What was a typical day under Lenin’s rule like? In his diary, a Petrograd professor named Vasily Vodovozov describes one:
3 December 1920
I shall describe my day – not because the minor details are of interest in themselves but because they are typical of the lives of nearly everyone – with the exception of a few bosses.
Today I got up at 9 a.m. There is no point getting up before since it is dark and the house lights are not working. There is a shortage of fuel… I drank some coffee (made from oats) without milk or sugar, of course, and ate a piece of bread from a loaf bought two weeks ago…
By eleven I was ready to go out. But after such a breakfast I was still hungry and decided to eat in a vegetarian canteen. It is frightfully expensive but the only place in Petrograd I know where I can eat… without registration or the permission of some commissar. It turned out the canteen was closed… so I went on to the Third Petrograd University, in fact now closed as a university but where there is still a cafeteria in which I am registered to eat… But here too I had no luck: there was a long [line] of hopeful eaters, tedium and vexation written on their faces; the [line] was not moving at all… Anyone reading this… may suppose that these people were expecting a banquet. But the whole meal was a single dish – usually a thin soup with a potato or cabbage in it. There is no question of any meat. Only the privileged few ever get that – i.e., the people who work in the kitchen… There was no choice but to go to work hungry…
By 2 p.m. I had reached [my workplace] by foot [the trams were typically not running for lack of fuel]. I stayed for half an hour and then went to the University, where there was supposed to be a ration of cabbage handed out at 3 p.m…. But again I was out of luck: it turned out that the cabbage had not been delivered and would be given out tomorrow. And not to professors but only to students. I also found out there would be no bread ration for a week: some people said that all the bread had already been given out to the Communists who run all the committees…
I went back to the vegetarian canteen with the hope of eating. Again out of luck: all the food was gone…. From there I went back home at 5 p.m. And there I had my first piece of luck of the day: the lights in our sector were switched on. That gave me one precious hour to read – the first hour of the day free from running around for meals, bread, or cabbage. At six I went to my [neighbors’] to eat (at last!), and came back to write these lines. At nine it went dark… I lit a candle… drank tea… and at eleven went to bed.
Source:
Fleming, Candace. "The World Will Never Know What Has Become of Them." The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion & the Fall of Imperial Russia. 247-48. Print.
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