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The March — April clean-up campaign is one of the set pieces of the siege, quoted as a turning point in almost every survivor interview, and credited with miraculously preventing epidemics of the three classic famine diseases — dysentery, typhoid fever and typhus. In reality, this was not quite true. Though the overall death rate fell from March onwards, in April numbers of dysentery and typhoid cases per thousand head of population were five to six times higher than a year earlier, and of typhus, twenty-five times higher. Quoting these numbers in a private letter to Zhdanov in mid-May, the head of the Leningrad garrison angrily blamed inadequate medical services and washing facilities. Half the city’s public bathhouses, he pointed out, still weren’t working; only 7 per cent of flats had running water and 9 per cent sewerage, and up to a third of households still suffered serious lice infection. Many courtyards were still covered in human waste. Typhus ‘hotspots’ included recuperation clinics, children’s homes, railway stations and evacuation points, and unless urgent measures were taken, would soon include army barracks.29 Dysentery — known as ‘hunger diarrhoea’ — also figures frequently in diarists’ accounts; it was often what finished off the already starving. Boldyrev managed to joke about it. Forced, on his way to a meeting with Hermitage administrators, to ‘do the unmentionable’ in an empty gallery — the one that normally housed Raphael’s Madonna Conestabile — he was delighted to find it conveniently provided with a spade and large pile of fire-fighting sand.

As spring turned to summer and hopes that the siege would be lifted faded, attention turned to avoiding a repeat of the mass-death winter. Riding a tram again for the first time in months, Dmitri Lazarev noticed that the previous year’s public notices — ‘Expose whisperers and spies!’ ‘Death to provocateurs!’ — had now been replaced by more practical exhortations:

Fifteen hundredths of a hectare will produce 800kg of cabbage, 700kg of beets, 120kg of cucumbers, 130kg of carrots, 340kg of swedes, 50kg of tomatoes and 200kg of other vegetables! This is more than enough for an entire family for the whole year. Save ashes from the stove for your vegetable patch!30

The gardening drive was enthusiastically taken up by Leningraders, who with the help of government-organised distributions of seeds and equipment — hoes and wheelbarrows were specially manufactured — created thousands of vegetable patches in parks, squares and on waste ground. At the Hermitage, staff grubbed up the lilacs and honeysuckle of Catherine the Great’s rooftop ‘hanging garden’ in favour of carrots, beets, dill and spinach. The Boldyrevs planted onions in a window box (‘Oh I long for onion!’); the Likhachevs grew radishes in an upturned kitchen table. Altogether, according to Pravda, 25,000 tonnes of vegetables were grown on individual allotments in 1942, and 60,000 tonnes the year after. This made them twice as productive, in terms of weight per acre, as 633 new ‘auxiliary farms’ attached to institutes, schools and factories.31

The city also continued to requisition large quantities of food from collective farms within the siege ring. As well as making their usual deliveries, via their collectives, to the state, peasants were obliged to provide animals and seed corn to refugees in their areas, to subscribe funds to a tank column (dubbed the ‘Leningrad Collective Farmer’) and to ‘donate’ grain from their personal stores to the Red Army. District Party committees were instructed to rely on the Statistics Department rather than the farms themselves for harvest forecasts, and committees that failed to come up with their allotted quotas were accused of giving comfort to ‘anti-collective elements’. In a rare concession to market forces, it was decided to offer underclothes, soap, thread, tobacco and vodka in exchange for deliveries of wild mushrooms and berries.32