Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (51 page)

In Leningrad, crowds gathered round the street-corner loudspeakers. ‘An extraordinary day’, wote Vera Inber on the 16th:

The entire city is waiting . . . Any moment now! People are saying that our fronts – the Leningrad and the Volkhov – have joined up. Officially nothing is known . . .

Somewhere guns are booming. The all-clear has just sounded. Ordinary siege life goes on, but everyone is waiting. Nobody says anything – nobody dares to, in case a wrong word gets to wherever our fate is being decided, and changes it all. I’m perplexed and bewildered. I can’t find a place for myself. I try to write and can’t.
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The official announcement came two days later, pasted up in massive lettering on posters all over the city. ‘The blockade is broken! The blockade is broken!’ exulted Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva. ‘What happiness, what joy! All night nobody slept. Some wept for joy, some celebrated, some just shouted . . . We’re no longer cut off from the Motherland! We share a pulse!’
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‘Everybody congratulates each other’, wrote Dmitri Lazarev, ‘recounts how and from whom they heard the news – how women ran out of the building managers’ offices, who kissed who, who crossed themselves . . . Never mind the raids and the bombardments, however hard or frequent. The blockade is broken – it’s the beginning of the end!’
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It was the beginning of the end, but only that. The victory was cheap by Soviet standards (34,000 killed, missing or captured) but far from complete.
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The Red Army had broken the German hold on Lake Ladoga, but had cleared only a fragile corridor to the ‘mainland’, just five miles wide at its narrowest point. South and west of Leningrad, the German armies still crouched in the outer suburbs. (Fritz Hockenjos, peering from his new observation post – another monastery bell tower – on the Gulf of Finland, could see cars and pedestrians moving along the streets, and count the windows in a government building.
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) In February 1943 a second operation, ‘Polar Star’, aimed to lift the siege completely by encircling Germany’s Eighteenth Army to the west, cutting its railway connection to the rear at Pskov. It failed thanks to rain, Hitler’s belated caution after Stalingrad, and to the Spanish Blue Division, which successfully defended its positions in vicious hand-to-hand trench fighting. (Hockenjos, who had earlier dismissed the Spaniards as ‘a great bunch of
caballeros
, dagger-wielders and operetta tenors’, presumably had to eat his words.)

The corridor did, however, allow the construction of a new thirty-four-kilometre temporary railway line into Leningrad, via a pontoon bridge over the Neva. The first train direct from the ‘mainland’ rolled into Finland Station on 7 February, to speeches, bunting and a brass band. Decorated with oak-leaf-wreathed portraits of Stalin and Molotov and a banner proclaiming ‘Death to the Fascist German Usurpers!’, it is said to have carried butter (‘for Leningrad’s children’) and kittens, the latter in great demand thanks to a plague of rats. Vulnerable to shelling until the Germans were finally pushed off the Sinyavino ridge in September, the line supplemented what were now well-organised ice and barge routes over Lake Ladoga.

Inside the city, the mood of 1943 became one of strained, wrung-out waiting – for a second front, for shelling and air raids to stop, for the war to end and normal life to resume. Everyone still suffered nagging hunger. The librarian Mariya Mashkova was overwhelmed by waves of depression, unable to take an interest in anything and exhausted by unshakeable thoughts of bread and
kasha
. Though her flat was now clean and warm, with working electricity, lavatory, telephone and radio, she felt constant exhaustion and irritation. At work tasks ‘slipped through her hands’, at home she felt guilty at her inability to take pleasure in her children. Her emaciated, rheumatic husband had closed in on himself, speaking little and sleeping ‘like a marmot’ in the evenings, while she resentfully darned socks or read
The Brothers Karamazov
. Her friend Olga Berggolts’s gossip about flirtations and jealousies at the Radio House she found incomprehensible, and the sight of a woman breast-feeding in a doctor’s waiting room almost repulsive. The baby would have been conceived, she calculated, in February or March of the previous year – ‘the months when people were collapsing in hundreds of thousands, dying of hunger, the morgues full, bodies everywhere, black wrinkled faces. And together with that, the start of a new life! Where did they find the strength, the desire?’

Shades of the mass death were still everywhere, most of all in the wrecked and filthy ‘dead’ flats from which it was Mashkova’s job to rescue books for the Public Library. Each had its tale of death, looting, suicide; of children arrested, gone to orphanages or simply missing. On 7 April 1943 she visited three such, one in particular ‘typical for Leningrad’:

Once there was a family of six. The father and eldest daughter leave for the Red Army and no more is heard of them. Nobody knows if they are alive or dead. The mother stays on in Leningrad with three children – mentally handicapped Boris, aged eight, Lida, aged thirteen, and Lyusya, fifteen. Bravely she tries to save them from death’s clutches, but can’t do it. In December Boris dies, in January Lida, and then, of hunger diarrhoea, the mother herself. The only one left is Lyusya – on a dependant’s card in a dark, cold, wrecked flat, covered in muck and soot. She drags herself to the market, sells things, then as a last resort, starts stealing from the neighbours. She was caught with stolen food cards and arrested; there’s been no news of her since March of last year. Perhaps she’s dead too. And what remains is a frightening, dystrophic room, full of filth and rubbish. No family – just two empty beds amid the chaos – all that’s left of a once-cosy home. Oh how familiar this is!

There were shades, too, of terror: Mashkova was summoned to the Big House four times, always late at night, in February and March. One meeting lasted an exhausting nine hours. Though she refers to the encounters only briefly and vaguely in her diary (‘I came home angry; I’m sick of complicated relationships’) she was almost certainly being asked to inform on friends and colleagues.

As winter turned to spring her life became superficially more cheerful. On Easter Sunday she and her husband got tipsy on five litres of beer and went shopping for clothes; on May Day they spring-cleaned their flat, had friends round to eat
pirozhki
and watched the children perform in a school concert. But her depression and self-disgust failed to lift.

Where can we find the strength to live happily, joyously, without endless worry? Why can’t the children be the basis for happiness? They are good children after all, and we should be living just for them. Why can’t we suppress the fear that the rest of our lives will be nothing but strain and effort? . . . Is it really just the lack of a piece of bread and a bowl of soup? Are our inner resources really so meagre that this defines everything around us?
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Frequent air raids added to the strain, alerts averaging slightly over one per night from January through to May.
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Shelling – worse in the first half of the year – became so accurate that tram-stops had to be moved and the newly reopened Aurora and Youth cinemas closed again.
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Barrages now fell into an established pattern, coinciding with morning and evening journeys to work. They were extra heavy on public holidays (on 1 May 1943 Vera Inber’s building ‘swayed and rocked like a swing’), and when news came through of (now frequent) Soviet victories. Well-established ‘lucky’ spots included Aleksandrinskaya Square, with its statue of Catherine the Great surrounded by her generals and courtiers, and the Radio House, said to have lead foundations dating from its days as the Japanese consulate. Unlucky ones were the Liteiniy or ‘Devil’s’ Bridge, the square in front of Finland Station, nicknamed ‘the valley of death’, and the corner of the Nevsky and Sadovaya, opposite the Public Library. On 8 August Mashkova’s children narrowly missed being killed there on their way home from a fishing expedition: ‘Suddenly they appeared, words tumbling out about severed limbs, blood, a crushed lorry – then all in the same breath about the three little fish they had caught, still flapping in their net. I kissed them, hugged them, was overjoyed and at the same time felt completely broken.’
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Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva still lived on the Vyborg Side with her maid Nyusha, whose only son had been killed at the front the previous year. During air raids they slept in the hallway, Ostroumova-Lebedeva on a folding chair, Nyusha on a trunk. With each impact the building ‘jumped’; pans fell off the shelves, spent shot from anti-aircraft guns pattered like dried peas on the roof and new cracks appeared in the ceiling. Once a bomb splinter flew in at the window and lodged in a chair, and they knew that if an incendiary landed in the attic the building would almost certainly burn down, since there were no other residents left to stand guard duty. In the mornings the pavements were covered with broken glass, crunchy and glittering. Ostroumova-Lebedeva was kept going by work – her first post-starvation woodcut was a special moment, tools slicing as surely as ever into smooth, golden board – and by the kindness of a loyal circle of friends, mostly younger women artists. For her seventy-second birthday, on 15 February 1943, they brought her a candle, half a litre of milk (for which the giver had walked five kilometres each way to a hospital), a small packet of tea, three sweets and two tablespoons of coffee. Nyusha presented her with a bar of kitchen soap. ‘All welcome and useful presents . . . [We] didn’t talk about food, rations, bread, dystrophy and so on, but about books, creativity, art – about the things close to my heart, by which I live.’ In the summer she started going for walks, mourning damage to favourite buildings and picking the clover and buttercups that grew amidst tall grass along the edges of the pavements. The weeds made her feel as though she were walking on ‘free earth, in a field somewhere . . . These humble flowers, so delicate and fleeting, bring my soul instant peace and happiness.’

There was more escapism in going over her girlhood diaries, with their notes on turn-of-the-century trips to Italy and watercolour sketches of Lugano and the Simplon Pass. On quiet days she wrote them up in the hospital gardens, amidst slit trenches and vegetable plots. During raids she sheltered in her windowless bathroom, writing on a board balanced across the washbasin. In the midst of a barrage on a hot night in late July a friend telephoned to ask if she was all right:

In between the whistles and bangs of the shells I shouted, ‘We’re still here! We’re still here!’ And remembering that she’d been abroad I added, ‘For God’s sake, tell me what those flowers are called, that grow high up in the snow, in the Alps. I’ve been trying to remember all day!’

‘Cyclamen!’

‘Yes, yes, cyclamen!’

A few days later she and Nyusha had a near miss when a shell hit the roof two rooms away and penetrated down to the bottom floor. Thereafter they went to a shelter during raids, but did not move out.

Barrages also disrupted work at the Sudomekh shipyard. On 18 April thirty-one shells hit Vasili Chekrizov’s workshop, forcing it to relocate. ‘My girls were in there when it started’, he noted approvingly, ‘but before they left they locked up. Good girls . . . By evening everyone had turned glazier, boarding up the windows with plywood.’
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When not repairing bomb damage, much of his time was spent battling on behalf of his staff with bureaucracy:

Interesting fact. A girl came out of hospital, went to her hostel. It had moved. Where to, nobody knew. No belongings, money or cards. The district soviet sent her to us. Processing will take six days. She spent last night outdoors in a courtyard. Today is a Sunday, so we can’t register her, and without registration we can’t give her a place in our hostel. Nor can she get new cards . . . I decided to send her to the allotment organisers, but even there she can’t get cards before Tuesday. Without cards she’ll go hungry, and in three days she’ll be back in hospital as before . . . So I arranged with the canteen that they’ll feed her today and tomorrow, but will they actually do it? That’s an example of the kind of work I’ve been caught up in for the last ten days. Everywhere there’s a shortage of hands, and the ones we do have, we use unproductively.
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Alongside these routine concerns, Chekrizov also continued to play his part in the virtual reality of workplace politics. At a meeting in July, the shipyard’s Party organisation staged a mini-purge. One man was sentenced to death and seven to lengthy prison terms, for colluding in food theft with senior management and for ‘preparing to welcome the Germans’. Despite having been unjustly expelled from the Party himself in the 1930s, Chekrizov seems to have no doubts about the latter charge, asking his diary ‘How did the Partorg miss it?’

In other institutions too, repression ground on. Yakov Babushkin, the lively and outspoken radio producer who had organised the Shostakovich premiere, was sacked from the Radio House in April; he thus lost his exemption from the draft, and was killed at the front a few weeks later.
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At the Yevropa hotel-turned-hospital, Marina Yerukhmanova, the twenty-one-year-old who had survived the mass death working as an orderly, was called to give evidence in the trial of its senior administrator, a man adored by the staff for his fairness, openness and charm. Defended only by Marina – who had naively assumed that others would speak up for him too – he was found guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, ‘plus endless other numbers and letters. The whole alphabet, apparently, did not suffice to enumerate his crimes.’ Marina – stunned by the sight of her boss unshaven, beltless and with a look of bitter resignation on his face – was given the sack, together with her mother and sister.
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