Leningrad Read online

  I found what I thought was a piece of sugar, and put it in my mouth. I sucked it all the while we were walking home. It didn’t dissolve but it tasted sweet. When we got home I spat it out into my hand, and it was just an ordinary stone . . . Mama scolded us of course, but not wanting to hurt my feelings, pretended there was some sugar there. She mixed it with water and it was as though we drank sweet tea.8

  Denying oneself food so as to give it to others – as hundreds of thousands of Leningraders managed to do – became an act of supreme self-control and shining charity.

  In January Yelena Kochina and her husband moved in with friends. Revisiting her own flat on 1 February, Kochina found the door open and the furniture in pieces. ‘“Why are you chopping up our furniture?” I asked the woman next door. “We’re cold,” she answered laconically. What could I say to that? She has two children. They really are cold.’ Returning four days later she found a corpse on her bed, ‘so flat that the bedspread was slightly raised only by its head and feet. After chopping the leg off a chair I left, without inquiring whose body it was.’ Two days later it had been joined by two more. ‘Evidently the neighbours have set up a morgue in my room. Let them – dead bodies don’t bother me.’9

  The point at which Leningraders most often broke out of their ‘caves’ and realised the scale of the tragedy overwhelming their city was when they had to arrange the burial of a relative. When his crabby, wood-chopping father died in March, Dmitri Likhachev washed him with toilet water, covered his eyes with eighteenth-century rouble coins, sewed him into a sheet and tied him to a wide double sled, fashioned from two smaller ones joined by a piece of plywood. First he and his wife dragged the corpse to the Vladimir Cathedral, where a priest said the burial service and sprinkled it with earth, adding a second handful on behalf of a woman whose son had gone missing at the front. Next they took it to a newly opened ‘mortuary’ in the grounds of a concert hall, where thousands of bodies lay piled in the open. When a lorry arrived to remove bodies for burial, Likhachev tried to persuade the driver to include his father in his first load. Otherwise, he feared, his shroud would be torn open and his gold teeth pulled. The driver refused.10

  Olga Grechina’s mother died at home on 24 January. Determined to give her the best possible funeral, Olga and her younger brother Vovka bought a coffin, for bread and two hundred roubles, from their building’s yardman. Though it was slightly too short for lack of wood, they did their best to make it presentable, lining it with a sheet and edging it with lace unpicked from one of their mother’s shawls. Olga was even able to buy a bunch of decorative maidenhair fern, from an otherwise empty florist on the Nevsky. ‘The coffin looked good’, she remembered:

  I was pleased with my work, never thinking about what it was for . . . It was just very strange seeing this white figure under the sheet. Why, who is this? I took a look and it wasn’t Mama, it was Death herself – a skull covered in skin, bones, hands that looked like chicken’s claws. (I couldn’t gut a chicken again for twenty-five years, I was so haunted by this memory.) Since it isn’t her, I need to get rid of it as quickly as possible, then things will be all right again. With a sort of happy energy I began to organise. I arranged a grave, called our relatives . . .

  The gathering was spoiled by her uncle Serezha, who arrived oddly dressed and whined like a child, endlessly repeating that he wanted soup (he died a few weeks later). With the help of the yardman’s son, they dragged the coffin on a sled from Mayakovsky Street to Suvorovsky Prospekt, past the Smolniy and over the Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge to the Bolsheokhtinskoye cemetery. As they approached the cemetery gates, they more and more often passed ‘mummies’, wrapped in bedlinen or old curtains, left at the side of the road. One coffin had been improvised out of a sofa, and decorated with a wreath made from curly ink-dyed woodshavings; a child lay in the case of an old-fashioned clock. Olga’s mother got a ‘real grave, dug to order but not very deep’, and a cross made from planks, her name and dates inscribed in indelible crayon.11

  Survivors of the siege have an irresistible urge to find a pattern to the deaths, a rationale behind who lived and who died. In one version the best – the ‘noble, restrained, scrupulous’ true Petersburgers – died first, elbowed aside in a Darwinian free-for-all. In the other (commoner) analysis restraint and scrupulosity were lifesavers: to survive it was vital to stay active, and to maintain certain standards – to wash one’s hair, shave, sweep the room, lay the table for ‘meals’, brush one’s teeth with charcoal, not eat the cat, not lick one’s plate and not let the slop bucket overflow or throw faeces out of the window. As one blokadnik puts it, ‘When someone gave up washing his neck and ears, stopped going to work, ate his bread ration all in one go and then lay down and covered himself with a blanket, he wasn’t long for this world.’12

  These disciplines also applied to children. Yelena Kochina and her husband moved in with a colleague’s extremely well-regulated family at the end of January, in (immediately disappointed) hope of a warmer room. His children, ‘pale as potato shoots’, spent the days sitting motionless side by side,

  as saturated with obedience as a sponge with water. N.A.’s wife Galya and her nanny work as if they were wind-up clocks. N.A. sets them going every morning, giving them their assignments for the day . . . He listens keenly to the work of his domestic machine, strengthening or weakening the load, increasing or decreasing the ration at just the right moment. He keeps the bread in his desk, weighing it out three times a day and handing to each their corresponding portion.13

  Likhachev and his wife made their four-year-old daughters memorise poetry. They learned by heart excerpts from Yevgeny Onegin – the ball scene and Tatiana’s dream – and Akhmatova’s poem ‘My Tartar Grandmother Gave Me’, about a girl who pretends that she has lost a ring of black jet, which in fact she has given to a lover who sails away, never to return. The little girls behaved ‘like heroes. We introduced a rule: no talking about food, and they obeyed! At table they never asked for food, were never naughty, but were terribly adult, slow-moving, serious. [All day] they sat close to the burzhuika, warming their hands.’14 It was another household rule to wash daily, if only face and hands, and to excrete, once the lavatory had frozen, in the loft, to which, since they lived on the fifth floor, they had easy access. (‘Fortunately’, Likhachev notes, ‘we had to go only once a week or even only once every ten days . . . When the weather grew warmer in the spring brown stains appeared on the ceiling in the corridor: we had been going in defined places.’)

  Crowded into a communal apartment on the Petrograd Side, Dmitri Lazarev’s extended family was equally mutually supportive. Though two members of the household – a family friend and his father-in-law – died over the winter, the flat became (like Marina Yerukhmanova’s room in the Yevropa) an ‘ark’. He and his wife distracted the children – a six-year-old daughter and nine-year-old niece – by reading aloud pre-revolutionary detective stories and by playing charades. The one their daughter remembered was the word blokada – ‘blockade’. For the syllable blok they acted out a scene from a poem by Aleksandr Blok; for ad – ‘hell’ in Russian – a devil sizzling a soul in a frying pan. For the whole word they pretended stumblingly to pull a sled across the room.15

  But the diaries and memoirs, almost by definition, come from the families that managed to hold on, and hold together. Very many did not, and the descriptions of those who gave up the fight – the unanswered door; darkness, stink and cold; still figures under heaped blankets; muttered ravings – are numerous and near-identical. With a mixture of disgust and pity Mariya Mashkova recorded the disintegration of neighbouring families in number 18 Sadovaya Street – most, like her, employees of the Public Library. One neighbour, until recently head of a ‘strong, alert, energetic’ household, having seen her husband leave for the army, her parents fall to quarrelling and stealing as they died, and her daughter taken away to a children’s home, ceased to care about anything except food: ‘[Her] overwhelming craving is to eat, to eat wit
hout end, savour and enjoy . . . Her husband’s visits home frighten her – he might take her portion of bread. I recognise this state of mind – it’s in me, in Olga, in everybody.’16 Another turned on her ten-year-old son after he lost his ration card:

  What never ceases to amaze me is the metamorphosis that has taken place in this loving mother, who we always used to tease for fussing so much about her Igoryok . . . Now she has turned into a wolf, stripped of humanity by hunger. Her only care is to snatch a piece of food from Igor, and her only fear that he will take a crumb of bread from her, or steal a spoonful of soup made from her grain. When I went to talk to her about getting help for Igor she didn’t even listen to what I was saying. She was tormented by one fear – that he would get his hands on her card, or eat her bread. She categorically stated, ‘I’m hungry, I want to live. I don’t care about Igor and his hunger. He lost his card, let him deal with it himself.’ She’s not going to give him anything. She must survive and she’s not interested in anything else. She hates and envies anybody who’s still on their feet . . . Igor just stood there, not saying anything, and devouring a piece of bread which the neighbours had given him out of pity. She was shouting angrily, ‘Don’t believe his complaints! Look what a huge piece of bread he’s stuffing down his throat, while I lie here hungry and weak!’ Igor, despite the horror and tragedy of their situation, is calm and never complains. He may no longer be of sound mind.17

  For those living in communal flats, whose kitchens, bathrooms and hallways were shared, neighbours’ breakdowns could be very close indeed. Igor Kruglyakov, kept alive by the iron discipline of his mother and grandmother (no talk of death was allowed, and he and his sister were forced to stand outdoors in the snow for ten minutes each day to get light and air), heard the couple in the next-door room first quarrelling, then fighting, then thumps on the wall as the wife killed their baby.18

  A consummate siege survivor was the Persianist Aleksandr Boldyrev. Good-looking, egotistical and possessed of a mordant wit, he had dodged the purges of 1936–7 by spending long spells in hospital with ulcers, or on research trips to remote parts of Central Asia. When war broke out he avoided the draft with the help of his lover, a colleague at the Hermitage, who interceded for him with the museum’s director via her long-suffering husband. Though not a Party member, Boldyrev continued indefatigably to work his contacts through the siege, inscribing himself at the Scholars’ Building and the Eastern Institute as well as at the Hermitage, and eating a daily ‘lunch’ at each. From the Hermitage he also managed to squeeze a manual worker’s card and, remarkably, 1,417 roubles in compensation for his lost summer holiday. He also delivered historical lectures – on ‘Peter’s Fleet’, ‘The Literature of the Fraternal Peoples of Central Asia’ and ‘Today’s Afghanistan’ – to sailors on Leningrad’s ice-bound ships. Sometimes these commissions meant a long walk across the city for no return, but usually they earned him a meal and a few Little Star cigarettes. His siege diary reads like an ever-changing to-do list of officials to be petitioned, debts to be called in and barter deals to be followed up – shifts he describes as like ‘leaping from tussock to tussock through a bog’.19 He managed, too, not to lose hope (the siege was always about to be lifted; England always about to open a second front) or his sense of humour. ‘All the time’, he wrote on 10 February, ‘sitting, standing or lying, I am reminded of my extreme emaciation. Especially striking is the disappearance of my buttocks, the one really distinguished aspect of my person, of which I was very proud. Now I have no bottom at all; my pelvis and hip bones clink against the chair.’

  Though his family was far from harmonious (his wife quarrelled relentlessly with his mother, and he with his wife), they continued to operate as a team, Boldyrev bringing home ‘yeast soup’ and ‘jelly’ from his various cafeterias, his wife donating blood (for which extra rations were given) and his mother queuing for bread. Most of all they were fortunate in having inherited valuables to trade. As well as the usual clothes and shoes, in the course of the winter they sold three watches – Boldyrev’s own, his late father’s and his wife’s Longine – for ten kilos of flour and five of beef fat; an amber cigarette holder (for 200 grams of bread), two sets of silver dessert spoons (for two kilos of bread and 700 grams of meat), a silver cream jug and sugar bowl, porcelain teacups (sold to the old Fabergé shop on the Morskaya for 670 roubles, which bought a litre of sunflower oil) and his mother’s wedding ring. This combination of perseverance, cooperation and luck just saved Boldyrev, his wife and daughter, but not his brother-in-law, uncle or mother, all of whom died of starvation between December and May.

  At night, lying on a sofa next to a stove stoked with furniture and picture frames, Boldyrev read novels. On 19 December he finished Great Expectations: ‘Indescribable delight – the only parts which grate are those repeated, oh-so-English edible passages.’ The following day he started on Priestley’s The Good Companions – ‘Wonderful so far. Its main appeal is England, contemporary England’ – which he finished ‘with great regret – it was just the book I wanted’. Next came Kipling’s heat- and light-drenched Kim (‘heavenly pleasure’) and Bulwer-Lytton’s critique of the Regency criminal justice system, Paul Clifford. In March he read de Maupassant and Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and in April Conrad’s Chance, about a teenage girl shunned by society after her father’s imprisonment.

  That the blockaded Leningraders escaped confinement by reading is a siege cliché. (‘I mostly read Balzac and Stendhal’, a Kirov Works foreman is said to have told the Party hack Aleksandr Fadeyev, ‘reporting’ from the city in the spring.) It is, however, borne out by the memoirs and diaries. At the start of the war, according to Ginzburg, ‘everyone’ avidly read War and Peace, since ‘Tolstoy had said the last word as regards courage, about people doing their bit in a people’s war’.20 Georgi Knyazev, on one of the days when his wife returned from the Academy’s ration distribution point empty-handed, distracted himself with ‘world history’, the Hittites and (uncharacteristically) the French decadents.21 On the pitch-black afternoon of 14 January, Vera Inber sat in coat and gloves reading The Sun, Life and Chlorophyll by the great nineteenth-century botanist Kliment Timiryazev, with its almost visionary description of plants transforming solar energy into life on earth. ‘“Unmeasurable surface of leaves”’, she wrote in her diary. ‘These words evoke in me a swaying ocean of green foliage and light particles flying towards us through the icy space of the universe.’22 A Red Army lieutenant in charge of barrage balloons read Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, from which he got (and successfully implemented) the idea of using the hydrogen inside the balloons themselves to fuel the engines which hauled them to the ground.23 Mashkova scoured the second-hand bookshops for treasures from the hastily sold libraries of evacuees. For herself she bought Herzen, Dostoyevsky and The Pickwick Papers (‘boring, pointless humour; I’m amazed it gets published, even for children’), and for her ten-year-old son Jules Verne, a life of Pissarro and Mayne Reid’s adventures of the Wild West. Another siege survivor, aged ten at the time, recalls a similarly escapist reading list – Pushkin’s fairy tales, Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Ernest Seton Thompson’s Two Little Savages, about a city boy who learns Indian woodcraft in the Ontario wilderness of the 1850s.

  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 prese
nted 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.24 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’.25 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.’26 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.27