Leningrad

by Anna Reid

  Until the publication of police records in 2004, evidence as to the use of human meat for food during the siege was anecdotal: the rumours, believed by Leningraders at the time, of children kidnapped on the street, and diary reports of corpses stripped of thighs and buttocks as well as clothing. A lurid description of a young couple lured into an apartment-turned-slaughterhouse, related as fact by Harrison Salisbury in his The 900 Days, on closer inspection turns out to have been drawn from a novel published, presumably under the auspices of Nazi propagandists, in occupied Ukraine.19

  For most people at the time, cannibalism was similarly a matter of second-hand horror stories rather than direct experience. ‘On Pokrovskaya Square’, wrote the geography teacher Aleksei Vinokurov, ‘I ran into a crowd of people silently staring at the clumsily butchered corpse of a plump young woman. Who did this and why? Is this proof of the persistent rumours of cannibalism?’20 When a ‘rather healthy’ acquaintance of Dmitri Likhachev’s failed to return home after setting off to a strange address in search of a barter deal, he wondered if she had been murdered by the sinister traders who offered anonymous mince ‘cutlets’ for sale in the Haymarket.21 Visiting her factory to collect her pay, Olga Grechina noticed that metal shavings had piled up around the lathes, and asked what had happened to an old cleaning lady, affectionately known as Auntie Nastya. Told that Nastya had been executed, she at first thought it must be a joke: ‘But no, it’s true! She ate her daughter – hid her under the bed and cut bits off her. The police shot her. These days you don’t go before a court.’22

  The city leadership was kept fully informed by the NKVD, which detailed its first nine cases of ‘the use of human meat as food’ in its situation report of 13 December 1941. A mother had smothered her eighteen-month-old daughter in order to feed herself and three older children; a twenty-six-year-old man, laid off from his tyre factory, had murdered and eaten his eighteen-year-old room-mate; a metalworker (a member of the Party) and his son had killed two woman refugees with a hammer and hidden their body parts in a shed; an unemployed plumber had killed his wife in order to feed their teenage son and nieces, hiding her remains in the toilets of the Lenenergo workers’ hostel.23 Ten days later thirteen more cases were reported: an unemployed eighteen-year-old had murdered his grandmother with an axe, boiling and eating her liver and lungs; a seventeen-year-old had stolen an unburied corpse from a cemetery and put the flesh through a table-top mincer; a cleaner had killed her one-year-old daughter and fed her to her two-year-old.24 Also among the first to resort to eating human meat were the criminally neglected pupils of the remeslennye uchilishchya. At Trade School no. 39 on Mokhovaya Street,

  the pupils were left to themselves. They had no supervision, and no ration cards were provided for them for December. Through December they ate the meat of slaughtered cats and dogs. On 24 December pupil Kh. died of malnutrition, and his corpse was partially used by the other pupils for food. On 27 December a second pupil, V., died, and his corpse was also used for food. Eleven people have been arrested for cannibalism, all of whom have admitted guilt. School director Leimer and commandant Plaksina, guilty of abandoning this group of pupils without provisions or supervision, have been subjected to criminal prosecution.25

  Altogether, police only arrested twenty-six people for cannibalism in December, but the number shot up to 356 in January and 612 in February. It halved to 300 in March and April, then rose again slightly in May before falling off steeply through June and July.26 By December 1942, when the phenomenon finally tailed off, 2,015 ‘cannibals’ had been arrested in total.27

  The Russian language makes the morally vital distinction between trupoyedstvo – ‘corpse-eating’ – and lyudoyedstvo – ‘person-eating’, or murder for cannibalism. The gruesome cases of intra-family killing highlighted by the police notwithstanding, the former was overwhelmingly more common (of the 300 ‘users of human meat for food’ arrested in April 1942, for example, only forty-four were murderers).28 Organised gangsterism was extremely rare: the NKVD reports mention only one such case – that of six young men, three of them railway workers, who lured a series of thirteen victims, mostly picked up outside bread shops, with offers of barter to a flat, where they were despatched with an axe-blow to the back of the head.29 Cannibalism was also significantly less common in the city centre than in the suburbs, which were poorer, worse policed and hosted the overflowing cemeteries. (The largest numbers of arrests were made in the outlying Primorsky and Krasno Gvardeisky districts and on the industrial Vyborg Side; the smallest in the Smolniy district, home to Party headquarters.30) On 22 December police patrolling the Serafimovskoye cemetery in Novaya Derevnya stopped two women carrying sacks, whch were found to contain the bodies of three infants. Questioning revealed that one woman was the wife of a soldier away at the front, the other that of a janitor, and that they had planned to feed the meat to their daughters, aged eighteen months and sixteen. Two more bodysnatchers – a factory worker and a carpenter – were arrested at the Serafimovskoye the following day; they too had planned to use the contents of their sacks to feed their children.31 A forty-three-year-old unemployed man, his wife and thirteen-year-old son were caught ‘systematically stealing’ corpses from a hospital morgue, and a twenty-four-year-old nurse was arrested for scavenging amputated limbs from an operating room.32

  Other easily accessible corpses were those of colleagues or relatives who had died of starvation. Typical of the kind of cooperative action this sort of trupoyedstvo often engendered were a clutch of cases in January and February. At the First of May Factory a group of nine men, all of whom lived in the same hostel, shared the corpse of a workmate.33 At the Lenin Factory a woman worker shared the corpse of her eleven-year-old son with two female friends. A cleaner shared the body of her husband with her unemployed neighbour; the electrician and the deputy manager of a public bathhouse together ate its dead boilerman.34 Three members of a civil defence team, one a Party member, shared a corpse they discovered while making safe a bomb-damaged building.35

  The optical engineer Dmitri Lazarev gives a first-hand account of being invited to join such an enterprise:

  Valentina Antonovna (a friend of Nina’s [Lazarev’s wife]) came round. Trembling with emotion, she recounted how yesterday a woman tried to drag her into a horrible business. Earlier in the day some civil defence workers had been crushed to death by falling beams, while dismantling a building on Krestovsky [Island]. Their bodies had been taken to an empty shed next to the flat in which this woman lives alone. She proposed to Valentina Antonovna that they take the corpse of one of the girls to her flat, prepare the meat, eat some and salt the rest for future use. She said she had firewood, but couldn’t manage everything on her own. As an inducement she cited the example of her sister, who has been eating human meat for three weeks, has got back her strength and feels much better. Imperiously she said that she would brook no hesitation, that it was a question of life and death, and that the next morning she would call round and they would go to work together.

  Valentina Antonovna didn’t sleep all night. At one and the same time she refused, outraged, even to consider the suggestion, and convinced herself, looking at her sleeping grown-up son, that for his sake she ought to agree. But then she began imagining in detail what it would actually involve, and leapt up: ‘No! Anything but that! I would lose my mind!’ Before morning she had again convinced herself that it wasn’t murder, that the girls were dead anyway, and that if she didn’t do it her tall, broad-shouldered son would die of starvation. On this she went back to sleep, awoke this morning, and waited for her guest. But when the woman appeared Valentina Antonovna’s reaction, quite unexpectedly, was a furious refusal. The woman left, viciously swearing and cursing.36

  Overall, 64 per cent of those arrested for ‘use of human meat as food’ were female, 44 per cent unemployed or ‘without fixed occupation’ and over 90 per cent illiterate or in possession of only basic education. Only 15 per cent were ‘rooted inhabitants’ of Leningrad and on
ly 2 per cent had a criminal record.37 The typical Leningrad ‘cannibal’, therefore, was neither the Sweeney Todd of legend nor the bestial lowlife of Soviet history writing, but an honest, working-class housewife from the provinces, scavenging protein to save her family.

  Remarkably, Leningrad’s medical authorities made at least one attempt to have those driven to eating human meat classified as mentally ill. On 20 February 1942 the head of the Leningrad Front’s medical services called a special meeting of seven senior psychiatrists – academics, the head of a psychiatric hospital, the chief court psychiatrist and a representative of the army medical service – to decide whether or not corpse-eaters should be held criminally responsible for their actions. The doctors’ verdict, from the judicial point of view, was contradictory: corpse-eaters were sane, but also not incurably criminal. One dissenter argued that no mentally healthy person, by definition, could resort to cannibalism, but that they should nevertheless stand trial: ‘These are inadequate and socially dangerous people! We need to deal with them strictly!’ In conclusion it was decided that most cannibals were mentally healthy, but ‘primitive, of a lower moral and intellectual level’. Though all were dangerous, ‘periods of isolation’ should be determined individually, taking into account the circumstances of the crime (‘active or passive corpse-eating’) and the offender’s personality.38

  In practice, however, all cannibals – sane, insane, murderers or harmless ‘corpse-eaters’ – were treated as criminals. Since no provision for cannibalism existed in the Criminal Code it was included under the catch-all clause of ‘banditry’ (the Code’s article 59–3). By the time the psychiatrists convened, 554 ‘special category bandits’ had already gone before military tribunals, and of these 329 had been shot and 53 given ten-year gaol sentences. At least another forty-five had died (presumably of starvation) in custody.39 But although no official distinction was made between murderers and corpse-eaters, variations in sentencing suggests that in practice the latter got off relatively lightly. Of the 1,913 cannibals whose cases had been processed by early June, military tribunals sentenced 586 to execution and 668 to prison terms of five to ten years.40 What happened to the remaining 659 is unclear. They may simply have awaited sentencing, but it is perhaps not wishful thinking to discern – in police reports’ habitual observation that a particular ‘user of human meat for food’ was an unsupported woman with dependent children and no previous convictions – coded pleas for clemency. It would be good to know that they were answered.

  16

  Anton Ivanovich is Angry

  An incongruous reminder of peacetime life, for people making their way down the Nevsky in the winter of 1941–2, was a series of flyers advertising a film comedy that had been due to open at the beginning of the war. Its title, pasted up on lamp-posts in large black letters, was Anton Ivanovich is Angry.

  How angry were Leningraders, and why did their anger never break out into open revolt? On one level this is a frivolous question – Leningraders, like other Soviet citizens, felt loyalty to their country if not to Bolshevism, hated and feared the Germans and were too exhausted and emaciated to do more than strive for their own bare survival. On another, it is a conundrum. Hundreds of thousands had already directly experienced repression and impoverishment at the hands of their government before the war; now almost all were either close to death from starvation themselves, or watching helplessly as family and friends died around them. The hypocrisies and inequalities of Soviet life, moreover, were sharper than ever. People could see with their own eyes that the lights in government buildings stayed on, that corruption was rife, that their bosses’ children ate while their own starved. Moscow was cut off, the rank-and-file police in almost as desperate a plight as themselves – what did they have left to lose? Bread shortages, a disastrous war and fury at government incompetence had sparked the February Rising in 1917. Why didn’t they do the same a quarter of a century later?

  That they would do so was certainly the expectation of the Nazis, whose pre-war confidence that invasion would immediately spark anti-Bolshevik revolt took a while to wear off. In particular, they vastly overestimated the importance of Russian anti-Semitism, every minor indication of which got top billing in SS and military intelligence reports. Their Russian-language propaganda was also startlingly inept, simultaneously denouncing the ‘Jewish-Stalinist’ Soviet government and boasting of the invincibility and ruthlessness of the Wehrmacht (‘Finish your bread, you’ll soon be dead’ was one slogan; ‘We bomb today, you die tomorrow’ another).1 Army intelligence began to correct itself in the autumn, admitting that though the ‘Jewish question’ was ‘increasingly actively discussed’ by Leningraders there was ‘no evidence of organised or active resistance to the Communist authorities’. Leaflets air-dropped over the city, it was noted, were not being passed from hand to hand, but hidden away for future use in case Leningrad was abandoned. Another report twelve days later concluded that although the public mood was febrile and anxious, the ‘Red government, with the help of terror and vigorous propaganda, holds the population strongly in hand, and at the present time an organised rising against the enemy cannot be counted on’.2

  The SS’s intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), persisted in its wishful thinking for longer, passing on every gloomy rumour and anti-Semitic anekdot. (One, according to the SD, had Russian prisoners of war refusing to obey German orders to bury Jewish POWs alive. ‘Upon which, the German soldiers ordered the Jews to bury the Russians. The Jews took up their shovels without hesitation. Thus the Germans were able to demonstrate to the Russian POWs the true essence of Judaism.’3) By the middle of winter, however, both services had begun to realise that the brutality of the Nazi occupation was only stiffening Russian resistance. ‘Earlier on,’ the SD reported in February, ‘deserters made the distinction between Nazis and Germans opposed to Hitlerism. But now they call all Germans “barbarians who must be destroyed”.’4 By May 1942, when intelligence on Leningrad was rolled into reports on the occupied territories in general, all hopes of a rising had been abandoned.

  The Germans were not wrong, though, in thinking that Leningraders were angry. Gauging overall public opinion is hard, but the diaries show Leningraders raging as much against the incompetence, callousness, hypocrisy and dishonesty of their own officials as against the distant, impersonal enemy. Among the best evidence for what ordinary people thought of their government, paradoxically, is the records kept by the regime itself. Unlike other dictators, Stalin and his satraps never made the mistake of believing themselves beloved – on the contrary, they saw plots under every stone. Paranoia aside, the reports Zhdanov received every few days from the head of the ‘instructors’ department’ of the city Party Committee were remarkably sophisticated, collating overheard snatches of conversation into quite rounded summaries of the issues preoccupying Leningraders at any one time. The age, sex, ethnicity and socio-economic status of each speaker were noted, but only if criticisms were overtly political were his or her details passed to the NKVD. Military censors, intercepting private letters to the front, tracked the percentage containing ‘negative communications’ (it rose from 6–9 per cent at the beginning of January 1942 to 20 per cent at the month’s end5). Letters from members of the public direct to Zhdanov were similarly grouped by subject matter, and totals calculated monthly for each type.6 Though the orders to sort out this or that problem that Zhdanov issued in response to this mass of data often went unfulfilled, he never went uninformed.

  Support for the authorities rose and fell in line with ration levels and progress at the front. The wave of patriotism that engulfed Leningrad on news of the German invasion was short-lived, giving way to fear and contempt in the autumn, when the city seemed about to fall and the bosses fled by plane. ‘We can’t think of Napalkova’, the archivist Georgi Knyazev wrote of a colleague on 29 November 1941,

  without loathing. It has come to light that the very day before she left she was haranguing some exhausted ‘whining i
ntellectual’, saying that every Leningrader must be on the alert, prepared to repel the enemy, and so on. In the few hours before her flight she never even hinted to anyone that she was abandoning Leningrad, her colleagues and her fellow Party members. The case is especially painful because Napalkova joined the Academy’s Party branch after so many people had unjustly been accused of disloyalty and expelled . . . That’s how people who go around talking grandly about self-sacrifice, bravery and heroism fix themselves up.7

  Though the problem was never as widespread as the Germans believed, autumn 1941 was also when scapegoating of Leningrad’s sizeable Jewish minority (just over 6 per cent of its population pre-war) reached its height. On 1 September Irina Zelenskaya, a manager at the Lenenergo power station, was shocked by ‘a flash of anti-Semitism’ from a ‘rude, vulgar girl’ in the plant’s canteen. Everywhere, she worried, there were ‘mutterings in corners, sideways looks at Party members, distrust and animosity – it could all end in a terrible explosion’.8 In the Russian Museum, according to (clearly anti-Semitic) Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, ‘the staff were filled with indignation at the behaviour of the Jews . . . When there was an appeal for volunteers at a meeting, they spoke very fervently and patriotically, but in practice all without exception managed to find warm, safe berths for themselves.’9 Instead of attacking the Germans, it was joked of the numerous Leningrad intelligentsia who evacuated to Central Asia, the Jews were storming Tashkent.