Who survived the siege of Leningrad. Siege Leningrad, rations for siege survivors. Your own entrance is a dangerous place

Commercial food stores were closed. “Non-card” products did not disappear from state stores immediately, but rather quickly. “Only coffee and chicory are in abundance,” noted E. Vasyutina on September 25, 1941. In the fall, it was still occasionally possible to buy “decent” non-rationed products in some stores, but people lined up for them. huge queues.

Not everyone could stand in it for several hours in the cold. Winter 1941/42 shops could not accommodate everyone who came to “shop cards" Basically, the stores sold only “ration” products, but not everyone got them either. To streamline their issuance, citizens began to be assigned to certain bakeries and shops, usually near their place of residence, since public transport did not work.

It didn't get any better. Dozens of blockade diaries are filled with complaints about the fact that it is not possible to buy food in “our” empty stores until the end of the decade, while in neighboring stores it was possible, often even without queues, to get what was due on the card. We had to stand at the stores to which we were assigned and wait for food to be delivered, which, of course, could not be enough for everyone. No one left the empty shelves even when store managers or sellers announced that food would not be delivered in the near future. They probably believed that if dozens of people were waiting outside the shops, it was no accident, that they knew something more, that the persuasion of the salespeople was just a trick, and therefore they also joined the line.

Without queues it was often possible to buy only bread in bakeries - with the exception of January 1942, when three times (at the beginning, middle and especially at the end of the month) various reasons its issuance has been temporarily suspended. It was much more difficult to “shop” non-bread coupons - for meat, butter, cereals, sugar, fats. No matter how tiny their portions were, they could only be obtained after standing in front of stores for many hours. The lines became massive in November 1941.

Giant "tails" were seen at the end of December 1941, when sold butter, - and later it was during its issuance that the terrible crush, some people were even maimed. The queues were reduced only in February 1942, when the city’s supply significantly improved. The intensive work of the Ladoga highway and the evacuation of thousands of people in January-February, although not immediately, yielded tangible results. Numerous food warehouses were created on the western shore of the lake and near the city, which made it possible to establish a largely uninterrupted supply of ration goods to the blockade survivors.

The queues were especially long after the announcement on the radio about the upcoming additional distribution of products— there was no certainty that there would be enough for everyone. When, at the beginning of February 1942, it was allowed to receive card cards not issued in January sugar and fats, then this caused an extraordinary stir: “There is a crowd in the stores in the morning, there are lines everywhere, because everyone is hungry and does not want to wait until it is freer, and many are afraid that the food will disappear, since the period for issuing January cards may expire.”

Bakeries usually opened at 6 o'clock in the morning; empty shops could start working at 8 o'clock. All of them were supposed to close at 9 pm, before the curfew, but if there were interruptions in the distribution of bread, they could serve visitors at night. The stores were often dark due to blackout, there were no electric lamps, they saved kerosene, preferring to use smokers, torches and candles - and sometimes they were extinguished if the shelves were empty.

Lined up queues outside stores long before they open. Despite the curfew and the introduction of a state of siege in November-December 1941, the line was often occupied overnight. The queues especially lengthened at the end of December 1941, when they were waiting for the “New Year’s” distributions. In the winter of 1941/42, the queue was occupied from 4-5 o'clock in the morning, during the “time of death” (December 1941 - January 1942), patrols looked at the night and morning queues very leniently. It is possible that, turning a blind eye to the violation of order, the authorities were afraid of food riots and pogroms, which could spontaneously break out if the store door was slammed without any hesitation in front of the townspeople standing for hours.

Not everyone was able to survive to the end in kilometer-long queues. Relatives replaced each other every few hours, depending on the weather, the person’s condition and the number of family members. The hardest thing was being alone. Usually, in the stores themselves, blockade survivors were divided into several groups - one stood at the cash register, the second - at the counters of the confectionery department, the third - next to the meat department. Since the products available in stores could disappear from the shelves very quickly, it was important to be close to someone who would have time to take a place in the most “promising” department at that time. Having the opportunity to “substitute”, people ran from one line to another in the store, irritating other visitors.

In order to at least somehow maintain justice and prevent “strangers” from accessing the counters, they began to distribute numbers in the queues. Having received them, many went home to warm up, and when they returned, they discovered that another “activist” (the authorities did not interfere in this matter) had managed to hand out new numbers. Quarrels and mutual accusations began...

Visible traces of crushes and fights in stores: broken windows, broken cash registers, broken and shifted counters. More serious incidents also occurred: pogroms in bakeries and shops. They usually began when the managers announced that no more goods would be delivered and tried to close the doors. Blockade survivors reacted especially emotionally to this at the end of the ten-month period, when non-bread coupons were expiring and they feared that they would “disappear.” People burst into utility rooms, looked for food under the counters, grabbed the remaining loaves from the shelves. The store managers tried to calm the crowd, promised that the food would be given out tomorrow, and together with the “elected” they walked from the line to the warehouses and bakeries. But sometimes this didn’t help either—we had to call in armed guards and work patrols.

In the queues, the most common conversation was about food. “The winter dystrophic queues were terribly silent,” recalled Lydia Ginzburg. The “unchaining” of people did not occur immediately, but later it became especially noticeable. As usual, they talked about how nutritiously they ate in the past, how they prepared for the holidays - in the stories of those on the waiting list, the feast table was characterized by an excessive abundance of dishes. The logic of such conversations is not difficult to detect: “Conflicting opinions of doctors were conveyed about whether sugar or fat rations should be stretched out over a decade or eaten in one or two days. It was recommended to chew small pieces of bread for a long time in order to fully utilize all its nutritional properties ... "

The queue showed persistent interest in how to increase ration standards in the coming weeks, and whether it will be possible to “shop” the coupons before the end of the decade. “Sometimes you could hear better news - tomorrow they will give you something, cereal for example.” It is not surprising that in line there was so much talk about injustice, cronyism, theft, and cheating. Anti-Soviet attacks were also noticed in the crowd.

Deception, body kits, fraud with “coupons,” and rudeness were the hallmarks of many stores. Taking advantage of the poor lighting and noticing the most exhausted people in a semi-fainting state, the sellers snatched more coupons from the cards than they were supposed to. Most often this happened if one person had to receive bread using several cards at once - he could not keep track of all the manipulations of the bakery workers. “It’s not uncommon for a woman to stand in line for an hour and, having handed over her card to the seller, finds out that the food on it... has been received. Usually in such cases crying begins or strong swearing begins, accompanied by mutual insults.” Arriving home, the resulting bread was sometimes weighed on “their” scales and quite significant shortcomings were often discovered.

An equally common violation was supply from the back door relatives, friends and neighbors of sellers, or even simply “useful” and “necessary” people. “The store manager spends all his time supplying his friends through the back door. The entire 25th police station through the back door receives its rations out of turn... On 30/XII all the policemen on duty were drunk in the store,” I.I. meticulously writes in his diary on January 2, 1942. Zhilinsky. This was not hidden, and no one could be deceived - everything happened in full view of the line, irritated, nervous, swearing. The people standing in line were outraged by the “disgrace,” but few could resist the temptation to be in the place of those who were “lucky.” The sellers did not have any particular self-interest here; according to eyewitnesses, they did not extort bribes.

From the book by S. Yarov “ Daily life besieged Leningrad", M., "Young Guard", 2013, p. 78-107.

Siege of Leningrad - a military blockade by German, Finnish and Spanish forces involving volunteers from North Africa, Europe and the Italian navy during the Great Patriotic War Patriotic War city of Leningrad. The blockade lasted from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944 - 872 days .

In 1941, the city did not have sufficient supplies of food and fuel. The only route of communication with Leningrad remained Lake Ladoga, which was within the reach of enemy artillery and aviation; a joint naval group also operated on the lake. Bandwidth this transport artery did not meet the needs of the city. As a result, mass famine began in Leningrad, aggravated by the particularly harsh first winter of the siege, problems with heating and transport, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths among civilians.

At the time of the blockade, 2 million 544 thousand civilians lived in the city, including about 400 thousand children; 343 thousand people remained in the suburban areas (in the blockade ring). In September, when systematic bombing, shelling and fires began, many thousands of families wanted to leave, but the routes were cut off. Mass evacuation of citizens began only in January 1942 along the ice road.

Rations for blockade survivors

Bread cards

On the collective and state farms of the blockade ring, everything that could be used for food was collected from fields and gardens. However, all these measures could not save people from hunger. On November 20 - for the fifth time the population and the third time the troops - the norms for the distribution of bread had to be reduced. Warriors on the front line began to receive 500 grams per day, workers - 250 grams, employees, dependents and soldiers not on the front line - 125 grams. Apart from bread, they received almost nothing. Famine began in besieged Leningrad.

Based on the actual consumption, the availability of basic food products as of September 12, 1941 was:

Bread grain and flour for 35 days
Cereals and pasta for 30 days
Meat and meat products for 33 days
Fats for 45 days
Sugar and confectionery for 60 days

Nutrition standards among the troops defending the city were reduced several times. From October 2, the daily bread norm per person in front line units was reduced to 800 grams, for other military and paramilitary units to 600 g. On November 7, the norm was reduced to 600 and 400 g, respectively, and on November 20 to 500 and 300 grams, respectively. The norms for other food products from the daily allowance were also cut. For the civilian population, the norms for the supply of goods on food cards, introduced in the city back in July, also decreased due to the blockade of the city, and turned out to be minimal from November 20 to December 25, 1941. The food ration size was:

Workers - 250 grams of bread per day,
Employees, dependents and children under 12 years old - 125 grams each,
Personnel of the paramilitary guards, fire brigades, fighter squads, vocational schools and FZO schools who were on boiler allowance - 300 grams.

Moreover, up to half of the bread consisted of practically inedible impurities added instead of flour. All other products almost ceased to be issued, beer production ceased on September 23, and all stocks of malt, barley, soybeans and bran were transferred to bakeries in order to reduce flour consumption. As of September 24, 40% of bread consisted of malt, oats and husks, and later cellulose. On December 25, 1941, the standards for issuing bread were increased - the population of Leningrad began to receive 350 g of bread on a work card and 200 g on an employee, child and dependent card; the troops began to issue 600 g of bread per day for field rations, and 400 g for rear rations. From February 10, the norm at the front line increased to 800 g, in other parts - to 600 g. From February 11, new supply standards for the civilian population were introduced: 500 grams of bread for workers, 400 for employees, 300 for children and non-workers. The impurities have almost disappeared from the bread. But the main thing is that supplies have become regular, food rationing has begun to be issued on time and almost completely. On February 16, quality meat was even issued for the first time - frozen beef and lamb. There has been a turning point in the food situation in the city.


Date establishing a norm	Workers hot shops	Workers and engineers	Employees	Dependents	Children up to 12 years
	1000g	800g	600g	400g	400g
	800g	600g	400g	300g	300g
	700g	500g	300g	250g	300g
	600g	400g	200g	200g	200g
	450g	300g	150g	150g	150g
	375g	250g	125g	125g	125g
	500g	350g	200g	200g	200g
	575g	400g	300g	250g	250g
	700g	500g	400g	300g	300g
	700g	600g	500g	400g	400g

Hospitals and canteens with enhanced nutrition

Bread from the times of the siege. Museum of Siege Leningrad

By decision of the bureau of the city committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Leningrad City Executive Committee, additional medical nutrition was organized at increased standards in special hospitals created at plants and factories, as well as one hundred and five city canteens. The hospitals operated from January 1 to May 1, 1942 and served up to 60 thousand people. From the end of April 1942, by decision of the Leningrad City Executive Committee, the network of canteens for enhanced nutrition was expanded. Sixty-four canteens were set up outside businesses. Food in these canteens was provided according to specially approved standards. From April 25 to July 1, 1942, 234 thousand people used them, of which 69% were workers, 18.5% were employees and 12.5% were dependents.

In January 1942, a hospital for scientists and creative workers began operating at the Astoria Hotel. In the dining room of the House of Scientists, from 200 to 300 people ate during the winter months. On December 26, 1941, the Leningrad City Executive Committee ordered the Gastronom office to organize a one-time sale with home delivery at state prices without food cards to academicians and corresponding members of the USSR Academy of Sciences: animal butter - 0.5 kg, wheat flour - 3 kg, canned meat or fish - 2 boxes, sugar 0.5 kg, eggs - 3 dozen, chocolate - 0.3 kg, cookies - 0.5 kg, and grape wine - 2 bottles.

By decision of the city executive committee, new orphanages were opened in the city in January 1942. In five months, eighty-five orphanages were organized in Leningrad, accepting 30 thousand children left without parents. The command of the Leningrad Front and the city leadership sought to provide orphanages with the necessary food. The resolution of the Front Military Council dated February 7, 1942 approved the following monthly supply standards for orphanages per child: meat - 1.5 kg, fats - 1 kg, eggs - 15 pieces, sugar - 1.5 kg, tea - 10 g, coffee - 30 g , cereals and pasta - 2.2 kg, wheat bread - 9 kg, wheat flour - 0.5 kg, dried fruits - 0.2 kg, potato flour -0.15 kg.

Universities open their own hospitals, where scientists and other university employees could rest for 7-14 days and receive enhanced nutrition, which consisted of 20 g of coffee, 60 g of fat, 40 g of sugar or confectionery, 100 g of meat, 200 g of cereal , 0.5 eggs, 350 g of bread, 50 g of wine per day, and the products were issued by cutting coupons from food cards.

Additional supplies were organized for the leadership of the city and region. According to surviving evidence, the leadership of Leningrad did not experience difficulties in feeding and heating living quarters. The diaries of party workers of that time preserved the following facts: any food was available in the Smolny canteen: fruits, vegetables, caviar, buns, cakes. Milk and eggs were delivered from a subsidiary farm in the Vsevolozhsk region. In a special rest house, high-quality food and entertainment were available to vacationing representatives of the nomenklatura.

Daily bread quota in besieged Leningrad

On January 27th we celebrate the breakthrough Siege of Leningrad, which allowed in 1944 to end one of the most tragic pages of world history. In this review we have collected 10 ways that helped real people survive the siege years. Perhaps this information will be useful to someone in our time.

Leningrad was surrounded on September 8, 1941. At the same time, the city did not have a sufficient amount of supplies that could provide the local population with essential products, including food, for any long time. During the blockade, front-line soldiers were given ration cards of 500 grams of bread per day, workers in factories - 250 (about 5 times less than the actually required number of calories), employees, dependents and children - a total of 125. Therefore, the first cases of starvation were recorded within a few weeks after the Siege ring was closed.

In conditions of acute shortage of food, people were forced to survive as best they could. 872 days of siege is a tragic, but at the same time heroic page in the history of Leningrad. And it is about the heroism of people, about their self-sacrifice that we want to talk about in this review.

During the Siege of Leningrad it was incredibly difficult for families with children, especially the youngest. Indeed, in conditions of food shortages, many mothers in the city stopped producing breast milk. However, women found ways to save their baby. History knows several examples of how nursing mothers cut the nipples on their breasts so that the babies would receive at least some calories from the mother's blood.

It is known that during the Siege, starving residents of Leningrad were forced to eat domestic and street animals, mainly dogs and cats. However, there are often cases when it is pets who become the main breadwinners of entire families. For example, there is a story about a cat named Vaska, who not only survived the Siege, but also brought mice and rats almost every day, of which there were a huge number in Leningrad. People prepared food from these rodents in order to somehow satisfy their hunger. In the summer, Vaska was taken out into the wild to hunt birds.

By the way, in Leningrad after the war, two monuments were erected to cats from the so-called “meowing division”, which made it possible to cope with the invasion of rodents that were destroying the last food supplies.

The famine in Leningrad reached such a degree that people ate everything that contained calories and could be digested by the stomach. One of the most “popular” products in the city was flour glue, which was used to hold wallpaper in houses. It was scraped off paper and walls, then mixed with boiling water and thus made at least a little nutritious soup. Construction glue was used in a similar way, bars of which were sold in markets. Spices were added to it and jelly was made.

Jelly was also made from leather products - jackets, boots and belts, including army ones. This skin itself, often soaked in tar, was impossible to eat due to the unbearable smell and taste, and therefore people learned to first burn the material on fire, burning out the tar, and only then cook a nutritious jelly from the remains.

But wood glue and leather products are only a small part of the so-called food substitutes that were actively used to combat hunger in besieged Leningrad. At the factories and warehouses of the city at the beginning of the Blockade there were enough large number material that could be used in the bread, meat, confectionery, dairy and canning industries, as well as in public catering. Edible products at this time included cellulose, intestines, technical albumin, pine needles, glycerin, gelatin, cake, etc. They were used to make food by both industrial enterprises and ordinary people.

One of the actual causes of the famine in Leningrad is the destruction by the Germans of the Badaevsky warehouses, which stored the food supplies of the multimillion-dollar city. The bombing and subsequent fire completely destroyed a huge amount of food that could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. However, residents of Leningrad managed to find some food even in the ashes of former warehouses. Eyewitnesses say that people were collecting soil from the place where sugar reserves had burned. They then filtered this material, and boiled and drank the cloudy, sweetish water. This high-calorie liquid was jokingly called “coffee.”

Many surviving residents of Leningrad say that cabbage stalks were one of the common products in the city in the first months of the Siege. The cabbage itself was harvested in the fields around the city in August-September 1941, but it root system remained in the fields with the stalks. When food problems in besieged Leningrad made themselves felt, city residents began to travel to the suburbs to dig up plant cores that had recently seemed unnecessary from the frozen ground.

During the warm season, the residents of Leningrad literally ate pasture. Due to their small nutritional properties, grass, foliage and even tree bark were used. These foods were ground and mixed with others to make cakes and cookies. As people who survived the Siege said, hemp was especially popular - this product contains a lot of oil.

An amazing fact, but during the War the Leningrad Zoo continued its work. Of course, some of the animals were taken out of it even before the Siege began, but many animals still remained in their enclosures. Some of them died during the bombing, but a large number, thanks to the help of sympathetic people, survived the war. At the same time, zoo staff had to go to all sorts of tricks to feed their pets. For example, to force tigers and vultures to eat grass, it was packed in the skins of dead rabbits and other animals.

And in November 1941, there was even a new addition to the zoo - Elsa the hamadryas gave birth to a baby. But since the mother herself did not have milk due to a meager diet, milk formula for the monkey was supplied by one of the Leningrad maternity hospitals. The baby managed to survive and survive the Siege.

***

The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944. According to the documents of the Nuremberg trials, during this time 632 thousand people out of 3 million pre-war population died from hunger, cold and bombing.

But wood glue and leather products are only a small part of the so-called food substitutes that were actively used to combat hunger in besieged Leningrad. By the time the Blockade began, the factories and warehouses of the city contained a fairly large amount of material that could be used in the bread, meat, confectionery, dairy and canning industries, as well as in public catering. Edible products at this time included cellulose, intestines, technical albumin, pine needles, glycerin, gelatin, cake, etc. They were used to make food by both industrial enterprises and ordinary people.

Many surviving residents of Leningrad say that cabbage stalks were one of the common products in the city in the first months of the Siege. The cabbage itself was harvested from the fields around the city in August-September 1941, but its root system with stalks remained in the fields. When food problems in besieged Leningrad made themselves felt, city residents began to travel to the suburbs to dig up plant cores that had recently seemed unnecessary from the frozen ground.

***
The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944. According to the documents of the Nuremberg trials, during this time 632 thousand people out of 3 million pre-war population died from hunger, cold and bombing.

But the Siege of Leningrad is far from the only example of our military and civil valor in the twentieth century. On the website website You can also read about during the Winter War of 1939-1940, about why the fact of its breakthrough by Soviet troops became a turning point in military history.

CHISINAU, July 1 – Sputnik. These days, exactly 76 years ago, the Nazi invaders developed an offensive against Leningrad. Very soon the city of Peter and Lenin will be under blockade.

An eyewitness to these events, now a resident of Chisinau Zoya Afteniy-Odegova at a very young age she survived the war and later wrote down her memories, and the relatives of the siege survivor sent them to the Sputnik Moldova editorial office for publication as part of the project.

Your own entrance is a dangerous place

It's getting cold. In those families where there were children, they fetched water while the adults did housework. By the winter of 1941, the water supply was turned off, but the house where Zoe’s family lived was located near the bay, where the water was fresh.

“There were three of us: me and sisters Nelya and Vilya. We took with us a sled, a bucket, a laundry bin

lid. We always passed by the graves of the Decembrists. At the very edge of the water there is a modest monument with five names: Ryleev, Pestel, Kakhovsky, Muravyov-Apostol and Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Once dead, hanged heroes of their bitter time. We drove up to the ice hole itself and filled our containers with a ladle. I, as the eldest, harnessed and drove, and Vilya and Nelya made sure that our containers did not slip, and pushed the sleigh as best they could. Mom was waiting for us at the entrance with a can. They poured water and took us up to the fifth floor, to our room. We also picked up firewood; we had no coal. We have prepared, sawed, and chopped firewood since the fall. The danger was posed by the steps of the second and third floors. Exhausted people lived here. They poured buckets of slop and sewage directly onto the stairs. It was all frozen into the steps, and I had to walk very carefully so as not to fall. No one lived above the 4th floor—some died, some managed to evacuate—and the steps were not dirty,” writes Zoya Ivanovna in her diary.

They heated the stove at home with books. They drank barley or acorn coffee without sugar.

From November 20, 1941, employees, dependents and children were given 125 grams of bread. All members of Zoya Ivanovna’s family had this standard. But seven people got 750 grams of bread a day.

“They usually bought bread in the morning, early. At home they divided it on scales, honestly. They didn’t eat it right away. They cut it into pieces, lightly salted it so that they wouldn’t eat it right away. They dried crackers. Each one, on the stove - they never took from each other and don't get confused."

Meat soup 40 days long

At that time, they traded everything for everything in the literal sense of the word—everyone wanted to survive. And replacing family jewelry, for example, with a piece of beef that accidentally caught your eye was considered almost the highest good.

“In our entrance lived a simple Russian woman, Aunt Dasha, with her husband, Uncle Karlusha, a descendant of the “Petrine” Germans (immigrants from Germany who moved to St. Petersburg during the time of Peter the Great - ed.). They kept a cow in a barn. Behind our house by the bay there was a meadow , and Aunt Dasha herded it there. In the summer, she sold milk. But by September, the hungrier and angrier people became, the more clear it became that the cow could be taken away. a watch, heavy, made of red gold for 10 kilograms of meat and his new felt boots for another 2 kilograms. So, 12 kilograms of meat is a huge wealth, but there were 6 of us, mother, grandmother, Aunt Anetta cut this meat into pieces of 300 grams. , and we ate for 40 days meat soup", recalls the siege survivor.

The family exchanged the new Swiss watch given to Zoya, which she was so proud of in those young years, for 2 kilograms of bread and 2 kilograms of buckwheat. And it’s good that this happened in September, Zoya Ivanovna believes, since in January 1942 they would have given half as much for them, and then in the best case.

“Every morning, 300 grams of meat and a small glass of buckwheat were cooked in our large three-liter saucepan. Then the meat and buckwheat were passed through a meat grinder, the mixture was divided into 6 bowls, topped up with “broth” and feasted. Nothing else was allowed. Others didn’t even have that. Aunt Anetta irritated us very much - she began to list all kinds of food, especially for some reason potatoes with herring: “eringid ya kardulit - illus mekk” (transliteration into Cyrillic of a phrase from Estonian - ed.) - “herring with potatoes - great taste.” Having been ill in the trenches intestinal infection, she weakened before everyone else, fell ill and moved slightly,” writes Zoya Ivanovna.

In those days, such fates were not uncommon. All these people were forced to get used to the monstrous face of war. The heart spared them, allowing acute pain losses go far and deep into reflection, which saved them from instant death, but were embedded in memory for life. That’s why our narrator remembers this time so vividly and vividly.

To be continued