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More crime must have gone unrecorded, since in the depths of the winter the police themselves partially ceased to function. On 10 February the head of the Leningrad NKVD, P. N. Kubatkin, asked his superiors in Moscow for a thousand new men to guard the city’s factories, since of the 2,800 men of his existing brigade, 152 had died of ‘exhaustion’, 1,080 were in hospital and at least a hundred reported in sick each day.13 The Pavlovsk curator Anna Zelenova, one of whose jobs was to take privately owned antiques into official safekeeping, once emerged from a (reportedly grateful) collector’s flat to find the policeman who had accompanied her dead on a chair on the landing.14 Other anecdotal evidence is of widespread corruption and summary justice. ‘If they discovered that bread had been stolen’, a post-war émigré recalled, ‘they would round up five people and shoot them for it, whether they had been involved or not.’15

But overall, the impression given by survivors of the first siege winter is less of fear of muggers and murderers, more of silence, emptiness and isolation. Eleven-year-old Anzhelina Kupaigorodskaya lived through it alone in her family’s flat on the Fontanka, her chemical engineer parents having been forced to move into their workplaces. Seven decades later, she credits her survival to a list of rules written down for her on a piece of paper by her father: she was to wash and empty her slop bucket daily, never to collect more than one day’s ration at a time, and regularly to visit the post office in case relatives had wired money. Going outdoors, she remembers, was frightening, but not because she feared crime — indeed, she only learned that there was any long after the war, by reading about it. At the time she felt ‘alone in the city, absolutely alone. I would walk to the shop and back, enter our courtyard, climb the stairs and go in my door. If anybody had wanted to they could have pushed me over with their little finger. But I never met a soul.’16 Kochina, waiting for her husband to return from his bread-thieving expeditions, used to go out on to the landing to listen for his arrival: ‘From below silence rose like steam, condensing on the staircase. I spat into the stairwell and listened to how the spittle smacked resoundingly below. I stood in the darkness for a long time, spitting and listening.’17

Most notorious of the crimes that flourished during the siege — and most symptomatic of Leningraders’ desperation — was cannibalism. The poet Olga Berggolts first heard of it from a psychiatrist friend:

Not long ago Prendel told us that corpse-eating is on the rise. In May [1942] his hospital dealt with fifteen cases, compared with eleven in April. He had to — and still has to — give expert advice on whether cannibals are responsible for their actions. Cannibalism — a fact. He told us about a cannibal couple who first ate the small corpse of their child, then entrapped three more children — killed them and ate them. . For some reason I found what he was saying funny — genuinely funny, especially when he tried to exonerate them. I said, ‘But you didn’t eat your grandmother!’ And after that I just couldn’t take his cannibal stories seriously. It’s all so disgusting — cannibals, roofs with holes in them, blown-out windows, pointlessly destroyed cities. Oh yes, the heroism and romance of war!18

Until the publication of police records in 2004, evidence as to the use of human meat for food during the siege was anecdotal: the rumours, believed by Leningraders at the time, of children kidnapped on the street, and diary reports of corpses stripped of thighs and buttocks as well as clothing. A lurid description of a young couple lured into an apartment-turned-slaughterhouse, related as fact by Harrison Salisbury in his The 900 Days, on closer inspection turns out to have been drawn from a novel published, presumably under the auspices of Nazi propagandists, in occupied Ukraine.19