Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege Read Online Free PDF Page A

Paragraph 1, Article 58 of the penal code (‘anti-revolutionary agitation and propaganda’) allowed for a very wide interpretation of ‘anti-revolutionary remarks’.
    The worsening situation in the besieged city and the desperate lack of food were ‘deeply scarring’ the population, the NKVD reported in January–February 1942, as it continued to monitor ‘several defeatist remarks’ (‘What good is there in defending the city? We’re all going to starve to death’) and ‘anti-Party’ sentiments (‘those Party and NKVD big shots aren’t queuing at four o’clock in the morning – they get served hot meals in their private canteens’). By this point, however, the NKVD’s priority was economic crime, violence, food theft, ration fraud and the smuggling and black markets that flourished as shortages took a tighter hold.
    The judicial records speak for themselves: over 17,000 thefts were brought to court during the blockade, and over 5,000 instances of gang violence and armed robbery. And the penalties were severe – including both ‘anti-revolutionary’ and common law crimes, between the summer of 1941 and the summer of 1943, more than 5,000 death sentences were issued. One particularly terrible aspect of this ‘dark side’ of life in the besieged and famished city, which was mentioned in every report sent to Moscow by the NKVD regional chief, Kubatkin, was cannibalism and necrophagy. The first cases surfaced in December 1941. In six months, police arrested nearly 2,000 people who had eaten human flesh, hundreds of whom had first murdered their victim for this purpose. Police uncovered gangs, composed of criminals and grave diggers, who trafficked in human flesh. Instances of cannibalism were severely punished, and a third of those convicted were shot, the rest sentenced to long stretches in prison camps. Remarkably, all of those convicted of cannibalism were recent arrivals in the city, peasant men and women who had fled forced collectivisation and marginalised drifters living on the outskirts of the city. This new proletariat, the hidden face of the USSR’s second city, emerged out of a decade of extreme economic and social turbulence which had defined the 1930s.
    Alexander Werth, forcibly sheltered as he was during his short stay in Leningrad, obviously had no way of witnessing the dreadful reality of life under the siege. In his account, he tried first and foremost to depict the heroic resistance of the defenders of Leningrad and the unflagging patriotism of civilians as well as soldiers, and to explain why and how the citizens had ‘held out’, despite their desperate conditions: the cold and a food crisis which far outstripped that suffered by Londoners or Parisians. Published in London in 1944, whilst the war still raged and Nazi Germany was still far from collapse, Werth’s book was intended primarily to enlighten the British – who were proud to have stood alone against the Nazis for so long, little aware of what was happening in the East – as to the courage and tenacity of their Soviet allies.
    In Russia at War, 1941–1945, written 20 years later, Werth undertook a deeper and more refined analysis of the ‘spirit of resistance’ unique to Leningrad. It had arisen, he suggested, from both a ‘profound attachment to their city, beloved for its great history and, to intellectuals, for its remarkable literary pedigree’ and ‘the great revolutionary and proletarian legacy to which the city’s workers remained particularly attached’. 13 Without trying to whitewash the most horrific elements of the tragedy endured by the inhabitants of Leningrad during the siege of their city, many modern researchers studying the Leningrad blockade have come to much the same conclusions. 14

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Moscow to Leningrad
    This time it was really definite. The Narkowindel rang me up on Thursday night, September 23rd, and told me to be at the airport at 2 p.m. the next day. They said that Dangulov would