Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (54 page)

Second, people realised that Communism was here to stay. Before the war, it had been possible to regard the regime as something temporary. The conversational code for tsarism had been ‘the peaceful time’, implying the possibility of return to a natural order. Now the phrase fell out of use: Leningrad had permanently replaced Petersburg. But third, people wanted this Communism to be of a different sort. Having fought, worked and suffered for their country for four years, they felt that they had earned the right to be trusted by its government. They longed for the ordinary decencies of civilised life – security, comfort, entertainment – but also for freedom to express their opinions, explore the outside world, and genuinely to participate in public life. In the first post-war elections to the Supreme Soviet Leningraders defaced their ballots, scribbling ‘When are you going to abolish Communist serfdom?’ ‘Give us bread and then hold elections’; ‘Down with hard labour in the factories and collective farms’, or even crossing out the candidate’s name and writing ‘For Adolf Hitler’. ‘It’s humiliating’, an actor at the Aleksandrinka was overheard to exclaim. ‘You feel like a machine, a pawn. How can you vote when there’s only one name on the list?’
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Alexander Werth, allowed briefly to report from Leningrad in September 1943, had sensed the yearning for change. A banquet in his honour at the Writers’ Union featured the usual toasts to Churchill and Eden, but he detected behind them ‘more even than in Moscow . . . a real thirst for close future contacts with the West. They thought in terms of harbours and ships – ships carrying passengers to and fro, and goods, and books and music, and paintings and gramophone records.’ Interviewing Popkov, he was struck by the fact that he called himself Leningrad’s ‘mayor’ rather than chairman of its soviet, and, visiting an airbase, by the mottoes pinned up in the mess, which were drawn not from Lenin but from an etiquette manual of the pre-revolutionary Corps des Pages (‘Avoid gesticulating and raising your voice’, and ‘An officer’s strength lies not in impulsive acts, but in his imperturbable calm’). His elderly chambermaid at the Astoria, accepting a Lucky Strike, reminisced about the Egyptian Tanagras she had smoked when in service with a Princess Borghese, and of annual trips to Paris to buy lingerie at Paquin and Worth. On his final evening, Werth was taken to see a packed-out stage adaptation of Frank Capra’s comedy
It Happened One Night
, complete with show tunes, millionaire, detectives and gangsters – ‘all dressed like “real” Americans in the brightest light-blue and purple suits’. Everywhere, he noticed, pictures of Zhdanov outnumbered those of Lenin and Stalin. All in all, he came away with ‘the curious impression that Leningrad was a little different from the rest of the Soviet Union’, its traditional superiority complex heightened by awareness of having fought its ‘own show’, without Moscow’s help. There was even a rumour that it might become the capital again – if not of the whole Soviet Union, then of the Russian Republic.
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These hopes – for comfort, a degree of political pluralism, contact with the outside world and a special role for Leningrad – were almost entirely disappointed after the war. Living standards did – agonisingly slowly – improve, but for Leningraders, as for other Russians, the early Cold War years brought only renewed repression, reaching a climax in the late 1940s and early 1950s before falling sharply off with Stalin’s death in 1953.

With hindsight, that this would be so had always been obvious. No longer constrained by the war effort to pay heed to public opinion, and aware that soldiers returning victorious from Europe had a history of fomenting revolt, Stalin had no intention of loosening his grip. Though the Leningrad NKVD arrested fewer people than usual for political crimes in 1944 (373 in total), this was only because it was busy hunting down collaborators in the newly liberated towns round about. Arrests rose again in 1945.
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Censorship, having slackened slightly during the war, became stricter, especially in regard to 1941–2’s mass death. A handicapped twenty-year-old’s diary recorded, alongside her father’s death from starvation, the discovery of dismembered bodies in a musician neighbour’s flat. She read it aloud to friends; one of them informed on her and she was sent to the Gulag for six years. Violinists, in the official version, hadn’t spent the siege eating children, but playing Shostakovich in fingerless gloves.
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Inber criticised Berggolts for continuing to produce ‘sad, old-fashioned’ poetry, only to find that a Writers’ Union meeting damned her own work as ‘repulsive’, ‘clinical’ and ‘torture to read’.
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At the Radio House, staff were ordered to destroy wartime recordings of unscripted interviews with ordinary members of the public; instead, they took the reels home hidden under their coats, or filed them in boxes labelled ‘folk music’. Fridenberg, commissioned (by, she was appalled to discover, the NKVD) to collect accounts of ‘Leningrad heroines’, was steered towards ‘favourites and pets of the authorities . . . Everything living, everything genuine was inadmissible . . . Though much that was unbelievably tragic was conveyed to me orally, nobody dared write down the truth.’
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Remaining hopes for a ‘Leningrad Spring’ were dashed, very publicly and deliberately, in the summer of 1946, by a crackdown on the Leningrad intelligentsia. Initiated by Stalin, it was deputised to Zhdanov, by now back in Moscow and widely touted as Stalin’s successor. He chose as his victims Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, picking them out for their popularity (‘I knew I was doomed the moment a girl ran up to me and dropped on her knees’, Akhmatova said of a triumphant public poetry reading) and because they embodied the clever, sceptical, Europhile Leningrad spirit. As the writer Konstantin Simonov put it in his memoirs:

I think the attack against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko was not concerned so much with them in particular . . . Stalin was always suspicious of Leningrad, a feeling that he had retained since the ’20s . . . I thought then ‘Why Akhmatova, who hadn’t emigrated, who gave so many poetry readings during the war?’ . . . It was a way of putting the intelligentsia in their place, of showing them that the tasks before them were just as clear as ever.
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The blow fell on 15 August, in the form of a resolution by the Party’s Central Committee. Akhmatova’s work was condemned as ‘empty and frivolous . . . permeated by the scent of pessimism and decay’, Zoshchenko’s as ‘putrid, vulgar nonsense’, liable to lead astray Soviet youth. Both displayed ‘cringing servility towards the bourgeois culture of the West’. One of two Leningrad magazines that published them was closed down, and the other put under the editorship of a Central Committee propaganda chief. A week later Zhdanov flew to Leningrad to anathematise the pair in person, in a speech to the Writers’ Union. As the significance of his words (he described Akhmatova as ‘half whore, half nun’ and Zoshchenko as ‘a trivial petit-bourgeois . . . oozing anti-Soviet poison’) sank in, the audience froze into silence – ‘congealing’, as one of its members put it, ‘over the course of three hours into a solid white lump’.
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One woman tried to leave the hall, but was prevented from doing so and sat down again at the back. There were no other protesters and a vote to expel Akhmatova and Zoshchenko from the Union was passed unanimously. The meeting ended at one o’clock in the morning, the assembled writers filing silently out into the warm summer’s night. ‘Just as silently’, remembered one, ‘we passed along the straight avenue to the empty square, and silently went off in late trolley-buses. Everything was unexpected and incomprehensible.’
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Akhmatova herself, magnificently contemptuous, claimed to have been unaware of the resolution’s existence until she saw it printed on a sheet of slimy newspaper from which she had just unwrapped some fish. Simonov’s interpretation of the affair is borne out by the fact that despite Zhdanov’s blood-curdling rhetoric neither she nor Zoshchenko was arrested, but both were reduced instead to their old pre-war existence of secrecy and penury, burning notebooks and living off the kindness of friends. One of the few brave enough not to drop Akhmatova was the much younger Olga Berggolts, who in consequence lost her position on the board of the Writers’ Union.

In August 1948 Kremlin politics were upended by Zhdanov’s death (without outside help) from a heart attack. Malenkov and Beria immediately began to reassert themselves, broadening the highly publicised crackdown on the Leningrad intelligentsia into a secret purge of Zhdanov’s protégés at the Kremlin and the whole Leningrad Party.

What became known as the ‘Leningrad Affair’ began in February 1948, with the dismissals from their posts of Zhdanov’s wartime deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov, who had followed him to Moscow and been given oversight of the NKVD, of ‘Mayor’ Popkov, who had taken over as Leningrad’s First Party Secretary, and of Nikolai Voznesensky, a clever young economist who had ridden on Zhdanov’s coat-tails to become head of the State Planning Commission. ‘The Politburo considers’, ran a secret resolution, that ‘Comrades Kuznetsov . . . and Popkov have [demonstrated] a sick, un-Bolshevik deviation, expressed in demagogic overtures to the Leningrad organisation, unfair criticism of the Central Committee . . . and in attempts to present themselves as the special defenders of Leningrad’s interests.’
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Though ‘the hunt was on’, as Khrushchev later put it, the Leningraders were initially left at liberty; Voznesensky was even still invited to Stalin’s drunken midnight dinners. Finally, on 13 August, Kuznetsov, Popkov and three others were invited to Malenkov’s office and arrested on arrival by his bodyguard. Though Voznesensky wrote a grovelling letter to Stalin – ‘Please give me work, whatever’s available, so I can do my share for Party and country . . . I assure you that I have absolutely learned my lesson on party-mindedness’ – it did him no good.
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He was arrested in turn on 27 October and joined Popkov and Kuznetsov in a special prison. In September 1950 they were put on closed trial in Leningrad, in the old Officers’ Club building on the Liteiniy. Kuznetsov refused to confess and was immediately executed – according to Khrushchev ‘horribly, with a hook in the back of his neck’.
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Voznesensky may have been kept alive for a little longer. There is a story that a few months after the trial Stalin asked Malenkov what had become of the famously workaholic Planning Commission head, and suggested that he be given something to do. Malenkov replied that this would not be possible, since he had frozen to death in the back of a prison truck.
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Altogether, sixty-nine Leningrad-connected Party officials were executed, imprisoned or exiled between 1949 and 1951, plus 145 of their relatives. Least deserving of pity was P. N. Kubatkin, head of the Leningrad NKVD. The standard mugshots taken at his arrest – facing the camera and in right profile – show him haggard and dishevelled, just like his thousands of wartime victims.

Conducted in great secrecy, the ‘Leningrad Affair’ remains something of a mystery today. The pretexts for it, whispered in Stalin’s ear by Malenkov, were that Voznesensky had massaged production figures, and that the Leningrad Party had set up an agricultural trade fair without Moscow’s permission. In reality, it seems to have been the product of Cold War tension – 1949 was the year of the Berlin airlift, the founding of NATO and the Soviet Union’s first atom bomb – combined with Stalin’s fear of rivals. He may have been rattled by talk of a Leningrad-headquartered Russian (as opposed to all-Union) Communist Party, and by a friendly visit to the city by a delegation from Tito’s independent-minded Yugoslavia.
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Revisionists argue that the purge was a shrewd power play, reasserting Stalin’s supremacy and balancing the Kremlin factions. Conventionally, and more convincingly, it was simply one of the last spasms of an ageing, paranoid mind.

In parallel with the ‘Leningrad Affair’, Stalin also launched, again with Malenkov’s and Beria’s encouragement, a Union-wide ‘war on cosmopolitanism’. Wartime harnessing of traditional values – the return of military ranks and insignia, honours named for Suvorov and Nevsky – now curdled into virulent anti-Westernism. It was the era of crackpot pseudo-genetics, of ‘city’ instead of ‘French’ bread, and of boasts that Russians had invented the radio, the aeroplane and the light bulb. People with foreign connections or Jewish surnames began to vanish daily (‘It used to be a lottery’, quipped one, ‘now it’s a queue’),
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and at Leningrad University colleagues gathered once again to accuse each other of ‘formalism’, ‘bourgeois subjectivism’ or ‘bowing to the West’. ‘All the professors’, Olga Fridenberg wrote of her classics department,

were ritually humiliated. Some, like Zhirmunsky, endured it elegantly and with flair . . . but Professor Tomashevsky, a man not yet old, of cool temperament and caustic wit, very calm and unsentimental, walked out into the corridor of the Academy of Sciences after his examination and fell into a dead faint. The folklorist Professor Azadovsky, already weakened by heart disease, lost consciousness during the meeting itself and had to be carried out.

It has been calculated that Union-wide, so many Jews lost their jobs that by 1951 they held less than 4 per cent of senior government, economic, media and university posts, down from 12 per cent in 1945.
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The highest-profile victim was Molotov’s luxury-loving fifty-three-year-old wife Polina, formerly People’s Commissar for fisheries. A grotesque pseudo-prosecution, involving accusations of Zionist espionage and group sex, ended with her divorce from Molotov and a five-year sentence to the camps. For all the ugliness Fridenberg found an ugly new word – ‘
skloka
’ – standing for ‘base, trivial hostility; spite, petty intrigues. It thrives on calumny, informing, spying, scheming, slander . . .
Skloka
is the alpha and omega of our politics.
Skloka
is our method.’
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