Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (55 page)

Akhmatova, though left at large, was made to suffer by proxy. One of the thousands arrested was her thirty-seven-year-old son Lev Gumilev, not long demobilised having fought all the way to Berlin. He had spent several years in the Gulag before the war, now he was sentenced to another ten, and, despite his mother’s petitions and obedient hackwork (a cycle of patriotic poems titled
In Praise of Peace
), not released until Khrushchev’s general amnesty of 1956. Also arrested was her ex-husband Nikolai Punin, who, having publicly observed of the disappearance of eighteen colleagues that ‘we lived through the Tartar invasion and we’ll live through this’, was charged with being ‘an advocate of the reactionary idea of “art for art’s sake”’ and sent to the Arctic Komi Peninsula. From camp he wrote his granddaughter jokey letters about sandcastles, hedgehogs and mushrooms, before dying there four years later at the age of sixty-five.
34
       

The same year another old man died alone – Josef Stalin. The news was met with a mixture of stunned silence and intense, cathartic emotion. In schools, teachers led their pupils in mass lamentation; in communal apartments, people struggled to look solemn or burst into tears; in the camps, guards gathered in nervous huddles as prisoners yelled and threw their hats in the air. Hysterical crowds followed the great dictator’s funeral cortege in Moscow, but in Leningrad a man lost his Party card for twice turning off the radio during the orations and quietly carrying on with his work. ‘We were doubly besieged’, Likhachev had written, ‘from within and without.’
35
The ‘siege within’ was not yet over: the Soviet Union would remain, and remain greyly repressive, for almost another forty years. But it would never be as bad again.

23

The Cellar of Memory

The chief memorial to the siege of Leningrad is the Piskarevskoye cemetery, in the city’s housing project and ring road-busy north-east. Opened in 1960, it is by Soviet standards a rather self-effacing complex, emphatically a place for mourning rather than victory celebration. The mass graves – big, grass-covered barrows, each marked (symbolically, since the burials were never so tidy) to a particular year – line a long central avenue. At one end an eternal flame wavers, transparent in the sunshine; at the other a statue of a broad-hipped woman in a long dress stands outlined against clouds and sky. The frieze behind her is carved with famous, untrue words from Berggolts: ‘No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten’.

Away from the central avenue, the mounds go on, shaded by limes and birches. Here they are less closely mown, and the dips between them soft with buttercups and cow parsley. One has a rabbit hole in its side. There are individual graves, too – nineteenth-century ones left over from the site’s days as an ordinary cemetery, and hundreds upon hundreds belonging to soldiers who died in Leningrad’s military hospitals, their young faces – handsome, jug-eared, freckled, Asian, with spectacles and without – gazing in fuzzy black and white from oval ceramic medallions. A loudspeaker system hisses into life – Beethoven’s Funeral March, the solemn chords distorted by the breeze and long use. When it snaps off again, the sounds are of birdsong and distant traffic.

Like all such places, the Piskarevskoye fails. Statues, landscaping, poetry – nothing can say all that should be said and felt about a tragedy on the scale of Leningrad. Perhaps, for a modern visitor, no adequate response is possible anyway. All one can do is take time, bring to mind, pay respect. Memorialising the siege has been problematic for the Soviet – now the Russian – state, too. Until Stalin’s death it was pushed into the background, an embarrassing reminder of the disastrous opening stages of the war. No memorial to the starvation dead was erected, they were cited but substantially undercounted at Nuremberg, and anti-begging decrees swept thousands of disabled ex-servicemen off the streets to the old monastery islands of Valaam in the far north of Lake Ladoga. The mass graves were fenced off and left to sprout nettles and brambles.

Some of the undergrowth was cleared under Khrushchev, who allowed the construction, following lively public debate as to a suitable site, of the Piskarevskoye complex, and the publication of Dmitri Pavlov’s outspoken (for the time) account of wartime food supply. It grew back again, in different form, under Brezhnev, who conscripted the siege into his cult of the Great Patriotic War, designed to substitute for the fading charms of Marxism-Leninism. In this version civilian suffering took the foreground again, but in abstracted, sanitised form. Extremes of horror were reduced to easy shorthand – cold, dark, a child’s sledge, a
burzhuika
– and heartbreaking moral and social breakdown was transformed into an uplifting redemption story. Leningraders had been selfless, disciplined heroes, unwavering in their faith in ultimate victory. Simply by surviving in the city they had helped to defend it, and when they died of hunger they did so nobly, in a sort of ecstatic trance. From this martyrdom they had emerged tempered, purified, a special race. Leningrad boys and girls, the cult’s most extravagant rhetoricians urged, should only marry each other.
1

Attempts to restore some reality to the siege story met determined resistance. When Harrison Salisbury published his classic (but itself romanticised, particularly as regards Voroshilov and Zhdanov)
The
900 Days
in 1969, it was attacked not only by
Pravda
, in an article signed by Zhukov, but by the Western left.
2
It was not published in Russian until 1994, six months after Salisbury’s death. The ground-breaking oral history
A Book of the Blockade
, compiled by the historian Ales Adamovich and the novelist Daniil Granin, similarly came under fire when first published in 1979, despite over sixty excisions by the censors. The gag applied not only to the siege, but to particularist ‘Petersburg’ history writing in general. Shostakovich’s amanuensis Solomon Volkov, trying to get a book on Leningrad composers published in the early seventies, was faced with this ‘over and over. The very concept of Petersburg or Leningrad culture was being quashed. “What’s so special about this culture? We have only one culture – the Soviet one!”’
3

The floodgates opened in the late 1980s, with Gorbachev’s policy of
glasnost
or ‘openness’, precursor to the collapse of Communism and the entire Soviet Union. Suddenly it became possible to subject the siege to genuine analysis. Wartime terror could openly be criticised for the first time; so could the senseless waste of the People’s Levy and the tragic inadequacies of the evacuation and rationing programmes. Uncensored personal accounts streamed into newspapers and journals, their unadorned fact-telling and often bitter tone acting like paint-stripper on the Brezhnevite myth of universal staunchness and self-sacrifice. Adamovich and Granin were able to fill out their
Book of the Blockade
with sharper diary extracts (such as those of Yuri Ryabinkin, the teenage boy abandoned by his mother), and with material on cannibalism and the ‘Leningrad Affair’. Several revelatory document collections appeared, most startlingly from the archives of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the NKVD. Zhdanov’s reputation – hitherto that of a wise and beloved war leader – took a plunge, and his name was removed from schools, factories, a battleship and the Black Sea port of Mariupol. The biggest renaming was that of Leningrad itself, which on 1 October 1991, after a closely fought referendum, became again Sankt-Peterburg – to English-speakers, St Petersburg.
4

Still important guardians of the siege story are the dwindling band of
blokadniki
themselves. For them the siege is not history but acute, lived experience, and their memories of it, as Olga Grechina puts it, ‘a minefield of the mind. You only have to step on them, and you explode. Everything flies to hell – quiet, comfort, present-day happiness.’
5
Memory triggers lurk in wait all around – a particular outdoor tap or fire hydrant, the drone of an aeroplane or the squeak of sled runners, the smell of joiner’s glue or just the sight of untrodden snow on a city pavement. One man never puts up a New Year’s tree, because it reminds him of the one underneath which his father lay dying of hunger; others always detour round particular streets or bridges. For Grechina, one day in 1978, it was the smell of a bonfire, drifting in at her window. Having for years given the conventional version of the siege in talks to students, she sat down at her desk and wept and wrote for two days and nights, releasing a torrent of long-pent-up grief and anger. Siege-time behaviours have stuck, too –
blokadniki
say they cannot leave food on their plates, throw away even the stalest bread, or pass a discarded piece of wood without wanting to take it home to feed a non-existent
burzhuika
. Survivors’ guilt, though never given this name, is common, expressed in many cases as distress at not having secured a relative a proper burial. One woman, not knowing where her father is buried, visits the Piskarevskoye each year on his birthday, and lays flowers on every individual grave she can find whose occupant had the same Christian name or date of birth. She never, she remarks, has flowers enough.
6

Many survivors have blocked out the siege entirely, never talking about it even to close friends and family. Others – as Grechina once did – have adopted the possible-to-live-with Brezhnevite version, subsuming their own acutely painful memories into a larger, safer story. But even for those who wanted to talk frankly, making themselves heard could be difficult. ‘Inside’, wrote Marina Yerukhmanova,

there was always this question – Can’t I just talk about it how it was? Sometimes I wonder why we kept quiet. Probably because it was somehow not done to talk about it . . . Every time conversation touched on the blockade, it seemed that everybody knew everything already – they’d read about it, heard about it, seen the films – and repetition of the details would give neither satisfaction to the teller nor understanding to the listener.

We too watched the films, read what was written about those times. But though your stomach turned upside down, somehow none of it put across the feeling of those days.

Blokadniki
often complain that nobody is interested in the siege any more. ‘Each generation has its own wars – Afghanistan, Chechnya’, says one. Another describes giving a talk about the siege to young offenders, and getting no reaction except when she showed them how scurvy had left her with only six teeth.
7
Grechina stresses the tension between siege veterans and post-war incomers to Leningrad, who she claims used rudely to grab
blokadnik
-reserved seats on public transport, justifying themselves on the grounds that in their villages ‘everyone starved too’.
8
       

That the siege took a back seat was true in the 1990s, when the fashionable subjects were the Terror and the Gulag, but is not so now. The last decade has seen the publication of dozens of memoirs and diaries, albeit usually in tiny print runs or in academic journals. The flood continues: just in the time it has taken to research this book several important new accounts have appeared, and more will doubtless continue to emerge from dusty files and top-of-the-wardrobe suitcases.

There has also been a last-minute effort to collect oral testimonies from the remaining siege survivors. Though interviewing
blokadniki
often tells one more about the strategies the mind employs to make the unbearable bearable than about the siege itself, it is nonetheless a compelling exercise. Sitting at a
zakuski
-covered kitchen table, in a mahogany-panelled backroom of the Public Library or in a shiny new café, these women – they mostly are women – were actually there. They were the muffled black and white figures shuffling along a snowy street, they themselves queued outside the bread shops, hoisted buckets of water up ice-covered stairs, watched their own flesh fall away and discolour, their parents and siblings fade and die. The events of the siege are distant and strange, but they happened not so very long ago, to that woman sitting right in front of me, insisting that I take another slice of bread and butter and a fresh cup of tea.

Blokadnik
interviewees are, by definition, psychological survivors, people who have adapted or come to terms with tragedy to the extent of being able to relate it on demand to a stranger with a notebook. It is nonetheless immensely touching how they tend to stress the positive – the bits of luck that came their way, the self-denial of mothers, the kindnesses of strangers. They dislike being labelled heroes – they were just children, they point out; the heroes were the adults who saved them. Irina Bogdanova, rescued from her corpse-filled flat seventy years ago, keeps saying ‘I was lucky’ and ‘I was blessed’ – blessed to have been picked up by conscientious Komsomol girls, blessed to have been adopted by the spinster sisters who became her new family. The only time tears come to her eyes is when she tells of a petty cruelty – that of the new occupants of her family’s flat, who, when she called round at the end of the war, refused to let her in. The sole personal possession she retains from childhood is a brass crucifix of her mother’s, which they handed her, wrapped in newspaper, through a crack in the door.

This reluctance to judge, this magnificent determination to focus on scant human kindness rather than abundant human callousness, is a different thing from Soviet-era pasteurisation. Ironically, it is not the siege survivors themselves but their sons and daughters – the generation currently in their sixties and seventies rather than eighties and nineties – who are most protective of the conventional Soviet narrative. Actual
blokadniki
are anxious to stress the siege experience’s closed, stony quality; its complete lack of redemptive value and the depth of damage done. I interviewed the historian Anzhelina Kupaigorodskaya, who lived through the first siege winter entirely alone save for occasional visits from her factory-tied father, sitting rather awkwardly on a sofa in a corridor in the Academy of Sciences. ‘All those stories’, she said, ‘of girls too weak to stand roped to lathes, clutching their dolls – they’re just post-war sentimentality.’ In reality the siege was drab, hard and horrible. No human being should have to live through such a time. As we parted she struggled to her feet, gripping my arm. Now that my questions were over this was the important thing, the point she was determined to get across.