*The system was admired by Hitler, who planned to install a loudspeaker in every Ukrainian village. They would not broadcast news, but ‘cheerful music’, giving Ukrainians ‘plenty of opportunities to dance’.

13. Svyazi

A not quite translatable word meant a great deal in the Soviet Union: svyazi, or ‘connections’ — the combination of string-pulling, exchange of favours and bribery by means of which citizens were able to work their way round the state’s monopoly on goods and employment to get themselves everything from jobs, telephones and university places to a bucket of potatoes or a new pair of shoes. In peacetime, astute use of svyazi improved one’s standard of living; during the siege it meant the difference between life and death.

If the typical Leningrader’s first line of defence against starvation was immediate family, the second was his or her network of friends. Especially among the city’s close-knit intelligentsia families, friendships — based on several generations of connection by marriage, education and profession, plus shared experience of fear and impoverishment — could be both extensive and remarkably strong. Not unusual was the experience of widowed, childless Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, who was given small but heartening presents of food by old colleagues from her late husband’s chemical research institute. ‘My friend Petr Yevgenevich visited today’, she wrote on New Year’s Day 1942. ‘He brought a handful of oatmeal for kisel [a thickened fruit drink], and Ivan Yemelyanovich brought three sprats.’ The pair reappeared a few weeks later, this time with 200 grams of bread, dried onion, mustard powder, ‘a tiny piece of meat, four dried white mushrooms, and four frozen potatoes (the first we’ve seen since the autumn). This is priceless treasure, and I was extremely grateful, especially since for the past week all we’ve had to eat is seaweed. . A celebration!’1 Similarly loyal were the retired railway clerk Ivan Zhilinsky and his wife Olga, who looked after an old friend whose family had departed into evacuation. They invited him to share wine and duranda at New Year — painstakingly cleaning their room and clothes beforehand, and giving him a wash and shave on arrival — took him in when his flat was made uninhabitable by shelling, and finally traded bread so as to give him a proper grave. If Olga had not also died of starvation, and Ivan been arrested by the NKVD, they would have adopted his children. Smaller acts of kindness could make all the difference, too: one siege survivor remembers the teenage girl next door bringing firewood filched from her job at a lumberyard — ‘Not a lot of it, but for us it was everything.’2 On a different level, Olga Grechina — aged nineteen and living completely alone — found human comfort in brief, heartfelt conversations with strangers on the street, who in January and February tended to walk together in pairs for fear of mugging:

It was interesting to observe people’s contradictory impulses: on the one hand you fear that your most valuable possession, your ration card, might be stolen; on the other you want, even just for the short walk home, to be with someone who will listen. Never since have I experienced such an odd, uncontrollable desire to tell a complete stranger everything about myself. .

Saying goodbye, each would thank the other for their company and wish that they might live to see victory. There was a new etiquette in this farewell, for the form of words was almost always exactly the same, whether spoken by a simple person or an educated one. The simple women, having heard my unhappy story, would commiserate with me and comfort me, saying that I was young and that everything would come again — home, education, friends. In these naive but sincere good wishes I found the vitamin I needed to live. And that was why I, like everyone else, in reply to my companion’s story would tell my own.3