In besieged Leningrad, with the onset of the most severe time, people involved in food production became the real "aristocrats". It was they who stood out from the crowd of Leningraders emaciated by hunger with their well-fed appearance, healthy skin tone and expensive clothes.
School inspector L. K. Zabolotskaya writes about the wonderful transformation of a friend:
“It was before the war - an emaciated, sick, eternally needy woman; she washed our clothes for us, and we gave it to her not so much for the sake of the clothes as for her: we had to somehow support her, but we had to refuse this, since she became worse washing … Now that so many people have died of hunger, Lena blossomed. This rejuvenated, red-cheeked, smart and cleanly dressed woman! In the summer, through the window one could hear different voices shouting: “Lena, Lenochka! Are you at home?" “Madame Talotskaya” - the wife of an engineer, a very important lady who has now lost a quarter of her weight (I lost 30 kg) is now also standing under the window and with a sweet smile shouts: “Lena, Lena! I have something to do with you. " Lena has many acquaintances and caregivers. In the evenings in the summer, she dressed up and went for a walk with a company of young girls, she moved from the attic in the courtyard to the second floor with windows to the line. Perhaps this metaphor is incomprehensible to the uninitiated, but a Leningrader will probably ask: "Does she work in a canteen or a store?" Yes, Lena works at the base! Comments are superfluous."
Such personalities evoked just condemnation from the Leningraders who were forced to starve, and many of them were put on a par with thieves and swindlers. Engineer I. A. Savinkin reveals for us the whole mechanism of theft in public catering:
“First of all, this is the most fraudulent part of the population: they weigh, measure, cut out extra coupons, drag our food home, feed their friends and relatives without coupons, give them cans of food to take away. The case is organized in an interesting way: any barmaid has a full staff to take food out of the canteen, the guards work together, because the guard wants to eat too - this is the first small batch of crooks. The second, larger one, is the chiefs, assistant chiefs, chief cooks, storekeepers. A bigger game is going on here, acts of damage, loss, shrinkage, shrinkage are drawn up, under the guise of filling the boiler there is a terrible self-supply. Food workers can be immediately distinguished from all other people who live only on their own card. First of all, this is a fat, well-fed carcass, dressed in silks, velvet, fashionable boots, shoes. There is gold in the ears, there is a pile on the fingers, and a watch is obligatory, depending on the scale of the theft, gold or simple."
For the front-line soldiers who returned to besieged Leningrad, the changes with the people they knew became especially noticeable. In their memoirs, they describe with amazement the transformation of people who have become representatives of the "aristocracy from the stove." So, a soldier who found himself in a besieged city shares with a diary:
“… I met on Malaya Sadovaya… my neighbor on the desk, I am Irina Sh. Cheerful, lively, even elegant, and somehow not for her age - in a fur seal. I was so incredibly happy with her, so I hoped to learn from her at least something about our guys, that at first I did not pay attention to how sharply Irina stood out against the background of the surrounding city. I, a visitor from the mainland, fit into the siege situation, and that is better …
- What are you doing yourself? - Seizing the moment, I interrupted her chatter.
- Yes … I work in a bakery … - casually dropped my interlocutor …
… a strange answer. Calmly, not at all embarrassed, a young woman, two years before the start of the war, had finished school, told me that she was working in a bakery - and this, too, flagrantly contradicted the fact that she and I were standing in the center of a tortured city that had barely begun to revive and recover from wounds. … However, for Irina, the situation was clearly normal, but for me? Could this cloak and this bakery be the norm for me, who had long forgotten about a peaceful life and perceived my current stay in St. Petersburg as a waking dream? In the thirties, young women with secondary education did not work as saleswomen. Then we finished school with the wrong potential … with the wrong energy …"
Even the former servant, who previously occupied the lower part of the social hierarchy, became an influential force in Leningrad. Moreover, in some cases, this is interspersed with open trade in one's own body. A low level of ambition gives rise to low deeds. In the "time of death" of November 1941, the native Leningrad woman E. A. Skryabin writes:
“Out of the blue, my former housekeeper Marusya appeared. She came with a loaf of bread and a bulky bag of millet. Marus is unrecognizable. Not the barefoot slob that I knew her. She is wearing a squirrel jacket, an elegant silk dress, an expensive downy shawl. And to all this, a blooming view. Like she came from a resort. It does not in any way look like an inhabitant of a hungry city surrounded by enemies. I ask: where does all this come from? It turns out that the matter is quite simple. She works in a food warehouse, the warehouse manager is in love with her. When those leaving work are searched, Marusya is examined only for show, and she brings out several kilograms of butter, bags of cereal and rice, and canned food under her fur blouse. Once, she says, she even managed to smuggle several chickens. She brings all this home, and in the evening the bosses come to her dinner and have fun. At first, Marusya lived in a hostel, but her foreman, taking into account all the benefits of living together, invited Marusya to live in her apartment. Now this brigadier uses the rich Marusina's harvest, even feeds her relatives and friends. As you can see, this is a very resourceful person. She completely took possession of the stupid and good-natured Marusya and, as a special favor, sometimes exchanges food for various things. This is how Marusya's wardrobe improved, who is delighted with these exchanges and has little interest in where her rich booty goes. Marusya tells me all this in a very naive form, adding that now she will try to prevent my children from starving. Now, as I write this, I am thinking about what is happening in our unfortunate, doomed city: thousands of people die every day, and some individual people in these conditions have the richest benefit. True, during my visit to Marusya, these thoughts did not occur to me. Moreover, I begged her not to forget us, offered her any things that might interest her."
Unfortunately, ingratiation and servility towards such persons have become a frequent phenomenon among the intelligentsia and ordinary inhabitants of Leningrad.
One of the ways to transport food in besieged Leningrad
In addition to purely physical suffering associated with hunger, Leningraders also had to experience moral suffering. Often, children and women in the last stages of exhaustion had to watch the gluttony of the powerful. E. Scriabina describes an incident in a carriage for evacuees, when the wife of the head of the hospital and her children sat down to have lunch in public:
“We got fried chickens, chocolate, condensed milk. At the sight of this abundance of food unseen for a long time, Yurik (Scriabin's son) felt sick. Spasms gripped my throat, but not from hunger. By lunchtime, this family showed delicacy: they curtained their corner, and we no longer saw how people ate chickens, pies and butter. It is difficult to remain calm from indignation, from resentment, but to whom to tell? We must be silent. However, we have already got used to it for many years."
The results of such moral torment are thoughts about the falsity of the ideas of socialism, to which most of the city's residents were devoted. Thoughts come about the impotence of truth and justice in besieged Leningrad. The basest instincts of selfish self-preservation are replacing the ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood. Often it turns into an exaggerated form. And again in the most terrible "mortal time" of the winter of 1941-42. B. Kapranov records in his diary:
“Not everyone is starving. The bread sellers always have two or three kilos a day, and they make a lot of money. We bought everything and saved up thousands of money. Military officials, the police, military enlistment offices and others who can take everything they need in special stores are overeating, they eat the way we ate before the war. Chefs, canteen managers, waiters live well. All those who occupy an important post get out and eat their fill … There are many in closed shops, but in ours it is empty. At the meeting, where the questions about the increase in the norm and about improvement are to be decided, there are not hungry people, but everyone who is well-fed, and therefore there is no improvement. Where is that freedom and that equality, which is mentioned in the constitution? We are all parrots. Is this really in a Soviet country? I'm just going crazy when I think about everything."
V. I. Titomirova, who survived the blockade, writes in her documentary work "Hitler's Ring: Unforgettable":
“The blockade showed firsthand that in conditions of the most severe control, when, it would seem, everything was in sight, on the register, when there was an extraordinary power, when any violation threatened with death, execution, such elements that were the power itself, or sophisticated criminals to whom the blockade is not a blockade, but a means of frantic profit, and borders are not borders, and there is no hunger, and they spit on the enemy and bombs. For profit, for revelry. And such, for these reasons of their own, were not evacuated either. They didn’t care about anything.”
In the book "Diary and Memory" G. A. Kulagin raises questions that could have cost him his life during the blockade:
“Why does the rear foreman sport a cover-coat and shine with grease, while a Red Army soldier, gray, like his own greatcoat, gathers grass to eat near his bunker on the front line? Why is the designer, the bright head, the creator of wonderful machines, stands in front of a stupid girl and humbly begs for a cake: "Raechka, Raechka"? And she herself, who cut out extra coupons for him by mistake, turns her nose up and says: "What a disgusting dystrophics!"
However, for all the tragedy of the situation in besieged Leningrad, some modern researchers argue that without speculators it would be very problematic for the majority of Leningrad residents to survive. Agile, grasping and unprincipled people were able to create a food market that saved the hungry in exchange for their values. We will discuss this controversial thesis of historians in the next part of the material.
