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A fifty-gram increase in the non-manual worker’s ration from 24 January also proved illusory. Although by this time flour was arriving fairly reliably via the Ice Road, the improvement coincided with a breakdown in water supply to the bakeries, with the result that for several days at the end of January and the beginning of February almost no bread was distributed at all. When the manager of a shop on Sovetsky Prospekt announced that he had only enough bread left for a few dozen people the crowd ‘exploded in frenzied noise and shouting’: ‘They do what they want with us! Yesterday they gave us a ration increase, and today they take away all the bread!’ ‘They’re taking away the last of our rations. What do they really want? They want us all to die like animals!’ ‘They plug our mouths with this fifty grams, but you have to queue for five hours in the cold to get it!’ ‘There’s a war on, so they think civilians should die too!’13 A bookkeeper at the Comedy Theatre was overheard saying, ‘The people are starving, but they bring Zhdanov cocoa in bed.’ Ominously, his name is underlined in Zhdanov’s copy of the report.14

On 13 January the chair of the city soviet, Petr Popkov, broadcast a speech in which he claimed that the worst was over, and that food supply was already beginning to improve. As an engineer rashly but rightly commented, these were ‘empty words, intended to pacify the population’.15 They had the opposite effect. Commentary from the crowd outside a shop on Dictatorship of the Proletariat (shortened, appropriately, to plain ‘Dictatorship’) Square was biting: ‘Of course Popkov’s got enough to eat — it’s easy for him to speak. I’d like him to come out here and see how we’re freezing.’ ‘They’re always saying that things are getting better. But how are they getting better exactly? I’ve already been waiting for bread for four hours, and there’s no sign of any.’ ‘Fine words from Popkov — he’s full, and he’s feeding us promises.’ ‘Soon they’ll be evacuating us to Volkovo cemetery.’16 The schoolgirl Klara Rakhman heard the speech on her family’s radio: ‘He says this whole story’s only going to last another few more days, that soon things will get better. But when? Probably when we’ve already kicked the bucket.’ Rumours circulated that Popkov had been arrested for sabotage, that Leningrad was about to be declared an ‘open city’, that Stalin was secretly negotiating peace or that he no longer cared about the city since it was to be handed over to Britain and America when the war was over.17

Popkov’s hypocrisy stung some into threatening talk. ‘He’ll start talking sense’, said a theatre employee, ‘when we go and smash up the shops.’ ‘Look what our leaders have driven us to — people are killing and eating their children’, a housewife declared. ‘And we fools sit and say nothing. We need to rise up if we’re not all to die of hunger. It’s time to end this war.’18 Nonetheless, only two accounts exist of anti-government demonstrations. The first, described in a German intelligence report, is said to have taken place at the Kirov Works in mid-October 1941. Hearing news that a Kirov-staffed regiment had been annihilated on the Finnish front, workers reportedly downed tools and demanded peace. NKVD troops fired into the crowd, killing many, and took the ringleaders away in lorries.19

The second account comes from a memoir written in emigration by Vasili Yershov, a former Red Army supply officer. He describes walking along Prospekt Stachek, the thoroughfare leading south towards the front line from the industrial Avtovo district, on the morning of Revolution Day, 7 November 1941, and seeing a crowd of several hundred ten- to fourteen-year-old children walking up to an army checkpoint. Reaching under their coats, they produced bundles of flyers bearing incitements to mutiny — ‘Twenty-four years ago you destroyed Tsarism! Please destroy the hated Kremlin-Smolniy executioners now!’ — and started handing them over the barrier to soldiers. A commissar ordered the soldiers to fire, and when they refused, fired himself. At the same moment a German artillery barrage began and the children scattered. Twenty children were arrested, together with the soldiers who had refused to shoot and several dozen of those soldiers’ relatives.20