Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (45 page)

The group’s finds are displayed in the gymnasium of a local school. There are hand-painted wall maps – the front lines carefully delineated in interlocking red and grey – a variety of guns (the police periodically take them away, Sasha says, but his group just goes out and gets more), and a litter of helmets, water bottles and tin spoons with Cyrillic initials scratched into the handles. Three fat ring binders are filled with the Red Army equivalent of dog tags: narrow paper forms, filled in by hand, which were rolled up and put inside small screw-top Bakelite cylinders. When found they are now almost always illegible, with the result that of the 29,000 bodies recovered from the Myasnoi Bor area to date, only 1,800 have been identified. Sasha’s prize exhibit, unearthed at the site of Vlasov’s last headquarters, hangs on the wall. It is a print matrix, lead type still gripped within a corroded metal frame, for the Second Shock Army’s one-page ‘newspaper’. The headlines read ‘Death to the German occupiers’, ‘The enemy will not break our resistance’ and ‘Our victory is near’. The issue, almost certainly never produced, is dated Wednesday 24 June – the day on which what was left of the Second Shock Army rushed the Myasnoi Bor corridor for the last time.

Overall, the winter offensive of January to April 1942 lost the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts 308,000 out of a total 326,000 troops committed to combat. Of these 213,303 were ‘medical losses’ – i.e. the wounded and those who died in hospital – and 95,000 ‘irrecoverable losses’ – i.e. the dead in battle, captured and missing. The operations of May and June lost the northern fronts another 94,000 men, of whom at least 48,000, according to German records, were taken prisoner at Myasnoi Bor.
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Ilya Frenklakh, survivor of the doomed People’s Levy, had been transferred to a reconnaissance unit within the Volkhov Front’s 52nd Army. His job was to lie motionless for hours at a time in no-man’s-land, watching the enemy lines through binoculars. All around lay corpses, their relative states of decomposition indicating whether they had formed part of the autumn or spring ‘call-ups to heaven’. ‘As you lay there’, he remembered,

you couldn’t help thinking and comparing: why are the Germans so well-trained, while all we do is try to overwhelm them with numbers? Why do they use technology and brains, while all we’ve got is bayonets? Why is it that every time we attack, our blood flows in rivers and our dead pile up in mountains? Where are our tanks? Who needs this wretched village of Dubrovka? And lots more unanswered questions.

A feeling of nausea would descend – only people who fought at Leningrad or on the Volkhov in the first two years of the war will understand what I mean. If our generals and colonels had done their jobs properly we would have won with a quarter of the losses . . . Butchers and undertakers – we had plenty of those.
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The Gentle Joy of Living and Breathing

Through the spring and summer of 1942, for those with the mental energy to follow them, Sovinform’s bulletins brought a torrent of bad news. The defeat of the Second Shock Army at Myasnoi Bor (inferred from the fact that it abruptly ceased to be mentioned) coincided with the encirclement and loss of 200,000 troops outside Kharkov, and with the abandonment of Crimea’s Kerch Peninsula, its defence  hopelessly bungled by Lev Mekhlis, the ignorant hatchetman who had helped to bring Leningrad’s January offensive to disaster. The most cutting blow was the fall of Sevastopol, on 3 July. The naval base, historic home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, had been surrounded since the previous November, 106,000 Soviet troops holding out against 203,000 Germans and Romanians under Erich von Manstein. Its civilians, like Leningrad’s, had not been evacuated, but sheltered from intensive artillery bombardment in cellars, caves and catacombs, where they turned out clothing and munitions while feeding off cats and dogs.

Three days before Stalin finally ordered that Sevastopol be given up – the admiral in charge left by submarine – the press still boasted its invincibility: ‘We have seen the capitulation,’ thundered the
Red Star
, ‘of celebrated fortresses, of states. But Sevastopol is not surrendering. Our soldiers do not play at war. They fight a life and death struggle. They do not say “I surrender” when they see a couple of enemy men on the chessboard.’
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This was a fling at Tobruk, the Libyan port, vital to the British Eighth Army’s defence of Egypt, which Rommel had almost bloodlessly captured, together with 33,000 British and South African troops and large quantities of supplies, nine days earlier. Churchill got the news in the Oval Office, in the middle of a meeting with Roosevelt. ‘It was’, one of the generals present remembered, ‘a hideous and totally unexpected shock. For the first time in my life I saw the Prime Minister wince.’ In August Churchill flew, together with Roosevelt’s envoy Averell Harriman, to Moscow for his first summit with Stalin. He had to break the news that a promised landing in northern France was now put off indefinitely in favour of Operation Torch, aimed at attacking Rommel in the rear via Vichy-held Morocco and Algeria. Stalin’s reaction was so insulting that Churchill’s interpreter thought his Russian counterpart must be mistranslating. In fact, he had the dictator’s words perfectly – Stalin was telling his allies to their faces that they were frightened of the Germans.
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While the great powers wrangled, spring came to Leningrad. The ice rotted and broke on the canals, snow slid in water-heavy avalanches off roofs and balconies, and the straight-sided piles of fire-fighting sand, their retaining planks long gone for firewood, thawed and crumbled. At the Hermitage burst pipes flooded the cellar underneath the Hall of Athena, drowning a collection of eighteenth-century porcelain. Staff – by now nearly all women – waded into the murky water, awash with floating inventory labels, and delicately groped for Meissen goatherds and shepherdesses. Leaks sprang in the palace’s bomb-shaken roof, and army cadets who helped move antique furniture into the dry were thanked with a tour of the galleries by a museum guide, who talked them through the absent masterpieces empty frame by empty frame.
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As the hours of daylight lengthened and ration levels increased, Leningraders began to emerge from their ‘small radii’, reacquainting themselves with the outside world and with ordinary human feeling. Carrying basket and scissors, Olga Grechina combed the parks for the first dandelions and nettles – so many were doing the same that to find any she had to venture on to a firing range. When the trams started running again, on 15 April, people stumbled after them, laughing and crying.
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‘In the dining room’, wrote Dmitri Likhachev of Pushkin House, ‘we met each other with the words “You’re alive! I’m so glad!” One learned with alarm that so-and-so was dead, that so-and-so had left town. People counted each other, counted up those who were left, as at roll-call in prison camp.’
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On May Day (to mark which food shops dressed their windows with artificial fruit and vegetables
^*
) the shipyard supervisor Vasili Chekrizov was pleased not only to see men going to work in ties and women in hats and lipstick, but also to see drunks. Normally they would have disgusted him, but this year they represented a welcome return to normality. A couple of weeks later he was amazed to wake up with an erection, and to hear, as he walked past a courtyard, a woman swearing and wailing. ‘I don’t know why she was weeping. All the same, tears are proof that the situation in Leningrad is improving. When every day hundreds of rag-wrapped corpses were being dragged along or thrown out onto the streets, there were no tears (or I didn’t see them).’
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For Lidiya Ginzburg’s starvation-numbed ‘Siege Man’ the first emotions to return were irritation – at leaking galoshes, broken spectacles, clumsiness in handling gloves and shopping bag in a crowded food shop – and impatience, the ‘sense of lost time’. Next came grief, and its close companion, guilt:

Siege people forgot their sensations but they remembered facts. Facts crept slowly out from the dimness of memory into the light of rules of behaviour which were now gravitating back to the accepted norm.

‘She wanted a sweet so much. Why did I eat that sweet? I needn’t have done. And everything would have been that little bit better.’ . . . Thus Siege Man thinks about his wife or mother, whose death has made the eaten sweet irrevocable. He recalls the fact but cannot summon up the feeling: the feeling of that piece of bread, or sweet, which prompted him to cruel, dishonourable, humiliating acts.
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One such guilt-ridden survivor was Olga Berggolts, whose epileptic husband Kolya had died in hospital in February. She poured sorrow and remorse into her diaries – why hadn’t she visited him every day? Why hadn’t she been there at his death? Why hadn’t she taken him some of the biscuits her sister sent from Moscow? How, most of all, should she feel about her colleague at the Radio House, Yuri (Yurka) Makogonenko, with whom she was still conducting a passionate affair?

Today, all day, I’ve had visions of Kolya, of how he was when I made my second visit to the hospital on Pesochnaya. His swollen hands, covered in cuts and ulcers. How he carefully gave them to the nurse so that she could change the bandages, all the time anxiously mumbling, making it hard for me to feed him, making me spill the precious food. I was in despair and in a fit of anger bit him on his poor swollen hand. Oh you bitch! . . . I was tired of him. I betrayed him. No, that’s not right. I didn’t betray, I just proved weak and callous. How Yurka calls me now! But this means cheating on Kolya! I DID NOT CHEAT. Never. But to give my heart to Yurka is to cheat on him . . . I’m unhappy in the full, absolute sense of the word . . . I hope that every terrible thing that can happen, happens to me.

This torrent of emotion coincided with the popular and official success of her long poem
February Diary
. In late March she was flown (chased by six Messerschmitts) to Moscow to attend a round of readings and receptions, including one at the headquarters of the NKVD (‘I suppose there were some human beings among them. But what oafs, what louts they are.’). The event gave her the opportunity to petition on behalf of her father, at that moment on a prison train on his way to Minusinsk in southern Siberia.

He writes ‘Contact whoever you can – Beria etc. – but get me out of here’. He has been travelling since 17 March. They are fed once a day, and sometimes not even that. In his wagon six people have already died, and several more await their turn . . . My God, what are we fighting for? What did Kolya die for? Why do I walk around with a burning wound in my heart? For a system under which a wonderful person, a distinguished military doctor and a genuine Russian patriot, is insulted, crushed, sentenced to death, and nobody can do anything about it.
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Though she managed to get a meeting with the secretary of the NKVD Party organisation it achieved nothing: ‘We had a “chat” (I can’t even talk about this without shaking with hatred). He took my petition and promised to pass it on to the Narkom this evening. Will they do anything? Hard to believe.’ The case was indeed shuffled back to Leningrad (‘simply to rid themselves of the bother’) and her father not allowed to return home until the war was over.

Berggolts’s despair was compounded by Muscovites’ ignorance of events in Leningrad. Like the military disasters of the war’s first months, starvation had been kept out of the news. Though newspapers mentioned ‘food shortage’ they did so seldom and in passing, instead making ghoulish play of civilian deaths by German shelling and bombing.
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Internally, euphemisms were coined to disguise the tragedy’s stark simplicity: instead of ‘hunger’ or ‘starvation’ (the same word,
golod
, in Russian), government reports talked of ‘exhaustion’, ‘avitaminosis’, ‘the cumulative effects of malnourishment’, ‘death due to difficulties with food supply’, or most commonly of ‘dystrophy’, an invented pseudo-medical term which passed into common parlance and is still current today.
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Though Berggolts was able to talk freely to her Moscow friends – and found herself doing so unstoppably, with the same ‘dull, alienated sense of surprise’ she had felt when released from prison in 1939 – her broadcasts were heavily censored. ‘I’ve become convinced’, she wrote,

that they know nothing about Leningrad here. No one seems to have the remotest idea of what the city has gone through. They say that Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what this heroism consists of. They don’t know that we were starving, that people were dying of hunger, that there was no public transport, no electricity or water. They’ve never heard of such an illness as ‘dystrophy’. People ask, ‘Is it dangerous?’ . . . I couldn’t open my mouth on the radio, because I was told ‘You can talk about anything, but no recollections of starvation. None, none. Leningraders’ courage, their heroism, that’s what we need . . . But not a word about hunger.’
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Bearing crates of lemons and tins of condensed milk, Berggolts returned to Leningrad on 20 April, to find that winter had ended and the air raids had resumed. She moved with Makogonenko out of his attic room with its view of shell-damaged roofs, down two floors into the flat of an actor recently killed at the front. Full of the actor’s possessions – photographs, books, ‘a mass of little saucers, two matching cups and a rusty mincer’ – it increased her sense of disconnection, of having stepped into somebody else’s life or into a life after death. Writing was impossible – ‘like pulling ticker-tape out of my soul, bloodily and painfully’. A writers’ conference held on 30 May should have been a magnificent occasion, a defiant celebration of the power of the word. But in reality it was ‘organised hypocrisy’ – dull, political and overcast by colleagues’ dangerous envy of her sudden new fame.
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