You know, Mama, I’d eat a loaf of bread this big”—and pointed at the washtub. I said, “No, you wouldn’t. It wouldn’t fit in your tummy.” And he argued, “I would, Mama, I would. I’d stay up and eat and eat and eat.” He looked like a baby bird, just a mouth and big brown eyes, such sad eyes.144
Little Tolya suggested to his mother several times that he be killed, maybe by gas. “At first it would make my head ache, but then I would fall asleep.” Many children spoke in those terms during the blockade. One girl consoled her mother, “If I start dying, I’ll do it very quietly, so as not to frighten you.”145
Rumors of cannibalism circulated in Leningrad, which were never reflected in Soviet publications. But some survivors of the siege did touch on this taboo topic with me. One woman told me, “I once traded a chunk of bread for a piece of jellied meat. I brought it home, we started to eat, when my father spat it out. ‘It’s made of human flesh.’ And who was to know whether it was human flesh or not. But we didn’t eat it, we couldn’t. How could we have looked each other in the eye afterward?”
The dying experienced a strange sense of liberation. The academician Dmitri Likhachev, who survived the blockade, wrote, “Only someone dying of hunger leads a real life, can perform the vilest deed or the greatest sacrifice, without fear of death.” Similar emotions were expressed by Olga Berggolts, the bard of the blockade, whose line “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten” is carved on the stela of the monument commemorating the victims of the siege. Her poem reads,
More than one survivor of the blockade described this sense of inner liberation, an emotional flight, to me. It involves the physiology of hunger, when the body seems weightless and visionary impulses are sharpened, heightening the potential for sacrifice and mysticism. And many Leningraders justifiably felt superpatriotic once again: the city’s inhabitants often recalled that never had an enemy set foot on Petersburg soil, and it was not to be this time, either.
These intense and noble emotions and the heroic behavior of Leningrad under siege were skillfully exploited by Stalin’s propaganda machine, which cleverly mixed truth with lies. On the one hand, articles, poems, and songs appeared about the exploits of the Leningraders; on the other hand, the terrible facts of the siege were classified. Olga Freidenberg, who spent the entire blockade in Leningrad, recalled,
The hunger and the killing of people in Leningrad were a deep secret for Moscow and the provinces. The censors had a legal (military) right to check all our letters. You could not tell, nor complain, nor appeal. The newspapers and radio screamed about the courage and valor of the besieged; the deaths were vaguely termed “sacrifices on the altar of the Fatherland.” There was something bizarre about having these besieged people, these starving ghosts, left without water and fuel, be proclaimed officially as the luckiest people in the country.… Our hardships were not only hidden from the world, but the official version spread the rumor that things were better in Leningrad than in the rest of the country, including Moscow. But the people stubbornly insisted that “Stalin does not like our city, if Lenin were alive, things wouldn’t be like this.”146
