The Ration Card Distribution
Kolya’s narration. “Piter was my home, but Piter as a graveyard now, a city of ghosts and cannibals” p. 130.
According to Salisbury 2003, there was cannibalism in Leningrad. In the market, according to published official histories, there was trade in human flesh.
There was a research from the field of anthropophagi.It is said that cannibalism is not strange to Russia soil.It means the men from the past, which were the
Scythians, and the mysterious people who live on the ground the time of Kievan, had a custom that shows cannibalism p. 474.
There were so many rumors about cannibalism in this era, although the survivors do not like to discuss this issue. A professor says that actually there
were no cannibals, but only when people went crazy. He heard that there was a mother who went crazy when there was no food and she killed her daughter and
butchered her daughter’s flesh to make meat patties. But the professor says that this matter could happen anytime, because he heard the similar story even before
the war p. 475. In Leningrad, the rumors about cannibals began in autumn since many
parents kept their children away from the streets. There were reports that many children were kidnapped. Children were the main target as it was easy to seize
them and some people said that their flesh were more tender p. 475- 6. Meanwhile,in the beginning of November, some people witnessed that
meat patties made from ground-up human flesh were sold with many trades at the Haymarket. Many people of Leningrad pretended that they did not know that the
meat was human flesh. They insisted that the meat was horse, or dog, or cat, and it was fine to eat them.
Late at night, there was a Leningrader walking through the world of ice while a bloody snowdrift had covered the heads of a man, a woman and a small
girl whose blonde hair was still plaited in Russian braids. He was sure that the bodies had been carted off by the cannibals for butchering. “No other explanation
seemed to fit the presence of the human heads in the drift.” A survivor said that “in the worst period of the siege, Leningrad was in the
power of the cannibals. God alone knows what terrible scenes went on behind the walls of the apartments.” He admitted that he knew a case in which husbands ate
their wives, wives ate their husbands and parents ate their children. In his building, there was a porter killed his wife and then thrust her severed head into a red-hot
stove. At night in Leningrad, there were soldiers on their patrol on the streets,
and these soldiers sometimes became the victims of the cannibals. These soldiers were regarded as preferable victims because they had been better fed, since they
received better and more ration. The same as any kind of food product, people could find the flesh trade in
the Haymarket, as it was the center of the trade. Starving people did not pay too much attention to the meats which were offered for sale. They knew that the meat
was made from horse, probably with cat meat or dog meat or rat meat. Those people told themselves that there could be no human flesh mixed in it. Without
considering what the meat was made from, the people should face the options between taking the meat and facing the death.
There was a terrible gossip among the women in the queues, waiting the bread shops to open. The gossip was about the children, how the cannibals wanted
to eat them because their flesh was so tender. Women were the second choice for the cannibals. Women were also starving like men, but since their bodies carried a
little more fat, their flesh was tastier p. 478-9. Cannibalism in Leningrad shows how the social life in that city changed.
Park and Mason state that deprivation also can be seen in social influence aspect as cited by Turner, 2006, p. 349. Because of the starvation which suffered by
Leningrad people, cannibalism became a common thing for them during that time. People ate either dead body or human flesh that they intentionally killed to feed
themselves.