Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 by Anna Reid

official ration dwindled and private stocks ran out, Leningraders also sought out their own, increasingly desperate, substitute foods. The commonest of these were zhmykh and duranda – the husks of linseed, cotton, hemp or sunflower seeds, pressed into blocks and normally fed to cattle. Grated and fried in oil, they could be turned into ‘pancakes’, the elaborate preparation of which helped give the comforting impression of a real meal. Also near-universally eaten was joiner’s glue, made from the bones and hooves of slaughtered animals. Likhachev found eight sheets of it at Pushkin House, which his wife soaked in several changes of water then boiled with bay leaves to make a foul-smelling jelly, which they forced down with the help of vinegar and mustard. They also cooked up the semolina used to clean their daughters’ white sheepskin jackets: ‘It was full of strands of wool and grey with dirt, but we were all glad of it.’ An art teacher searched the flats of evacuated friends: ‘I rummaged in all the cupboards and took rusks of any kind – green, mouldy, anything . . . Altogether I collected a small bagful. I was extremely pleased to have got quite a good amount. Later one of my students brought me oilcake – three blocks this size. That was something tremendous – three blocks of oilcake!’ 10 He also ate linseed oil and fish glue, used for mixing paints and priming canvases.
    Substitutes were often dangerous. Even if not poisonous in themselves, they could cause diarrhoea and vomiting, or damage thinned stomach linings. Anything, though, was better than nothing. Glycerine contained calories, Leningraders discovered, as did tooth powder, cough medicine and cold cream. Factory workers ate industrial casein (an ingredient in paint), dextrine (used to bind sand in foundry moulds), tank grease and machine oil. At the Physiological Institute Pavlov’s slavering dogs were eaten; at another, scientists shared out their stocks of ‘Liebig extract’ – a dried meat broth made from the embryos of calves and used as a medium for growing bacteria. One father brought home the maggoty knee of a reindeer, an air-raid casualty at the zoo. 11
    Eaten also were the vast majority of household pets. ‘All day long’, a wife wrote to her husband at the front, ‘we’re busy trying to find something to eat. With Papa we’ve eaten two cats. They’re so hard to find and catch that we’re all looking out for a dog, but there are none to be seen.’ 12 One family, to save themselves embarrassment in front of neighbours, referred to cat meat by the French chat . Others swapped pets so as not to have to eat their own animal, or bartered them for other necessities. A teacher brought a handwritten advertisement, which she had found pasted up in the street, into her staff room. Reading ‘I will trade 4.5 metres of flannel and a primus for a cat’, it sparked a ‘long argument – Is it moral to eat cats or not?’ 13 Such squeamishness soon faded. ‘Not all parents’, a siege survivor remembered of her astronomer father’s colleagues at the Pulkovo observatory,
     
    love their children as much as Messer and his wife loved their big pointer Graalya. Tender tears used to well in Yelizaveta Alekseyevna’s eyes as she watched the dog frisking on the grass. During the hunting season, Messer would take his darling prize-winner out every Sunday, setting off proudly and ceremoniously, with proper Germanic formality.
    In January 1942 they ate her. Messer cut her throat while Yelizaveta Alekseyevna held her down. The dog was strong; they couldn’t manage it on their own, so asked Pimenova for help, promising a piece of meat in return. But at the end of the whole operation all they gave her was the intestines. 14
     
    This was the period, also, when private stocks of food or tradeables started to mean the difference between life and death. One family unearthed a suitcase full of ‘fossilised’ rusks, laid in twenty years earlier