by Anna Reid
Three days before Stalin finally ordered that Sevastopol be given up – the admiral in charge left by submarine – the press still boasted its invincibility: ‘We have seen the capitulation,’ thundered the Red Star, ‘of celebrated fortresses, of states. But Sevastopol is not surrendering. Our soldiers do not play at war. They fight a life and death struggle. They do not say “I surrender” when they see a couple of enemy men on the chessboard.’1
This was a fling at Tobruk, the Libyan port, vital to the British Eighth Army’s defence of Egypt, which Rommel had almost bloodlessly captured, together with 33,000 British and South African troops and large quantities of supplies, nine days earlier. Churchill got the news in the Oval Office, in the middle of a meeting with Roosevelt. ‘It was’, one of the generals present remembered, ‘a hideous and totally unexpected shock. For the first time in my life I saw the Prime Minister wince.’ In August Churchill flew, together with Roosevelt’s envoy Averell Harriman, to Moscow for his first summit with Stalin. He had to break the news that a promised landing in northern France was now put off indefinitely in favour of Operation Torch, aimed at attacking Rommel in the rear via Vichy-held Morocco and Algeria. Stalin’s reaction was so insulting that Churchill’s interpreter thought his Russian counterpart must be mistranslating. In fact, he had the dictator’s words perfectly – Stalin was telling his allies to their faces that they were frightened of the Germans.2
While the great powers wrangled, spring came to Leningrad. The ice rotted and broke on the canals, snow slid in water-heavy avalanches off roofs and balconies, and the straight-sided piles of fire-fighting sand, their retaining planks long gone for firewood, thawed and crumbled. At the Hermitage burst pipes flooded the cellar underneath the Hall of Athena, drowning a collection of eighteenth-century porcelain. Staff – by now nearly all women – waded into the murky water, awash with floating inventory labels, and delicately groped for Meissen goatherds and shepherdesses. Leaks sprang in the palace’s bomb-shaken roof, and army cadets who helped move antique furniture into the dry were thanked with a tour of the galleries by a museum guide, who talked them through the absent masterpieces empty frame by empty frame.3
As the hours of daylight lengthened and ration levels increased, Leningraders began to emerge from their ‘small radii’, reacquainting themselves with the outside world and with ordinary human feeling. Carrying basket and scissors, Olga Grechina combed the parks for the first dandelions and nettles – so many were doing the same that to find any she had to venture on to a firing range. When the trams started running again, on 15 April, people stumbled after them, laughing and crying.4 ‘In the dining room’, wrote Dmitri Likhachev of Pushkin House, ‘we met each other with the words “You’re alive! I’m so glad!” One learned with alarm that so-and-so was dead, that so-and-so had left town. People counted each other, counted up those who were left, as at roll-call in prison camp.’5
On May Day (to mark which food shops dressed their windows with artificial fruit and vegetables*) the shipyard supervisor Vasili Chekrizov was pleased not only to see men going to work in ties and women in hats and lipstick, but also to see drunks. Normally they would have disgusted him, but this year they represented a welcome return to normality. A couple of weeks later he was amazed to wake up with an erection, and to hear, as he walked past a courtyard, a woman swearing and wailing. ‘I don’t know why she was weeping. All the same, tears are proof that the situation in Leningrad is improving. When every day hundreds of rag-wrapped corpses were being dragged along or thrown out onto the streets, there were no tears (or I didn’t see them).’6
For Lidiya Ginzburg’s starvation-numbed ‘Siege Man’ the first emotions to return were irritation – at leaking galoshes, broken spectacles, clumsiness in handling gloves and shopping bag in a crowded food shop – and impatience, the ‘sense of lost time’. Next came grief, and its close companion, guilt:
Siege people forgot their sensations but they remembered facts. Facts crept slowly out from the dimness of memory into the light of rules of behaviour which were now gravitating back to the accepted norm.
‘She wanted a sweet so much. Why did I eat that sweet? I needn’t have done. And everything would have been that little bit better.’ . . . Thus Siege Man thinks about his wife or mother, whose death has made the eaten sweet irrevocable. He recalls the fact but cannot summon up the feeling: the feeling of that piece of bread, or sweet, which prompted him to cruel, dishonourable, humiliating acts.7
One such guilt-ridden survivor was Olga Berggolts, whose epileptic husband Kolya had died in hospital in February. She poured sorrow and remorse into her diaries – why hadn’t she visited him every day? Why hadn’t she been there at his death? Why hadn’t she taken him some of the biscuits her sister sent from Moscow? How, most of all, should she feel about her colleague at the Radio House, Yuri (Yurka) Makogonenko, with whom she was still conducting a passionate affair?
Today, all day, I’ve had visions of Kolya, of how he was when I made my second visit to the hospital on Pesochnaya. His swollen hands, covered in cuts and ulcers. How he carefully gave them to the nurse so that she could change the bandages, all the time anxiously mumbling, making it hard for me to feed him, making me spill the precious food. I was in despair and in a fit of anger bit him on his poor swollen hand. Oh you bitch! . . . I was tired of him. I betrayed him. No, that’s not right. I didn’t betray, I just proved weak and callous. How Yurka calls me now! But this means cheating on Kolya! I DID NOT CHEAT. Never. But to give my heart to Yurka is to cheat on him . . . I’m unhappy in the full, absolute sense of the word . . . I hope that every terrible thing that can happen, happens to me.
This torrent of emotion coincided with the popular and official success of her long poem February Diary. In late March she was flown (chased by six Messerschmitts) to Moscow to attend a round of readings and receptions, including one at the headquarters of the NKVD (‘I suppose there were some human beings among them. But what oafs, what louts they are.’). The event gave her the opportunity to petition on behalf of her father, at that moment on a prison train on his way to Minusinsk in southern Siberia.
He writes ‘Contact whoever you can – Beria etc. – but get me out of here’. He has been travelling since 17 March. They are fed once a day, and sometimes not even that. In his wagon six people have already died, and several more await their turn . . . My God, what are we fighting for? What did Kolya die for? Why do I walk around with a burning wound in my heart? For a system under which a wonderful person, a distinguished military doctor and a genuine Russian patriot, is insulted, crushed, sentenced to death, and nobody can do anything about it.8
Though she managed to get a meeting with the secretary of the NKVD Party organisation it achieved nothing: ‘We had a “chat” (I can’t even talk about this without shaking with hatred). He took my petition and promised to pass it on to the Narkom this evening. Will they do anything? Hard to believe.’ The case was indeed shuffled back to Leningrad (‘simply to rid themselves of the bother’) and her father not allowed to return home until the war was over.
Berggolts’s despair was compounded by Muscovites’ ignorance of events in Leningrad. Like the military disasters of the war’s first months, starvation had been kept out of the news. Though newspapers mentioned ‘food shortage’ they did so seldom and in passing, instead making ghoulish play of civilian deaths by German shelling and bombing.9 Internally, euphemisms were coined to disguise the tragedy’s stark simplicity: instead of ‘hunger’ or ‘starvation’ (the same word, golod, in Russian), government reports talked of ‘exhaustion’, ‘avitaminosis’, ‘the cumulative effects of malnourishment’, ‘death due to difficulties with food supply’, or most commonly of ‘dystrophy’, an invented pseudo-medical term which passed into common parlance and is still current today.10 Though Berggolts was able to talk freely to her Moscow friends – and found herself doing so unstoppably, with the same ‘dull, alienated sense of surprise’ she had felt when released from prison in 1939 –
her broadcasts were heavily censored. ‘I’ve become convinced’, she wrote,
that they know nothing about Leningrad here. No one seems to have the remotest idea of what the city has gone through. They say that Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what this heroism consists of. They don’t know that we were starving, that people were dying of hunger, that there was no public transport, no electricity or water. They’ve never heard of such an illness as ‘dystrophy’. People ask, ‘Is it dangerous?’ . . . I couldn’t open my mouth on the radio, because I was told ‘You can talk about anything, but no recollections of starvation. None, none. Leningraders’ courage, their heroism, that’s what we need . . . But not a word about hunger.’11
Bearing crates of lemons and tins of condensed milk, Berggolts returned to Leningrad on 20 April, to find that winter had ended and the air raids had resumed. She moved with Makogonenko out of his attic room with its view of shell-damaged roofs, down two floors into the flat of an actor recently killed at the front. Full of the actor’s possessions – photographs, books, ‘a mass of little saucers, two matching cups and a rusty mincer’ – it increased her sense of disconnection, of having stepped into somebody else’s life or into a life after death. Writing was impossible – ‘like pulling ticker-tape out of my soul, bloodily and painfully’. A writers’ conference held on 30 May should have been a magnificent occasion, a defiant celebration of the power of the word. But in reality it was ‘organised hypocrisy’ – dull, political and overcast by colleagues’ dangerous envy of her sudden new fame.12
Six weeks later Makogonenko temporarily lost his job at the Radio House, for inadvertently allowing the broadcast of a banned poem, Zinaida Shishova’s Sassoonesque Road of Life. With its reference to a corpse stored on a balcony, and deliberately trite, heavily sarcastic final couplet – ‘Rest, son, you did all you had to/You were at the defence of Leningrad’ – it had been deemed ‘odd’ and ‘almost mocking’ by the censors, and was taken off air mid-verse by a telephone call direct from the city Party Committee.13 Berggolts’s own February Diary was published but bowdlerised, a thrice-repeated line – ‘In this dirt, darkness, hunger, sorrow’ – made bland by the replacement of the words ‘hunger’ and ‘dirt’ with the safely abstract ‘bondage’ and ‘suffering’.14 Consolation came from ordinary members of the public, who wrote to Berggolts in their hundreds. Some of the letters were semi-official group efforts, from Red Army units or collective farms, but others were from private individuals, thanking her for putting their experiences and feelings into words. One woman described how Berggolts’s broadcasts had helped her bear news of a son’s death at the front, another how they calmed her as she tried to feed her dying husband in the darkness, the spoon often hitting his nose instead of his mouth. ‘This is something truly splendid’, wrote Berggolts:
The people of Leningrad, masses of them, lay in their dark, damp corners, their beds shaking . . . (God, I know myself how I lay there without any will, any desire, just in empty space). And their only connection with the outside world was the radio . . . If I brought them a moment’s happiness – even just the passing illusion of it – then my existence is justified.
Like others, she also found symbolism-freighted comfort in the coming of spring, in the greening of the city square limes (their buds stripped to the height of an upstretched hand), and in the sprouting of coltsfoot and camomile amid bomb-site rubble. One of her very few truly joyful diary entries was written on a warm June night while Makogonenko stood outside on the roof watching for incendiaries:
Yesterday we had an amazing evening. At great expense Yurka bought a huge bundle of birch branches. We brought them indoors and put them in a vase. The window was wide open and you could see the great calm sky. A cool breeze wafted in, the city was very quiet and the scent of birch so sweet that my whole life, my best days, seemed reborn in me. Feeling poured through my soul – happiness, desire, content. Damp, fragrant childhood evenings in Glushina. My first evening with Kolya on the Island, when, young and handsome, he kissed me for the first time. I was wearing an embroidered smock and it smelled of birch then too . . . And now I have yesterday evening, when I lay next to a handsome, loving, present husband, and felt with my entire being that this is happiness – that he is here now, lying next to me, loving me, and that it’s quiet and smells, smells of fresh birch. All this merged into one, painlessly – or to be more exact, with a pleasurable pain. Everything was wonderful, eternal, whole.15
The postal service started to work again towards the end of March, giving Leningraders what was often their first news for months of friends and relatives in evacuation. Since evacuees usually had only a vaguest idea of what those left behind had been through, the resumption of communication was often awkward. The classicist Olga Fridenberg, ridden with scurvy and walking with a stick, was insulted by a rather breezy letter from her cousin Boris Pasternak, describing life in the Urals town of Chistopol, where mud oozed from between the cobblestones and housewives collected water from the fire hydrant outside his window in buckets slung from wooden yokes. ‘For some reason’, he wrote apprehensively, ‘I feel this letter is not turning out right, and I sense . . . that you are reading it with coldness and alienation.’ He was right: Fridenberg expected more. ‘No, I couldn’t expect help from anywhere or anyone. The letter spoke of water buckets, and of a spirit worn smooth, like an old coin.’16
In February, the young curator Anna Zelenova had written to a colleague in Novosibirsk, candidly describing the tensions between museum staff cooped up together in St Isaac’s. Now she backtracked. Her first letter, she feared, might have given the wrong impression; though nobody was without his Achilles heel the trials of the winter had in fact bound the museum kollektiv more tightly together.17 Bogdanov-Berezovsky, head of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, started receiving requests from evacuated members that he check on their flats, an arduous task entailing bureaucratic battles with dishonest building managers as well as exhausting walks across the city. Anna Akhmatova, sick with typhus in intelligentsia-packed Tashkent, heard that a former neighbour, a small boy nicknamed Shakalik or ‘Little Jackal’, had been killed in an air raid. Once she had read him Lewis Carroll; now she wrote her own poem for him:
Knock with your little fist – I will open.
I always opened the door to you.
I am beyond the high mountain now,
Beyond the desert, beyond the wind and heat,
But I will never abandon you . . .
I didn’t hear your groans
You never asked me for bread.
Bring me a twig from the maple tree
Or simply a little green grass
As you did last spring.
Bring me in your cupped palms
Some of our cool, pure Neva water
And I will wash the bloody traces
From your golden hair.18
The ‘bloody traces’, she later discovered, were misplaced, for it was Shakalik’s older brother who had died, and not in an air raid but of starvation.
For Vera Inber a bundle of date-disordered letters from her daughter – in evacuation, like Pasternak, in Chistopol – brought news of the death from meningitis of her baby grandson. ‘I read this letter to the end. Then I put it aside . . . then very quickly picked it up and read it again, vaguely hopeful that I had imagined it. No, it is all true . . . Our Mishenka is dead.’ To mark his first birthday she had made him a rattle out of a pink celluloid cylinder, a dried pea and a piece of ribbon, and hung it at the end of her bed. By then, she now discovered, he had already been dead a month, and she hid the rattle away in a drawer.19 At the front, Vasili Churkin received two letters. The first, from his father, told him that his older son, Zhenya, had been killed in battle three and a half months earlier. The second, from his younger son Tolya, described the death from starvation of his wife: ‘They loaded her body, together with others, into a lorry in the courtyard of our building, just like firewood. She was taken away to the Pis
karevskoye cemetery, to a communal grave . . . You and I, Papa, are all that’s left of our family now. Take revenge on the two-legged beasts, Papa, for Mama and Zhenya!’20 Tolya himself, just turned seventeen, looked forward to being called up, and hoped to join his father’s unit.
For Vladimir Garshin – cultivated, fifty-four-year-old chief pathologist at the Erisman Hospital and a conquest of Anna Akhmatova’s – the way back to some sort of normality was work. In March he got undressed for the first time in three months: ‘They put this strange bony body into the water and lifted it out again. The body couldn’t get out of the heavenly water by itself. Warm! . . . It’s somebody else’s body, not mine. I don’t know it; it works differently from how it did before. It produces different excreta; everything about it is new and unfamiliar.’ His personality was new, too. By good luck he had not lapsed into indifference during the mass death, nor into hatred and rage. (This was true – a bag of oats he gave the family with whom Akhmatova stayed before evacuation saved their lives.21) Yet things were altered, he was ‘not quite right’. He had to search inside himself, ‘study this new body and this new soul, explore their hidden corners, as though I had moved into a new, unfamiliar flat’. He also literally dissected bodies in the Erisman’s mortuary. As was to be expected, they carried no fat, but the most astonishing thing about them was their organs:
