Leningrad Read online

  Another siege cliché borne out by the diaries is the emotional sustenance Leningraders derived from the radio. Portable sets having been confiscated at the outbreak of war, they listened on fixed-wire loudspeakers, more than 400,000 of which had been installed in domestic apartments, as well as in outdoor public spaces, from the 1920s onwards.* Headquartered in the art deco ‘Radio House’ on the corner of Italyanskaya and Malaya Sadovaya streets, the city radio station continued to broadcast, despite power outages and shell damage to its transmission network, throughout the mass-death winter. Stories of its resuscitating power are legion: Olga Berggolts, collapsed in the street, picking herself up at the sound of her own voice reading her own poetry; a fighter pilot making it home ‘on one wing’ on hearing Klavdiya Shulzhenko – Russia’s Vera Lynn – singing ‘Little Blue Scarf’; the housewife, stumbling home to her family, ‘handed’ from loudspeaker to loudspeaker as if along a human chain. A (hammily Stalinist) programme for teenagers, titled ‘Letter to my Friend in Leningrad’ and broadcast on 7 December, delighted sixteen-year-old Klara Rakhman. ‘What a wonderful letter!’ she wrote in her diary: ‘It very precisely expresses my thoughts. I’ll put down everything I can remember of it.’28 The writer Lev Uspensky, smoking a late-night cigarette at a railway junction south of Ladoga, was startled to hear the words ‘Leningrad speaking’ echoing out of the fog above his head. A time delay between loudspeakers attached to a series of telegraph poles meant that the words overlapped, fading into the distance. It sounded, he thought, as if a line of giants were speaking, gently urging the German idiots to give it up, to go back home before they got hurt.29

  The most listened-to items were the Sovinform news bulletins, broadcast at 11 a.m. and 11 p.m. daily. Having got hold of a radio just in time for the Red Army’s January offensives, Fridenberg and her mother tearfully hung on the announcer’s every word. They knew the reports were untruthful, not to be relied upon – ‘but all the same, one listened and believed’.30 Genuinely beloved were Berggolts’s readings of her own verse, in particular her February Diary, a long poem commissioned in February 1942 to mark Red Army Day. Though censored, it managed to combine patriotism with an unusual degree of realism and personal feeling, perfectly fitting the public mood. The verses, a survivor remembers, were ‘so simple that they just stuck in your head. You’d walk along, muttering the lines . . . When I had to climb up on to our library roof and stand there during the shelling it was somehow a big help knowing them by heart.’ Another calls them ‘splendid . . . they really shook us out of that animal brooding about food’.31 Other popular programmes were Campfire – an imaginative magazine feature for children, which continued long after the war – and, from the spring of 1942, Letters to and from the Front, which enabled Leningraders to send each other (morale-boosting) personal messages. The Radio House also broadcast to Leningrad’s besiegers. Headed by émigré Austrian Communists, the brothers Ernst and Fritz Fuchs, its German-language section featured defeatist interviews with German POWs and faked ‘letters from home’, said to have been discovered in dead soldiers’ pockets. One described the bombing of Berlin; another, written by Berggolts, waxed lyrical about Christmas in Bavaria – ‘Do you remember the smell of Christmas biscuits? Spices, raisins, vanilla? The warmth and crackle of Christmas candles?’32

  In December and January programming shrank to a few hours per day. In the gaps, the radio broadcast the calm ticking (at fifty strikes per minute) of a metronome – the steady beating, for households whose sets still worked, of Leningrad’s heart. What exactly the Radio House put out hardly mattered; the important thing was that the organism lived, that communication was maintained. Ivan Zhilinsky was one of the many diarists to record each day, even as his entries shrivelled to a bare record of food intake and deaths among neighbours, whether or not he had radio reception.

  Much harder to gauge is how much solace Leningraders got from religious faith during the months of mass death.33 By the late 1930s organised religion had been suborned or driven underground in the Soviet Union, following Stalin’s closure or demolition of thousands of churches and monasteries, and execution, imprisonment or exile of their monks, nuns and priests. At the start of the war only twenty-one churches operated in the whole of the Leningrad diocese, the rest having been knocked down or turned into warehouses, garages, cinemas, planetaria or ‘museums of religion’. The Cathedral of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood – a multicoloured neo-Russian confection, filled with glowing mosaic, that is today one of Petersburg’s chief tourist attractions – was only saved from demolition, ironically, by the outbreak of war.

  With the German invasion, Stalin made a swift U-turn, allowing the Orthodox (but not the Catholic, Baptist or Lutheran) Church to play a tightly circumscribed role in public life in exchange for supporting the war effort. Some churches were reopened, the Atheist newspaper was renamed then closed, and Leningrad’s Metropolitan Aleksei was allowed to make a patriotic appeal to the nation in which he invoked Russia’s medieval warrior-saints Dmitri Donskoi and Alexander Nevsky but did not once mention Stalin. Priests were allowed to take funeral services (as for Likhachev’s father) and to visit homes to administer the last rites. Crypts were used as bomb shelters and as distribution points for kerosene, firewood, hot water and clothing. (As a toddler, the poet Josef Brodsky sat out raids underneath the martial white and gold of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, round the corner from his family’s flat on the Liteiniy.) Leningrad churches also collected substantial defence funds – over two million roubles by the end of 1941, which paid for a Dmitri Donskoi tank column and an Alexander Nevsky air unit. So, too, did the Choral Synagogue, the one remaining place of worship for the city’s 200,000-odd Jews.

  Independent congregations, in contrast, were still ruthlessly persecuted. Typical was a small underground group discovered and liquidated in the summer of 1942. It was led, the NKVD’s case report tells us, by a sixty-year-old known as Archimandrite Klavdi, who had already served time in prison for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ and was now living in Leningrad illegally. His elderly, mostly unemployed followers included ‘kulaks’, former nuns, ‘monastic elements’ and a nurse from the Lenin Hospital. Their crimes, according to Klavdi’s confession, included ‘illegally trying to recruit believers’, ‘praising the pre-revolutionary order and living standards’, and ‘voicing disapproval of the methods of Soviet power’.34 What became of them we do not know, but it was probably similar to what happened to Berggolts’s doctor father, who in early 1942 was deported to Siberia for refusing to inform on a Father Vyacheslav, an old friend with whom he used to enjoy playing cards.35

  How many Leningraders actually attended services during the first siege winter is hard to say. Though one memoirist movingly describes services at the St Vladimir Cathedral – choir wrapped in shawls and felt boots, oil in the icon lamps frozen solid, the sacraments taken with beetroot juice in place of wine – the diarists of the time make no remark, even when recklessly frank on other matters. Perhaps the packed Vladimirsky was a benevolent trick of the memory; perhaps it only attracted crowds from the spring onwards, when surviving Leningraders had the strength to begin mourning their dead; or perhaps it was simply that it was the intelligentsia, on the whole, who kept diaries, and the working class who went to church. Educated Leningraders may have also found it harder to maintain what faith they had. Berggolts – Jewish by background and an idealistic Communist in youth – saw the siege as a collective punishment for having allowed the Revolution to be perverted, for the lies and moral cowardice of the purge years:

  What unhappy people we are! What did we wander into? What savage dead end and delirium? Oh what weakness and terror! I can do nothing, nothing. I should have ended my own life, that would have been the most honest thing. I have lied so much, made so many mistakes, that can’t be redeemed or set right . . . We have to fight off the Germans, destroy fascism, end the war. And then we have to change everything about ourselves . . . (Just now Kolka [her husband] had
[an epileptic] fit – I had to hold his mouth shut so he wouldn’t frighten the children in the next door room. He fought terribly.) Why do we live? Oh God, why do we live? Have we really not suffered enough? Nothing better will ever come.

  She had caught her mood from a friend, a traumatised survivor of the naval retreat from Tallinn, who had visited earlier in the day, incoherently mumbling ‘For twenty years we have been in the wrong, and we’re paying for it now.’36

  Others found themselves returning to faith as their fear and suffering increased. Party members whispered prayers and crossed themselves in the air-raid shelters; Georgi Knyazev, self-styled humanist and worshipper of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov, by the depths of January mused through the eighteen-hour nights on the strength of the light fitting in his ceiling – he would hang himself, he had decided, if his wife died before him – and his ‘favourite theme of Christ, that amazing teacher of love and mercy from faraway Galilee’.37 A painter, dying alongside his wife, drew sketches of a fiery angel, of Christ – his skull-shaped head resembling those of the starving – and of the Virgin spreading her protective veil over the well-like courtyard of a blacked-out apartment block.38 Old Believers and Seventh Day Adventists continued, as they had done since 1938, to hold services in secret, in their homes. The mother of one such family (whose husband, a priest, was already in prison) made her six children kneel for long hours on the floor, praying. When they became emaciated she let them kneel on pillows (two out of the six died).39 Muslims and Buddhists also had to worship in secret, despite the fact that thousands were serving on the Leningrad front, and that the city possessed both a mosque and a magnificent Buddhist temple, built during the reign of Nicholas II and the tethering point of the barrage balloon that served as its wartime radio mast.

  In sum, religious faith remained a private, risky source of consolation during the siege. Stalin’s relaxation of the rules was opportunistic and temporary, and Leningraders knew it. A ten-year-old girl, taken into one of ninety-eight new orphanages that opened between January and March 1942, woke one night to see her class teacher kneeling, head bowed, at the dormitory window. The teacher whispered that she was praying for her son, who had gone missing at the front – and begged the girl not to tell anybody what she had seen.40

  *The system was admired by Hitler, who planned to install a loudspeaker in every Ukrainian village. They would not broadcast news, but ‘cheerful music’, giving Ukrainians ‘plenty of opportunities to dance’.

  13

  Svyazi

  A not quite translatable word meant a great deal in the Soviet Union: svyazi, or ‘connections’ – the combination of string-pulling, exchange of favours and bribery by means of which citizens were able to work their way round the state’s monopoly on goods and employment to get themselves everything from jobs, telephones and university places to a bucket of potatoes or a new pair of shoes. In peacetime, astute use of svyazi improved one’s standard of living; during the siege it meant the difference between life and death.

  If the typical Leningrader’s first line of defence against starvation was immediate family, the second was his or her network of friends. Especially among the city’s close-knit intelligentsia families, friendships – based on several generations of connection by marriage, education and profession, plus shared experience of fear and impoverishment – could be both extensive and remarkably strong. Not unusual was the experience of widowed, childless Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, who was given small but heartening presents of food by old colleagues from her late husband’s chemical research institute. ‘My friend Petr Yevgenevich visited today’, she wrote on New Year’s Day 1942. ‘He brought a handful of oatmeal for kisel [a thickened fruit drink], and Ivan Yemelyanovich brought three sprats.’ The pair reappeared a few weeks later, this time with 200 grams of bread, dried onion, mustard powder, ‘a tiny piece of meat, four dried white mushrooms, and four frozen potatoes (the first we’ve seen since the autumn). This is priceless treasure, and I was extremely grateful, especially since for the past week all we’ve had to eat is seaweed . . . A celebration!’1 Similarly loyal were the retired railway clerk Ivan Zhilinsky and his wife Olga, who looked after an old friend whose family had departed into evacuation. They invited him to share wine and duranda at New Year – painstakingly cleaning their room and clothes beforehand, and giving him a wash and shave on arrival – took him in when his flat was made uninhabitable by shelling, and finally traded bread so as to give him a proper grave. If Olga had not also died of starvation, and Ivan been arrested by the NKVD, they would have adopted his children. Smaller acts of kindness could make all the difference, too: one siege survivor remembers the teenage girl next door bringing firewood filched from her job at a lumberyard – ‘Not a lot of it, but for us it was everything.’2 On a different level, Olga Grechina – aged nineteen and living completely alone – found human comfort in brief, heartfelt conversations with strangers on the street, who in January and February tended to walk together in pairs for fear of mugging:

  It was interesting to observe people’s contradictory impulses: on the one hand you fear that your most valuable possession, your ration card, might be stolen; on the other you want, even just for the short walk home, to be with someone who will listen. Never since have I experienced such an odd, uncontrollable desire to tell a complete stranger everything about myself . . .

  Saying goodbye, each would thank the other for their company and wish that they might live to see victory. There was a new etiquette in this farewell, for the form of words was almost always exactly the same, whether spoken by a simple person or an educated one. The simple women, having heard my unhappy story, would commiserate with me and comfort me, saying that I was young and that everything would come again – home, education, friends. In these naive but sincere good wishes I found the vitamin I needed to live. And that was why I, like everyone else, in reply to my companion’s story would tell my own.3

  Leningraders’ second and most important ring of svyazi derived from their workplaces. Having a job not only meant getting a worker’s ration card, but with luck, access to off-ration meals, to firewood, to food parcels from affiliated organisations in the unoccupied Soviet Union, and to a bed in one of the hundred-odd recuperation clinics, or statsionary, opened from December onwards on the orders of the city soviet. (Though many statsionary were little better than dumping grounds for the dying, others saved lives simply by providing patients with food without making them queue.) Not all workplaces were equal. Among factories the best supplied were the large, prestigious defence plants, though their staff’s chances of survival were pulled down to the civilian average by the physical demands of their work, by targeted bombardment and by the fact that even after call-up most defence workers were quicker-to-starve men. At the Stalin Metal Works the fatality rate was around 35 per cent, and in the Kirov Works, situated in the vulnerable southern suburbs, somewhere between 25 and 34 per cent.

  During the production push of the autumn going absent without leave had meant criminal punishment and loss of the worker’s ration, but in the midst of mass death the rules ceased to be enforced. Employees who failed to appear at work were automatically listed as sick and kept their cards, so that in January 1942 837,000 Leningraders were still registered as workers despite the fact that 270 factories had been officially closed and most of the rest hardly functioned.4 Among the many Leningraders with a purely notional job was Yelena Skryabina. ‘Friends’, she wrote on 15 January 1942, ‘have found me a position in a sewing workshop. This puts me on first category rations. The workshop does very little – there’s no light or fuel – but they hand out the ration just the same. Thus I get a little more bread, and at the moment every crumb is vital.’5

  One of the most sought-after intelligentsia ‘survival enclaves’ – as one historian calls siege-winter workplaces – was the Radio House, whose director organised fair distribution of food that he regularly smuggled back to the office from the Smolniy’s fabled Canteen no. 12. Though t
he amounts involved were small – a few lumps of sugar, a couple of meat patties, a bowl of kasha – the ‘tremendous moral effect it had on us’, as Olga Berggolts’s lover Yuri Makogonenko recalled, ‘is difficult even to describe’.6 Radio House staff also received at least two special deliveries of food from Moscow, the first arranged by Berggolts’s indomitable sister Mariya, who personally escorted a lorry-full of supplies over the Ladoga ice at the end of February. ‘She took a roundabout route’, Berggolts wrote admiringly, ‘alone with the driver, in trousers and a short fur coat, armed with some sort of pistol . . . She slept in the lorry, chatted up the commandants, passed through villages just liberated from the Germans, collecting letters and packages for Leningraders along the way . . . I am proud of her, amazed by her – my wonderful quarrelsome Muska!’7

  A second delivery was organised by Berggolts herself, who collected food and medicines for air transport to Leningrad while in Moscow giving readings of her February Diary. She would have been able to send more if it had not been for the Leningrad authorities, who mistrusted non-Party initiatives, did not want their own failings shown up and possibly feared public anger if some institutions were noticeably better supplied than others. ‘Zhdanov’, Berggolts wrote furiously on 25 March, ‘has just sent a telegram forbidding the despatch of individual packages to Leningrad organisations. This apparently has “bad political consequences”. Thanks to this idiotic telegram we can hardly send anything to the Radio Committee.’ Pleading was useless: