blockade

The published document is a primary source on the history of the 1st Leningrad Tobacco Factory named after Uritsky. It was the largest enterprise in the USSR to operate during the siege of Leningrad, supplying the city’s population and its defenders with cigarettes and tobacco. In the challenging conditions of war and blockade, smoking frequently served as means of coping with psycho-emotional distress, alleviating hunger, and acquiring a certain ritualistic significance. The factory’s activities in the initial year of the Great Patriotic War are discussed by the factory director, V. N. Rumyantsev, in a letter to V. P. Zotov, A. I. Mikoyan’s commissioner on food issues. The factory’s staff, in their efforts to substitute scarce raw materials, not only produced tobacco products but also successfully mastered the production of ammunition and medicines. The author of the letter goes on to describe his efforts to maintain the factory’s operational capacity during the first blockade winter, and characterizes the domestic characteristics of the workers.