Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (49 page)

Its various premieres – in Kuibyshev on 5 March 1942, in Moscow (in the Kremlin’s Hall of Columns) on the 29th, and in London and New York in June and July – were sensations. ‘The Seventh Symphony’,
Pravda
exulted after the Kuibyshev performance, ‘is the creation of the conscience of the Russian people . . . Hitler didn’t scare Shostakovich; Shostakovich is a Russian man.’
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Attending the Moscow concert, Olga Berggolts passionately wished that her dead husband could be there too – ‘Oh what sorrow that I can’t tell Kolya about it. How terrible and unfair that he can’t hear it . . . Inside I was weeping all the time, listening to the first part, and was so exhausted from the unbearable tension that the middle section disappeared somehow. Did they hear it in Leningrad?’
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For Alexander Werth, also listening in Moscow, the symphony reflected ‘infinite pity for the Russian people’, and its sinister pipe and drum march, repeated eleven times at ever-increasing volume, the feeling that ‘naked evil, in all its stupendous, arrogant, inhumanly terrifying power’, was overrunning the country.
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The symphony’s London premiere – held on the first anniversary of Barbarossa – was broadcast across the Empire. Its opening movement, the announcer intoned in what he was instructed should be a ‘sincere’ and ‘enthusiastic’ voice, introduced two themes. The first was ‘straightforward and sturdy, like the plain, tanned faces of the millions of Soviet men and women who gathered together on Sunday 22 June last year, in the midst of peaceful, joyous life’. The second symbolised the German invasion – ‘the theme of the Fascists – brutal, senseless, implacable’. (References to its ‘insidious’ and ‘sardonic’ nature were cut from the script.) ‘If you have ears to hear and heart to feel’, the announcer sonorously concluded, ‘I am sure you will agree that that music tells a story of sublime heroism, of unquenchable faith in victory.’
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A proms performance followed under the baton of Sir Henry Wood, for which six thousand people packed the Albert Hall.

In New York the symphony sparked a tussle between the great conductors Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, both of whom lobbied the Soviet embassy for the honour of directing its first performance. Toscanini and his NBC Orchestra won, and though Shostakovich privately loathed his interpretation (‘He minces it up and pours a disgusting sauce all over it’), it glued millions of Americans to their radios.
Time
magazine celebrated the event by putting ‘Fireman Shostakovich’ on the cover, strapline ‘Amid bombs bursting in Leningrad, he heard the chords of victory’. During the 1942–3 season the symphony was performed sixty-two times in the United States, many of the concerts turning into public demonstrations of support for a second front. Determined not to be outdone again by NBC, CBS paid the Soviet government $10,000 for whatever symphony Shostakovich composed next. Shostakovich himself, though praised to the skies in the Soviet press, was unnerved by it all – ‘A new success’, he later said, ‘meant a new coffin nail.’
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The Seventh’s final and most poignant premiere was that held in Leningrad itself, on 9 August 1942. The city’s more prestigious orchestras having been evacuated as the siege ring closed, the performance fell to the Radio Committee Symphony, directed by Karl Eliasberg. Though severely depleted by the draft, the orchestra had continued to perform as the mass-death winter set in. It had given its last public concert (of Tchaikovsky) on 14 December, in the Philharmonia’s freezing blue and white Great Hall, and its last live broadcast on New Year’s Day 1942, of excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Snow Maiden
(the lead tenor, I. A. Lapshenkov, barely made it through his aria and died the same evening). A few weeks later Berggolts overheard Makogonenko dictating a memo: ‘Leader, first violins – dead. Bassoon – near death. Senior percussionist – dead.’
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Twenty-seven members of the orchestra had perished altogether.

At the end of February 1942 the Radio Committee announced that the orchestra was being reconstituted, and broadcast an appeal requesting all musicians left in the city to report for registration. When only sixteen did so, Eliasberg hauled himself out of the
statsionar
in the Hotel Astoria and hobbled from apartment to apartment urging the bedridden on to their feet. The first rehearsals, an oboist remembers, were only forty minutes long, and she was embarrassed to see friends’ faces dirty with soot, and lice crawling over their collars. Meals were provided, though most took the extra food home to their families. A first concert – of waltzes, and extracts from
The
Nutcracker
and
Swan Lake
– was held on 5 April, in the vast Aleksandrinsky Theatre. The oboist watched Eliasberg mount the podium:

Karl Ilyich came out all starched, in tails. But when he raised his arms his hands shook. I had this feeling that he was a bird that had just been shot, that at any moment he would plummet to the ground . . . After a while his hands stopped shaking, and he began to conduct.

When we finished the first piece the audience started to applaud, but there was no sound because everyone was wearing mittens. Looking out at the crowd, you couldn’t tell who was a man and who was a woman – the women were all wrapped up, and the men were wearing scarves and shawls, or even women’s fur coats. Afterwards we were all so inspired, because we knew that we had done our job and that our work would continue.
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Rehearsals for the Shostakovich began in mid-July, only a few weeks before the premiere. Scored for eight horns, six trombones, five timpanists, two harps and a minimum of sixty-two strings, the symphony far outran the Radio Committee’s resources, though extra brass players were drafted in from military bands, and given manual workers’ ration cards. Microfilm of the score arrived by air from Sweden, and each musician copied out his own part by hand. The male players were provided with jackets and the females with dark dresses – though they looked, the oboist remembered, as if they were hanging on coathangers. On the morning of the concert – its date the first anniversary of that on which Hitler was said to have planned to hold a victory banquet at the Astoria – General Govorov mounted a special Operation Squall, so as to prevent disruption from air raids or barrages. Inside the grandee-packed auditorium the performance itself was ragged, but the atmosphere overwhelming. ‘Some wept’, remembered a woman in the audience,

because that was the only way in which they could express their excitement, others because they had lived through what the music was now expressing with such force, many because they were grieving for those they had lost, many because they were overcome with the mere fact of being present here in the Philharmonia.

During the finale everyone stood: ‘It was impossible to listen sitting down. Impossible.’
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The besieging Germans, hearing the music ring out from loudspeakers across no-man’s-land, are said to have realised at that moment that the war in the East would never be won – Leningrad was invincible, and so was Mother Russia.

It is a wonderful story, but seems to resonate more in retrospect than it did among Leningraders at the time. Few diarists mention the concert, and then only in passing. The chameleon Seventh – by turns menacing, nervy, terrifying and transcendent – perhaps better suited the summer of 1941, when Shostakovich wrote it, than numbed, emptied 1942. As Vera Inber, who attended the Leningrad premiere, wrote in her diary when she got home, ‘The rumbling approach of the German tanks – there it was. But the shining conclusion is yet to come.’
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Later the symphony became a pawn of the Cold War, played to death in the Soviet Union and written off as a bombastic slice of Stalinism in the West. Shostakovich was able to clear its name only posthumously, via memoirs written by friends. Composing the famous ‘Fascist’ pipe and drum march, he explained, he had had in mind not only the Nazis but ‘other enemies of humanity . . . I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot or starved to death. There were millions of them in our country before the war with Hitler began.’
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The other great recovery story of 1942 is that of Leningrad’s children. At the beginning of the siege children aged twelve and under made up just under 20 per cent of Leningrad’s civilian population of 2.4 million. By May, 170,000 had either died or been evacuated over the Ice Road, and thousands more had been orphaned or left without care.
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One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva:

28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.

From January onwards teams of civil defence workers, mostly young women in their late teens or twenties, did the rounds of ‘dead’ flats picking up children like Tanya. They were handed in to police-run reception centres, similar to those opened five years earlier to process the offspring of purge victims. From the centres younger children, aged three to thirteen, were transferred to 130 new children’s homes (ninety-eight in the city, thirty-two in surrounding towns and villages) which opened from January to March. By the end of the year 26,250 children had been taken in, 54 per cent of them orphaned, 30 per cent with a single parent serving in the forces.
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Older children were enrolled with civil defence teams or factories, either directly or via trade schools. Fourteen-year-old Galina Vishnevskaya, abandoned in Kronshtadt by her father and stepmother, joined an all-women civil defence brigade. She lived in barracks, wore a boiler suit and learned how to shoulder planks, dig up broken pipes, drink vodka, smoke
makhorka
and sing jazz to sailors. ‘It was’, as she put it in her memoirs, ‘no institute for aristocratic young ladies . . . I came to know life as it really is – life as I would never have known it under other conditions.’
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Another sole survivor child, aged eight at the time, was Irina Bogdanova. Her family had already been half-destroyed by the Terror, during which her paternal grandparents were exiled to Archangel and her father, a journalist on
Leningradskaya Pravda
, committed suicide. Irina – a plump, pretty girl in white socks with blonde pigtails – was brought up by her mother (a frequently absent geologist), aunt and grandmother in a flat on Barmaleyev Street, on the Petrograd Side. Come February 1942, the adults succumbed one by one to dysentery, leaving Irina alone with the corpses of her mother and grandmother. She was picked up ten days later by a twenty-one-year-old civil defence worker, who handed her in to the police together with her clothes, shoes and unused ration card (‘Just think, in those conditions, how honest she was not to take it!’ Irina exclaims now). On her registration form someone first wrote ‘boy’ and then corrected it to ‘girl’. The days Irina spent alone are a blank: the first thing she remembers is waking in a large, light room and realising that the girl with whom she was sharing a bed was dead. This was not unusual: of the 4,508 children received into ten suburban orphanages, 682 died, mostly within a few days of admission.
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Through the spring and summer of 1942 the orphanages – 38,080 children in total – were evacuated to the ‘mainland’.
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Shuffled between overburdened local administrations, they often travelled for weeks, ending up in deep countryside far from medical services or communications. An extreme case was Children’s Home no. 82, whose 135 orphans ended up quartered in two small, unlit huts in a tiny settlement in western Siberia, twenty-five kilometres from the nearest telegraph and 800 kilometres from a railway line.
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Irina was evacuated with her Children’s Home no. 57 to a village in Yaroslavl province. Life there she remembers as ‘hard but good’. The children slept on hay-filled mattresses, were put to serious work collecting mushrooms and berries – none could be eaten until one had fulfilled one’s norm – and ostracised if caught filching food. Irina had to apologise in front of the whole school after she was caught digging the crumb out of a loaf on the way home from the village bakery, squishing it together with buds pulled off overhanging lime trees: ‘They were sweet and sticky, and so good with the bread – I remember the taste even now.’
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For children as for adults, of course, recovery entailed much more than better rations. Survivors remember persistent anxiety, dull-wittedness, distrust of adults and obsession with food. Asked if she liked gingerbread, a girl in evacuation in the Urals didn’t understand the question: ‘I remember sitting there and wondering – What does it mean this “nice” or “not nice”? . . . What is this phrase “I don’t want to eat”?’ At night she sneaked outdoors and dug in a nearby field for bread, which she believed grew underground like potatoes. ‘I thought that all I had to do was dig a small hole and there I’d find a fresh loaf. I’d take it and eat my fill.’
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A paediatrician gave the children on her ward drawing materials: one drew a clock face, captioned ‘This is our watch. It tells us when we can eat the next little piece of bread’; another, a nine-year-old boy, drew a large black square.
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An entrant in a story competition imagined the vegetables she was cultivating in her school allotment as tiny people with green legs and heads, who ran up the stairs of an apartment building to save a thin, golden-haired girl, or raced through shellfire to a Red Army dugout.
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Other children hoarded obsessively, collecting crumbs in matchboxes, developed stammers or would not speak at all.
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For teachers, one of the most cheering signs of recovery was when their pupils started misbehaving again. One girl, told to report to her headmistress for running out on to the street, was amazed when the usually stern woman burst into tears: ‘It was our first childish prank; it meant that we were returning to life and that made them very happy.’
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