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Leningrad was now entering its period of mass death. In December, according to police records (certainly a substantial undercount), starvation and its related conditions — ‘dystrophy’ in a new coinage — had killed 52,881 out of the city’s civilian population of about two and a half million.4 January’s toll was 96,751 and February’s 96,015.

The sight of death, already commonplace by the end of the year, now became universal. ‘Early this morning’, wrote a manager at the Lenenergo power station, ‘[the director] Chistyakov’s father died. He’s still lying on a daybed in Chistyakov’s office. Next to him Chistyakov carries on working and eating, and takes rests on the same bed. Colleagues and visitors come and go — the dead man disturbs no-one.’5 As if caught in Vesuvius’s gas cloud, the corpses of the many who collapsed outside on the street also remained as they were, huddled in doorways or slumped against walls and fences. ‘On the pavements’, wrote Ostroumova-Lebedeva on 18 January,

lots of wooden boxes have been erected, and filled with sand. There’s no water, so these sandboxes are all we have to fight fires with. Today, walking along the street, I saw a very old woman sitting on one of these sandboxes. She was dead. A few buildings further on, on another box, a dead boy slouched. He had been walking along, became exhausted, sat down and died.

Vera Kostrovitskaya, a dance teacher at the Mariinsky ballet school and niece of the Franco-Polish poet Apollinaire, recorded the gradual stripping of a corpse that leant against a lamp-post opposite the Philharmonia:

With his back to the post, a man sits in the snow, wrapped in rags, wearing a knapsack. . Probably he was on his way to Finland Station, got tired and sat down to rest. For two weeks I passed him every day as I went back and forth to the hospital. He sat 1. Without his knapsack; 2. Without his rags; 3. In his underwear; 4. Naked; 5. A skeleton with ripped out entrails. They took him away in May.6

Shock and horror disguised themselves as gallows humour. The shrouded corpses pulled along the streets, sometimes two at a time, on sleds, prams, handcarts or sheets of plywood, were nicknamed ‘mummies’ or ‘cocoons’. A ‘strengthened supplementary food’ ration — the usilennoye dopolnitelnoye pitaniye or UDP — sometimes issued to the dying became umresh dnem pozzhe or ‘You’ll die a day later’.7 Saying goodbye, people told each other not to ‘end up in the trenches’ — referring not to the trench warfare of the front, but to the newly dug pits in the cemeteries. The soldiers who did the rounds of the streets picking up bodies dumped outside on the pavements called their job ‘gathering flowers’, because the heads of the dead were often wrapped in bright-coloured cloth, so as to make them easier to spot under the snow.8 Bodies were also deposited in the open slit trenches in the parks, which formed impromptu mass graves when their props were looted for firewood, causing them gradually to collapse. The whole, as ever, was gloatingly recorded by German intelligence. On Prospekt Stachek (a long thoroughfare running through the south-western industrial suburbs), a report of 12 January noted, six people had collapsed and died, and their corpses been left lying. ‘Such cases have become so common that nobody pays any attention to them, and general exhaustion is anyway such that only a few can give real help.’9

In part thanks to the design of the rationing system, mortality followed a clear demographic. In January 73 per cent of fatalities were male, and 74 per cent children under five or adults aged forty or over. By May the majority — 65 per cent — were female, and a slightly smaller majority — 59 per cent — children under five or adults aged forty or over. Children aged ten to nineteen made up only 3 per cent of the total in the first ten days of December, but 11 per cent in May.10 Within a single family, therefore, the order in which its members typically died was grandfather and infants first, grandmother and father (if not at the front) second, mother and older children last.

The point at which an entire family was doomed was when its last mobile member became too weak to queue for rations. Heads of households — usually mothers — were thus faced with a heartbreaking dilemma: whether to eat more food themselves, so as to stay on their feet, or whether to give more to the family’s sickest member — usually a grandparent or child — and risk the lives of all. That many or most prioritised their children is indicated by the large numbers of orphans they left behind. The lucky ones were put into children’s homes; the unlucky had their cards stolen by neighbours, took to thieving on the streets or simply died alone.11