Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (56 page)

Russians’ attitude to the Second World War in general is uncomplicated: fierce pride in having won a just war; fierce hatred of an enemy who wanted to destroy them. Other considerations – the pre-war purge of army officers, the Nazi–Soviet pact, the military blunders, the massacre of Polish POWs at Katyn, the wartime arrests and deportations – are (sometimes reluctantly) acknowledged, but beside the point.

The fact remains that Russia’s Great Patriotic War – as it is still mostly called – was won at unnecessarily huge cost. Of this the blockade of Leningrad is perhaps the most extreme example. Nazi Germany initiated the siege, with purposive and inhuman deliberation, but it was the Soviet regime that failed to evacuate the civilian population in time, to lay in food stocks, to stamp out food theft or to organise the Ice Road properly. It was also the Soviet regime that threw away thousands of young lives in the People’s Levy, and continued to imprison and execute its own humblest and most patriotic citizens even as they died of hunger. Had Russia had different leaders she might have prepared for the siege better, prevented the Germans from surrounding the city at all, or, indeed, never have been invaded in the first place.

Counter-factual history only takes one so far. This book is designed in part to correct Soviet myths, and as such, dwells on the negative. What it does not argue is that Leningrad should have been surrendered. The Nazis, too, would have let civilians starve to death, as they did in other Russian cities they occupied. All the city’s remaining Jews would have been rounded up and murdered. The 300,000 Axis troops pinned down outside Leningrad (15–20 per cent of the Eastern Front total) would have pushed further east, meaning a longer war, even greater swathes of Russia fought over and occupied, and a heavier burden on the other Allies. Finally, Leningrad would almost certainly have been physically destroyed, first by the Soviets as they abandoned it, again by the Germans as they finally retreated west. One of Europe’s most ravishing cities would today be either a Stalinist megalopolis, like Kharkov and Kaliningrad, or a patchy, artificial reconstruction, like Warsaw and Dresden.

None of the diarists most extensively quoted here is still alive. Dmitri Likhachev, the young medievalist who heard of the invasion while sunbathing on the bank of a river, enjoyed a distinguished academic career, becoming head of the university’s Ancient Russian Literature department and a leading pro-democracy activist of the
glasnost
era. He died in 1999, at the age of ninety-two.

Yelena Skryabina, the young mother who initially half-welcomed the news of invasion, emigrated with her sons to America after the war, becoming Professor of Russian at the University of Iowa. Her husband, left behind in Leningrad, assumed that she had died during evacuation and married her widowed best friend.

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva continued to paint and to enjoy official favour, publishing three volumes of heavily censored diaries before her death in 1957.

Mariya Mashkova was sacked by the Public Library during the ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’ campaign, but rehired three years later and worked there until retirement.

Olga Fridenberg lost her directorship of the University’s classics department during the ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’ campaign, and with it her appetite for life, but lived just long enough to see Stalin dead and her cousin Boris Pasternak awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Anna Zelenova saw her beloved Pavlovsk Palace fully restored, dying in 1980 while delivering a lecture at a Party meeting.

Aleksandr Boldyrev divorced and remarried shortly after the war. Though he became estranged from his daughter he never lost his attachment to the Hermitage, from which he retired having published over a hundred studies of ancient Persian literature. He died in 1993.

Olga Grechina became an assistant professor at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, her specialism Pushkin’s use of folklore. She married and had two daughters, and died in 2000 at the age of seventy-eight.

Vera Inber joined the Party and returned with her husband to Moscow. Despite her Trotsky connection she was untouched by the post-war purges and remained a loyal member of the literary establishment until her death in 1972.

Olga Berggolts buckled under the strain, taking to drink and feeling paradoxical nostalgia for the intensity and sense of purpose of siege-time life. A chance meeting at the theatre with her former NKVD interrogator (‘Do you recognise me, Olga Fyodorovna? Can I be of service?’) helped free her exiled doctor father, who returned to Leningrad in 1948 but died less than a year later.
9
Though her own death in 1975 got little official notice, news of it spread by word of mouth, and her funeral in Volkovo cemetery turned into a spontaneous public event, attended by thousands of ordinary Leningraders.

Vasili Chekrizov continued to work in shipbuilding and lived to the age of ninety-seven, cursing ‘Bloody Boris [Yeltsin]’ for Communism’s collapse in a postscript to his wartime diary.

Oberleutnant
Fritz Hockenjos left his bicycle unit to join an SS infantry division on the Rhine, where he was captured by the Americans. Having spent two years in a prisoner of war camp he returned to his career as a forestry manager, and wrote a popular series of walking guides to the Schwarzwald.

Leningrad – Petersburg – is still a melancholy city. Twenty years after the end of Communism, its reintegration into the West still feels partial and provisional, a bright new patina of illuminated signs and PVC windows failing to disguise the dripping gutters and vagrant sycamore seedlings of the dank courtyards behind. Like other former capitals, it also has a Marie Celeste quality, its once-bustling palaces and government buildings now sleepy academic institutes or quiet museums. The melancholy, though, is of the pleasant autumn-leaf, peeling-stucco kind; nostalgic rather than tragic, its attendant ghosts the vivid characters of fiction – white-shouldered Princess Hélène, Raskolnikov with his axe – rather than the shadowy multitudes of the siege. In contrast with brash Moscow, the new rich do not dominate. Bookshops outnumber Versace boutiques; elderly women, shabby of cardigan and splendid of face, fill the stalls of the Philharmonia, and the students flocking out of their lectures on to the Moika flirt with each other, not with the snaky men in fine Italian knits sipping eight-dollar espressos at the bar of the Yevropa. Changing but unchanged is what Akhmatova called the operatic weather: restless skies give their colour to the moving river; snow falls endlessly, in thick disorienting whirls; sea winds bruise the eyes and sweep the streets fiercely clean.

The last word goes to Lidiya Ginzburg, most analytical and perhaps also most accepting of all the blockade memoirists. After even the greatest tragedies, she obliquely reminds us, life flows on. New replaces old; absences are filled; the past is overlaid and forgotten. It is June, the time of the White Nights, and her anonymous Siege Man has been working into the small hours. Emerging from his shuttered office onto the Nevsky, he feels ‘the usual astonishment’ at finding the sun still shining, light bouncing off the wet pavements. ‘It is this inexhaustibility’, he thinks, ‘that real Leningraders love so much. The feeling of untouched reserves of life, waiting to be released each day.’

Appendix I

How Many?
^*

Two approaches have been used to estimate the total number of civilian deaths during the siege of Leningrad.

The first is based on official death registrations. Using data from the city’s central labour agency, the fifteen municipal districts and from local authorities in outlying Kronshtadt and Kolpino, a ‘Commission to Investigate Atrocities Committed by the Fascist Occupiers’, set up in 1943, arrived at a total of 649,000 civilian deaths during the siege, 632,253 of them from starvation and associated illnesses, the remaining16,747 caused by bombing and shelling. These numbers were cited by the Soviet government at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and have been widely quoted since. They are also within the same order of magnitude as figures from Leningrad’s Burial Trust, the government agency responsible for cemeteries. The Trust’s records show it disposing of around 460,000 corpses in the fourteen months from the beginning of November 1941, to which should be added another 228,263 buried by the civil defence organisation (MPVO) making 688,263 burials in total.

This 650,000-690,000 range for the death toll is, however, almost certainly a substantial under-estimate. Many siege deaths were never registered (‘a negligible proportion of the population went to the registry offices’, according to the Leningrad Municipal Services Department) or registered long after they occurred. The Commission was still receiving new wartime registrations as late as 1959. The Burial Trust numbers are similarly dubious, as evidenced by chaotic scenes in cemeteries and mortuaries, and by the fact that the Trust could not produce daily figures for deliveries and burials when ordered to do so by the city soviet at the end of December 1941.

Historians have also tried to calculate the death toll from the top down, by looking at the drop in Leningrad’s population from the beginning of the siege to its end, and assuming that all absences not otherwise accounted for were due to starvation or bombardment. When the siege ring closed in early September 1941 the city’s civilian population was about 2.5m, including roughly 100,000 newly-arrived refugees. By the end of 1943, on the eve of liberation, it had decreased by at least 1.9m, to no more than 600,000. In that time about one million Leningraders had been evacuated across Ladoga, and another 100,000 been sent to the front, which leaves assumed deaths from starvation at no less than 800,000.

The demographer Nadezhda Cherepenina recently reworked this calculation, based on the number of Leningrad residency permits extant over time. Her death-toll estimate – of 700,000 – is lower in part because it excludes the city’s illegal, unregistered underclass, as well as unregistered peasant refugees. Lastly, none of the above calculations includes deaths in rural areas within the siege ring, nor the tens of thousands who perished on the Ice Road and beyond. The best, therefore, that one can safely say is that the siege’s civilian death-toll was not less than 650,000 and not much more than 800,000. If a single figure must be given it should probably be about 750,000, or between one in three and one in four of Leningrad’s immediate pre-siege population.

*
V.M. Kovalchuk and G.L. Sobelev ‘Leningradsky “Rekviyem”: o zhertvakh naseleniya v Leningrade v gody voiny i blokady’
Voprosy istorii
12 (1965) p191. Nadezhda Cherepenina ‘Assessing the Scale of Famine and Death in the Besieged City’ in John Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich (Eds.)
Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941–44
London 2005, p28. See also Eleanor Martineau ‘Blokada mezhdu geroizmom i tragediyei (k metodike voprosa)’
Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Muzeya Istorii Sankt Peterburga
5 (2000) p253.

Appendix II