Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (10 page)

‘Most of these people pulled themselves together when they were given work. It was a great thing. But on the whole men collapsed more easily than women and at first the death rate was highest among the men. However, those who survived the worst period of the famine finally survived. The women felt the after-effects more seriously than the men. Many died in the spring when already the worst was over. The famine had peculiar physical effects on people. Women were so run down that they stopped menstruating … so many people died that we had to bury most of them without coffins. People had their feelings blunted, and never seemed to weep at the burials. It was all done in complete silence without any display of emotion. When things began to improve the first signs were when women began to put rouge and lipstick on their pale skinny faces. Yes, we lived through hell right enough; but you should have been here the day the blockade was broken – people in the streets wept for joy and strangers fell round each other’s necks. And now, as you see, life is almost normal. There is this shelling, of course, and people get killed, but life has become valuable again. The other day I saw an unpleasant street accident: a man was knocked down by a tramcar and had his leg cut off by the wheels. Why, our Leningrad crowd nearly lynched the driver! It seemed so wrong that anyone who had lived through the Leningrad siege should lose a leg through the fault of another Leningrader; whose fault it was exactly I do not know, but you see the point?’

After seeing many more projects and blueprints our party drove to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. This was pure sightseeing. We visited the grave of Alexander Nevsky and the tomb of Suvorov, the latter inside a small chapel, with some other tombs around it. It occurred to me that here, in Leningrad, were buried three of the great national heroes of Russia, whose example had so often been invoked in this war and in whose memory the three most famous Army Orders of this war had been created: Alexander Nevsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov. A dark red velvet flag with tassels was suspended over Suvorov’s tomb, a large flat stone forming part of the stone floor of the chapel and bearing the simple words: ‘
HERE LIES SUVOROV
,’ and nothing else. Around Suvorov were other tombs. There was one with the following inscribed in beautiful eighteenth-century lettering: ‘Spouse of Lieutenant-General Alexander Alexandrovitch Biron, youngest daughter of Prince Alexander Danilovich Menshikov. Born December 17, 1712. Died September 13, 1736.’ A young lady of that frivolous age, between Peter and Catherine, when squabbling female royalty and their German favourites nearly undid the work of Peter the Great. On a small table near the entrance was a visitors’ book. I looked at one of the latest entries: ‘Having visited the grave of the Great General, at a time when the German Nazis are shelling the town and killing innocent people, I fervently hope that his shadow will help us to defeat these barbarians. There can be no question about it. (Signed) Major …’ The scrawl was hard to make out. The date was July 7th, 1943.

Outside the chapel, in the large yard of the monastery, now turned into a large vegetable garden, there was an air of country quiet. The doorkeeper was a very doddery old man, probably one of the oldest men of Leningrad. He might well have been a former monk of this very monastery. On our way back we drove past the Smolny, heavily camouflaged with netting, and the beautiful baroque church that Rastrelli had built, camouflaged green and black. ‘We have to repaint it white in winter,’ said the architect. ‘But the camouflage of this place is so thorough that from 13,000 feet they simply cannot identify it.’ Then we drove past the beautiful Tauris Palace, which Potemkin had built for himself, and later the seat of the Duma, and scene of so many historic events during the stormy days of 1917. I remembered those exciting days of April 1917 when crowds around the Tauris Palace with many soldiers among them were clamouring for the resignation of the Lvov–Miliukov Government. Improvised orators jumped on to improvised platforms. Some praised Kerensky to the skies. To them the lawyer who looked like Rachmaninoff, and had such a wonderful gift of the gab was the Man of Destiny. Many ladies thought him a
dushka.
Another orator was being howled down for defending Milyukov, an Imperialist – so his opponents said – who wanted to go on indefinitely with the war, because Russia had been promised the Straits. ‘To hell with the Straits!’ soldiers in the crowd were saying. ‘Down with the war!’ A Jewish lawyer with pince-nez was saying to the little crowd around him that Kerensky was the true guardian of Russia’s democratic liberties, the liberties the Russian people had won with their blood in overthrowing Tsarism. But a Sturdy soldier angrily shouted he had been rotting away in the trenches for three years, all for the benefit of international capitalism, and that the Russian Army had had enough of it, and he shouted that there was only one man whom the Russian people could trust, and that was Lenin. ‘German agent!’ the little lawyer cried. ‘He came here in a sealed wagon from Germany!’ There was now angry shouting on both sides. Unrestrained Russian democracy was living its brief hectic life.

The shelling which had stopped for a while now started again and Colonel Studyonov thought we had better go home and cut out the visit to the anti-aircraft battery. The Morskaya had at one point been roped off: a disposal squad was taking away an unexploded shell. We had to drive round the other way, through half-deserted streets, past Velten’s beautiful building of the Ermitage and across that superb square outside the Winter Palace now called the Uritsky Square. The giant caryatids of polished black granite outside the Ermitage had been slightly damaged by a shell, but apart from broken windows the general appearance of the wonderful Winter Palace square was unchanged. There was scaffolding round the giant red granite monolith in the centre of the square, with the angel on top. ‘This scaffolding,’ said the architect, ‘was put up some time before the war. We were not sure whether the monolith could stand the traffic so we were going to test it; but shells have been blowing up all around it, and it’s none the worse for it. There couldn’t have been a better test!’ We went back to the Astoria where the old dame had prepared an excellent dinner for us, and after dinner about five o’clock we drove off to the theatre. All the theatre shows in Leningrad began at five-thirty.

We drove to the Dramatic Theatre on the Fontanka to see Gorki’s
Petit-Bourgeois.
I had always remembered it as a rather shabby little theatre, compared with the Big Three, and it looked much the same as before. In the past it used to be called the Maly Theatre. I had gone there to a schoolchildren’s matinée once to see
Henry of Navarre
 – it must have been in 1913 or 1914. Outside the theatre was a small crowd, mostly soldiers, all wearing the Leningrad medal, and some of them had other decorations. There were also some girls, many of them in khaki, and several wearing the Leningrad medal. There was also a sprinkling of Baltic sailors – officers and ratings – the latter with something of the old Baltic swagger, and the forelock sticking from under the sailor’s cap. ‘It’s no good,’ somebody remarked. ‘The
trevoga
is still on, and until it’s over they won’t start the show.’ Nearby there was a loudspeaker saying every few minutes: ‘Citizens, the artillery shelling of the district is continuing; citizens, the artillery shelling of the district is continuing.’ This wasn’t very evident, though, for what explosions could be heard could be heard only faintly. And the people stood round the theatre doors totally unperturbed. A militiaman was, however, inviting the public to take cover – though without much success, and not very pressingly for that matter. Our colonel, however, thought we had better go in, and we were escorted into a dark little office with a couple of chairs and an old leather sofa; a Lenin portrait and a large pink theatre bill were on the wall. This gave the repertory of the Dramatic Theatre for the week:
Davnim Davno,
the sentimental and rather silly rhymed play, full of
marivaudage,
about the Hussars in 1812 and the young girl dressed up as a Hussar – a play I had seen at the Ermitage in Moscow in the summer of 1942; also that great nineteenth-century comedy,
Krechinsky’s Wedding,
and
The Road to New York,
a light American play, and finally, the Petit-Bourgeois we had come to see. Bad luck. This was really the heaviest of all the plays running in Leningrad that week (even if the lightest of Gorki’s plays), but that day there was nothing else to see. Actually there were only two theatres open in Leningrad, this and the Alexandrinka, if one did not count a smaller theatre in the Viborg district on the other side of the river. So we sat in the little office for some time, a little aimlessly. Likharev and Major Lozak were recalling various Leningrad experiences; curious how their thoughts always seemed to run back to those famine months. ‘They used to play the comic opera
Bayadère
during the famine,’ one of them said. ‘They played it here and also went out to the front to play it to the troops. It used to be so frightfully cold in the theatre that the actresses had to play with their fur coats on. Yes, even the dancers wore fur coats. Nobody minded, you couldn’t expect anything else. It became a little extra theatrical convention – there are plenty of conventions anyway at the theatre – one had to accept these oriental princesses in fur coats!’

‘We became pretty desperate at one time,’ Likharev said. ‘It was no longer safe to take German prisoners down the Nevsky. And then, there was the famous case of the German plane crashing in the Tauris Gardens. The airman had one of those high decorations they call the Ritterkreuz. He was beaten up by the women. He was certainly in a nice mess when they got him to hospital. And the reason why he crashed was that Sevastianov, our great air ace, had rammed his plane. Ramming was a Leningrad invention. We were outnumbered in the air. Out of a kind of despair, rather than see any of these vultures escape, our fellows began to ram them. It put the fear of death into the Germans. They couldn’t take it. Sevastianov. … Yes, there was he, and there were several others who developed a ramming ‘technique’ if you please. It takes guts – my God, it does! We no longer need such desperate remedies now. We are more than equal to them now. We can lick them on equal terms.’ And it made me wonder whether this quite extraordinary personal bravery and self-sacrifice had not, in 1941, made that tiny difference which in reality made
all
the difference and saved Moscow, and Leningrad, and was ultimately going to win the war for Russia.

‘Funny,’ said the major, still thinking back to the dark days of 1941, ‘how during those days people never talked about food. It was bad style, it was tactless. But how things changed after February! You cannot imagine what it was like when on April 15th, 1942 – yes, I remember the exact date – when the first tramcar ran down the Nevsky. People ran after it and cheered their heads off. It was like their triumphal chariot, that tramcar.’

Every few minutes the loudspeaker in the room had been saying: ‘Citizens, the artillery shelling of the district continues,’ but suddenly it said: ‘Citizens, the artillery shelling of the district has ceased.’ Somebody came in to say the show would now start. It was ten to six – the show had been delayed by twenty minutes.

Meschane
 – the petit-bourgeois – would not have been much of a play really but for the actors. It was typical young-Gorki stuff which, when you come to analyse it, is not very different from old-Ibsen stuff, full of the correct sentiments and sentences, and with its slightly more juvenile Dr. Stockmanns and slightly less stuffy Noras and Hedda Gablers. The petit-bourgeois household is drab and terribly discontented and unhappy, except the lodger, the young railwayman who ‘loves life,’ and proclaims this love on every occasion: ‘I know Life is difficult, full of violence and injustice, but I am a strong and healthy man, and I know we shall win. And I want to throw myself right up to my neck into Life.’ With a capital L, of course. To which the boss of the household – miserable old bully he is – replies: ‘Life will just show you where you get off. You must be drunk.’ But the frivolous young widow agrees with the hero. She does not vamp him; she tries instead to vamp the helpless, futile young son of the boss but he is mentally too impotent, too henpecked by Pa to react. Equally miserable is the daughter of the household, driven to an abortive suicide by her failure to find a husband. The hero finally goes off with the daughter of the saintly old bird-catcher whom the miserable bully had driven out of his house. All a trifle dreary but for the long spells of comic relief provided chiefly by the philosophising drunk, a sort of unsuccessful tragedian, who hangs about the house. But the acting was so good throughout and the bird-catcher’s daughter had such a pretty face and alluring figure that one watched the play with considerable interest. The audience, without being over-enthusiastic, seemed to enjoy it – especially the funny passages. There was much laughter, but not loud laughter; cheering, but not frantic cheering, as one gets in Moscow. But perhaps, I thought, Leningrad had become naturally reserved. For, as the curtain was about to rise after the second interval, the manager appeared before the curtain and announced the fall of Smolensk. It was really tremendous news and news which might, sooner or later, have a direct bearing on the whole Leningrad situation. The audience cheered loudly, but without rising to its feet. It was odd to contrast this calm reaction with the frantic enthusiasm in Moscow, for instance, to the news of the capture of Kharkov. Was Leningrad at heart so absorbed in its own problems still that the news from the ‘mainland’ seemed a little remote?

The next day was Sunday. We drove in the morning to the Kamenny Island at the end of the long Kamennostrovsky – now the Kirov Avenue. The Kamenny Island on the north side of the Neva delta measures about three-quarters of a mile from west to east and half that length from north to south. It is separated from the much larger island, the so-called ‘Petrograd Side,’ through which the Kamennostrovsky runs, by a narrow branch of the delta, and, from the mainland in the north by the small Neva, the main branch of the Neva itself. Separated from the Kamenny by other branches of the delta are the famous Elagin Island in the west, famous for its palace now destroyed, and the ‘Arrow,’ the Strelka, the westernmost point of the island pointing into the Gulf of Finland. The wooded Elagin Island is one of the beauty spots of Leningrad, and to drive in a horse-carriage round it on a ‘white’ summer night used to be in the old days one of the favourite pleasures of romantic young couples, and of drunks in need of fresh air after a riotous night with the gipsies or at the ‘Aquarium,’ the famous nightclub somewhere off the Kamennostrovsky. South-west of the Kamenny Island and south of the Elagin is the much larger Krestovsky Island, chiefly noted in the past for its yachting clubs and its tennis courts. It has remained the sports centre of Leningrad, and shortly before the war one of the largest stadiums in the Soviet Union was about to be completed on its western tip, overlooking the Gulf of Finland.