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The little boy had reached the last stage of starvation. He was all oedema — the liquid had swelled his body so much that it seemed as if his skin wouldn’t hold. . We somehow pulled him together, gave him something to eat. Like a stuck record, he kept repeating and repeating that he would die within a week, his mother maybe sooner, and so on and so on. And we sat and listened, but our feelings were so blunted. . We lived only in order to live. Thought and emotion somehow came to a standstill.

All over the city, public institutions — schools, factories, banks, post offices, police stations, university departments — similarly ground to a halt, though employees with strength enough continued to turn up for warmth, companionship and the chance of obtaining a plate of watery soup in the canteen. ‘In the mornings’, Lazarev wrote of his Optical Institute, ‘we sat round the stove in silence, heads bowed. We sat for hours, not moving, not talking. When there was no more firewood the stove went out. Though there was a big pile of wood in the courtyard nobody had the strength to chop it and carry it up the stairs. Instead, we sat out the wait until lunch in the cold. After lunch we went home.’ The first to die (as in Georgi Knyazev’s Academicians’ Building and Olga Grechina’s apartment block) were the Institute’s ancillary staff. ‘The old cleaning lady has just died of hunger’, he wrote on 25 December. ‘Only the day before yesterday she was dusting my desk. I’m told that she went home, lay down on her bed, stretched out her arms, sighed and died. Today, entering the lab, I saw the corpse of our recently deceased security guard in the next room.’

Unlike the cleaning lady, Lazarev had access to the Scholars’ Building, a clubhouse for academics splendidly housed a few doors down from the Hermitage on the Neva. Through September pirozhki, coffee and potatoes had been available there off-ration, though by New Year this had been cut to soup and sweet tea. ‘In the freezing hall’, wrote Lazarev

a long queue winds up the marble staircase. People stand and wait in silence. Almost everyone carries a document case over their shoulder, with hidden inside it a container for carrying food back home to the family. The wait feels endless. It’s especially cold standing next to the massive marble banisters — a perceptible wave of cold streams off them. At last our turn comes, and we enter the canteen. Frozen, in fur coats and hats, we sit down at the free tables. After some time a desultory conversation begins. A zoologist — tall and formerly overweight — complains that people of different sizes are all given the same food. ‘Mark my words, bigger men. .’ But nobody listens to him, since Katyusha is approaching our table with her scissors and the matchbox for coupons. She is our favourite waitress — it seems to us that she serves up faster, and that her portions are a little bigger. People come to the canteen with their own plates and spoons. The respectable grey-haired professor licks his plate clean before hiding it in his gas-mask bag.19

Lazarev himself fell gravely ill in the spring, and was reprieved only by a providential secondment to a minelayer, which as well as providing him with proper meals allowed him to pass his ration cards to his wife and daughter.

The Leningrad Party Committee officially closed 270 factories over the winter, but most of the rest hardly functioned and even what remained of the defence plants managed only a little erratic repair work.20 Olga Grechina, orphaned by her mother’s death in January, stood guard duty at night in her semi-shut missile factory. Alone in the empty workshops she kept fear at bay by reading H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds by the light of a ‘bat’ — the person on duty got the best book, as a distraction from the rats that scuttered ‘loathsomely and incessantly’ across the concrete floors. Off-duty she sat in the warmth of the janitor’s room, stripping pine branches of their needles for processing into a vitamin C drink — another food supplement devised by the Forestry Academy. The job paid her a single meal at 2 a.m. each day, of soup and kasha.

Out of the 270 workers of Workshop 15 of Vasili Chekrizov’s Sudomekh shipyard, 47 had died by the end of January. ‘How many will die in February nobody knows. Only seventy appear for roll-call, or at the canteen. All the others are lying down. . Skilled, qualified workmen, the backbone of the shop, have died. . Only a few people are working on repairs, and you can’t really call it work — in truth they’re just marking time.’21 The usual draconian punishments for absenteeism ceased to have any effect. At the Marti shipyard, a report to Zhdanov of early February complained,