Instead of punishing dishonest officials, the leadership concentrated on preventing the public from cheating the system. One of Pavlov’s first moves was to clamp down on unauthorised and duplicate ration cards. Record-keeping, he discovered on arrival in the city in September, had failed to keep up with the enormous population movements of the past two months, allowing Leningraders to take out cards in the names of friends and relatives who had gone into evacuation or to the front. Stricter checks and penalties cut the number of cards issued for October to 2.42 million, down 97,000 from the previous month. It was not enough, and on 10 October the city soviet passed a resolution, proposed by Zhdanov, to re-register all cards. Between 12 and 18 October Leningraders had personally to present proofs of identity at building managers’ offices or workplaces, and would receive a ‘re-registered’ stamp on their ration cards in exchange. Unstamped cards would thereafter be confiscated on presentation. The measure cut the number of bread cards in circulation by another 88,000, meat cards by 97,000 and cards for oil and butter by 92,000.

Applications for replacement cards immediately started to rise. All the applicants, Pavlov remembered, ‘told more or less the same story — “I lost my cards while taking cover from bombing or artillery fire.”. . Or if their building had been destroyed — “The card was in my flat when the building was hit.”’29 In response, it was ordered that replacement cards should be issued only by the central ration card bureau, and then only in the best-attested cases. For petitioners, this turned the application process from a familiar dreary tussle with petty officialdom into a fight literally for life — a ‘weird combination’, as Lidiya Ginzburg put it, of ‘old (bureaucratic) form and new content (people dying of hunger)’:

First there is the malicious secretary, who speaks in a loud voice, in studied tones of rejection, gently restraining her administrative triumph. Then there is the languid secretary, with beautiful, heavily made-up eyes, not yet dressed siege-fashion. . She regards you without malice — her only desire is to rid herself of bother — and rejects your request lazily, even a little plaintively. . Finally there is the businesslike secretary, who. . prizes the official process itself. She turns you down majestically, with sermonising and reasons. And although the secretary is only interested in what she herself is saying, the applicant, who will likely be dead in a few days without a ration card, is comforted for a moment by these reasons.30

In December also, cards were made exchangeable only at designated stores. Since some stores were markedly better than others, getting registered at the store of one’s choice became another life and death fight with bureaucracy. (The diarist Ivan Zhilinsky, despairing of his local Shop no. 44 — dishonestly run and overrun with ‘granny-hooligans’ — managed to swap to a more orderly Gastronom by bribing the manager with his fur hat.31)

It is unrealistic to be too critical. No rationing system could have saved the whole population of Leningrad: the mouths were simply too many, the food supply too small. Nor was the system a fiasco: food was collected, distributed and queued for, in circumstances which could reasonably have been expected to cause complete social breakdown. It did, however, unarguably have serious and avoidable defects, costing uncountable thousands of lives. As the siege progressed, one of the most widespread frauds became concealment of the death of a relative so as to be able to go on using his or her ration card until it expired at the end of the month. Husbands, as Zhilinsky recorded of his neighbours in a subdivided wooden house in Novaya Derevnya, thus posthumously supported their widows and children. ‘[The families] store them away in the cold’, he wrote in January 1942, ‘and carry on getting bread with their cards. That’s what’s happened to Serebryannikov and Usachov — they’re being kept in the laundry room. So are Syropatov and Fedorov. This is going on all over the city — so many more are dead, but hidden.’32

9. Falling Down the Funnel