Also detailed were the gruesome finds made by those assigned to deal with the thousands of dead bodies that were stacking up at the city’s largest cemeteries and elsewhere. After dynamiting the frozen ground, “[the men] noticed as they piled the corpses into mass graves that pieces were missing, usually the fat thighs or arms or shoulders.” The bodies of women with their breasts or buttocks cut off were found, as were severed legs with the meat cut away. In other instances, only the heads of the deceased were found. People were arrested for possessing body parts or the corpses of unrelated children.
But beyond the diaries and the accounts of Leningraders who lived through the siege, what other evidence for cannibalism has been uncovered? No physical evidence survives, no bones with cut marks suggestive of butchering or signs that they had been cooked. The inhabitants of Leningrad buried their dead, as difficult as the task had been, then tried to get beyond the nightmare they’d lived through.
As for official word, “You will look in vain in the published official histories for reports of the trade in human flesh,” Salisbury wrote in 1969, and this remained so until relatively recently. All mention of cannibalism-related incidents had been purged from the public record, apparently because Stalin and other Communist Party leaders wanted to portray Leningrad’s besieged citizens as heroes. Leningrad was the first of 12 Russian cities to be award the honorary title “Hero City” for the behavior of its citizens during World War II. That said, anything as unpleasant as eating one’s neighbors would have cast Leningraders in something far dimmer than the glorious light mandated by their leaders.
In 2004, the official reports made right after the war by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) were released.24 They revealed that approximately 2,000 Leningraders had been arrested for cannibalism during the siege (many of them executed on the spot). In most instances, these were normal people driven by impossible conditions to commit unspeakable acts. Cut off from food and fuel and surrounded by the bodies of the dead, preserved by the arctic temperatures, Leningrad’s starving citizens faced the same difficult decisions encountered by other disaster survivors, that is: Should they consume the dead or die themselves? According to an array of independent accounts as well as those from the NKVD, many of them chose to live.
On December 26, 1846, only ten days after leaving the Truckee Lake Camp, the members of The Forlorn Hope were lost deep in the frozen High Sierras. Only a third of the way into their nightmarish trek, they reportedly decided that without resorting to cannibalism they would all die. At first the hikers discussed eating the bodies of anyone who died, but soon they began to debate more desperate measures: drawing straws with the loser sacrificed so that the others might survive.
It was a procedure that had become known to seafarers as “the custom of the sea,” a measure that provided (at least in theory) some rules for officers and their men should they find themselves cast adrift on the open ocean. Sailors drew straws, with the short straw giving up his life so that the rest might eat. In some descriptions, the person drawing the next shortest straw would act as the executioner. Although heroic in concept and theoretically fair in design, modified versions of “the custom of the sea” were sometimes less than heroic and anything but fair.
In perhaps the most famous case, in 1765, a storm demasted the American sloop Peggy, leaving her adrift in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. On board were the captain, his crew of nine, and an African slave. They had been en route to New York from the Azores with a hold full of wine and brandy. After a month, they had nothing to eat but plenty to drink, a fact driven home when the spooked captain of a potential rescue vessel took one look at the Peggy’s ragged-looking crew of drunks and promptly sailed away. The Peggy’s captain, perhaps fearing for his own life, remained in his cabin, armed with a pistol.