Читаем Leningrad полностью

The Russian language makes the morally vital distinction between trupoyedstvo — ‘corpse-eating’ — and lyudoyedstvo — ‘person-eating’, or murder for cannibalism. The gruesome cases of intra-family killing highlighted by the police notwithstanding, the former was overwhelmingly more common (of the 300 ‘users of human meat for food’ arrested in April 1942, for example, only forty-four were murderers).28 Organised gangsterism was extremely rare: the NKVD reports mention only one such case — that of six young men, three of them railway workers, who lured a series of thirteen victims, mostly picked up outside bread shops, with offers of barter to a flat, where they were despatched with an axe-blow to the back of the head.29 Cannibalism was also significantly less common in the city centre than in the suburbs, which were poorer, worse policed and hosted the overflowing cemeteries. (The largest numbers of arrests were made in the outlying Primorsky and Krasno Gvardeisky districts and on the industrial Vyborg Side; the smallest in the Smolniy district, home to Party headquarters.30) On 22 December police patrolling the Serafimovskoye cemetery in Novaya Derevnya stopped two women carrying sacks, whch were found to contain the bodies of three infants. Questioning revealed that one woman was the wife of a soldier away at the front, the other that of a janitor, and that they had planned to feed the meat to their daughters, aged eighteen months and sixteen. Two more bodysnatchers — a factory worker and a carpenter — were arrested at the Serafimovskoye the following day; they too had planned to use the contents of their sacks to feed their children.31 A forty-three-year-old unemployed man, his wife and thirteen-year-old son were caught ‘systematically stealing’ corpses from a hospital morgue, and a twenty-four-year-old nurse was arrested for scavenging amputated limbs from an operating room.32

Other easily accessible corpses were those of colleagues or relatives who had died of starvation. Typical of the kind of cooperative action this sort of trupoyedstvo often engendered were a clutch of cases in January and February. At the First of May Factory a group of nine men, all of whom lived in the same hostel, shared the corpse of a workmate.33 At the Lenin Factory a woman worker shared the corpse of her eleven-year-old son with two female friends. A cleaner shared the body of her husband with her unemployed neighbour; the electrician and the deputy manager of a public bathhouse together ate its dead boilerman.34 Three members of a civil defence team, one a Party member, shared a corpse they discovered while making safe a bomb-damaged building.35

The optical engineer Dmitri Lazarev gives a first-hand account of being invited to join such an enterprise:

Valentina Antonovna (a friend of Nina’s [Lazarev’s wife]) came round. Trembling with emotion, she recounted how yesterday a woman tried to drag her into a horrible business. Earlier in the day some civil defence workers had been crushed to death by falling beams, while dismantling a building on Krestovsky [Island]. Their bodies had been taken to an empty shed next to the flat in which this woman lives alone. She proposed to Valentina Antonovna that they take the corpse of one of the girls to her flat, prepare the meat, eat some and salt the rest for future use. She said she had firewood, but couldn’t manage everything on her own. As an inducement she cited the example of her sister, who has been eating human meat for three weeks, has got back her strength and feels much better. Imperiously she said that she would brook no hesitation, that it was a question of life and death, and that the next morning she would call round and they would go to work together.

Valentina Antonovna didn’t sleep all night. At one and the same time she refused, outraged, even to consider the suggestion, and convinced herself, looking at her sleeping grown-up son, that for his sake she ought to agree. But then she began imagining in detail what it would actually involve, and leapt up: ‘No! Anything but that! I would lose my mind!’ Before morning she had again convinced herself that it wasn’t murder, that the girls were dead anyway, and that if she didn’t do it her tall, broad-shouldered son would die of starvation. On this she went back to sleep, awoke this morning, and waited for her guest. But when the woman appeared Valentina Antonovna’s reaction, quite unexpectedly, was a furious refusal. The woman left, viciously swearing and cursing.36