Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (23 page)

Perhaps I was just imagining it. For actually Egorenkova was completely businesslike from beginning to end; and yet, I am still sure of it.

‘The outstanding fact about the library is,’ she began, ‘that it never closed down. Not even in December 1941 or January and February 1942. By the time the blockade started, we had managed to evacuate only a very small part of our most valuable things. We had evacuated the most important incunabula and manuscripts, some unique Russian and foreign eighteenth and nineteenth-century books, and our unique collection of newspapers published during the Civil War – 360,000 items in all, out of a total of over 9,000,000. Our staff put in an enormous amount of work for the protection of this library. Our staff filled the attics of the building with sand – carrying there 2,200 cubic metres. To some extent we had to decentralise the library, and also to store away in our basements some of the most valuable items. Windows had to be bricked up and sandbagged; we secured water-tanks, pumps, fire-extinguishers, and large quantities of sand, and organised the whole fire-fighting system with the maximum thoroughness – allowing for the difficulties arising, for instance, from the absence of a normal water supply. Our A.R.P. staff consisted of 102 people. We were lucky though. The only trouble we had from air raids was a few incendiaries in the autumn of 1941. Since then we have had three direct hits from shells; they damaged our roof, but no books suffered, and there were no casualties. A more serious problem was the lack of fuel and the effect of the cold and damp on our books. I shall come to this later.

‘Before the war there were seven reading rooms in our main building; we had as many as 3,000 readers a day and as many as 9,000 books were issued in one day; moreover, we had to deal with some 400 written queries a day.

‘On June 22nd there was a sudden sharp drop in the library attendance. In August we closed down the main reading-room and opened a safer reading-room on the ground floor, with 150 seats. People who were very nervous could do their reading in the air raid shelter. Not all people react the same way to bombing.

‘Our real problems started with the coming of winter. We closed all the reading-rooms but opened two small ones – one used to be the newspaper room, the other was the staff dining-room. Both of these had little brick stoves. But in January 1941 we had to close down the first of these two rooms, and the former dining-room remained the only reading-room in this whole great library. There were days in January 1942 when only five readers came. But we continued to receive queries from soldiers and from various organisations, a lot of them on problems of nutrition, on the manufacturing of matches, and the like.

‘In March we managed to open another reading-room – a larger one, and the Lensoviet helped us to fit it with a more satisfactory stove, and we were also given some fuel.

‘Today we have about sixty readers a day; the number of readers is growing. We have ten or twelve new entries a day on the average. Now that the various technical and other colleges such as the Polytechnic, the Pædagogic Institute, part of the University are about to open again, the number of our readers is sure to grow in the coming months. But for the present, our principal readers now are engineers, army doctors, scientific workers – in short, specialists dealing with practical present-day problems. We have no young students among our readers just now.’

She was factual throughout, without any expression of approval, disapproval, hope or regret. What she said during our inspection of the library was also confined to statements of fact – without comment.

With its miles of bookshelves, the famous library looked almost normal. Here and there there were large gaps of empty bookcases – for instance a large set of bookcases labelled ‘Bibliothèque de Voltaire.’ The magazine room was open, with a somewhat scrappy collection of the latest numbers displayed on a large table – the Ministry of Information’s
Britansky Soyuznik,
and copies of the
Lancet,
the
British Medical Journal
(about six months old) and (significantly) the American
Journal of Nutrition,
and other scientific magazines.

‘These things come very irregularly,’ said Egorenkova. ‘Our great problem now will be to keep the books in good condition for another winter with little or no heating.’ And, pointing at the windows in one of the rooms, with no glass panes in them, she said: ‘We have had most of our windows blown out four times, but we are not putting in new glass or plywood just yet; the fresh air coming in is good for drying the books. We shall close the windows when the rainy weather starts.’

On the main staircase was a display of various charts and diagrams, including several depicting the Allies’ war effort. On another wall was a display of photographs and various documents on the occasion of the eighty-fifth birthday of Bychkov, the director of the manuscripts department of the library. ‘He isn’t feeling very well, so he is not here today,’ said Egorenkova. ‘From the start he has refused to leave Leningrad.’ Again no comment.

We then went through the immense main reading-room almost as large as that of the British Museum. Everything seemed in order, but there were no readers. There were ten or fifteen readers in a smaller reading-room nearby.

Then we went down a long corridor which seemed almost interminable; it was lined with card indexes. ‘This catalogue was down in the basement at first, and there it got damp,’ said Egorenkova. ‘We brought it upstairs and dried it; no serious damage was done, all the cards are legible and in good condition now. It was important to save the card index, which is our only absolutely complete catalogue. There’s a handful that aren’t quite dry yet,’ she added, pointing to a number of index cards spread out on a window sill. ‘They are the last ones.’

On the second floor were still 3,500,000 foreign books – mostly French, German and English. ‘The most important incunabula, both Russian and foreign, we have evacuated,’ Egorenkova said. ‘We still have here, among other things, the archives of the Bastille – they were bought up for this library by a Tsarist diplomat in Paris.’

Up till now there had been few signs of human life in the enormous building. But now we came into a large room which was buzzing with activity. Fifteen elderly women were here, filling in index cards, writing notes, sorting out piles of material – posters, manuscripts, newspaper cuttings, cartoons, ration cards and what not. ‘This is quite a new and special department,’ said Egorenkova, ‘here we are building up a complete record of the life of Leningrad and the Leningrad front in wartime. Meet Vera Alexandrovna Karatygina, a specialist in the history of Leningrad, Petrograd and St. Petersburg.’ No one could be more different than these two women. Karatygina was a handsome elderly woman with white hair, rouge and lipstick, a loud exuberant voice, and the shrill delivery of an enthusiastic school teacher.

‘We disdain nothing,’ she said. ‘Everything that seems of the slightest historical value for the full reconstruction of the history of our defence of Leningrad, we keep and catalogue, and classify. Brochures, and invitation tickets of every kind, pamphlets, leaflets, membership cards – everything is important. Theatre tickets, concert tickets, programmes, concert bills – for instance the bills announcing the first performance in Leningrad of Shostakovich’s Seventh – documents relating to our industrial, scientific and literary life; ration cards of the different periods of the blockade and after, a list of all the houses of Leningrad with, as far as possible, details of the number of people living there, damage through shelling, etc., A.R.P. instructions – some printed, other simply manuscripts, photographs, copies of front newspapers and other publications, however ephemeral – all these we are collecting and classifying. We are also compiling large files of newspaper cuttings on every conceivable subject concerning the defence of Leningrad. And just now,’ she said, ‘several of us are here compiling an album of the rupture of the Leningrad blockade – with letters from soldiers who actually took part in it, and masses of other printed, written and photographic material.’

The old ladies – most of whom looked like rather decrepit old gentlewomen who had seen better times – were up to their ears in cuttings and posters and bills and were so absorbed in their work that they scarcely seemed aware of our existence – any more than of the shelling that was continuing outside. As we went out I remarked to Egorenkova, ‘It must give these old ladies great satisfaction to take part in such a highly valuable enterprise.’ ‘Why do you call, them old ladies?’ she said, a little acidly. ‘They are not “old ladies,” they are fully qualified librarians who have been for years on the staff of the library.’

The Anichkov Bridge across the Fontanka, halfway down the Nevsky Prospect, and the Anichkov Palace, built by Rastrelli and Rossi, on one side of the river, and a beautiful baroque palace in red and white stucco – the name of which I forget – on the other, constitute another of the architectural beauties of Leningrad. The main feature of the bridge itself was now, however, missing – I mean its four famous bronze horses which Klodt made about 1850 and which are as much a part of Leningrad as the Chevaux de Marly – which they vaguely resemble – are part of Paris. There are many stories about the removal to safety of the Klodt horses in the dark days of October or November. It was an arduous job, but it was completed in one night except that one of the horses was left standing in the middle of the Nevsky, waiting for its turn to be removed. People further down the Nevsky rubbed their eyes in the morning when they saw one of the Klodt horses apparently galloping down the street. To the literary-minded, the horse had clearly borrowed the idea of leaping off its pedestal from the
Bronze Horseman.
It is said that an old woman made the sign of the cross at so supernatural a phenomenon, and that another one burst into tears. She was convinced that this was an evil omen – that the horses had leapt from their pedestals so as not to be captured by the Germans who were now going to enter Leningrad.

Long before, in Moscow, I had heard that the Anichkov Palace – now the Pioneers’ Palace – had been severely damaged in the bombing. But, whatever the damage, it had now been fully repaired. The old palace of the Empress Maria Feodorovna (sister of Queen Alexandra) was now in perfect condition, except that the more valuable paintings and furniture had been removed to safety. It had become the Children’s Palace, and had been that since 1935. Before the war, as many as 13,000 children and 600 teachers could be received at the palace and in the palace grounds simultaneously. Its function then was the same as that of any Pioneers’ Palace in any other large town of the Soviet Union. The children came here to listen to lectures, to play games, to read, to listen to concerts and to work in ‘circles’ – literary ‘circles,’ dancing ‘circles,’ musical and dramatic ‘circles,’ or chemical and other scientific ‘circles’ – which the children joined in accordance with their individual tastes. There were physics and chemistry laboratories in the palace. Children were encouraged to go in for this ‘individual activity’ which helped them, outside their school work proper, to develop their own particular talents. For example, a child who in the Pioneers’ Palace displayed great musical or dancing gifts had every chance of being passed on, if he or she wished it, to the Conservatoire or the Ballet School. At the same time, the Palace of Pioneers was not only a place of study and entertainment but also one where, in one way or another, the ‘solidarity’ and’ civil consciousness’ of the children were being developed.

In Leningrad during the war the Pioneers’ Palace had to adapt itself to entirely different conditions; it acquired a different purpose. Its purpose now was to provide the greatest possible moral and physical help to the children. There were many war orphans and hunger orphans in Leningrad, and the Pioneers’ Palace was something like a new home for them. Actually they did not live there, but in a large hostel close by, and were always welcome at the Anichkov Palace. Further, the Pioneers’ Palace was really the centre from which care and supervision were extended to practically all the children of Leningrad between, roughly, the ages of seven and fourteen. As before the war, so now, there was a close link between the schools and the Pioneers’ Palace, both of which belong to the education department of the Leningrad Town Council.

One of the main tasks of the Pioneers’ Palace was now to keep watch over the largest possible number of schoolchildren, to organise their time outside school hours, and keep them in good physical and moral condition – both of which were essential in view of the frequent or total absence of both parents, and also in view of the psychological effect of living in a town under almost constant bombardment.

In a large room overlooking the garden, and with Empire decoration and Empire furniture, we were received by the head of the palace, a bright and lively little man called Natan Mikhailovitch Steinwarg; ‘Natan,’ as everybody called him, was, it appeared, a famous Leningrad character, popular with children and teachers alike. He was certainly a live wire and seemed none the worse for the extremely arduous job he had been doing in Leningrad since the beginning of the war, and right through the blockade.

‘There were 500 schools in Leningrad before the war,’ he said. ‘Now there are 105. Before the war Leningrad was, in fact, the largest educational centre in the whole Soviet Union. We had half a million schoolchildren and 400,000 students – which means that nearly one-third of the population were pupils of one kind or another. It was a city of young people. It is not so now; though even now there is a surprisingly large number of children still in Leningrad – and we are letting them stay on. There is no longer any need to evacuate them.

‘What we at the Pioneers’ Palace have been doing since the war, in co-operation with the schools, can be stated briefly. For example, we have had to organise holiday camps for 50,000 schoolchildren last summer – that is, nearly all the children of Leningrad, except the very young ones who have their own crêches and kindergartens to look after them. Each lot of children spent at least one and a half months in the country, and we made all the arrangements for their extra food rations. The younger children simply rested and had a good time; the children over ten also worked a lot on the vegetable gardens throughout the summer. During the blockade we had much more difficult jobs to do; together with the schools we had to organise the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of children, and I needn’t tell you in what difficult conditions that had to be done.