Badayev Warehouses

Origins and early functions

A first-guild merchant, S. I. Rasteryaev, opened the complex in Petrograd in 1914 on an extensive 27-hectare plot east of Zabalkansky Prospekt, behind the Novodevichy cemetery and monastery. The project's approval date, the start of works and the funding sources are unknown. In 1915 a new Navalochnaya station, able to unload up to 150 wagonloads of firewood a day, opened on this land, and a dedicated city freight-tram line was laid to the warehouses from Zabalkansky Prospekt, the second such freight line in Petrograd; it let goods be transferred from railway wagons to tramcars, saving wagon idle time and warehouse capacity. A contemporary 1916 account records 34 large temporary wooden warehouses with platforms and a private auxiliary freight station on Rasteryaev's land, built to serve the capital's small wholesale buyers.

The early complex was a general-commodity freight and logistics facility with no clear commodity specialisation, competing with other station warehousing in Petrograd. Food storage was not the 1914 original purpose but a function formed after the NEP.

Revolution and NEP

After the October Revolution the infrastructure continued to handle various categories of freight. During the 1918-19 crisis, when most Petrograd enterprises closed and the population fell severalfold, the city's freight tram, one of the few branches of work that did not stop, made up for the shortage of horse transport. Rasteryaev's own shot-casting works at Chernigovskaya 11 was nationalised in 1918 and during the NEP was leased out as the state shot-casting works 'Okhotnik', so the site belonged to a mixed industrial complex, not only to warehousing.

After the end of the NEP, the site was reprofiled as a food storage base through the restructuring of intra-city goods flows under socialist industrial reorganisation and the growth of the Leningrad transport hub. The adoption of the name of Bolshevik A. E. Badayev, who headed the Petrograd food board and became food commissar of Petrograd and the Northern Oblast, is treated as an indirect sign of that reprofiling. The name 'Badayev warehouses' appears on a city map compiled in 1929 and printed in 1935 and in Leningrad telephone directories no later than 1937. In 1923 the whole territory was still marked as Rasteryaevo station, while the modern railway station at the site bears the name Badayevskaya.

On the eve of the siege and the 1941 fire

In the immediate prewar period the site was Leningrad's main food base, occupying 32 hectares. It was never fully loaded and constantly received goods that moved on after a short time: a transit node rather than a complete reserve of last resort. The last train bearing food products entered Leningrad on 27 August 1941, and on 8 September the Axis began the siege.

On 8 and 10 September 1941 German air raids dropped 280 incendiary bombs on the warehouse grounds. Thirty-eight wooden warehouses and 11 other structures burned, containing, according to officially published archival data, 3,000 tons of flour and 2,500 tons of sugar. An operational fire-brigade report dated 8 September 1941 records Kievskaya ul. 5 as the centre of the Moscow district raid, 280 incendiary bombs, the fire detected at 19.05, units committed at 19.10, the fire extinguished at 23.35, and 52 city fire departments plus 14 facility teams deployed.

After the fire was put out, up to 1,000 tons of burnt or water-soaked flour and up to 900 tons of burnt sugar were collected from the ashes and later processed by the city's food enterprises: a record of recovery rather than total loss.

The fire entered Leningraders' memory as the cause of the onset of the 1941-42 famine. One version holds that the depots held only three days' supplies under the ration norms then in force; the article presents this as a version rather than verified fact, and notes that unknown quantities of biscuits, sweets and other products were also destroyed.

Conflicting interpretations of the famine

The fire's effect on the famine is assessed differently in the sources. The 1992 St Petersburg encyclopaedic reference states that the version making the Badayev warehouses fire one of the main causes of the 1941-42 famine does not correspond to reality, and that remaining stocks were subsequently dispersed across the city to protect them from shelling and bombing. It gives the loss as 41 structures with 3,000 tons of flour and about 2,500 tons of sugar, calling these a day and a half's flour and three days' sugar consumption.

Contemporary historians likewise treat as a degree of exaggeration the claim that the famine occurred precisely because the entire contents of the depots perished. By various versions the fire destroyed flour and sugar sufficient for from several days to a month, while Leningrad held no large reserves in general and had been supplied 'from the wheels' since prewar times.

Political responsibility is also documented in the literature. The version that the fire did not affect the level of famine in Leningrad is said to absolve the party leadership of Leningrad of blame for failing to disperse these food stocks in time, which would have prevented their large-scale destruction by bombing. Dispersal capacity existed: 92 large enterprises had been evacuated, leaving hundreds of empty workshops after 70,000 units of equipment were removed. The literature records that on 22 June 1941, at the first meeting of the operational staff of the Leningrad NKVD directorate, the head of the economic-crime department A. S. Dryazgov proposed dispersing food stocks among small city warehouses, which would have prevented their destruction in one strike. This is an argument recorded in a particular source, not a settled fact.

The quantities themselves are disputed. A 2024 Vecherniy Peterburg account based on historians and museum researchers gives the loss as 3,000 tons of flour and 700 tons of sugar. This conflicts with the 2,500 tons of sugar reported by Wikipedia, the St Petersburg encyclopaedia and ITMO.NEWS, and with the same article's own account of the 'Badayev earth'. The figure must be attributed to its source.

'Sweet earth' and related terms

The burned site produced the wartime Leningrad terms 'Badayev earth' and 'sweet earth' for soil soaked in melted sugar, which starving residents dug up and ate and which circulated at flea markets wrapped in newspaper as the 'Badayev product'. A Petersburg dictionary records 'Badayevskaya zemlya' as the siege-era name for the sweet earth soaked in melted sugar in the area of the burnt warehouses, which people ate after buying it at markets for huge money, and cross-references the synonymous terms 'sweet earth', 'Badayev product' and 'Leningrad cheese'. However, the Russian colloquial market words 'barakholka' and 'tolchok' are general terms for second-hand markets and must not be conflated with this site; the best-known Leningrad and St Petersburg flea market grew up at Udelnaya station from 1990.

Reconstruction and after

After the fire the warehouses were rebuilt and continued to function as an urban wholesale and food base, later variously named an optorg base and a glass-container special base. Between 1945 and the 1970s the Badayev warehouses were rebuilt, and the 1965 Leningrad city directory lists the 'Badayev wholesale base' of the city food-trade administration at Kievskaya 5, with the Leningrad inter-oblast wholesale base of Roskhoztorg also documented on the territory. By the 1990s the territory housed the Leningrad special base for glass containers and all structures had been rebuilt anew.

The buildings standing today are not only the 1914 wooden depots. As of 2021, six structures of 1912-1917 and six of 1928-1933 survived among more than 50 buildings at the Kievskaya 5 address, while the wooden complex was rebuilt from 1945 and further added to until the mid-1970s.

The site burned again on 20 May 2010, after earlier fires in November 2006, February 2007 and December 2008. The 2010 fire was fought as a category-three blaze covering 4.5 thousand square metres and burning non-food goods, notably furniture; smoke was visible from Nevsky Prospekt. On 30 December 2010 the insurer RESO-Garantiya paid 30.8 million rubles to its insured ZAO 'B. V. S.' for property lost in that fire.

Memory and examples

The 8 September fire is commemorated as the symbol of the beginning of the blockade. The literature records the siege-era laboratory of the Badaev bread factory, led by biochemist Mikhail Knyaginichev with engineer Pavel Plotnikov and microbiologist Zinaida Shmidt, which developed bread substitutes from dark rye flour, knotweed seed flour, saltbush, birchbark, flour dust, plant pulp, soybean meal and hydrated cellulose; over 26 tons of additives yielded 50 extra tons of bread.

Eyewitness testimony survives. Nikolai Nikulin, then at an army school nearby, described the September 1941 raid and the smoke of the burning 'Badayev food warehouses', which he later understood decided the fate of a million starving Leningraders; blockade survivor Antonina Vasilyevna Vavilonova is also cited.

Wartime food-policy context is needed as well. Ration cards for bread, flour, sugar and meat were introduced in Leningrad on 18 July 1941, free sale of food was banned from 1 September, norms were first cut on 2 September, and from 20 November workers received 250 g of bread while clerks, dependants and children under 12 received 125 g.

The fire also entered art: Gorodnitsky's lines about the burning sugar are quoted in the Petersburg press as commemorating it, and the site appears in Vysotsky's blockade song 'I grew up in the Leningrad blockade'. A generalising mass-culture account exists too: a US popular-history page dates the start of the siege to 8 September 1941 and records that a German air bombardment set fire to warehouses containing a large part of Leningrad's scant food supply, without naming the site; it gives the siege as 872 days with about one million dead.