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Rank-and-file Party members — mostly ordinary workers — were not very much better off than ordinary citizens. Seventeen thousand Party members — 15 per cent of the total — are estimated to have starved to death in the first half of 1942. Though this was half or less of the overall civilian mortality rate of 30–40 per cent, the comparison is not direct, since the membership’s demographic — mostly men, relatively few old people, no children — differed from that of the general population.32 Food supply was unquestionably better, however, for the bureaucrats employed at Party headquarters. It is often said that Zhdanov ate ordinary workers’ rations during the siege, but given the meals on offer in the Smolniy this seems highly improbable. Visitors came away with tantalising hints of abundant food — to Likhachev, attending a meeting about a book commission, it ‘smelled like a dining room’, and a Red Army supply officer remembered delivering smoked ham, sturgeon and caviar, left over from a shipment out of the city to officials’ evacuated families.33

The best (and unique) first-person account of what Leningrad’s elite actually ate comes from Nikolai Ribkovsky, an official in the Profsoyuz, the Party-sponsored trades union. Aged thirty-eight at the start of the war, Ribkovsky came from a peasant family, was a fervent Stalinist and a member of the generation of functionaries who did well out of the Terror, stepping swiftly into the shoes of their purged seniors. Prior to landing a job in the Smolniy in early December 1941, he lived like any Leningrader, worrying about his wife and son in evacuation (‘I’ve saved a few bars of chocolate to send to Serezhenka’), queuing for the ordinary rations and becoming ordinarily emaciated: ‘Is this my body or did it get swapped for somebody else’s without me noticing? My legs and wrists are like a growing child’s, my stomach has caved in, my ribs stick out from top to bottom.’ His Smolniy post, as an instructor in the ‘cadres department’ of the city soviet, was a passport to a different world. ‘For breakfast in the mornings’, he wrote on his fourth day into the job,

macaroni or spaghetti, or kasha with butter, and two glasses of sweet tea. Lunch — first course soup, second course meat. Yesterday for example, I had vegetable soup with sour cream, followed by a mince patty with vermicelli. Today for the first course, soup with vermicelli, for the second, pork with steamed cabbage. In the evening, for those still at work, free bread and butter with cheese, a bun, and a couple of glasses of sweet tea. Not bad. They only cut coupons for the bread and meat; everything else is off-ration. This means that with your spare coupons you can go to the shops and buy grain, butter and anything else available, and take a bit home.

Though many Smolniy staff were coming down with diarrhoea, the building was warm, clean and light, and its sewerage and running water worked normally. Other Leningraders, he noted, ‘go to the bathroom right in their flats, and then empty it just anywhere, and don’t wash their hands before eating. . Meeting such people — and you meet them quite often — is unpleasant.’

In March 1942 Ribkovsky was sent to the city soviet’s ‘Rest House’ — effectively a hotel — in a dacha village to the north of the city:

The surroundings are lovely. Little two-storey dachas with covered porches, surrounded by soaring pines, reaching right up to the sky. . After a walk in the cold, tired and a little hazy in the head from the forest smells, you come home to a warm, cosy room, sink into a soft armchair and gratefully stretch out your legs.

The food here is like in a good peacetime Rest House: varied, delicious, high-quality. Every day there’s meat — lamb, ham, chicken, goose, turkey and sausage. For fish — bream, Baltic herring and smelt — fried, poached or in aspic. Caviar, smoked sturgeon, cheese, pirozhki, cocoa, coffee, tea, 300 grams of white bread and of black bread every day, thirty grams of butter and to top it all off, fifty grams of wine and good port with lunch and dinner. . We eat, drink, spend time outdoors, sleep or just do nothing while listening to the Pathephone, swapping jokes and playing dominoes or cards. . I am almost unaware of the war, which reminds us of its presence only by the distant bang of guns, though we are only a few dozen kilometres from the front.

The district soviets, he added defensively, were said to do themselves no less well, ‘and several organisations have recuperation clinics with which ours pale in comparison’.34 From the end of February district soviets also fed NKVD staff, on whose shoulders much of the ordinary administration of the city had fallen once the bulk of Party and Komsomol members departed for the front.35