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Trips to the front itself were also highly prized, since they often involved being treated to what felt like lavish meals. An actress entertaining troops in mid-December wonderingly recorded the menu of a ‘banquet’ to celebrate the ‘140 Heroes of the Patriotic War’ — 100 grams of alcohol per person, two glasses of beer, 300 grams of bread and one white roll, fifty grams of salted pork fat, two meat patties with buckwheat and gravy, a glass of cocoa with milk, sunflower seeds, a pack of Belomor cigarettes and a box of matches. She was also able to take 400 grams of boiled sweets back home.23 Vera Inber joined a delegation that visited the Volkhov front in February 1942, bearing shaving kits, guitars and five automatic rifles inscribed with the words ‘For the best exterminators of the German occupiers’. At breakfast she was thrilled to be served porridge, bread and a large chunk of butter. ‘What a marvellous thing! Next time I shall without fail bring a spoon.’ About a hundred workers’ delegations made similar trips in November and December.24 Other civilians managed to attach themselves to the warships moored around the city. Jobs aboard a submarine and a minelayer saved the engineers Chekrizov and Lazarev, and numerous writers and academics — like Boldyrev — earned themselves vital meals by giving readings or lectures to sailors. Visits home by front-line soldiers, in contrast, were forbidden, and doubly dangerous since a man walking alone through the streets in the small hours with a knapsack on his back made a tempting target for mugging or murder.

One of the surest survival techniques was to get employment in food processing or distribution. Leningraders with these sorts of jobs, unsurprisingly, seldom died of starvation. All 713 employees of the Krupskaya sweet factory survived; so did all those at the no. 4 bakery and at a margarine manufacturer. At the Baltika bakery, only twenty-seven out of what grew from 276 to 334 workers died, all the victims being men.25 Canteen waitresses and bread-shop salesgirls were notoriously ‘fat’, as were orphanage staff — a friend of Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s, spotting ‘Rubenesque’ young women in a newly reopened public bathhouse in the spring, automatically assumed that they worked in bakeries, soup kitchens or children’s homes.26 Menstruation having ceased for most during the winter, women who gave birth in 1942 were also assumed to have worked in a food plant or dining hall. (The only two pregnant women Chekrizov saw during the whole of the siege were both waitresses in his shipyard’s cafeteria.)

A measure of such women’s buying power was the fact that on the black market the most saleable items were not those of practical value, but fashionable women’s clothes. Skryabina traded dress fabric and a chiffon blouse for bread and rice with her former maid, now the squirrel-jacketed mistress of a warehouse manager.27 Boldyrev bribed the ‘tsaritsa of the kitchen’ at the Scholars’ Building with a lace handkerchief and yellow silk pompoms. Likhachev’s wife sold two dresses at the Sitny market for a kilo of bread and 1,200 grams of cattle cake.28 Despite a crackdown in the summer of 1942, theft and corruption continued to thrive within the food distribution system throughout the siege. As one Leningrader complained in a private letter (intercepted by the NKVD) in September of that year: ‘There are people who don’t know what hunger is, who’ve been positively spoiled. Look at the salesgirl in any shop, and you’ll see a gold watch on one wrist and a bracelet on the other.’ This was only one, the security men gloomily reported, of 10,820 similar complaints picked up in just ten days.29 Whistle-blowing was pointless: when Lazarev’s wife complained that the children in the paediatric hospital where she worked were getting less than half their allotted milk, she found herself despatched out of town to spend twelve hours a day digging the hospital’s vegetable plot.30

Likeliest to survive — and most resented — of all were the apparatchiks at Party headquarters. ‘I saw bread being delivered to the Smolniy myself’, an informer heard a woman hiss to her neighbour in a queue in late January. ‘They’re not hungry there. If they had to do without bread for a couple of days maybe they’d sit up and take notice, pay a bit more attention to us.’ ‘They’re stuffing their faces’, said another. ‘We starve, and watch their fat mugs being driven about in automobiles. It’s not fair.’31