The Twelve Hundred and Sixty Days, in Reply to the Strictures of W. Cuninghame

LikhachevБЂ™s wife sold two dresses at the Sitny market for a kilo of bread and 1,200 grams of cattle cake.28 Despite a crackdown in the summer of 1942, theft and corruption continued to thrive within the food distribution system throughout the siege. As one Leningrader complained in a private letter (intercepted by the NKVD) in September of that year: БЂThere are people who donБЂ™t know what hunger is, whoБЂ™ve been positively spoiled. Look at the salesgirl in any shop, and youБЂ™ll see a gold watch on one wrist and a bracelet on the other.БЂ™ This was only one, the security men gloomily reported, of 10,820 similar complaints picked up in just ten days.29 Whistle-blowing was pointless: when LazarevБЂ™s wife complained that the children in the paediatric hospital where she worked were getting less than half their allotted milk, she found herself despatched out of town to spend twelve hours a day digging the hospitalБЂ™s vegetable plot.30 Likeliest to survive БЂ” and most resented БЂ” of all were the apparatchiks at Party headquarters ...»