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

bridges. Snow went uncleared, so that all but major thoroughfares became impassable save for trodden-down, single-file paths, which traced new short cuts through bomb sites and the remains of fuel-scavenged fences. The patchworks of newsprint, wrapping paper, planks and plywood covering apartment-building windows lost the odd gaiety they had had at the start of the war. Now the boards had a ‘funeral symbolism’, they marked ‘people jammed together, perishing, buried alive’. 8
    From 27 November residential buildings were banned from using electricity between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., by which time it was anyway supplied very erratically or not at all. For light and heat, Leningraders turned instead to the technologies of the village. Various sorts of home-made lamp were devised – an improvised ‘bat’ or storm lantern and the koptilka , or ‘smoker’, which consisted of a wick suspended in a small bottle, tin cup or upturned kettle lid. Both types burned dirtily, covering faces, hands and walls in sticky black soot. When kerosene ran out – a final two and a half litres per person was distributed in September – camphor, stain-remover, machine oil, eau-de-cologne and insecticide were burned instead. All rapidly disappeared from the shops and fetched increasingly outlandish prices in the street markets. The second vital piece of siege equipment was a small, usually home-made metal stove, or burzhuika , its pipe leading outdoors via a boarded-up or cushion-stuffed casement window. Into it went wood scavenged from bomb sites, furniture (in the street markets, wardrobes fetched more chopped up than whole), graveyard crosses, books and parquet tiles. Georgi Knyazev was advised by the Tartar wife of the Academy boilerman to feed his with dried faeces, as practised on the steppe. The burzhuika nickname – from the Russian for ‘bourgeois’ – came from the stoves’ tubby shape, or from their greediness for fuel, or from the fact that it was the old middle classes who had resorted to them during the Civil War. (Metalworking equipment used to make burzhuiki , a crime report of January 1942 noted, was being stolen from factories and sold on the black market.) Third – and today most powerfully symbolic of the blockade of all – came the sanki , or child’s sled, vital for transporting firewood, water and, finally, corpses.
    Leningraders also had to master village skills. They learned that birch wood burned well and aspen badly, that dried maple leaves could substitute for tobacco, and how to light the resulting cigarette, rolled in newspaper, by holding a lens up to the sunlight, or by striking metal against stone. Oddly, few tried to ice-fish, probably because they lacked the necessary lines and drills. One man, a theatre producer, likened it to being in a time machine. The blockade had hurled Leningrad back to the eighteenth century – but worse, because people no longer owned fur coats, there weren’t wells at every corner any more, and water had to be carried home in kettles instead of with buckets and yokes. 9 In most apartment buildings the water supply failed by degrees, starting with the top floor. When the last tap dried residents resorted first to neighbouring buildings, then to broken pipes and ice holes, cut by the fire brigade, on the frozen canals and river. Over time, spillages turned into icy hillocks, up which one had to push oneself and one’s receptacle on hands and knees. Dmitri Likhachev was able to collect water from a fire hydrant, dragging it home on a sled in a zinc baby’s bath. Less sloshed out on the way, he discovered, if he floated a few sticks in it first. His elderly father (‘the most inconsistent and short-tempered man I ever knew’) turned out to be unexpectedly good at chopping wood, being a veteran, like the burzhuiki , of the Civil War. Zoologists, Likhachev remarks, survived the siege, because they knew how to catch rats and pigeons. Impractical mathematicians died.
    As the