Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (21 page)

‘Yes,’ said Ketlinskaya, ‘an old aunt of mine had some neighbours, and it was noticed how they kept their light on at night, despite the strictest blackout rules. It was found that there was a man there, of German origin, who was signalling to his pals.’

Somebody else said that the most critical day of all was the 14th of September. ‘That day our various high school students held together with the Komsomol an enormous meeting, as a result of which every single young man still in town volunteered for immediate service. Hundreds of thousands of young people volunteered that day and in the next day or two.

‘Only one thousand did not volunteer. We said, ‘We want no cowards here.’ And we said goodbye to them.’

That was Vishnevsky speaking, and he said the last phrase in a very ominous tone. The dazzling captain now held the floor again.

‘The people of Leningrad knew among other things,’ he said, ‘that they were fighting for their own skins. General Malwerstedt of the S.S. Polizei Division made it perfectly plain that the S.S. were going to undertake a gigantic purge of the city, that 400,000 people at least would be bumped off or tortured to death right away. He said that the Revolution was a ‘concrete thing’ and that unless you killed all the people in any way typical of the Revolution, you did not stamp it out at all. It is a principle which, I sometimes wonder, shouldn’t we be well advised to apply to Germany in stamping out Hitlerism. … I am glad to say that Malwerstedt was subsequently bumped off by the partisans.

‘We weren’t going to be taken in by any nonsense. They started by dropping leaflets calling upon us to declare Leningrad an open city. Our people laughed at the idea. It wasn’t cheerful laughter, I can tell you, but they laughed. They said, ‘Nothing doing.’ All the time the Germans tried to frighten us out of our wits. They announced that Field-Marshal von Kuechler, who had smashed Warsaw to smithereens, would do the same to Leningrad. Hitler had already announced on July 16th: ‘Ich habe alle Móglichkeiten kalkuliert,’ and had announced the imminent fall of Leningrad. Then on November 5th, when the town was already cut off, they dropped leaflets, saying, ‘We shall do the bombing on the 6th, and
you
will do the burying on the 7th.’’

‘How the Germans love sadistic jokes!’ I remarked, ‘especially against people who are down or who they think are down.’

‘Yes,’ said Vishnevsky, ‘they were going to make it hot for us on the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Revolution. On the night of the 6th they dropped 65,000 bombs on Leningrad – mostly incendiaries, but very few started any fires. Our fire-fighting had already been perfectly organised. Then on the 8th Hitler announced that he would starve us into surrender: ‘That town will raise its arms of its own accord.’ The divine Führer really didn’t understand the first thing about our people. He is really a lout like the rest of his lousy soldiery. The German prisoners we get here – they don’t understand anything either.

‘Those were the days when our soldiers had entrenched themselves and a German breakthrough already seemed improbable. They fought like devils. So did the Naval Infantry. What superb fellows they were! Everybody in the Navy fought who could carry a rifle – the bakers fought and the cooks fought. The Baltic Fleet played its great part, tens of thousands went into the naval infantry, and the Fleet Air Arm was in charge – that was a little later – of protecting the Ladoga ice road. These sailors fought like devils. In one very hot engagement, south of Lake Ladoga, one of our sailors had his foot blown off by a German shell; he stuck the bleeding stump into a large shell-case and carried on till he lost consciousness through loss of blood – which was pouring over the sides of the shell case. There was a sacred frenzy in these men which frightened and bewildered the Germans. … Then, at one of the blackest moments, we learned that the Finns had broken into Beloostrov. We had hardly any men to spare. There were no rifles except training rifles. But I shall always remember that grey winter dawn at the Finnish station when 700 men, poorly armed but determined to get Beloostrov back, went north. They got it back, and the Finns have never tried to shoot their necks out again.’

Vishnevsky and others then talked about the famine. Much of what was said I had already heard, but there were a few fresh points.

‘The Leningrad Public Library was of great help to us in the blockade. People went there at first – actually before the blockade began – and studied every conceivable book on the sieges of towns. Then during the blockade there were no matches in Leningrad; scientists and others went to the Public Library and looked up books, 100 and 150 years old, books in French and English and German – on all the primitive methods of making matches. There is an old man there, Bychkov by name, one of the curators of the library. He recently celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday. He refused to be evacuated. He said, ‘Leningrad won’t be taken – to hell with you!’ And he refused to go. He was so weak, though, for a while he couldn’t walk at all.

‘At that time we didn’t know yet about the Ladoga ice road and the prospect really was very grim. But we cheered up enormously after the Battle of Moscow. We were all very hungry. To walk up to the third floor was agony. You’d stop a dozen times before getting there. But people didn’t complain. They never looted bakeries. Many thousands died quietly every week. The Komsomol did all it could to keep people’s morale up. They would drop in on people who were obviously going to pieces and say, ‘Look here, old man, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you had a wash and a shave.’

‘I myself said at a meeting,’ said Vishnevsky, ‘that women should use rouge and lipstick, it would make them feel better.’

‘The Komsomol and the Pioneers,’ somebody said, ‘did a lot to help the civilian population to pull through. They’d go to the houses of older people and would help them to change their ration cards which were about to expire. An enormous number of letters kept coming to Leningrad, especially from our own Leningrad front. The children did the work of postmen. They whistled outside houses till the people came down to fetch the letters addressed to them. With food rations what they were, you naturally couldn’t expect the children to run up and down hundreds of stairs.

‘There was a terrible fuel shortage, of course. One of the most extraordinary stunts of the blockade days was this one. There is a place in the Port of Leningrad where for half a century or more the coal ships from Cardiff used to be unloaded. As you know, when coal is unloaded there is always a certain amount of waste – the stuff drops into the water. Well, large holes were cut in the ice, and divers went down and worked for many days in the icy waters; and they brought to the surface 4,000 or 5,000 tons of coal! Those were the sort of expedients to which we were reduced.

‘There continued to exist the closest contact between Leningrad and the front – that front which was so near and whose guns could be heard throughout the dark, hungry winter nights. Women in Leningrad continued to knit comforts for the troops, and people kept sending them all sorts of little presents.

‘There was a soldier, a Sergeant Chistov, who wrote a letter to one of the Leningrad papers, saying that he never received any letters from anyone; and he added, ‘I am lonely; my heart isn’t armoured.’ Within a week he received 692 letters from people in Leningrad.

‘An enormous interest was shown here in the sniper movement. It was really here on the Leningrad front that it started. The real pioneer of the sniper movement was a Komsomol lad from the Viborg district, now Hero of the Soviet Union Smolyachkov. There’s another one, Semenchuk, aged nineteen. He has a sniper’s rifle personally inscribed by Zhdanov. He has killed 209 Germans. … And it was also here, on the Leningrad front, that the technique of ramming enemy planes was developed.

‘Fearful things were happening all the time. There were dead bodies all over the place. Cats and dogs had disappeared completely. I knew an elderly artist who strangled his cat and ate it. Even last summer I remember taking some small children out to the country, and a little girl began to scream in terror: ‘There’s a German. There’s a German!’ What she saw was a pig. She had never seen a pig before, except on war posters. A lot of our children have never seen even a cat or a dog.

‘One of the greatest examples of how Leningrad fought for its life was when in the spring 300,000 or 400,000 people came out into the street with shovels – people who were scarcely standing on their feet, so weak and hungry were they – and proceeded to clean up the town. All winter the drains and sewers had been out of action; there was a great danger of epidemics spreading with the coming of the warm weather. And in a few days these 300,000 or 400,000 weak, hungry people – many of them were very old people who had never handled a shovel in their lives – had shovelled away and dumped into the river and the canals all those mountains of snow and filth which, had they remained there, would have poisoned Leningrad. And it was a joy to see the city streets a few days later all clean and tidy. It had a great moral effect.’

Mr. Eliasberg, the conductor of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, was also there, a middle-aged man with a long thin Jewish face, who talked about the various experiences of his orchestra. This orchestra was the only one left behind in Leningrad during the blockade; it was split into first-aid, A.R.P. and air raid shelter ‘groups.’ ‘I’ve got a great viola player, Yesenyavsky; I always remember the wonderful way he plays the viola solo in Berlioz’s
Childe Harold in Italy.
That man – I have never seen him happier than on the 13th of September; that was the day we had eleven air raid warnings, it was really one continuous raid. But Yesenyavsky was a happy man that day. He had put out his first incendiary bomb. … I also remember another memorable day – the 28th of October, when things were looking very black indeed. We had seven air raids that day. In the morning we had a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth which we were going to play that night; it was going to be relayed to London. During that rehearsal four bombs dropped right outside the Radio Headquarters. Several people were wounded, among them two of my musicians. One was wounded in the head, the other in the leg. But they both arrived at the rehearsal, and later at the concert, bandaged up, and they played. I remember how another warning went just as we had started on the third movement, the Waltz; and then, when we were in the middle of the Finale, the whole building shook with a bomb that had landed just outside.’

I remarked that Broadcasting House had had very similar experiences in London during the blitz, and worse.

‘Well, yes,’ said Eliasberg, ‘that side of it must have been much the same; but what happened to us later can’t have had any parallel in London. For in November things became more and more difficult. We were constantly going to the front under shellfire, to do what we could for the troops. Many of our people were becoming very weak. In December and January many of them died from exhaustion and undernourishment. For seven long weeks the Orchestra was out of action. Then the party and the Leningrad front came to our rescue. The front gave us eighteen people for our Orchestra – eighteen people whom it was essential for us to have. Thanks to this we were able, on May 7th, to play for the first time in Leningrad Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. It had been performed only in Kyubyshev before then. Now we have seventy-five people in the Orchestra, and we play twenty-two or twenty-three times a month. Life has almost returned to normal for us, after the great ordeal we have lived through. But there is one thing I shall always remember. During those black days our musicians developed a new quality in their playing; they felt it more deeply, they gave more thought to it. Altogether, people in Leningrad are thinking a lot these days, and reading a lot, most of all our classics – Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, not least his
Writer’s Diary,
in which so much thought is given – whether he is right or wrong is another matter – to Russia’s destiny and her place in the world.’

‘And people themselves keep diaries,’ somebody else said, ‘a lot of diaries, with many astonishing details; a lot of this will be the basis for the literature Leningrad will produce after the war.’

Serov, the painter, much of whose work I had seen at the Leningrad art exhibition in Moscow, was also there. The impression I had formed of that exhibition was that, on the whole, Leningrad had maintained a rather higher standard of craftsmanship than most of the Russian painting produced today. The Leningrad artists had, during the blockade – and one realises in what fearful conditions they were working – concentrated on small canvases, on small charcoal drawings and etchings. Much of the work was little more than of documentary interest; but there were many poignant little paintings of the desolate Leningrad streets buried under the snowdrifts, and drawings, notably by Dormidontov, of a bread queue during the worst days of the blockade; some of these drawings, apart from their documentary value, had also a deep emotional content, and unquestionable qualities of composition. But actually, I think, the greatest value of the exhibition was to be found in the portraits, not least in Serov’s own portraits. These were the faces of Russian soldiers of the Leningrad front, of partisans, of airmen – faces of men, famous or nameless, all of whom were profoundly typical of the great and terrible years of 1941 and 1942.

It occurred to me then that there was a curious parallel between the art of this Russian war and French art during the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The vast canvases of David and the rest were no doubt of greater artistic merit than some of the giant monstrosities one had seen at exhibitions in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow: ‘The Rout of the Germans outside Moscow,’ ‘Sebastopol,’ and the rest of all those monumental battle scenes, those glorified
images d’Épinal,
with their static tanks spitting tassels of fire – but they were not half as typical of the Revolution or Napoleonic period as the portraits by the same David, Gerard, Gros, Gericault and so many others. In the same way, the
epoch
of this war in Russia – and what an epoch it is – is best of all reflected in the portraits painted by the Russian artists of today. The human material at the artist’s disposal is so supremely good that, even with the ordinary academic canons to which Russian artists generally adhere today (for lack of encouragement to follow less academic and more experimental or even plainly modern lines) the result is bound to be good. But Serov was not inclined to discuss painting in theoretical terms; somehow the ‘artistic’ side of art was something for which he had little interest in the present circumstances; he agreed with me, though, about the historic importance of the portraits painted in Russia today, and said that Leningrad would probably have its portrait gallery of the men who had taken part in the great battle and the blockade. He preferred instead to dwell on the active role played by the artists of Leningrad in this war. Many artists died of hunger, many others were killed in the bombings and bombardments; all, except the old men, had volunteered for the army, and the authorities had to make an effort to keep some of them back. Many of those who had gone into the army were dead now. ‘We Leningrad artists,’ said Serov, ‘were busy preparing a large exhibition for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution when the war came and upset all our plans. Those of us who did not go to the front devoted ourselves almost entirely to poster and propaganda work. Like the Moscow artists, many of us joined the Tass poster organisation – the Leningrad ‘Tass Windows’ are altogether distinct from the Moscow ‘Tass windows’ – and to nearly all of us ordinary painting really became very much a sideline. But whether we do poster work or simply paint, we painters have come much closer to the ordinary masses of the people. We continuously go to the front, we even live among the partisans, in the enemy rear. Like cinema operators, some of us have been killed. We have much interesting correspondence with soldiers and partisans. There is one young sniper who recently distinguished himself. One of our people painted a very good portrait of him. Having seen the picture, the sniper wrote a few days later: ‘You’ve made my picture. I killed today a German
for you.’
Another soldier who had his portrait painted said to the artist: ‘You mustn’t show my picture to anybody just now, because I am going into the enemy rear.’ Then a few weeks later he wrote: ‘I’ve come from the enemy rear; I’ve done this and that. You can show my picture now.’