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

during the Civil War. Another, a ten-year-old diarist recorded, came upon a box of candles, which they were able to sell for 625 roubles – they had cost only eight kopeks apiece when his father bought them back in 1923. The classicist Olga Fridenberg kept herself and her mother going on a package of tinned food that they had earlier prepared for her brother prior to his departure for the Gulag. Another woman traded her dead husband’s clothes, bought on a pre-war visit to America. The trip had cost him his life – he had been shot as a capitalist sympathiser during the Terror – but the good-quality suits and jackets helped to save his family.
    When there was no food to be had, fantasies took its place. Igor Kruglyakov, eight years old at the time of the siege, remembers going through the family box of Christmas decorations with his sister, looking for walnuts: ‘Their insides were dry and shrivelled, but we ate them, they felt like food. We picked all the crumbs out of the cracks in our big, dirty kitchen table – again, they seemed like food. I can’t say that it cheered us up, it was just a way to pass the time.’ At the end of November his grandfather died of ‘hunger diarrhoea’ – possibly, Kruglyakov’s mother agonised, because she had in desperation given him diluted potassium permanganate – the bright purple, all-purpose disinfectant known as margantsovka – to drink. The children, who not long before had been running round the streets collecting shrapnel, now stayed huddled in bed, leafing through a nineteenth-century book of birds and Madame Molokhovyets’s Gift to Young Housewives , with its recipes for aspics, mousses, Madeira cake and suckling pig. ‘For the first time in my life I read the words “Rum Baba”. It had pictures too – quite simple ones, but they gave us pleasure.’ 15 One of the most devastating documents on display in Petersburg’s Museum of the Defence of Leningrad is an imaginary menu penned by a hungry sixteen-year-old, Valya Chepko. ‘Menu’, he neatly writes, ‘for after starvation, if I’m still alive. First course: soup – potato and mushroom, or pickled cabbage and meat. Second course: kasha – oatmeal with butter, millet, pearl barley, buckwheat, rice or semolina. Meat course: meatballs with mashed potatoes; sausages with mashed potatoes or kasha . But there’s no point in dreaming about this, because we won’t live to see it!’ He didn’t, dying in February.
     
    Sadder, perhaps, even than physical breakdown, was the way in which hunger destroyed personalities and relationships. Increasingly preoccupied with food, individuals gradually lost interest in the world around them, and at the extremity, with anything except finding something to eat. ‘Before the war’, wrote Yelena Kochina as early as 3 October, ‘people adorned themselves with bravery, fidelity to principles, honesty – whatever they liked. The hurricane of war has torn off those rags: now everyone has become what he was in fact, and not what he wanted to seem.’
    Her diary – written in the margins of old newspapers, on scraps of wallpaper and on the backs of printed forms – charts, with searing honesty, the gradual breakdown of her marriage. Immediately pre-war her mood is joyous, delighting in her new baby and doting husband. ‘Dima is on holiday’, she writes on 16 June, while watching him change a nappy. ‘All day he’s busy with our daughter: bathing her, dressing her, feeding her. His well-kept, sensitive designer’s hands manage all this with amazing skill. His hair blazes in the sun, lighting up his happy face.’ Six days later the young family was hit, like millions of others, with the announcement of invasion: ‘I carried Lena out into the garden with her coloured rattles. The sun already ruled the sky. A cry, the sound of broken dishes. The woman who owns our dacha ran past the house. “Yelena Iosifovna! War with the Germans! They just announced it on the