Читаем Leningrad полностью

Diversion of rations from the productive to the unproductive was prevented by rules forbidding workers from taking food home to their families. An army surgeon, who had been forced to move into the hospital where she worked and thus leave her elderly mother living alone, asked permission to take home some of her own relatively generous ration. The request was turned down, but she nonetheless managed to smuggle her mother food via an orderly. ‘I was ordered to report to the commissar’, she wrote later, ‘and he attempted to persuade me that I had no right to undermine my health, to deprive myself of food. I agreed, didn’t protest, but told him that I couldn’t do otherwise, that my sacred responsibility was to save my mother.’22 Though in many workplaces, as here, the rules were not strictly enforced, in others employees’ bags were searched as they left the premises.

The authorities did make some exceptions to their ruthless utilitarianism. On hearing that many of the city’s elderly scholars were dying, Zhdanov is said to have personally ordered that a list be drawn up of the most prominent and that they be sent extra food parcels by municipal trade organisations.23 One beneficiary was the artist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, who on 20 January 1942 was astonished to open her door to a woman in a white coat carrying a box filled with butter, meat, flour, sugar and dried peas. ‘This is Comrade Zhdanov’, she wrote in her diary, ‘who has noticed my age and taken it upon himself to send me food. I calculate that it amounts to roughly what one would get in a month on a worker’s card.’24 The delivery fed her and her maid Nyusha for ten days, but did not soften her attitude to the system as a whole. The dependant’s card, she thought, was a death sentence and a ‘disgrace’, designed to rid Leningrad of old people and housewives — all ‘superfluous mouths’.25

The biggest, inevitable, weakness of the rationing system was its vulnerability to corruption. The most romanticised Soviet accounts do not admit this at all, picturing the entire city, save for a few weak souls and saboteurs, as selflessly devoted to resisting the enemy. Even the more realistic ones, such as Pavlov’s (published during Khrushchev’s short-lived ‘Thaw’), greatly understate the level of breakdown, detailing the measures taken to prevent forgery and ration-card fiddles on the part of the general population, but glossing over theft and bribe-taking within the food distribution network itself. Though ‘egotists’ and ‘locusts’ attempted to undermine the system, Pavlov concludes,

the measures taken by the city Party organisation made it possible to protect the population from speculators, swindlers and spongers. The inhabitants’ confidence in the established system of food distribution was maintained. There was little food, but each individual knew that his ration would not be given to anyone else. He would receive whatever he was supposed to receive.26

This picture, as both private and official records make clear, is far too rosy. Leningraders did not receive what they were supposed to receive — on the contrary, they queued for hours in the dark and cold, often to get far short of the designated ration, or nothing at all. Nor did they believe that the system was fair: every diarist complains of corrupt bosses and rosy-cheeked canteen workers and shopgirls; every diarist describes wangling extra rations themselves when possible, and trading on the black market.

The Party files, too, are stuffed with corruption cases. The chairman and deputy chairman of the Petrograd district soviet, one note records, instead of ‘maintaining iron order’ arranged regular off-ration food distributions for themselves and colleagues. ‘Comrade Ivanov, moreover, converted his office into a bedroom for himself and his colleague Comrade Volkova, thus laying himself open to accusations of having sexual relations with a subordinate.’27 There were similar goings-on in the Primorsky district Party Committee, twelve of whose members, led by its First Secretary and the district soviet chair, took special deliveries direct from the local Canteen Trust. ‘Before the 7 November [Revolution Day] festivities’, an NKVD investigator reported,

the Trust issued the district committee with ten kilos of chocolate and eight kilos of caviar and tinned goods. On the 6th the committee telephoned the Trust demanding more chocolate. . Altogether, 4,000 roubles-worth of food were misappropriated in November. . Canteen no. 13 had cigarettes for all the committee members — 1000 packs — but Secretary Kharytonov told the canteen not to hand them out, saying ‘I will smoke them all myself’.

Nikita Lomagin, the historian who has worked most extensively in Petersburg’s security service archive, concludes from the fact that the report was not made until the end of December that the police had previously been taking a cut themselves. None of the Party officials involved, he also points out, lost his job.28