In the morning on the way to work, I saw a little boy all on his own. Now and again he sobbed, and I was struck by his odd, uncertain gait. I approached him, and he disconnectedly muttered that his mother had gone, that he wouldn’t have anything to eat until the evening. It was immediately obvious that he had lost his reason. His mind was wandering. He kept telling me about his father, and asked me to show him the way to the front. He was on his way to find him, but didn’t know how to get there.51

Like the Gulag’s ‘goners’, the still-starving acted as fearful reminders of mortality, objects of scornful mockery as much as of compassion. Lazarev’s daughter and niece learned the following popular rhyme, adapted from the words of a pre-war children’s song:

A dystrophic walked along

With a dull look

In a basket he carried a corpse’s arse.

‘I’m having human flesh for lunch,

This piece will do!

Ugh, hungry sorrow!

And for supper, clearly

I’ll need a little baby.

I’ll take the neighbours’,

Steal him out of his cradle.’52

To get rid of the physically useless, bosses used them to fill quotas of ‘volunteers’ for out-of-town logging camps and peat mines. Boldyrev, now enrolled at the Public Library, railed against the despatch to peatworks of a colleague, a ‘second-degree dystrophic’ and ‘sorry, clumsy creature’ quite incapable of digging for ten hours a day. ‘Work!’ he wrote angrily in his diary, ‘after a day of it they fall off their feet. Tomorrow she has to go. Cruelty, pointless cruelty.’ Four weeks later she returned and told him what it had been like:

For the strong it’s fine there — extra bread, lunch. The barracks are warm and have electric light. Many gain weight and apply to stay for the winter — the camp regime, of course, doesn’t bother them. But woe to the weak, because if you don’t meet your norm they cut your rations. Our unfortunate librarian — who could hardly stand even before she left — was down to a single bowl of wheat soup a day. And this on a first-category card — in other words, she wasn’t even being given the rations she was due. That’s the system. Everywhere, all the time, the weak are now being trampled and repressed, on principle. ‘Dystrophic’ has turned into a swear word — in workplaces, on the streets, on the trams. Dystrophics are despised, persecuted, beaten into the ground. If you’re applying for a job, the first requirement is not to look dystrophic. These are the morals of the second year of the siege.53

*In Moscow, Alexander Werth noted ‘cruel cardboard hams, cheeses and sausages, all covered in dust’.

20. The Leningrad Symphony

For the American and especially the British governments, the Soviet partnership had always been fraught with difficulty. For the first two years of the war (as even the least nationalistic Russians prefer to forget), the Soviet Union had not only been publicly dedicated to world revolution, but in alliance with Hitler. There had also been intense public anger at its invasion of Finland, during which the British and French governments seriously considered sending a joint expeditionary force to the Finns’ defence. Only when itself invaded by Germany did the Soviet Union abruptly turn from foe into friend.