The Taste of Blockade Bread

At the bread factory on Moskovsky Prospect in St. Petersburg there is an unusual monument: a young girl, a working woman and an elderly woman, all doing their utmost to support one another. The girl is holding closely a small piece of bread. The sculptural composition is called The Women of the Blockade, and it was set up in honor of those who worked at the bread factory during the Great Patriotic War. And one of these workers was Anna Kapustina, one of the few people remaining who remember the taste of blockade bread.

Anna is a modest person, and does not enjoy speaking about the blockade years. There is so much that she would like to forget, and never bring up again, but even to this day the memories haunt her. When the war began Anna was on the verge of turning 13. “My sister and brother and I were immediately evacuated to the Kirov region,” she says. “We had a really difficult time. The railroad we were traveling on was bombed by the Germans, there was little food and the conditions were wretched. We cried, and our guardians also cried. We wrote tearful letter to our parents, asking them to take us home. And so they came and took us back to Leningrad.  Now I understand that that was a horrible mistake. But we had no way of knowing then that the war would drag on for so long. Our elders thought: ‘If we’re going to die, might as well die together’ and so they took us back.”

As the Germans approached, the city was gradually boxed in from all sides. Those who could evacuate did so. Those who voluntarily returned to Leningrad were few and far between.

“We traveled in boxcars with coal, and it is a miracle that we survived – the railroad lines were constantly coming under fire,” says Anna. “We returned home when the city was practically encircled. So we came to see the blockade from the very start – it was our own fault and that of the tragic circumstances.”

Anna’s grandfather has a house on the outskirts of the city near Novaya Derevenya. As Anna sees it, it was his providence that saved the Kapustin family: when her grandfather understood that things were taking a turn for the worst, he gathered all the remnants of the harvest from the field. During the winter we added millcake to this to make some sort of porridge, which was shared with our neighbors. They tried not to eat all the bread received right away – her grandfather split it up into small portions, salted them and feed the household.

Bloodstained Embankment

The outskirts were bombed with no less fury than the center. Anna has trouble believing how close she came to death.

“The Serafimovskoye Cemetery was situated nearby,” she recalls. “Following artillery shelling each of the graves appeared have been dug up where the shells exploded. Once I went with my aunt to the market, which was on the bank of the Malaya Neva. Usually we went there and stood for hours in line. But on that day for some reason we decided to go across the Neva to Malaya Podyacheskaya Ulitsa: my aunt had an apartment there and she want to check and see if it was still intact. It was a long and difficult route. When we reached Trinity Bridge we came under artillery attack. We managed to make it the Field of Mars, where we hid in soldiers dugouts. The ground rocked as if we were on a ship. We thought we were going to die. But no, we survived. When we were making our way back home we saw that the market on Malaya Neva simply ceased to exist. It was completely bombed out. The pitch on the embankment had turned red from blood – so many people had died there! This scene remained so engrained in my mind that following the war when I went on an excursion to the Brest Fortress, I couldn’t get out of the bus. It had rained there and the stone bridge had turned that very same color of red as back then.”

Anna tries not to think about the horrors of the blockade, but when she does start talking about, she cannot help but cry. How bodies were stacked like firewood at the Serafimovskoye Cemetery, or how she and other women were forced to fertilize fields with ashes containing human remains…

“My dear, there was a lot of awful things, what can I say. But people somehow held on and did let themselves turn into animals,” Anna says. “For example, a boy snatched a ration of bread that I had just received. I ran after him with all my might and yelled: ‘Give me the bread, its mine!’ He ate a bite will on the run and then stops and gives me back what he stole: ‘Here!’ I wonder if that boy who could do that is still alive?”

At 14 Anna started working, at first collecting chickweed with other teenagers. “This plant has a lot of vitamin C,” Anna explains. “It was sent to the brad factories and hospitals – it saved people from scurvy.”

And then she got another job, at the airfield in Shuvalovo cleaning the landing strip for those planes that managed to break through to the city under siege. The working brigades were mainly composed of adolescents, women and elderly who were weakened by hunger. Some people took pity on the girl, who spent hours shoveling snow. But others thought if she earned the same ration as everyone else, she should also work just as hard.

“Sometimes we worked 14-18 hours in a row, carrying the munitions and cleaning the air strip,” Anna says. “That’s when I knew what it means to sleep on your feet. We were taken to the cafeteria three at a time, and we held on to one another, so I closed my eyes and nodded off, opening them every now and then so as not to fall down.

Despite this backbreaking labor, malnutrition and sleep deprivation, the young workers watched films in their free time with the pilots. “Some of the films were shown 12 times,” laughs Anna. “The pilots taught us to dance… But I did think about any sort of courtship then – I was too young and wasn’t up to that anyway, but we had a good time with the pilots and for a few minutes all the problems seemed to fade away.”

Convoys by the Bread Factory

And then a new problem arose: her aunt fell ill. The sick woman started taking all of the girl’s rations, and times turned from bad to worse.

“An older girlfriend, seeing that I was in a desperate situation, proposed arranging my employment at the bread factory,” recalls Anna. “The personnel department had doubts, saying that I shouldn’t be working – I should be studying in school. But fortunately, they took me, but with the condition that I attend evening school.”

Many thought and to this day believe that work at the bread factory was a fat place, and that the factory workers knew nothing of starvation. Anna Kapustina quickly came to understand this was not the case.

“The work was physically very difficult,” she says. “We overloaded with these bags of flour weighing 50-70 kilograms which were had to haul off to this special pit. It was forbidden to take anything out – it was even forbidden to go from one factory building to the next. Security guards stood at the entrances. The guards carefully checked all purses and searched the employees. But people were different then; they lived by different moral principles. I remember an instance when this woman, a chemist, had a mother at home who was dying of hunger. Someone suggested that she hide a piece of bread in her braid. But they nonetheless found it. She couldn’t bear the humiliation and ended her own life before the authorities had the chance to look into the case. For taking out one piece of bread they could sentence you to five years in prison.”

These days we hear lots of stories about the blockade bread, and they practically added sawdust to the ingredients.

“There was no sawdust,” the blockade survivor says. “But flour really did account for no more than 30% of the ingredients. Scientists at the Institute of Food Industry were constantly experimenting and developing new recipes for bread based on the ingredients they did have. They added malt, millcake, soy mill and husks. But what they sent to the frontlines was always just real rye bread and biscuits made from it.”

The working conditions for the breadmakers were hellish. The pipes were always freezing, flour running out, air raid sirens wailing… Women stood watch on the roof with tongs in order to put out the firebombs. When the air raid sirens went off, the first thing that they did was cover the bread dough with a tarpaulin to prevent splinters and glass from falling in – the bread had to be produced regardless of the situation.

“Over the course of the blockade 18 employees of the bread factory died at work,” Anna notes. “And the rest were nearly emaciated. But the women who worked at the bread factory were truly resilient. We all were waiting for the war to end, and I remember how one day at the factory the flour had run out once again and we were sent out to shovel snow. That’s where we were when we heard that the blockade had fully been lifted. This news delighted us so the despite our complete exhaustion we started a snowball fight and went romping around. One of the guys accidentally dumped a shovel full of snow on a passing car, and it turned out that a general was riding inside. He made a complaint about us. But we were not punished, as this was such painfully appreciated news.”

Never Enough

When the war ended, Anna hoped for the best: her relatives returned from evacuation and she would have the opportunity to study and be done with the backbreaking work.

“I had this sense of eminent happiness in my soul – finally my life would start going as it should!” Anna says. “My teacher at the evening school always said that I had a knack for literature and advised me to continue my studies. But no, my dream was not fated to come true. The years following the war were very difficult ones, and my grandfather was an old and sick man. I was worried to death of hunger, so I couldn’t leave my job at the factory – I wanted to be closer to bread, to life. I completed a special course and became a technologist… Somewhere up until 1953 I was always afraid that I couldn’t get enough bread to eat. And I was very weak. Once I fainted right there at the factory. They took me to a medical station, and when I came to I heard the nurse tell my boss: ‘This girl should rest for three years, and only then begin to live her life.’ But I never had that opportunity.” 

Anna Kapustin has maintained her reverence for bread her entire life. “Bread can only be baked by decent people, people who are clean through and through,” she declares. “After all, we are feeding people. For me, bread is sacred.”

And she still works at the factory to this day. Even upon reaching retirement age she kept on going. However, despite the enormous respect she commands at the factory from coworkers and management alike, time is not passing by unnoticed, and she is now thinking of leaving. “It’s time to take a break – I haven’t had any rest since I was 14,” Anna admits. “I’ll work out the rest of this month and then call it quits.”

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