CANNIBALS OF LENINGRAD
In the most desperate times of the long siege, people were driven to unthinkable acts in order to survive
with the rescue team – [they] began frantically pulling away the debris… but when the last timbers were pulled away, the girl had died.” Hitler, reconciled to a siege, issued a general order on 22 September stating: “After the defeat of Soviet Russia there will not be the slightest reason for the future existence of this large city,” and that through blockade and bombardment it’d be “razed to the ground”.
Winter began to set in and the thermometer plummeted to -30°C, as Stephan Kuznetsov recorded on 2 November: “The temperature is really dropping now and hunger is a constant presence among us.” By then the city’s centrally baked bread contained cottonseed oil cake previously used as cattle feed, mouldy grain retrieved from a ship sunk in Lake Ladoga and floor sweepings. Elena Kochina described how “the bread was now sticky and damp”.
With so little food available, people had to improvise. The city’s dogs and cats soon all went into the pot, to be followed by joiner’s glue scraped from furniture as it was based on animal proteins. Faina Prusova remembered that “on the advice of one elderly woman
I boiled the wallpaper… then I tried boiling a leather belt”. By then the daily bread ration had dropped to half what it had been in September.
As the snow on the ground thickened heading towards Christmas, the meagre bread ration was cut once again, this time to just 250 grams for factory workers and 125 grams for everyone else – the equivalent of just three slices of a medium-sized loaf. A lecture given at the time described how “the outward manifestation of starvation is seen in swelling… the skin is dry, deprived of sweat and fat; the specific facial expression is apathy”.
By January of the new year 17-year-old
Vasily Vladimirov was writing in his diary that: “The death toll has reached 20,000 a day. Everywhere in the streets you see people carrying dead bodies.” Life inside the besieged city became primal, with one inhabitant stating: “Some seek to save their lives at any price: they steal ration cards, tear bread out of the hands of passers-by… they roam the streets, mad from hunger and the fear of death.” In total desperation some turned to cannibalism: “One woman, utterly worn out… said that when her husband fainted through exhaustion and lack of food, she hacked off part of his leg to make soup for her and her children. Another said she cut off part of a dead body lying in the street.” These women were caught and executed by the authorities. Gangs formed and preyed upon people walking alone at night, parents ate their children and children waited for their parents
Alone in her home, 12-year-old Tanya Savicheva scrawled in her diary the words: “The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.” The notebook, in blue pencil filled with misspellings, lists each of her family members who she had seen die of starvation.
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 people 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 as a result of Hitler’s determination to starve her city to death. His 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.
The three million people trapped in the city were left to survive on almost nothing – just 125 grams 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 did nothing to stop 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, a 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 increasingly gaunt populace was about to face a gruelling winter that would torment the already weakened city.
As the temperature dropped below -32°C, people started burning everything they could find to heat their homes, starting with the furniture, then 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, people started to show symptoms of extreme starvation.
“[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 corpses 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 unremarked 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. They became paranoid of one another as 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’s fears were confirmed when the NKVD, Stalin’s notorious secret police, filed the first report of the consumption of human flesh. Over the period of the siege 1,207 individuals were convicted for cannibalism.
One account from survivor Galina Yakovleva recalls a strange warm smell coming from a room, a smell that 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 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 children aged somewhere between eight and 11 years old.
There were so many reports of desperate, starving people eating corpses that the
NKVD started a special unit of police and psychiatrists dedicated to trying to minimise the cannibalism.
Despite these tragedies and crimes that were committed in the name of survival, many citizens 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.”
After 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.
to die, as one survivor recalled: “I watched my mother and father die. I knew perfectly well they were starving, but I wanted their bread ration more than I wanted them to stay alive.” This was Leningrad’s nadir.
However, the Soviet authorities were also partly to blame for the city’s misery. By the beginning of December 1941 Lake Ladoga had frozen and the Soviets built an ice road across it – the so-called ‘Road of Life’.
Despite Luftwaffe bombing attacks and the treacherous nature of the crossing, by the end of the year over 4,000 trucks were taking 700 tons of food and supplies into the city every day and were available to evacuate citizens out. By 10 February that daily amount had grown to 3,000 tons, allowing the authorities to actually increase the bread ration back up to its September levels of 500 grams for factory workers. But in reality most citizens weren’t getting anything like this allowance as corruption became endemic, with Party officials plundering the convoys for their own benefit. Stalin and local Party bosses also delayed civilian evacuation, convinced it would send the wrong message about their willingness to defend the city. The decision cost thousands of lives.
A dysentery epidemic then struck the population, who, already severely weakened by malnutrition, succumbed in huge numbers. Nadia Makarova described the horror in a letter to her sister: “After two weeks of sickness and diarrhoea our dear and beloved mother died… Three days before mother died I lost little Misha and Fedya, now I have only two children left.” Even as spring approached the daily death toll remained at between 20,00 and 25,000. As Olga Freidenberg said: “It was a flood of death that no one could handle.”
Then, on 8 March, Women’s Day (a traditional Soviet holiday), the authorities ordered the city’s female population out onto the streets to begin a massive clear-up of snow, rubble and refuse. A week later there were 100,000 of them spending several hours a day cleaning up. Remarkably, this collective effort began to work, as Elena Martilla acclaimed: “We would defy Hitler’s cruel order that our city should be erased from the Earth… we were proud to be called Leningraders.”
Finally, on Wednesday 15 April, the nurse Vera Pavlova was working in a hospital when: “We all heard the sound of a tram bell clanging. There was a gasp of astonishment… it’s victory!” Gefreiter Falkenhorst was in the German trench lines: “I began to lose my faith in Hitler when I heard the sound of tramcars on Leningrad’s streets.”
The siege would cost the lives of one million Leningraders and would only finally be lifted on 27 January 1944, but that first terrible winter was over. Poet Olga Berggolts endured the whole siege and wrote a poem that now stands engraved in the vast Piskaryov Memorial Cemetery where her own husband is buried: “Know you who gaze upon these stones, None is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten.”
“WE WOULD DEFY HITLER’S CRUEL ORDER THAT OUR CITY BE ERASED FROM THE EARTH”