Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (48 page)

Leningrad had also turned into a city of women, who now made up three-quarters of the population and the majority of workers in every manufacturing sector except weapons production and shipbuilding.
43
(The laying of a fuel pipe under Lake Ladoga, completed in June, allowed power stations and factories to resume limited production.) The Hermitage’s head of security complained that whereas before the war he had had 650 guards, he now had 64, ‘a mighty troop composed mostly of elderly ladies of fifty-five or more, plus some in their seventies. Many are cripples who used to serve as room attendants . . . at any one time at least a third of them are in hospital.’
44
Chekrizov unwillingly took on a batch of eighteen women, formerly clerks and bookkeepers, at his Sudomekh shipyard – they would be of no use, he grumbled, except to tidy up. A couple of months later he was eating his words, having successfully trained more than a hundred housewives as lathe operators, metalworkers and welders. They not only worked, he admitted, but ‘worked well’.
45
The yard also employed over two hundred children under the age of eighteen, all either orphaned or without a parent in the city.

With more food available and fewer mouths to feed, most Leningraders now ate, by Soviet standards, almost normally (‘A fairly well-organised system of under-nourishment’, as Ginzburg sardonically put it). In addition to bread, meat, fats and sugar, coupons became exchangeable for tiny amounts of salt, wine, dried onion, dried mushrooms, cranberries, salted fish, coffee and matches. In works canteens, people no longer licked their plates, though they still ran a finger round the edge of the bowl and followed the waitresses with hungry eyes. The death rate, though still several times higher than before the war, fell steadily, and heart failure (an after-effect of severe malnutrition) took over from ‘dystrophy’ as the single biggest killer.
46

The mental adjustment took longer. It was a continual surprise to encounter no queues at food shops – ‘like a man who braces himself to pick up a heavy suitcase’, wrote Ginzburg, ‘and finds it empty’. The words ‘I’m hungry’, recently so charged with desperation and despair, only slowly reverted to their old function of expressing an ordinary desire for lunch. Most Leningraders were still extremely weak – their recovery as fragile, as Boldyrev put it of his family, as a spider’s web that might at any moment be ripped apart by a passing tractor. When Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s surviving fifteen-year-old nephew came to visit her at the end of May she was shocked to see him ‘corpse-pale, dragging his feet, unbelievably thin, using a walking stick, hair fallen out and head covered in a white fuzz’. (True to form, she set him to painting, and he completed ‘a good study of trees, sky, and parts of the Anatomy Department’.)
47
The genuinely healthy still stood out, especially in the newly reopened public bathhouses. Berggolts saw a smooth-skinned, full-breasted young woman mobbed by blotched and bony fellow bathers, who slapped her bottom, hissing that she must be a canteen manager’s mistress or thieving orphanage worker, until the girl dropped her water basin and fled.
48

In the midst of recovery, also, a minority of people continued to die of starvation, either because their bodies had been pushed beyond recovery or because they fell outside the rationing system. From the spring, although ration levels gradually increased, getting a card was made harder. Another general re-registration in April reduced the number of cards in circulation, rules excluding those without residence permits were more harshly enforced and cards were withdrawn from the unemployed so as to push them into evacuation.
49
‘It’s not medieval, like it was in the winter’, wrote Berggolts in July,

but almost every day you see someone lying propped up against a wall – either exhausted or already dying. Yesterday on the Nevsky, on the steps of the Gosbank, a woman lay in a puddle of her own urine. A pair of policemen were hauling her up by the armpits, and her legs, wet and reeking, dragged on the asphalt behind her.

And the children, the children in the bakeries! Oh this pair – a mother and three-year-old daughter, with the brown motionless face of a monkey. Huge transparent blue eyes, frozen, staring straight ahead with accusation and contempt. Her taut little face was turned slightly upwards and to the side, her dirty, inhuman brown paw held out motionless in a begging gesture . . . What an accusation of us all – of our culture, our life! What a judgement – nothing could be more merciless.
50

Lazarev was haunted by a starving teenage girl who approached him outside a food shop, begging for a piece of bread to go with a herring head and telling him that she ‘lived without cards’. He gave her the makeweight from his family’s ration and looked out for her the next day, but never saw her again. The editor of a factory newspaper picked up a starving child in the street:

In the morning on the way to work, I saw a little boy all on his own. Now and again he sobbed, and I was struck by his odd, uncertain gait. I approached him, and he disconnectedly muttered that his mother had gone, that he wouldn’t have anything to eat until the evening. It was immediately obvious that he had lost his reason. His mind was wandering. He kept telling me about his father, and asked me to show him the way to the front. He was on his way to find him, but didn’t know how to get there.
51

Like the Gulag’s ‘goners’, the still-starving acted as fearful reminders of mortality, objects of scornful mockery as much as of compassion. Lazarev’s daughter and niece learned the following popular rhyme, adapted from the words of a pre-war children’s song:

A dystrophic walked along

With a dull look

In a basket he carried a corpse’s arse.

‘I’m having human flesh for lunch,

This piece will do!

Ugh, hungry sorrow!

And for supper, clearly

I’ll need a little baby.

I’ll take the neighbours’,

Steal him out of his cradle.’
52

To get rid of the physically useless, bosses used them to fill quotas of ‘volunteers’ for out-of-town logging camps and peat mines. Boldyrev, now enrolled at the Public Library, railed against the despatch to peatworks of a colleague, a ‘second-degree dystrophic’ and ‘sorry, clumsy creature’ quite incapable of digging for ten hours a day. ‘Work!’ he wrote angrily in his diary, ‘after a day of it they fall off their feet. Tomorrow she has to go. Cruelty, pointless cruelty.’ Four weeks later she returned and told him what it had been like:

For the strong it’s fine there – extra bread, lunch. The barracks are warm and have electric light. Many gain weight and apply to stay for the winter – the camp regime, of course, doesn’t bother them. But woe to the weak, because if you don’t meet your norm they cut your rations. Our unfortunate librarian – who could hardly stand even before she left – was down to a single bowl of wheat soup a day. And this on a first-category card – in other words, she wasn’t even being given the rations she was due. That’s the system. Everywhere, all the time, the weak are now being trampled and repressed, on principle. ‘Dystrophic’ has turned into a swear word – in workplaces, on the streets, on the trams. Dystrophics are despised, persecuted, beaten into the ground. If you’re applying for a job, the first requirement is not to look dystrophic. These are the morals of the second year of the siege.
53

*
In Moscow, Alexander Werth noted ‘cruel cardboard hams, cheeses and sausages, all covered in dust’.

20

The Leningrad Symphony

For the American and especially the British governments, the Soviet partnership had always been fraught with difficulty. For the first two years of the war (as even the least nationalistic Russians prefer to forget), the Soviet Union had not only been publicly dedicated to world revolution, but in alliance with Hitler. There had also been intense public anger at its invasion of Finland, during which the British and French governments seriously considered sending a joint expeditionary force to the Finns’ defence. Only when itself invaded by Germany did the Soviet Union abruptly turn from foe into friend.

Churchill, on hearing the news, immediately grasped that to sell this U-turn to the public he needed to draw a distinction between the Russian people and their government. He first did so in a speech broadcast on the very evening of Barbarossa, memorably declaring support for ordinary Russians – ‘I see the ten thousand villages of Russia . . . where there are still primordial joys, where maidens laugh and children play’ – while continuing to condemn the regime – ‘No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I . . . I will unsay no word I have spoken about it.’
^*
Government information agencies were instructed to follow suit, but it was a hard balance to strike. The BBC, obliged to broadcast a generous quota of Russian material but to steer clear of ideology, stuck mostly to the nineteenth-century classics (a radio adaptation of
War and Peace
, starring Celia Johnson as Natasha and Leslie Banks as Pierre, was a hit), folk songs and Rimsky-Korsakov. It took the corporation six months to get permission to broadcast the ‘Internationale’ (‘we were asked not to overdo it’), and ‘talkers’ were restricted to distant historical topics, especially if left wing. Of Bernard Pares, distinguished founder of London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, it was decided that he couldn’t ‘do much harm on Peter the Great etc’.
1
Mass starvation in Leningrad – beyond the occasional observation that the city was ‘in a bad way for food’ – was not mentioned at all. Stressed instead were the city’s cultural losses (Inber wrote a moralising article, for foreign consumption, about shell damage to a bust of Roentgen, inventor of the X-ray) and its stout defence. A Professor Ogorodnikov broadcast fraternal greetings – ‘wearing an infantryman’s greatcoat, with a rifle in my hands’ – to the Astronomer Royal.
2
A proposal that the BBC broadcast its own Russian-language programmes direct to the Soviet Union got nowhere: when the suggestion was put to Maisky, according to Anthony Eden, the Soviet ambassador ‘shied like a young colt’.
3

In early 1942 news arrived of something that promised brilliantly to transcend all these difficulties – a new symphony, written in besieged Leningrad, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Though he looked younger with his cowlick and owlish spectacles, Shostakovich was thirty-four when the war broke out. A child prodigy, he had entered the Leningrad (then Petrograd) Conservatoire at the age of thirteen and joined the Soviet musical establishment six years later, when his First Symphony was taken up by the great German conductor Bruno Walter. In 1936 his career went dramatically into reverse, when his
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
, successfully premiered two years earlier, was suddenly denounced by
Pravda
as ‘muddle instead of music’. Having spent the late 1930s in constant fear of arrest, he was (like Anna Akhmatova) brought back into the fold with the German invasion. As well as writing songs for the troops he very publicly joined in trench-digging, applied to join the People’s Levy and was photographed, wearing an absurd, old-fashioned brass fireman’s helmet, on the roof of the Conservatoire. On 17 September – just over a week after the siege began – he was summoned to the Radio House to make a national broadcast, from a text closely echoing
Leningradskaya Pravda
’s ‘The Enemy is at the Gates’ editorial of the previous day. He was speaking, he told listeners, from the front line. But though a battle to the death was joined outside the city walls, inside life went on as normal, as proven by the fact that two hours ago he had completed the first movement of a new symphony.

The first person to hear the symphony’s outline, on a ‘steel-grey, depressing sort of day’ six weeks before, had been his secretary, Isaak Glikman:

He told me that he wanted me to hear the first pages of his new work. After a moment’s hesitation he played the exposition and variation of the theme depicting the Fascist invasion. We were both extremely agitated; it was a rare event for Shostakovich to play with such manifest emotion. Afterwards we sat for a while in silence, which Shostakovich finally broke with the words (I wrote them down) ‘I don’t know what the fate of this piece will be.’ After another pause he added, ‘I suppose that critics with nothing better to do will damn me for copying Ravel’s
Bolero
. Well, let them. That’s how I hear war.’
4

Equally moved was the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who was among a group of musicians Shostakovich invited to his flat to hear a fuller run-through two days after his broadcast.

Unanimously we asked him to play it again. But the sirens rang out – another air-raid alert. Shostakovich suggested that we take a short break while he helped his wife and children, Galina and Maksim, down to the air-raid shelter. Left to ourselves, we sat in silence. No words seemed appropriate to what we had just heard.
5

Realising the new work’s propaganda value, in early October the authorities evacuated Shostakovich and his family by air to Moscow. From Moscow they travelled, in a chaotically overcrowded train (for a horrible half-hour the symphony’s manuscript was thought lost), to the Volga town of Kuibyshev. There, despite shared living quarters  and desperate anxiety for his mother, sister and in-laws left behind in Leningrad, Shostakovich finished the Seventh’s orchestration.