Lennigrad Cannibals
The horrors that unfolded under Hitler’s directive to starve a city into submission are revealed by the secret diaries of the people of Leningrad
Suffering under a Nazi siege, the citizens of the Soviet Union were forced to take desperate measures
Alone in her home, 12-year-old Tanya Savicheva scrawled in her diary the heartbreaking words, “The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.” The notebook, filled with misspellings in blue pencil, lists each of her family members who she had seen die at the hands of hunger.
First her older sister Zhenya, her grandmother Yevdokiya, her brother Leka, and her two uncles, and finally the entry, “Mama on May 13th at
7:30 in the morning, 1942.” Tanya was alone, abandoned in a city that had been entirely cut off from the outside world. But she was not alone in writing a diary. Across the city, hundreds of diarists were chronicling the horrors of one of the deadliest sieges in history – the extent of which would not be revealed until decades later.
In spring 1942, outside Tanya’s home, the streets were strewn with more victims who had perished in the wake of Adolf Hitler’s horrific plans to starve her city to death. The chilling directive had come on 22 September 1941, “St Petersburg must be erased from the face of the Earth. We have no interest in saving the lives of the civilian population.” Nearly a third of the inhabitants would starve to death over the next 872 days while 150,000 shells were fired at the city and more than 107,000 incendiary and high-explosive bombs were dropped.
The three million people trapped in the oncethriving city were left to survive on almost nothing – just 125 grammes of dense sticky black bread made from a mixture of rye and oatmeal, kerosene and unfiltered malt. But the bitter tasting bread offered little nutritional value and it did not stave away the hunger pains.
Unprepared for the siege, it had taken just 12 weeks for German and Finnish forces to surround the city, destroying hospitals, food stores, roads, schools, power plants, and water supplies. Leningraders were forced to forage for anything they could that might offer more life-sustaining calories than the rationed bread alone. People started to eat anything they could stomach; leather belts boiled into jelly, the scrapings from the back of wallpaper, fur coats. Elena Skryabina, teacher of Russian literature, described in her diary on 3 October 1941, “I visited a lady I know, and she let me try one of her culinary inventions – a jelly made from leather belts. The recipe is: cook belts made from pig leather and prepare a sort of aspic out of it. This nastiness beggars description! A sort of a yellowish colour and a horrible smell. Despite my extreme hunger, I couldn’t bring myself to swallow even a spoonful, and gagged.”
The city became rife with outbreaks of disease and the evermore gaunt populace was about to face a gruelling frost that would set into the already weakened city.
“The city became rife with outbreaks of disease”
Without food, a human might be able to survive up to 50 days. Beyond this, once the food in the gut has been used and the fat reserves depleted, the internal organs start to break down and the body starts to autocannibalism – an agonising and slow process that leads to a painful death that first devours the body, and then the mind.
As the thermometer mark dropped below
-32.1°C, people started burning everything they could find to heat their homes, starting with the furniture, before the cherished family books. But some precious notebooks were kept as writing had become an important way of coping for many of the people confined to the city.
As the hunger became more and more intolerable, it wasn’t long before birds, rats, and stray dogs and cats started disappearing from the streets. And when this resource ran out, Leningraders traded beloved pets with their neighbours so they were not forced to kill and eat their own. At this point, Leningraders started to show symptoms of extreme starvation, moving slowly through the streets with sunken eyes and extended stomachs swollen from the effects of oedema as a result of malnutrition.
“[They’re] horrible, only skeletons, not people,” wrote factory worker Ivan Savinkov in his diary. Klavdiya Naumovna, a doctor at a Leningrad hospital, had similar sentiments in his diary, writing, “These aren’t people, rather skeletons with dry skin of a horrible colour stretched over them. Their consciousness is muddied, there’s a kind of dullness and doltishness about them.
“They lack strength completely. Today I saw a patient like that; he walked to the hospital by himself, but died two hours later.”
Bodies piled in the open and uncoffined bodies were dragged through the streets on sleds to be buried in mass graves. It’s no wonder, that between the hunger and the heavy artillery bombardment, that tensions started to rise. First between neighbours, and then between families, as people were killed for ration cards and others started secretly keeping dead loved ones to claim their rations. These rising tensions didn’t go unnoticed by the people of the starving city. Arkadii Lepkovich noticed the blockade breaking apart his marriage as he and his wife grew suspicious of one another, “Even relations between mother and child, husband and wife, have been made completely inhuman,” he wrote. “The whole city has become this way because the battle for life has brought despair to every living individual.”
People were going to increasing lengths to find a way to feed themselves and their families, with mothers even cutting their veins to feed their children blood. And then they became paranoid of one another. Rumours began to spread that others were dining on much worse than their beloved pets. Children started disappearing, bodies went missing from the cemetery, corpses on the streets had parts missing. On 13 December 1941, the people of Leningrad’s fears were confirmed – the NKVD, Stalin’s notorious secret police, filed the first report of the consumption of human flesh.
Eating human meat is not a feat for the fainthearted. It is a gruesome task that requires hours of preparation to hack through bone, pull apart the limbs, and carve out chunks of edible flesh, all the while being careful not to contaminate the meat by slicing the intestines. But if it can be stomached, human meat can provide protein, calories, and nutrition for those who have little other choices. And the cuts of human flesh, beef-like in texture and pork-like in taste, can provide a welcome meal. With the fat stripped and muscle ground up, marrow scooped from the inside of bones, and cooked internal organs, a human corpse can be enough to sustain someone for several weeks. Historically, eating deceased kin has been a lifeline in times of famine and over the period of the siege 1,207 individuals were convicted for cannibalism.
The Russian language distinguishes two types of cannibalism – ‘trupoedtsvo’ (eating the flesh from some who is already dead) and ‘liudoedstvo’ (killing and eating a person). In Leningrad, both corpseeating and people-eating became a new horror in the unfolding nightmare of the siege. And it wasn’t long before these sources of food became available on the black market and people stopped asking each other where they had found such tender succulent meat in such a time of terrible famine. One account from survivor Galina Yakovleva remembers a strange warm smell coming from a room and realising it emanated from the flesh of a corpse prepared for food, “In the twilight, there were huge chunks of meat hung from hooks to the ceiling. And one piece was a human hand with long fingers and blue veins…”
The perpetrators of cannibalism in starving Leningrad had not been criminals – only 18 people had previous convictions. Instead, they were people driven to such crimes by starvation and
“People were going to increasing lengths to find a way to feed themselves”
by madness, driven by the will to survive and to save their families. The vast majority of those who resorted to cannibalism were eating corpses that had already died, and were unsupported women with young children. But the NKVD reports do detail some gristly occasions where Leningraders killed others in the pursuit of a meal.
One of these reports includes a 42-year-old river port worker and his son who murdered, dismembered and ate their two housemates (in the report named only by their initials, M and I) before distributing the flesh, under the guise of horse meat, to trade for wine and cigarettes. On another occasion, the wife of a Red Army soldier lured a 13-year-old girl into her room and killed her with an axe to feed to her two dependent children aged between eight and eleven years old.
There were so many reports of corpse-eating and people-eating that the NKVD started a special unit of police and psychiatrists dedicated to trying to minimise the number of cannibalistic instances.
But despite these tragedies and crimes that were committed in the name of survival, many Leningraders still clung to humanity, determined that their suffering would not mean they would lose themselves. After the first devastating winter, in the summer of 1942, people still found ways to stay optimistic, with one diarist Klavdiya Naumovna writing, “The people are clean; they’ve started to wear nice dresses. The tram is running, shops are opening up bit by bit. There are queues at the perfume shops – there’s been a delivery of perfume to Leningrad… I was very happy. I love perfume so! I put some on myself and I feel like I’m not hungry, like I’ve just returned from a concert or a restaurant.”
The siege ended on 27 January 1944 when Soviet soldiers defeated the German line of defence and recaptured hundreds of towns and villages in the region. The total death toll of the Leningrad siege exceeds 1,500,000 military and civilians. As the siege ended, the government passed out cabbage and carrot seeds and the people of Leningrad planted every available piece of land with vegetables and people celebrated their victory in the streets.
Cats were introduced into the city again to protect the new small crops from rats. People came together to start to rebuild. Families were reunited with loved ones who were outside the blockade when the circle closed, real bread made from flour returned to the market, and a healthy glow came back to the complexions of the survivors. Life had returned to Leningrad.
The diaries and NKVD reports would languish in archives behind the Iron Curtain, for the most part unread until the 21st century.
As memory coalesced around the narrative of collective suffering, defiance and heroism in the face of the fascist aggressor, there was no room for personal stories in the sweeping opera of the Great Patriotic War, and certainly not stories that introduced soul-searching and moral ambiguity.
The humanity and determination to try to keep a normal life through adversity kept the population surviving through the 872 days of siege. Through the hardship, though the people of Leningrad were pushed to the limits of human survival, it was a time of great solidarity and triumphant resistance; for every story of murder and cannibalism, there are 100 more of the altruistic efforts to fight for the lives of others.
Stories of already struggling mothers taking in orphaned children, people sharing the last of their bread rations with strangers and groups risking their lives to bring supplies across the Road of Life over frozen Lake Lagoda.
Although much of its history was wiped clean, stories of love and loss continue to surface, a reminder that Leningrad was never wiped out.