The prioritisation of Moscow continued into November, as Leningrad’s own civilian population started to die on the streets. Typical is a letter from Zhukov to Zhdanov of the 2nd. It opens confidingly — ‘My thoughts often return to the difficult and interesting days and nights when we worked and fought together. I greatly regret not having completed the business, I was convinced that I would’ — but carries a sting in its tail. The Central Front’s generals had ‘squandered all their troops; nothing but the memory is left of them. From Budenniy all I got was a headquarters and ninety men; from Konev, a headquarters and two regiments.’ Could Zhdanov send forty 82mm and sixty 50mm mortars on the next air convoy, since ‘you have them in excess, while we have none at all?’33 Zhdanov’s counter-requests for more transport planes and for deliveries of concentrated foods were fulfilled late or not at all.34 ‘You assigned us twenty-four Douglases’, Zhdanov replied to yet another of Stalin’s demands for immediate breakout, transmitted by Malenkov. ‘So where are they? Get them sent as soon as possible.’35

Altogether, between 1 October and their virtual shutdown in December, Leningrad’s factories sent the Central Army Group 452 76mm field guns with over 29,000 armoured shells and 1,854 mortars of different sizes. With hindsight, they could arguably have been better put to use outside Leningrad itself, since they were not numerous enough to tip the balance in Moscow, but might have done so south of Ladoga, where the Germans’ foothold on the lake shore was only ten miles wide. Had the Red Army then established a secure land route out of the city — a year before it actually did so — not only would hundreds of thousands of civilians have been saved from starvation, but the city’s defence factories could have resumed normal production, to the benefit of the Soviet war effort as a whole. As it was, the autumn’s massive production effort crippled Leningrad, draining it of the resources either to break the siege or — save at the cost of mass civilian death — to survive it.

*The British mission took a week to get there, thanks to frequent stops to let pass troop trains going the other way. Having omitted to supply themselves with food, its members had to bargain at farmhouses for provisions, and on arrival were put up, ‘most uncomfortably’, in a school.

8. 125 Grams

Marina Yerukhmanova, nineteen-year-old descendant of Peter the Great’s favourite Alexander Menshikov, was, like Olga Grechina, a studious, sheltered girl to whom war was to give a harsh emotional and social education. Her first war work was in a ‘concert brigade’ seeing off soldiers on their way to the front. ‘The station platforms were covered with soldiers, sitting or lying, some with sobbing relatives. And then we appeared — four little girls with music stands and sheet music — and played quartets.’ Though she had been given the opportunity to evacuate to Tashkent with the Conservatoire, she had turned it down, preferring to remain with her family. When the air raids began they moved to an aunt’s safer ground-floor apartment — four adults, four children, four dachshunds and a baby squashing into a single room. The household saw its first death in early October, when Marina’s stepfather, a naval officer de-listed during the 1937 purges, suffered a heart attack two days before papers arrived reinstating him to the service. The family were able to give him a religious funeral at the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, and marked his grave with a large wooden cross (later stolen for fuel).