Proud harvesters. Cabbages grown in St Isaac’s Square during the siege.
Clearing snow and rubble from the Nevsky Prospekt.
The aural bombardment of a radio metronome ticked constantly from the city’s 1,500 street speakers, quickening its rhythm when bombers were on their way, slowing it down as they departed.46 In apartments across the city 400,000 speakers had been installed to keep inhabitants almost up-to-date, or partially informed, through twice-daily news bulletins.47 Otherwise, radio broadcasts of patriotic song and classical music sustained the spirit of the city. Two musical giants responded to events. The first finished an opera which was premiered in Moscow in 1957 – too late for the war. The other composed a symphony that trumpeted Leningrad’s plight to the world.
Under suspicion for having spent so much time abroad, Sergei Prokofiev had redeemed himself as a Soviet composer with the rousing cantata he produced as a soundtrack to Eisenstein’s patriotic epic Alexander Nevsky. This was followed by his ballet Romeo and Juliet, premiered at the Kirov during the dark days of the Winter War, with Galina Ulanova, somewhat reluctantly, dancing the lead. Although she famously declared, ‘Never was there a tale more of woe, than Prokofiev’s music for Romeo,’ Juliet was one of her most expressive creations. It was while working on a follow-up ballet, Cinderella, that Prokofiev first thought of writing an opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The composer felt that the story of ‘the expulsion of Napoleon’s army from Russian soil’ was ‘particularly relevant’. To be sure, the novel was republished with a wartime print run of half a million copies in Leningrad alone.48 Prokofiev’s powerful opera, with its choruses of defiance and Kutuzov’s declaration before the Battle of Borodino that ‘there is no people greater than ours’, was written for a wartime audience.49 Finished in Perm in 1943, it would have been a tonic to the nation, but the resources needed to perform such a work proved too considerable.’50 Even a symphony – Shostakovich’s 7th – barely made it onto the platform in the city to which it was dedicated.
Shostakovich finished the third movement of the symphony during the autumn of 1941, when he was working as a fireman in the Civil Defence Brigade. In October, he and his family were forced to evacuate to Kuibyshev on the Volga River where he finished the work. It was premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra in Kuibyshev on 5 March 1942 and broadcast across the Soviet Union. Three weeks later, it was performed in Moscow and the score was microfilmed and transported via Persia and Cairo, to be flown to London and New York. Henry Wood premiered the symphony in London in June, and Arturo Toscanini – whose performance displeased the composer – gave its American premiere at Radio City in New York in July. Sixty-two further performances were given across the United States before the end of the year. In the composer’s native city, deprived of food and power, the 7th Symphony’s passage to performance was challenging.
The Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated, so when the score was flown in, posters went up across the city appealing for performers. The oboist Ksenia Matus wanted to participate, but found her instrument rotten. When she took it to be repaired, the charge was a cat. The man declared he had already eaten five. The distraught instrumentalist replied that there were no cats or dogs or birds left, so the craftsman repaired the oboe for cash. Musicians arrived from villages outside the city with passes declaring, ‘Permission to enter Leningrad to perform the Seventh Symphony.’51 Players arrived with grimy faces or crawling with lice, and the conductor, Karl Eliasberg, was disappointed by the response. The orchestra that assembled was below the number of players specified in the score, and each time they arrived for rehearsal they would be greeted by ‘How many violins do we have left?’ or ‘We’ve just lost a bassoon player.’ Yet the symphony was given its Leningrad premiere on 9 August 1942, the very day that Hitler had planned to celebrate the city’s fall at the Astoria Hotel. The invitations had been printed. On the day of the concert, German artillery positions were bombarded, in an attempt to secure the quiet needed to relay the performance by loudspeaker across the city. It was even blared out beyond Leningrad’s defences, to the Nazis camped close to the city. Several years after the end of the war, Eliasberg was thanked by some German soldiers who had been sitting in those siege trenches in 1942. They had listened to the symphony and burst into tears, realising they would never be able to capture Leningrad.52
By the time the siege moved into its second winter, shell damage had disfigured the cityscape. The glass dome of the old Stieglitz Museum had been hit. A bomb shattered the façade of the Small Hall of the Philharmonic. The Winter Palace was hit. When a one-tonne bomb fell in Palace Square, glass was blown out and there were gaping holes in the Hall of Columns and on the Jordan staircase. One of the most surreal spectacles of the siege was the guided tours given to soldiers from the front through the freezing galleries of the Hermitage. They were stopped in front of faded rectangles and empty frames on bare walls, while their guides lovingly described the composition and quality of the paintings that had been taken away for safe keeping.53
The Kirov Ballet had been evacuated to Perm. Ulanova was touring, frequently dancing for Red Army audiences. Many of the young ballet students left behind at the school were too ill and undernourished to dance.54 But a good number of cinemas and theatres remained open. Lena Mukhina remembered seeing the 1937 American film Champagne Waltz at the Koloss cinema and revelling in its world of ‘sparkling shops, gleaming cars, adverts, adverts, endless adverts. Adverts here, there and everywhere. Glittering, whirling, clamouring adverts.’ Many of her peers loved what they knew of American popular culture, and it would be hard for those who survived the war to cope with the strengthened censorship of Soviet peace.55 Leningrad Zoo, on the Petrograd Side, evacuated many animals before the Germans surrounded the city. The creatures that remained were fooled into eating paltry vegetable substitutes by spiking their rations with splashes of blood or bone-broth. But the zoo had been hit in an early raid, and a much-loved elephant from Hamburg was among the casualties.56 The National Public Library on the Nevsky Prospekt was able to make a significant number of acquisitions during the siege, as the apartments of the dead were emptied and private libraries came onto the market. All in all, they added to their collection ‘58,892 books, 112,640 prints’ and over 48,000 roubles worth of manuscripts. The library never closed, and people came to consult treatises on pressing topics such as vitamin deficiency and edible wild plants.57
Part of the Hermitage was opened as a convalescent centre – and a morgue – for the staff of Leningrad’s museums.58 In the hospitals, conditions slowly improved with the arrival of medicines and new materials. For New Year 1943 the staff managed a small party, and wrapped little bags of toys or sweets for the patients, who were also given fifty grams of vodka to welcome what people hoped would be a better New Year.59
Although German shelling had become so accurate that tram stops frequently had to be moved, by the winter of 1943 conditions were definitely better.60 The winter was less cold than the previous one, and the food and fuel supply improved when the Red Army regained enough territory to enable the building of a railway to the city – the first train arriving on 7 February. During the rest of the year – with the track repaired 1,200 times – heavily shelled trains continued to get through. That summer, the city’s vegetable harvest was twice as large as the previous year and, by late autumn 1943, the birth rate exceeded the number of deaths.61 In September, the Germans began their retreat. Peterhof, Pushkin and Pulkovo were liberated.
On 23 January 1944, the last German shell fell on Leningrad and a new light filled the night sky the safe, joyous sparkle of fireworks. The war had not yet been won, but Leningrad had been saved. Survivors could stare at the explosions snowing down on them, without scattering for cover. Blanks fired from ships and gun salutes discharged from the fort were a disturbingly joyous echo of the deafening explosions that had wrecked their lives for 900 days and 900 nights. In the fighting around Leningrad, two million Russians had been kille
d. Civilian deaths in the city stood at one million. As liberated prisoners of war started to trickle back, they were interrogated. Had they been turned by Western Intelligence? One and a half million were carted off to camps.62
The ‘overmastering’ Bronze Horseman, uncovered after the war.
Today, rival clubs taunt Petersburg’s Zenit football team, calling them ‘Blockade Rats’ and their grandparents ‘cannibals’.63 Those grandparents bravely faced down the Nazi terror. Yet, with the return to peace, they were once again forced to confront the omnipresent threat of their Comrade General Secretary. Shostakovich later declared that his 7th Symphony was ‘about Leningrad that Stalin has systematically been destroying’.64
15
MURMURS FROM THE UNDERGROUND
1945–91
There are two museums in St Petersburg dedicated to Leningrad’s suffering and resistance in the Great Patriotic War. It was not always so. Stalin’s incompetence before and during the early stages of the conflict resulted in strict censorship after the end of hostilities. The siege became taboo. Three victory arches appeared, then disappeared. The first attempt to show what life had been like – the Museum of the Heroic Defence of Leningrad – was closed down and its directors arrested.1 Meanwhile the priority for survivors was to plant trees and restore the parks and open spaces that were such an important aspect of Leningrad life. Extensive damage to the city required building on a scale unseen since the days of Peter the Great, and architects saw, in Leningrad’s post-war reconstruction, an opportunity to emphasize what they held to be the city’s defining style: the austere order beloved by Catherine and Alexander I – neoclassicism. Since the second quarter of the nineteenth century, construction serving the changing needs of life had resulted in a cityscape that was increasingly functional and eclectic. Railway stations, stores, apartment and office blocks generated a grab-bag of neo-Renaissance, neo-baroque, stil-moderne, modernist and Soviet-empire style. To allow neoclassicism to dominate, after the war the façades of certain ruined buildings constructed in other styles were modified, thus altering the architectural balance of the city centre. No. 68 Nevsky Prospekt, beside the Anichkov Bridge over the Fontanka, was one such building. Local architects organised training in plastering, moulding and marble-cutting as young people returned from evacuation. The Herculean task of reviving the city was underpinned by giving a number of important streets and squares their pre-revolutionary names.2
In October 1945, the Hermitage welcomed back the paintings sent off to Sverdlovsk for safe keeping. Less than a week later, trains from Germany began to deliver some of the two million artworks taken from German museums and private collections in retaliation for the Nazi invasion. One and a half million of these were returned to Soviet satellite countries in the 1950s, but hundreds of thousands of artefacts were kept hidden and remain in Russia as ‘moral and not . . . financial compensation’3 for the 110 million books and documents destroyed, the 427 Russian museums and 4,000 libraries devastated by the Nazis.4 As the Hermitage collection was to be rehung, repairs to the damaged interior of the Winter Palace were a priority and, by November 1945, sixty-nine rooms and galleries were open to the public. Renovations to the city’s palaces also went ahead. The Yusupov Palace functioned as the base of the Union of Workers in Education, the Anichkov Palace as the headquarters of the Leningrad Young Pioneers, the Tauride Palace as the Leningrad Communist Party High School.5 By 1950, a substantial number of buildings had been restored, although Leningrad’s outlying palaces lay in ruins for years.
People were swift to realise that the war, for all its terrors, had offered some respite from the unremitting fear of Stalin’s Russia. After their new-found camaraderie, many were loath to return to suspicion and treachery and pined for the collapse of the regime. But with only one communist candidate standing for each seat in the 1946 elections, there seemed little chance. That same year, as a poor harvest resulted in a famine that killed yet another one million Soviet citizens, Stalin set about securing the good life for the party elite. The Gastronom network of special shops had reopened, with luxury goods offered at prices well beyond the means of ordinary workers. Fees had been introduced to cover the last three years of school and university, so that the chance for advancement was placed beyond the means of modest families.6 Special hospitals and holiday homes rewarded the party faithful, and Stalin waited for his reward – Shostakovich’s victory symphony. If the composer had sustained the nation with his 7th Symphony, and in his 8th had targeted totalitarianism – which Moscow understood as fascism – then Stalin expected a musical tribute to his leadership, a surging, triumphant, victorious 9th. Daring as ever, Shostakovich produced an energetic, often-happy work – but happy in the boisterous, vulgar manner of post-war ebullience in the streets. The 9th Symphony contained no glorious paean to the man who had crushed the Nazis. Once again Shostakovich seemed to be the only person who could humiliate Stalin and live to tell the tale. The composer simply offset his insult with scores to soundtrack the mawkish adulation of the Comrade General Secretary in films such as the 1949 Fall of Berlin. ‘That’s the reason,’ wrote Shostakovich, ‘I survived.’7
The first movement of the 9th Symphony is impish and capricious. Stalin, at the time, was increasingly gripped by fear – fear of rivals, plots, Jews, foreigners and foreign achievements. An encyclopaedia was produced. Forget Marconi, Edison and the Wright brothers. Alexander Popov invented the radio. Alexander Lodygin switched on the first electric light. Alexander Mozhaisky was the first to fly.8 Apart from indicating that ‘Alexander’ was a sterling choice of name for ambitious parents to give their child, the entries suggested that Stalin’s paranoia was spinning out of orbit. His fear of opposition from intellectual Leningrad ran at least as far back as 1925, when the city’s leader, Grigory Zinoviev, dared oppose the Central Committee in Moscow.9 After the war, among the protégés of Andrei Zhdanov, Kirov’s successor as local party leader, there had been talk of an increasingly important and independent role for Leningrad. When the city warmly welcomed a delegation from that wayward satellite, Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia, it seemed as if it was intent on flouting Stalin. Zhdanov – who had been transferred to Moscow in 1944 – was detailed to attack cultural deviation in his old city. The journals Zvezda and Leningrad were criticised for publishing Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko.10 Stalin personally wrote an article criticising ‘hooliganlike representations of our reality’ and ‘anti-Soviet attacks’.11 Most ominously, the article declared that ‘the transgressions could not have taken place without a deplorable lack of vigilance on the part of local Party organs.’
Ruins of Peterhof Palace after the German occupation.
A new purge started: the ‘Leningrad Affair’ of 1949-50, targeting Zhdanov’s associates, Nicholai Voznesensky, Alexei Kuznetsov and Peter Popkov – ironically, all supporters of Stalin. After a meteoric career, the economist Voznesensky became a member of the Politburo and received the Stalin Prize for his book The War Economy of the USSR. On closer reading, however, Stalin decided that the text criticised his handling of the war, and Voznesensky was imprisoned, then shot. Kuznetsov – more effective in the management of Leningrad during the war than Zhdanov – had been promoted to First Secretary when his boss was moved to Moscow. After refusing to confess to trumped-up charges in a closed trial of 1950, he was executed. A hook was slammed into the back of his neck. Accused of turning the city into a nest of ‘un-Bolshevik’ opponents who were plotting against Moscow’s Central Committee, 2,000 Leningraders lost their jobs. By 1952, sixty-nine had been executed, imprisoned or exiled.12
Leningrad workers are told of the execution of Zinoviev and others for complicity in the Kirov murder.
Zhdanov was already dead from drink and the suppression was directed by Lavrenti Beria and Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s new favourites.13 Once again, the purge demonstrated that following Stalin was the only option. The leader – glorified in increasingly magisterial parades and mushy films – had become so
paranoid that he surrounded himself with gulag-like security. His isolation was almost total. Fond of commenting that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic, he listened, misty-eyed, to his favourite song, ‘Suliko’ – touched by a tale of the search for a loved one’s grave. Most of Stalin’s victims had no grave. By the time he himself became a ‘tragedy’ – choking slowly to death at his maximum-security dacha in March 1953 Stalin had realised a good number of statistics.
At the XXth Party Congress in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor, and the long Stalin winter began to thaw. Totalitarianism eased into authoritarianism, and between Stalin’s death and the end of the decade, two million people returned from the gulags and a further two million from special settlements. But the world outside the Soviet Union appeared increasingly dangerous. The threat of nuclear war and Western imperialism resulted in cultural lockdown at home, just as young Soviets were showing even greater enthusiasm for Western film and fashion.
One way of undermining foreign influences was to give the products of Western culture a new ideological slant. John Ford’s classic western, Stagecoach – the story of personal tensions in a vehicle under threat of attack – was presented as the dramatic struggle of an indigenous population against imperialist invaders.14 Nonetheless, new ideas and influences did begin to infiltrate with gathering speed. Foreign tourists started to arrive, wearing different styles of clothing. Sailors returning to Leningrad brought back Western records, although their impact was slow and slight, compared with that of the American singles that Liverpool merchant seamen carried home with them, thereby changing the course of popular music. When Leningraders listened to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, intimations of the easy-going and genial life in the West only added to their disenchantment and impatience with the party. Workers continued to be lodged in overcrowded factory hostels, and handled industrial equipment that was obsolete. Others were crammed into communal flats, where the kitchen, bathroom and toilet were shared. Many Leningrad kommunalki had been built as sizeable apartments for the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie and had deteriorated after 1917. Many more had been damaged during the siege. In the single room that lodged a family, screens and wardrobes were arranged to secure a modicum of privacy for each generation.
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