Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (34 page)

Leningraders also wrote – Knyazev his catalogues, Inber poetry, Likhachev a history of medieval Novgorod, and Olga Fridenberg a paper on the origins of the Greek epics, until the contents of her inkwell congealed into a violet lump. Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, remarkably, never lost her appreciation of beauty, describing in detail the look of bare, frost-covered branches against the sky even in the depths of February. She tried to animate her increasingly lethargic teenage nephews, Petya and Boba – ‘pale and thin as paper' – by setting up a still life for them to draw (Boba died, Petya survived). Mikhail Steblin-Kamensky, a folklorist and friend of Boldyrev's, studied Greek grammar and strove to convince himself that he had ‘been presented with a singular opportunity to observe life at its most strange and remote'. He had often tried to imagine medieval Russia in time of plague or famine; now he could see it for himself. No wonder that the chroniclers had described a dragon swooping over the land, snatching children and breathing fire.
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The archaeologist Boris Piotrovsky, living in the Hermitage basement, wrote a history of Urartu, a lost seventh-century kingdom on the shores of Lake Van. ‘Terribly cold', he scribbled in the margins, and ‘Cold, it's hard to write'.
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At the zoo, Nikolai Sokolov wrote up different species' reactions to artillery fire. Baboons and monkeys, he noted, became hysterical during shelling, but quickly became used to barrage balloons and showed only ‘normal curiosity' towards searchlights and flares. Completely unruffled was the zoo's bear, which ‘lay peacefully, sucking on its paw'. Similar sang-froid was displayed by a Siberian mountain goat: when a high-explosive shell landed in its enclosure it was found peering with calm interest into the resulting crater. The emu was ‘completely unresponsive to anything' – thanks, Sokolov thought, to its ‘limited intellect'.

As well as being read or written, books could, of course, be used as fuel. ‘We warm ourselves', wrote Fridenberg, ‘by burning memoirs and floorboards. Prose, it turns out, provides more heat than poetry. History boils the kettle to make our tea.'
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Boldyrev sorted his books, like his furniture, into three categories –‘keep', ‘sell' and ‘burn'. One by one Likhachev dismembered and fed into his
burzhuika
the records of the proceedings of the pre-revolutionary Duma, saving only the volume covering its last session, a rarity. Olga Grechina burned her dead uncle's books of Roman law – nineteenth-century paper, she discovered, gave out more heat than the flimsy Soviet sort. Another family started with reference works and technical manuals, moved on to bound sets of journals, then to the German classics, then to Shakespeare, and finally to their blue and gold-bound editions of Pushkin and Tolstoy.
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Another siege cliché borne out by the diaries is the emotional sustenance Leningraders derived from the radio. Portable sets having been confiscated at the outbreak of war, they listened on fixed-wire loudspeakers, more than 400,000 of which had been installed in domestic apartments, as well as in outdoor public spaces, from the 1920s onwards.
^*
Headquartered in the art deco ‘Radio House' on the corner of Italyanskaya and Malaya Sadovaya streets, the city radio station continued to broadcast, despite power outages and shell damage to its transmission network, throughout the mass-death winter. Stories of its resuscitating power are legion: Olga Berggolts, collapsed in the street, picking herself up at the sound of her own voice reading her own poetry; a fighter pilot making it home ‘on one wing' on hearing Klavdiya Shulzhenko – Russia's Vera Lynn – singing ‘Little Blue Scarf'; the housewife, stumbling home to her family, ‘handed' from loudspeaker to loudspeaker as if along a human chain. A (hammily Stalinist) programme for teenagers, titled ‘Letter to my Friend in Leningrad' and broadcast on 7 December, delighted sixteen-year-old Klara Rakhman. ‘What a wonderful letter!' she wrote in her diary: ‘It very precisely expresses my thoughts. I'll put down everything I can remember of it.'
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The writer Lev Uspensky, smoking a late-night cigarette at a railway junction south of Ladoga, was startled to hear the words ‘Leningrad speaking' echoing out of the fog above his head. A time delay between loudspeakers attached to a series of telegraph poles meant that the words overlapped, fading into the distance. It sounded, he thought, as if a line of giants were speaking, gently urging the German idiots to give it up, to go back home before they got hurt.
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The most listened-to items were the Sovinform news bulletins, broadcast at 11 a.m. and 11 p.m. daily. Having got hold of a radio just in time for the Red Army's January offensives, Fridenberg and her mother tearfully hung on the announcer's every word. They knew the reports were untruthful, not to be relied upon – ‘but all the same, one listened and believed'.
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Genuinely beloved were Berggolts's readings of her own verse, in particular her
February Diary
, a long poem commissioned in February 1942 to mark Red Army Day. Though censored, it managed to combine patriotism with an unusual degree of realism and personal feeling, perfectly fitting the public mood. The verses, a survivor remembers, were ‘so simple that they just stuck in your head. You'd walk along, muttering the lines . . . When I had to climb up on to our library roof and stand there during the shelling it was somehow a big help knowing them by heart.' Another calls them ‘splendid . . . they really shook us out of that animal brooding about food'.
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Other popular programmes were
Campfire
– an imaginative magazine feature for children, which continued long after the war – and, from the spring of 1942,
Letters to and from the Front
, which enabled Leningraders to send each other (morale-boosting) personal messages. The Radio House also broadcast to Leningrad's besiegers. Headed by émigré Austrian Communists, the brothers Ernst and Fritz Fuchs, its German-language section featured defeatist interviews with German POWs and faked ‘letters from home', said to have been discovered in dead soldiers' pockets. One described the bombing of Berlin; another, written by Berggolts, waxed lyrical about Christmas in Bavaria – ‘Do you remember the smell of Christmas biscuits? Spices, raisins, vanilla? The warmth and crackle of Christmas candles?'
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In December and January programming shrank to a few hours per day. In the gaps, the radio broadcast the calm ticking (at fifty strikes per minute) of a metronome – the steady beating, for households whose sets still worked, of Leningrad's heart. What exactly the Radio House put out hardly mattered; the important thing was that the organism lived, that communication was maintained. Ivan Zhilinsky was one of the many diarists to record each day, even as his entries shrivelled to a bare record of food intake and deaths among neighbours, whether or not he had radio reception.

 

Much harder to gauge is how much solace Leningraders got from religious faith during the months of mass death.
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By the late 1930s organised religion had been suborned or driven underground in the Soviet Union, following Stalin's closure or demolition of thousands of churches and monasteries, and execution, imprisonment or exile of their monks, nuns and priests. At the start of the war only twenty-one churches operated in the whole of the Leningrad diocese, the rest having been knocked down or turned into warehouses, garages, cinemas, planetaria or ‘museums of religion'. The Cathedral of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood – a multicoloured neo-Russian confection, filled with glowing mosaic, that is today one of Petersburg's chief tourist attractions – was only saved from demolition, ironically, by the outbreak of war.

With the German invasion, Stalin made a swift U-turn, allowing the Orthodox (but not the Catholic, Baptist or Lutheran) Church to play a tightly circumscribed role in public life in exchange for supporting the war effort. Some churches were reopened, the
Atheist
newspaper was renamed then closed, and Leningrad's Metropolitan Aleksei was allowed to make a patriotic appeal to the nation in which he invoked Russia's medieval warrior-saints Dmitri Donskoi and Alexander Nevsky but did not once mention Stalin. Priests were allowed to take funeral services (as for Likhachev's father) and to visit homes to administer the last rites. Crypts were used as bomb shelters and as distribution points for kerosene, firewood, hot water and clothing. (As a toddler, the poet Josef Brodsky sat out raids underneath the martial white and gold of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, round the corner from his family's flat on the Liteiniy.) Leningrad churches also collected substantial defence funds – over two million roubles by the end of 1941, which paid for a Dmitri Donskoi tank column and an Alexander Nevsky air unit. So, too, did the Choral Synagogue, the one remaining place of worship for the city's 200,000-odd Jews.

Independent congregations, in contrast, were still ruthlessly persecuted. Typical was a small underground group discovered and liquidated in the summer of 1942. It was led, the NKVD's case report tells us, by a sixty-year-old known as Archimandrite Klavdi, who had already served time in prison for ‘counter-revolutionary activity' and was now living in Leningrad illegally. His elderly, mostly unemployed followers included ‘kulaks', former nuns, ‘monastic elements' and a nurse from the Lenin Hospital. Their crimes, according to Klavdi's confession, included ‘illegally trying to recruit believers', ‘praising the pre-revolutionary order and living standards', and ‘voicing disapproval of the methods of Soviet power'.
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What became of them we do not know, but it was probably similar to what happened to Berggolts's doctor father, who in early 1942 was deported to Siberia for refusing to inform on a Father Vyacheslav, an old friend with whom he used to enjoy playing cards.
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How many Leningraders actually attended services during the first siege winter is hard to say. Though one memoirist movingly describes services at the St Vladimir Cathedral – choir wrapped in shawls and felt boots, oil in the icon lamps frozen solid, the sacraments taken with beetroot juice in place of wine – the diarists of the time make no remark, even when recklessly frank on other matters. Perhaps the packed Vladimirsky was a benevolent trick of the memory; perhaps it only attracted crowds from the spring onwards, when surviving Leningraders had the strength to begin mourning their dead; or perhaps it was simply that it was the intelligentsia, on the whole, who kept diaries, and the working class who went to church. Educated Leningraders may have also found it harder to maintain what faith they had. Berggolts – Jewish by background and an idealistic Communist in youth – saw the siege as a collective punishment for having allowed the Revolution to be perverted, for the lies and moral cowardice of the purge years:

 

What unhappy people we are! What did we wander into? What savage dead end and delirium? Oh what weakness and terror! I can do nothing, nothing. I should have ended my own life, that would have been the most honest thing. I have lied so much, made so many mistakes, that can't be redeemed or set right . . . We have to fight off the Germans, destroy fascism, end the war. And then we have to change everything about ourselves . . . (Just now Kolka [her husband] had [an epileptic] fit – I had to hold his mouth shut so he wouldn't frighten the children in the next door room. He fought terribly.) Why do we live? Oh God, why do we live? Have we really not suffered enough? Nothing better will ever come.

 

She had caught her mood from a friend, a traumatised survivor of the naval retreat from Tallinn, who had visited earlier in the day, incoherently mumbling ‘For twenty years we have been in the wrong, and we're paying for it now.'
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Others found themselves returning to faith as their fear and suffering increased. Party members whispered prayers and crossed themselves in the air-raid shelters; Georgi Knyazev, self-styled humanist and worshipper of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov, by the depths of January mused through the eighteen-hour nights on the strength of the light fitting in his ceiling – he would hang himself, he had decided, if his wife died before him – and his ‘favourite theme of Christ, that amazing teacher of love and mercy from faraway Galilee'.
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A painter, dying alongside his wife, drew sketches of a fiery angel, of Christ – his skull-shaped head resembling those of the starving – and of the Virgin spreading her protective veil over the well-like courtyard of a blacked-out apartment block.
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Old Believers and Seventh Day Adventists continued, as they had done since 1938, to hold services in secret, in their homes. The mother of one such family (whose husband, a priest, was already in prison) made her six children kneel for long hours on the floor, praying. When they became emaciated she let them kneel on pillows (two out of the six died).
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Muslims and Buddhists also had to worship in secret, despite the fact that thousands were serving on the Leningrad front, and that the city possessed both a mosque and a magnificent Buddhist temple, built during the reign of Nicholas II and the tethering point of the barrage balloon that served as its wartime radio mast.

In sum, religious faith remained a private, risky source of consolation during the siege. Stalin's relaxation of the rules was opportunistic and temporary, and Leningraders knew it. A ten-year-old girl, taken into one of ninety-eight new orphanages that opened between January and March 1942, woke one night to see her class teacher kneeling, head bowed, at the dormitory window. The teacher whispered that she was praying for her son, who had gone missing at the front – and begged the girl not to tell anybody what she had seen.
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