VOICES OF THE DAMNED

Women selling their bodies for food. Cannibalism rampant. Newly discovered diaries reveal the horror of the Nazi siege of Leningrad — where 800,000 died

WHEN her school, like so many others, closed down, Alexandra Mironova lost her job as a history teacher. But she soon found a new position in leningrad in the autumn of 1941 — working in an orphanage. rather than teaching children, it became Alexandra’s job simply to keep them alive. With a city of two million people blockaded since September 8 by the Nazi war machine, leningrad had swiftly become a place of famine rather than a bustling centre of life and culture.

Part of Alexandra’s role was to travel around leningrad, braving constant german bombardments, to seek out and rescue abandoned children. What she saw was truly the stuff of nightmares.

In one apartment she found two young girls scrounging for food, while in a nearby chair sat their mother’s two-day-old corpse. Alexandra later learnt that the girls’ uncle had recently visited the apartment, stolen a piece of wooden furniture for firewood, and left his nieces behind. As they were too emaciated to walk, Alexandra, despite being appallingly weak from lack of food herself, had to drag them to the orphanage on a sled.

Just under a week later, Alexandra found an 11-year- old girl called Shura in another apartment. She was lying under a mattress, swaddled in a heap of filthy laundry. In the kitchen lay the body of her mother. Shura explained to Alexandra how a seemingly kind stranger had come to the flat and taken away the family’s ration cards. As Alexandra well knew, having no ration card was a certain death sentence.

And, all over the city, she found scores of youngsters who had been abandoned by their parents to starve. As a mother herself, she found such inhumanity almost impossible to understand.

Alexandra never gave up on her own three children. However, in February 1942 she was to record their tragic fate: ‘Kostia died. Ania and Vasia died. My dear ones. What will become of the children? How much grief! I ought to live and save more children.’

TRAGICALLY, despite her best efforts, hundreds of thousands more children — and adults — were to die in leningrad during one of longest and deadliest sieges in history. lasting for 872 days, from September 1941 to January 1944, the blockade resulted in the deaths of an estimated 800,000 inhabitants — some 40 per cent of the city’s pre-war population.

To put that into perspective — though not to diminish the contemporary suffering — that figure is around 26 times greater than the 31,000 deaths that took place in the Siege of Aleppo, which lasted for four years. In Aleppo, an average of 20 people died every day. In leningrad it was 900.

Today, the story of the siege is often neglected — especially in the immensely broad picture of World War II — but it deserves a more central position in the canvas. No other civilian population suffered as much as the inhabitants of leningrad, who endured terrible extremes of famine, bombardment and severe cold.

Those who survived did so thanks to extremes of human behaviour. While some lives were saved by those who displayed heroism, generosity and selflessness, others saved themselves through greed, murder and cannibalism. The siege brought out the very best in people and the very worst.

Another reason why leningrad is often overlooked, or dismissed in little more than a footnote, is because the voices of those who were there are seldom heard. But now, thanks to a powerful book, we are finally able to hear those voices. In a groundbreaking history, Professor Alexis Peri, of Boston University, has sifted through scores of previously unpublished diaries that have lain largely forgotten for decades in russian archives.

As a result, we now have a far fuller picture of the siege. It may make disturbing reading, but these journals personalise the catastrophe far better than any conventional history.

After the german invasion of russia in June 1941, many leningraders remained upbeat about their future. raised on a diet of Soviet propaganda, they were confident that Stalin would surely triumph soon.

‘Victory will be ours, comrades,’ declared schoolgirl Elena Mukhina in her diary. ‘We will do anything to save humanity from tyranny.’

Meanwhile, in his diary, factory foreman Alexei Evdokilov was equally resolute. ‘ you lying reptiles,’ he wrote of the germans. ‘you do not scare us. We will fight with triple strength.’

Such words would quickly ring hollow. The german army encircled leningrad on September 8, just 11 weeks after they had invaded russia. Although some 500,000 leningraders had been evacuated, the population had actually increased because of the huge number of refugees who had flocked to the city.

As well as blockading leningrad, the germans made sure its population suffered. A series of air raids on food warehouses meant the city had only enough provisions to last for a month, leading the authorities to slash the bread ration to a mere nine ounces (255g) a day. Bread quickly became more valuable than money itself. ‘Bread reigns supreme,’ wrote one diarist. ‘Bread rules, bread can do anything, it dictates and chooses.’

In weeks, people were starving to death. Those who survived became skeletal, androgynous figures, robbed of all vitality.

Elena Mukhina, so optimistic after the invasion, saw herself turning from a 17-year- old into what she described as the ‘old man’ in the mirror, no longer ‘a young woman who has everything ahead of her’.

Alexandra Borovikova, who was 36 years old, saw herself ‘like all the other devils — I have become just bones and wrinkled skin’.

Another result of starvation was that both boys and girls started growing facial hair. ‘We called them little old people,’ recalled one diarist after the war.

In tandem, men were rendered impotent while women saw their menstrual cycles cease and their breasts harden and stop producing milk.

When the city’s residents gathered naked in communal bathhouses — the bania — it was impossible to distinguish between men and women. ‘I wanted to write about the scene in the bania,’ wrote Ivan Savinkov in his diary in January 1942. ‘ Horrible. Only skeletons, not people. What will become of us?’

Savinkov knew the answer to his question only too well, because it lay all around him. With nearly a thousand people dying every day, corpses were an omnipresent feature of daily life.

BODIES were stacked in mounds like so many logs, and the sight of people perishing in public was common.

‘One old woman, waiting for bread, slowly slides to the ground,’ wrote Vera Kostrovitskaia, a ballerina. ‘But no one cares. Either she is already dead or she will be trampled to death.’

Vera then recorded, horrified, how she watched those in the queue looking to see if the woman’s ration card had fallen to the ground, or whether they needed to snatch it from her dead hand.

But ration cards for the pitifully small amount of food officially available were not all that was stolen from the dead. corpses were a source of food, and cannibalism was widespread. Some 1,500 leningraders were arrested for it during the siege.

The russian language distinguishes between two types of cannibalism. There is trupoedstvo — eating the flesh of someone who is already dead — and liudoedstvo, which means eating the flesh of someone you have killed.

In leningrad, both took place, and mothers even fed their children human flesh. The former history teacher, Alexandra Mironova, encountered a family called the Kaganovs, who practised cannibalism. When Alexandra tried to take their children to the orphanage, she found ‘they did not want to leave their uncooked meat’.

Those who did not break this taboo faced other temptations. Fathers would steal food from their children and earn the hatred of family members.

In her diary, 13-year- old Valia Peterson berated her stepfather for eating not only her rations but her dog. ‘I hated him terribly,’ she confessed. ‘Hunger uncovered his filthy soul, and I have got to know him.’

When her stepfather did eventually die, Valia was jubilant: ‘I was ready to jump for joy, but I was too weak and did not have enough strength.’ The wish for

Fathers would steal bread from their own children

people — even family members — to die is frequently expressed by the diarists. One, Arkadii Lepkovich, found extreme hunger made him and his wife Verochka distrust and despise each other.

Describing his wife as a ‘devil in a skirt’, Arkadii was convinced Verochka was depriving him of his rations. ‘Verochka began to divide even the bread and hide it in order to strengthen herself at the expense of my already poor health,’ he complained.

Arkadii realised his family was by no means the only one broken by the blockade. ‘Even relations between mother and child, husband and wife, have been made completely inhuman,’ he observed. ‘ The whole city has become this way because the battle for life has brought despair to every living individual.’

The couple’s marriage finally broke down when Verochka accused her husband of selling her coat so he could secretly buy food for himself. What happened to them is unclear, as Arkadii’s diary ended at the same time as his marriage.

Starvation sometimes created appalling psychosis in people, who began to suffer from delusions and even hallucinations. In her diary, Nina Mervolf, an 18-year-old drama student, recalled how her ‘completely withered’ father would scream out: ‘Where is my body? I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t understand what’s going on with me. Where is my body?’

Another who suffered was Natalia Uskova, who recalled lying in bed listening to the radio, then experiencing the most disquieting sensation that her head was expanding until it seemed to fill the entire room and was about to burst.

‘Am I losing my mind?’ she asked herself.

But despite the bombardment, famine and horrors, many Leningraders did manage to survive the siege. This was partly thanks to the Red Army managing to maintain a trickle of supplies over the frozen Lake Ladoga, but also because the Leningraders ate everything possible — leather belts were boiled up to make meaty jelly, glue was turned into soup, coffee granules became pancakes.

Inevitably, prostitution — for those still physically capable — also provided a means of survival for both sexes.

Female prostitutes were known as ‘blockade wives’ or ‘cafeteria girls’ and sold their bodies for food. Typically better- dressed and better-fed than most other women, the blockade wives earned themselves much opprobrium. A friend of Ivan Savinkov noted: ‘They are mostly young women, the only Hell on earth: After a German raid, Leningrad citizens leave their bomb shelter stratum of population this winter that has preserved its normal appearance, although without much honour for themselves.’

Men would also sell themselves for food. Their clients were often female food-service workers, whose access to food meant they were seen as high-status ‘aristocrats’.

Savinkov had no time for them, with their ‘silk, velvet, stylish boots and shoes’ and well-nourished bodies. ‘She thinks she can buy you for a night for a bowl of soup,’ he wrote — and doubtless in many other cases the ‘aristocrat’ could.

There was one other group of people in Stalin’s Russia who were never to starve during the blockade — members of the local council, or soviet.

In his diary, soviet member Nikolai Ribkovskii recorded how he scoffed down caviar, goose, turkey and ham during a period when some 2,000 to 3,000 people were starving to death every day. At one point he ate so much, he had to recover in a clinic.

The local authorities showed no sympathy to doctors working in hospitals swamped by corpses. Their failure to deal with this problem meant they were deemed ‘counter-revolutionary’ and threatened with imprisonment.

ALTHOUGH members of the soviet seemed to inhabit a different planet, they were well aware of the extent of famine and even established a commission to record people’s experiences by collecting diaries and conducting interviews. ‘ People need to bring to the story as much as possible,’ the commission determined.

When the siege eventually ended on January 27, 1944, it was hoped the testimony collected by the commission would be widely publicised to show Russia — and the rest of the world — what Leningrad had been through. The city was awarded ‘hero’ status and also received the Order of Lenin.

however, by 1949 Stalin was wary of an increasingly independent spirit in the city that he saw as a challenge to his power. Furthermore, he had no wish to publicise the heroism of Leningrad, as the stories of famine and hardship only reminded people that their leader had not been able to relieve the city for nearly two and a half years.

As was customary in the Soviet Union, Stalin ordered a purge, and tens of thousands of items of ‘ blockade sedition’, including diaries, were impounded or destroyed. Members of the commission were fired for ‘diminishing’ Stalin’s ‘greatness’.

Thankfully, after Stalin’s death in 1953, attitudes changed and it slowly became acceptable for the blockade to be written about. Today, 73 years after the siege was lifted, we can finally appreciate the horrors experienced by so many forgotten, starving voices.

The War Within: Diaries From The Siege Of Leningrad, by Alexis Peri, is published by harvard University Press, £23.95.