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I remember the death of Yasinsky. He had once been a tall, slim, very handsome old man, who reminded me of Don Quixote. During the winter he moved to the Pushkin House library, sleeping on a folding bed, behind the book stacks. . His mouth wouldn’t close and saliva trickled from it; his face was black, making an eerie contrast with his completely white, unkempt hair. His skin was taut over his bones. . His lips became thinner and thinner and failed to cover his teeth, which protruded and made his head look like a tortoise’s. Once he emerged from the stacks with a blanket over his shoulders and asked ‘What’s the time?’ Then he asked if it was day or night (dystrophics’ voices became slurred, as the vocal chords atrophied). He couldn’t tell because in the lobby all the windows were boarded up. A day or two later our deputy director, Kanailov, drove away everyone who had tried to settle down to die in Pushkin House, so as not to have to remove their bodies. Several of our ancillary staff — porters, caretakers, cleaning women — died like this. They had been drafted in, torn from their families, and then when they no longer had the strength to get home they were thrown out in thirty degrees of frost. Kanailov kept a close eye on all those who weakened, and not a single person died on the premises.17

In January 1942 Kanailov arranged his own evacuation across Lake Ladoga, offering friends places in his lorry if they carried his cases, which he stuffed with antique carpets and other valuables. The cases themselves — beautiful old ones in yellow leather — weren’t his either, being part of a bequest from a book-loving illegitimate son of Alexander III. More Pushkin House valuables were stolen by sailors from a nearby submarine, who were allowed to move in — and appropriate Turgenev’s sofa and Blok’s bed — in exchange for supplying Kanailov’s (slightly less corrupt) replacement with soup and electric light. ‘In the spring’, Likhachev remembered, ‘when the Neva thawed, the sailors left the Institute one fine day without any warning, taking with them as much as they could carry. After they had gone I found on the floor a gilded plaque: Chaadayev’s clock. The clock itself had disappeared. On what ocean floor does it rest now?’18

By far the best organisations to be connected to, to escape starvation, were the armed services, the food processing and distribution agencies, or Party headquarters at the Smolniy.

Front-line life, for soldiers in the trenches around Leningrad, was extraordinarily hard. They were brutally and capriciously disciplined, made to march long distances in filthy footcloths and ill-fitting boots, gouged ditches and dugouts out of the frozen ground with crowbars and pickaxes, slept outdoors on the snow wrapped in their greatcoats, waged a constant war against rats and lice, and during offensives went without hot food for days. Nonetheless their ration, even at its lowest, included a daily 500 grams of bread. Though in some units food was systematically stolen by the upper ranks, the full ration was possible to live on, and in general enough food circulated within the military so as to support not only servicemen and women but also their dependants.

Wives and girlfriends of officers stationed in the city itself were noticeably better off than the average, earning the resentful nickname ‘defence ladies’. One such lived next door to Georgi Knyazev in the Academicians’ Building. Wife of a military engineer, she traded small quantities of bread, sugar and rice for her neighbours’ tablecloths, towels, carpets and lamps. Though the food was useful, it also proved, Knyazev wryly noted, that ‘even in starving Leningrad, there are some well-fed types!’19 In early February 1942 a smooth-faced, smartly uniformed officer appeared at Yelena Skryabina’s door to serve her with evacuation papers. He seemed like a member of an alien species, ‘literally a creature from another world who had accidentally landed on our planet. . For the hundredth time you reflect on how differently situated those with power or advantage are, from ordinary people who have nothing but their ration cards.’20 Servicemen also feature as the heroes of what siege historiographers call ‘saviour stories’ — the accounts, related by numerous survivors, of kind strangers turning up at the eleventh hour with life-saving gifts of food. Though part of siege mythology — one historian even likens them to the Great War’s Angel of Mons21 — many of these stories are undoubtedly true. Igor Kruglyakov remembers that ‘just before or just after New Year we had a knock on the door from a young, rosy-cheeked pilot. He brought two boxes, from Father. One contained butter and flour, the second was full of sukhari. This saved us.’ Skryabina’s family was rescued by a completely unknown soldier who appeared one day on her doorstep with a pail of sauerkraut.22