Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (42 page)

Terror, though particularly severe in the first twelve months of the war, continued throughout.
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The large-scale deportations of July and August 1941 were followed by mini-purges in September, November and March, the last of which swept up around a hundred scholars at a variety of academic institutions.
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By autumn 1942 more than 9,500 people had been arrested for political crimes, about a third of them intelligentsia or ‘former kulaks, tradesmen, landowners, nobles and officials’, the rest peasants and ordinary white- and blue-collar workers.
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For those put in front of the military tribunals that supplemented the regular People’s Courts, the chances of acquittal were extremely slim: only in 6 per cent of cases were not-guilty verdicts returned or the case dismissed. The civilian courts’ comparative laxity (20 per cent dismissals or not-guilty verdicts) earned reprimands from the military prosecutor.
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Likhachev witnessed siege-time terror’s workings at Pushkin House, where Grigori Gukovsky (the same professor whom Olga Grechina had criticised for avoiding the draft, and who had joked that if the Germans came he would pass himself off as Armenian) was arrested and forced to denounce three colleagues, one of whom subsequently died in prison. Likhachev – himself a veteran of five years on the Solovetsky Islands – was unjudgemental. ‘At the time’, he wrote later,

a conversation between two people about what they would do, where they would hide, if the Germans took the city, was considered little short of treason. I therefore didn’t think of blaming Gukovsky in the least, nor the numerous others who under duress put their signatures to whatever the interrogator-torturer wanted . . . It was the first time Gukovsky had been arrested and he obviously didn’t know that one should either refuse to answer the interrogator’s questions or say as little as possible.
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Marksena Karpitskaya, another veteran of NKVD interrogation rooms as the daughter of ‘enemies of the people’, was called into the Big House and asked to join in the denunciation of a colleague at the Public Library, an elderly ex-officer in the tsarist army who helped out with small tasks in exchange for company and warmth. When she refused, the policeman sneered that this was only to be expected, given her parentage. Karpitskaya, to her own amazement

exploded with rage. I said that nobody had yet proved that my parents were enemies of the people, and that what he was saying was itself a crime . . . Only the foolishness of youth could have possessed me to be so brave! He jumped up and lunged towards me, as if to hit me . . . I stood up and grabbed a stool . . . He came to his senses, sat down at his desk and asked for my papers.

Though ordered to leave Leningrad, Karpitskaya managed to evade deportation with the help of her boss at the Publichka, who put her up in her own office, hiding her whereabouts from the authorities for the rest of the war.
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The geography teacher Aleksei Vinokurov came to the attention of the security services when he posted up handwritten notices offering to buy landscape photographs of the Urals and Siberia. A scribbled response invited him to a flat on the Nevsky, where he was promptly handed over to a police lieutenant and escorted to the Big House. ‘It was tedious at the NKVD’, he confided to his diary. ‘The staff at that establishment amaze with their dullness. The stupid interrogation procedure went on for about three hours. With difficulty the lieutenant wrote out the protocol, which I virtually had to dictate to him.’ These were among the words underlined by Vinokurov’s investigator a year later, when his flat was searched and his diary confiscated. Also underlined were mentions of seeing corpses fall out of the back of a truck, and emaciated soldiers, marching along the Nevsky, step out of line to trade tobacco for bread. So too were criticisms of Sovinformburo for its ‘meaningless’ reporting, and references to the Germans as Europeans. Combined with a hint that he wished to join relatives in the Nazi-occupied town of Staraya Russa this was more than enough to condemn him, and on 19 March 1943 he was shot, having been convicted of ‘conducting counter-revolutionary agitation’ at his school.
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Cannier was Aleksandr Boldyrev, whose diary references to a ‘stupid’ English novel – title
Two Trips to the Big House
– were code for interrogation sessions.
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Execution may have been a merciful end, since memoir evidence suggests that the large majority of those imprisoned in Leningrad during the first siege winter died of starvation. An inmate of the Kresty (‘Crosses’) prison, a vast, red-brick neo-Byzantine edifice next to Finland Station, had the job of removing corpses from the cells. He counted 1,853 between 16 October and 2 February:

Every day we removed between twenty-five and forty dead. The insides of their clothes were covered in a moving crust of lice. The bodies weren’t marked or labelled in any way – these people were anonymous, nobody noted anything down. We carried them into the yard, where they were loaded on to lorries and taken away somewhere . . . And on 3 February I saw that the doors of all the cells in the prison corridor stood open. There was nobody left to lock up.
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The account tallies with a report from the city statistical service on total numbers of deaths in Leningrad prisons, which rose from zero in March 1941 to 1,172 in December, 3,739 in January 1942 and over two thousand in each of the next four months.
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Prisoners were also put to work on the Ice Road and in Gulag enterprises within the siege ring, which included a logging camp, pig farm and power station as well as munitions, chemicals and cable-making factories. There, too, their chances of survival were slim: on 31 December the NKVD asked supply commissar Dmitri Pavlov to raise the bread ration for the 3,578 inmates of its labour camps from 250 grams a day to the manual workers’ 350 grams, pointing out that the existing arrangements led rapidly to ‘exhaustion’ and ‘unfitness for work’.
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Death in prison or a labour camp was probably the fate of the railway clerk Ivan Zhilinsky. Fifty-one years old; decent, intelligent, resourceful and patriotic, he is typical of the thousands of ordinary Leningraders who met their end during the siege at the hands not of the enemy, but of their own government. By midwinter he and his wife Olga were swollen with oedema and walked with sticks, surviving from day to day on the dependant’s ration supplemented with cough drops, glycerine, castor oil, wallpaper paste and carpenter’s glue, washed down with hot water flavoured with orange peel, mustard powder, blackcurrant twigs or salt. To light their freezing rooms they burned splints of wood. Zhilinsky’s undoing, like Vinokurov’s, may have been a connection with photography. Having left his pre-war job when the trams stopped running, and not received his pay (a promised delivery of firewood) at another, in mid-January he started advertising himself as a passport photographer for departing evacuees. The room in which he set up a makeshift studio was also occupied by his dead mother, who lay hidden, dressed in her best clothes with an icon at her head, behind a cupboard and a piano. The scheme worked, earning 100 grams of bread per photograph. But it came too late for Olga, who died in her sleep on 20 March. ‘With Olya’s death’, wrote Zhilinsky, ‘has come the spring thaw, of which she dreamt all winter.’ She also died just too soon to receive a backlog of letters and money orders from relatives in evacuation, by whom the couple had mistakenly felt forgotten and deserted.

Zhilinsky was arrested without warning a week later, possibly at the instigation of hostile neighbours. Again, the police pounced on his diary, in which he had recorded his rather shrewd forecasts for the war. The Germans, he thought, had made a mistake in thinking they could ‘take a stroll, as if in Poland, to the Urals’, since the Russians, though not natural Bolsheviks, had a historic hatred of invaders and the advantages of boundless space, a ‘special psychology – “he’s a fool but he’s our fool”’, and the ability to do without. The Allies were drip-feeding the Soviet Union just enough aid to keep her fighting, but not enough to allow her to launch a major counter-offensive. After the war, they would turn Leningrad into an ‘international port’ and put pressure on the government to allow freedom of speech and religion, ‘in the full sense of those words . . . Our lot, of course, will wriggle about just enough so that America and England back off and leave us to stew in our own juice . . . In the end, we’ll find ourselves alone again with our Comintern, while the rest of the world remains democratic, parliamentary and capitalist, as we are accustomed to call the other side.’
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On the basis of these comments Zhilinsky was accused of ‘slandering Soviet reality’ and sentenced to death, later commuted to ten years’ imprisonment.

Most poignant, perhaps, of the yellowing papers in Zhilinsky’s prosecution file is an inventory of the contents of his flat. ‘The furnishings’, typed a policeman, ‘consist of two cupboards, two metal beds, a sofa upholstered in a checked fabric, a piano, a table, five chairs, a nickel-plated samovar, a hand-operated sewing machine, a lamp, a Red Guard gramophone and a circular wall clock.’ The wooden building in which he and Olga lived is long gone; at one end of the street there now stands a shopping centre, at the other a car dealership, shiny bonnets ranged at the diagonal against smooth new asphalt. Less changed, a block to the north, is the Serafimovskoye cemetery, its leafy muddle of headstones washed by a quiet flow of strollers, flower sellers and old women with besoms. A lumpen Brezhnev-era memorial inside the main gates commemorates the starvation dead, but the actual mass graves – a stretch of rough ground at the cemetery’s boundary with a timber yard – have been left to themselves. To people like Zhilinsky – innocent victims not of the war, but of wartime terror – there is no monument at all.

Part 4

Waiting for Liberation: January 1942–January 1944

‘Will trade for food’, February 1942. On offer are gold cufflinks, a length of navy blue skirt material, patent leather boots, a samovar, a camera and a hand-drill.

Today I went to the clinic. Two topical notices had been posted up. The first – ‘Report children left without care due to death of parents to room no. 4’. The second – ‘The polyclinic does not issue exemption notes for labour duty’. And on the way home a notice pinned to a fence: ‘Light coffin for sale’ . . .

Dmitri Lazarev, April 1942

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Meat Wood

For the rest of the world, Leningrad’s agony took place out of sight and largely out of mind. Once the immediate threat to the city had receded, Allied eyes turned first to the battle for Moscow, then to an avalanche of losses in the Far East and elsewhere. The first month of Leningrad’s mass death – December 1941 – coincided with the fall of Hong Kong; the second with heavy losses of Atlantic shipping to German U-boats; the third with Japan’s capture of Singapore, together with 70,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen. As regards the Soviet Union, Britain and America’s aim was simply to keep her from collapsing altogether or making a separate peace, while resisting Stalin’s – and the British left’s – increasingly importunate calls for a second front. The first of the Arctic convoys carrying tanks, Hurricanes and other military supplies diverted from Britain’s Lend-Lease programme arrived in Archangel at the end of August, the prelude to four long years of acrimonious diplomacy. ‘Surly, snarly and grasping’, Churchill wrote later, ‘the Soviet Government had the impression that they were conferring a great favour on us by fighting in their own country for their own lives.’
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All along the Eastern Front, in January 1942, the Wehrmacht ground to a halt. Analysts have made fun of the Nazi generals’ post-war tendency to lay the blame for ultimate defeat in the East on the weather, the roads and Hitler’s bullying – on anything, in fact, except for their own mistakes or superior Russian skill in the field. This is unfair: even by Russian standards, the winter of 1941–2 was punishingly cold, and hit the German armies hard, most of all those of Army Group North. The sudden plunge in temperature, Hitler stormed over dinner at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on 12 January, was an ‘unforeseen catastrophe, paralysing everything. On the Leningrad front, with a temperature of 42 degrees below zero, not a rifle, not a machine-gun nor a field-gun has been working on our side.’
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Aircraft were grounded, tank and truck engines refused to start and horses waded in snow up to their bellies, so that to move from place to place troops had to shovel a path by day along the route their transports were to take at night. Soldiers stole clothes and bedding from local peasants (Soviet cartoons guyed them as comical ‘Winter Fritzes’, dressed in headscarves and frilly bloomers), or fell prey to frostbite and exposure. The Spanish ‘Blue Division’, despatched by Franco to aid the war on Communism, were so named, the press jeered, for the colour not of their shirts but of their faces.