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In September still, golden days had alternated with autumn gales. In October the last of the summer came to an end. The first snow fell, unusually early, on the 15th, and ice, grey-white under the granite embankments and darkly transparent at its outer perimeter, began to creep across the canals.1 Georgi Knyazev, wheeling himself along the Vasilyevsky Island embankment each morning, saw the military bustle that had invaded his ‘small radius’ fade away. The files of marching sailors, helmets strapped to their knapsacks, disappeared; so did the speeding, mud-spattered army lorries and the soldiers camped out with their horses on the yellowing grass of Rumyantsev Square. Shelling had ravelled the overhead tram wires along the Nicholas Bridge, and a warship blocked his view of the Senate House, her three funnels painted winter-camouflage white. Next to the still unsandbagged Luxor sphinxes a truck stood on chocks, two of its wheels missing. The sphinxes themselves looked like ‘a couple of miserable naked pups, thrown out into the bitter frost’.2

This period — from September to the end of December 1941 — was, as the historian Sergei Yarov puts it, when Leningraders ‘fell down the funnel’. Over the course of three months, the city changed from something quite familiar — in outward appearance not unlike London during the Blitz — to a Goya-esque charnel house, with buildings burning unattended for days and emaciated corpses littering the streets. For individuals the accelerating downward spiral was from relatively ‘normal’ wartime life — disruption, shortages, air raids — to helpless witness of the death by starvation of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and children — and for many, of course, to death itself.

So swift was the transition, so anomalous its backdrop, that grapevine news of hunger deaths was at first greeted with incredulity. Lidiya Ginzburg wrote her forensic memoir of the blockade in the guise of an anonymous, composite ‘Siege Man’. For him famine belonged ‘in the desert, complete with camels and mirages’. He ‘didn’t believe that the inhabitants of a large city could die of hunger. . On hearing of the first cases of death amongst their acquaintances, people still thought: Is this the one I know? In broad daylight? In Leningrad? With a master’s degree? From starvation?’3

Yelena Skryabina, whose first reaction to the announcement of war had been to rent a holiday cottage at a knockdown price, similarly found the idea of death by starvation ‘demeaning and absurd’. Though responsible for four dependants — her mother, two sons and an elderly former nanny — she returned to the city only in mid-August and thus began stocking up with food very late. On 15 September she made a trip to the city outskirts, to barter with villagers: ‘I had cigarettes, my husband’s boots, and some women’s shoes. . Everywhere I had to beg, literally implore. The peasants are already overloaded with valuable things; they don’t even want to talk.’ A few days later she managed, at the cost of endless queuing, to buy vodka, which she traded for potatoes with a ‘drunk old woman. . Lucky for us that there are still such old women around.’4 Another lucky contact was a Tartar pedlar, who sold her chocolate and horsemeat for cash (‘completely unbelievable these days, since money’s worth nothing any more’) and a bottle of red wine. Not all the inhabitants of her communal apartment, she noted in early October, were as fortunate:

People turn into animals before our eyes. Who would have thought that Irina, always such a quiet, lovely woman, would be capable of beating her husband, who she has always adored? And for what? Because he wants to eat all the time and can never get enough. He just waits for her to bring something home, and then throws himself on the food. .

The most grisly sight in our apartment is the Kurakin family. He, back from exile and emaciated by years in prison, is already beginning to bloat. It’s simply horrible! Of his wife’s former love, there is little left. She is constantly irritated and argumentative. Their children cry and beg for food. But all they get is beatings. However, the Kurakins are no exception. Hunger has changed almost everyone.

Two lifelines helped prevent Skryabina’s family from going the same way. The first was a pass to her military engineer husband’s mess, from which she was able to bring home small but regular amounts of soup and porridge. The second was a fictitious job, arranged by a friend, for her fifteen-year-old son Dima, which allowed him an adult worker’s ration. But though her younger son, five-year-old Yura, continued happy and lively, ‘helping’ the yardman to chop firewood and sweep snow, for teenage Dima even this was not enough: