Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (57 page)

Notes

Introduction

1
Olga Berggolts, ‘Tragediya moego pokoleniya’,
Literaturnaya gazeta
, 18 July 1990, p. 5.

2
Evan Mawdsley,
Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945
, p. 238. The death rate among Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Nazis is reckoned to be even higher, at 55 per cent.

3
Professor Ulrich Herbert, interview with the author, Freiburg, April 2008.

4
The Times
, 19 January 1943.

5
Commander Geoffrey Palmer; interview with the author, Sherborne, July 2007. Commander Palmer, who sadly passed away before this book was completed, was probably the last Englishman to have met Stalin. He described him as resembling ‘a benevolent grocer; someone who would make a good godfather to one’s children. He looked you straight in the eye, but then you realised that he was looking right through you and out the other side. It was rather uncanny.’

6
The diarist Vera Inber describes visiting the museum on D-Day: see her
Leningrad Diary
, p. 204. For an interview with the curator at the reopened museum see Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds,
Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose
, p. 170. See also Lisa Kirschenbaum,
The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments
, p. 144. The book is a fascinating analysis of siege memorialisation up to the present – the ‘story of the story of the siege’, as Kirschenbaum calls it.

7
Anne Applebaum,
Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps
, p. 14.

8
See Sergei Yarov, ‘Rasskazy o blokade: struktura, ritorika i stil’,
Nestor
, 6, 2003, p. 422.

Part 1. Invasion: June–September 1941

Chapter 1: 22 June 1941

1
Dmitry Likhachev,
Reflections on the Russian Soul: A Memoir
, p. 215.

2
Yelena Skrjabina,
Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader
, p. 3.

3
Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin,
A Book of the Blockade
, p. 236.

4
Edward Crankshaw, ed.,
Khrushchev Remembers
, London, 1971, p. 135.

5
Harold Shukman, ed.,
Stalin’s Generals
, pp. 2, 319–20.

6
Solomon Volkov,
St Petersburg: A Cultural History
, p. 425.

7
G. Kulagin,
Dnevnik i pamyat: o perezhitom v gody blokady
, Leningrad, 1978, p. 17.
Notes to Pages 14–28

8
Elliott Mossman, ed.,
The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910–1954
, p. 203.

9
Evan Mawdsley,
Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945
, p. 8.

10
John Erickson,
The
Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany
,
vol. 1, p. 105.

11
Dmitri Volkogonov,
Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy
, pp. 401–2; Mawdsley,
Thunder in the East
, p. 37.

12
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed.,
Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944
, p. 24.

13
Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, eds,
The Halder War Diary, 1939–1942
, p. 313.

14
Mawdsley,
Thunder in the East
, p. 11; Antony Beevor,
Stalingrad
,
pp. 14–15; Mark Mazower,
Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
, pp. 142, 147.

15
Field Marshal von Kleist, in Basil Liddell Hart,
The Other Side of the Hill: Germany’s Generals, Their Rise and Fall
, p. 182.

Chapter 2: Barbarossa

1
Yelena Skrjabina,
Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader
, p. 4.

2
Andrei Dzeniskevich, ed.,
Leningrad v osade: sbornik dokumentov
, doc. 197, p. 466.

3
Richard Bidlack, ‘The Political Mood in Leningrad during the First Year of the Soviet-German War’,
The Russian Review
, 59, January 2000, p. 99.

4
Dzeniskevich, ed.,
Leningrad v osade
, doc. 197, p. 466.

5
Interview with Dr Lyuba Vinogradova, Moscow 2007.

6
Andrei Dzeniskevich, ‘The Social and Political Situation in Leningrad in the First Months of the German Invasion: The Social Psychology of the Workers’, in Robert Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds,
The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union
, p. 78.

7
Lidiya Ginzburg,
Chelovek za pismennym stolom
,
p. 579
.

8
Ibid., p. 91.
Notes to Pages 28–40

9
Katherine Hodgson,
Voicing the Soviet Experience: The Poetry of Olga Berggolts
, p. 67; Harrison Salisbury,
The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
, pp. 121–2.

10
Leon Gouré,
The Siege of Leningrad
, p. 59.

11
Dzeniskevich, ed.,
Leningrad v osade
, p. 151.

12
Skrjabina,
Siege and Survival
, pp. 10–11 (1 July 1941).

13
O. I. Molkina, ‘Nemtsy v koltse blokady’,
Istoriya Peterburga
, 3, 2006, pp. 62–4.

14
These numbers are derived from two NKVD documents. The first, in Dzeniskevich’s document collection
Leningrad v osade
, p. 442, of 1 October 1942, gives a total of 58,210 Finns and Germans deported to date. The second, in Nikita Lomagin’s document collection
Neizvestnaya blokada
, vol. 2, p. 37, of 4 April 1942, gives a total of 35,162 Finns and Germans deported during the second half of the previous month. The March 1942 deportations were mostly from towns and villages around the city.

15
Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds,
Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose
, pp. 37–9.

16
Dzeniskevich, ed.,
Leningrad v osade
, pp. 441–2; John Barber and M. Harrison, eds,
The Soviet Home Front 1941–1945
, London, 1991, p. 66; Orlando Figes,
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
, pp. 385–6.

17
The Council of People’s Commissars only ordered mass mobilisation on 2 July (Gouré,
The Siege of Leningrad
, p. 38).

18
Gouré,
The Siege of Leningrad
, p. 22; Salisbury,
The 900 Days
, p. 168.

19
Adamovich and Granin,
A Book of the Blockade
, pp. 237–8.

20
Dmitri Likhachev,
Reflections on the Russian Soul: A Memoir
, p. 220.

21
Adamovich and Granin,
A
Book of the Blockade
, p. 229.

22
Throughout the Stalin period, temporarily moving elsewhere was a surprisingly effective way of avoiding the local security services, who were often more concerned with filling their quotas than with exactly who they put behind bars. Lidiya Chukovskaya, friend and amanuensis of Anna Akhmatova, escaped the purges of 1937 simply by moving to Kiev to live with her parents-in-law. ‘You are like a glass which has rolled under a bench during an explosion in a china shop,’ said Akhmatova.

23
Alexander Werth,
Russia at War,
1941–1945
, pp. 162–7.

24
Ibid., p. 184.

25
Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva,
Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Leningrad v blokade
, p. 250.

26
David Glantz,
The Battle for Leningrad 1941–1944
, pp. 30–31.

27
Eino Luukkanen,
Fighter over Finland
,
p. 116; Salisbury,
The 900 Days
, p. 106.

28
RGVA: Fond 32904, op. 1, delo 81, p. 28.
Notes to Pages 41–52

29
Glantz,
The Battle for Leningrad
, pp. 35, 37.

30
Yelena Kochina,
Blockade Diary
,
pp. 35–6, 3 and 9 July 1941; Ginzburg,
Chelovek na pismennym stolom
,
p. 4.