Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (4 page)

Any evaluation of the statistics is fraught with difficulty. A critical analysis of police records – and especially of the numbers they cite – gives the impression that these negative sentiments were very much the minority. The number of ‘defeatist and anti-Soviet remarks’ reported on a day-to-day basis by the NKVD’s informers was, by their own admission, estimated at a few hundred (fewer than 200 at the close of September 1941, between 300 and 400 two months later). As for the proportion of letters containing ‘negative information’ and seized by the censors, it wavered between 2 and 6 per cent. A few dozen handwritten ‘tracts’ pasted around the city (‘Down with the war! Down with Communism!’, ‘Bread and peace!’); a call for a demonstration before the Hermitage (the former Winter Palace) demanding bread on the anniversary of the huge demonstration of workers on 9 (22
¹²
) January 1905 that sparked off the 1905 Revolution; and three or four instances of refusal to work extra hours (involving only a few dozen female factory workers) – excluding ‘defeatist and anti-Soviet sentiments and rumours’, this was the grand sum of the subversive activity reported by the Leningrad NKVC during the first months of the siege. Yet, repressive measures were extreme, as shown by a report, dated 25 October 1941, listing 3,375 ‘anti-revolutionary elements’ who had been arrested since the start of the war. Unfortunately, there is no information on the nature of the crimes committed by these ‘elements’, but Paragraph 1, Article 58 of the penal code (‘anti-revolutionary agitation and propaganda’) allowed for a very wide interpretation of ‘anti-revolutionary remarks’.

The worsening situation in the besieged city and the desperate lack of food were ‘deeply scarring’ the population, the NKVD reported in January–February 1942, as it continued to monitor ‘several defeatist remarks’ (‘What good is there in defending the city? We’re all going to starve to death’) and ‘anti-Party’ sentiments (‘those Party and NKVD big shots aren’t queuing at four o’clock in the morning – they get served hot meals in their private canteens’). By this point, however, the NKVD’s priority was economic crime, violence, food theft, ration fraud and the smuggling and black markets that flourished as shortages took a tighter hold.

The judicial records speak for themselves: over 17,000 thefts were brought to court during the blockade, and over 5,000 instances of gang violence and armed robbery. And the penalties were severe – including both ‘anti-revolutionary’ and common law crimes, between the summer of 1941 and the summer of 1943, more than 5,000 death sentences were issued. One particularly terrible aspect of this ‘dark side’ of life in the besieged and famished city, which was mentioned in every report sent to Moscow by the NKVD regional chief, Kubatkin, was cannibalism and necrophagy. The first cases surfaced in December 1941. In six months, police arrested nearly 2,000 people who had eaten human flesh, hundreds of whom had first murdered their victim for this purpose. Police uncovered gangs, composed of criminals and grave diggers, who trafficked in human flesh. Instances of cannibalism were severely punished, and a third of those convicted were shot, the rest sentenced to long stretches in prison camps. Remarkably, all of those convicted of cannibalism were recent arrivals in the city, peasant men and women who had fled forced collectivisation and marginalised drifters living on the outskirts of the city. This new proletariat, the hidden face of the USSR’s second city, emerged out of a decade of extreme economic and social turbulence which had defined the 1930s.

Alexander Werth, forcibly sheltered as he was during his short stay in Leningrad, obviously had no way of witnessing the dreadful reality of life under the siege. In his account, he tried first and foremost to depict the heroic resistance of the defenders of Leningrad and the unflagging patriotism of civilians as well as soldiers, and to explain why and how the citizens had ‘held out’, despite their desperate conditions: the cold and a food crisis which far outstripped that suffered by Londoners or Parisians. Published in London in 1944, whilst the war still raged and Nazi Germany was still far from collapse, Werth’s book was intended primarily to enlighten the British – who were proud to have stood alone against the Nazis for so long, little aware of what was happening in the East – as to the courage and tenacity of their Soviet allies.

In
Russia at War, 1941–1945,
written 20 years later, Werth undertook a deeper and more refined analysis of the ‘spirit of resistance’ unique to Leningrad. It had arisen, he suggested, from both a ‘profound attachment to their city, beloved for its great history and, to intellectuals, for its remarkable literary pedigree’ and ‘the great revolutionary and proletarian legacy to which the city’s workers remained particularly attached’.
¹³
Without trying to whitewash the most horrific elements of the tragedy endured by the inhabitants of Leningrad during the siege of their city, many modern researchers studying the Leningrad blockade have come to much the same conclusions.
¹⁴

This time it was really definite. The Narkowindel rang me up on Thursday night, September 23rd, and told me to be at the airport at 2 p.m. the next day. They said that Dangulov would accompany me and would pick me up in his car at the Metropole.

At the airport we were joined by Colonel Studyonov, our frequent guide on front trips. Little Dangulov who had never been in Leningrad before was as excited as I was about this trip, and it was something of an anticlimax to the ‘great adventure’ to see him emerge a few minutes later from the airport booking office holding in his hand three Moscow–Leningrad tickets, complete with their return halves! Then after a while an airport official said ‘Passengers for plane number so-and-so, come this way.’ That was our plane. There were several officers travelling; a young woman with a white coat and red beret, possibly an actress, and a middle-aged woman with a little boy. It seemed a healthy sign that children should be taken to Leningrad. Shortly before the plane took off – it was a comfortable twenty-seater Douglas – there was a heated discussion between the child’s mother and an airport official who charged her with taking more luggage than was allowed, and accused her of ‘cheating the State.’ I don’t know how the discussion ended. The cargo, apart from the passengers’ luggage, contained numerous packing cases and the matrix of the
Moscow Pravda,
which, no doubt, was going to be printed a day late in Leningrad. All this felt surprisingly normal.

And then we took off. The idea of going to Leningrad – after nearly 26 years – was hard to take in, and since I had been told nothing about the programme, I made no attempt to visualise anything lying ahead. There is a peculiar pleasure in abandoning oneself completely to the
imprévu.
We were flying north, leaving Moscow behind us almost at once. To the left I could see, among the autumn trees, the white sugar-cake pavilion of the Khimki bathing beach. There was a cold nip of autumn in the air, and I remembered regretfully how in this cold and rainy summer I had gone to bathe at Khimki only three or four times. Now the beach was quite deserted. Then we passed over a wooded belt of
datchas,
with an electric suburban train running along some railway. Moscow was now far behind us. And as we flew out of the immediate neighbourhood of Moscow into the great spaces of the northern forests – an ocean of dark-green fir trees with here and there a patch of fluffy bright yellow birches – I remembered the same scenery the day when I flew north out of Moscow in October 1941, when the fate of Moscow and of Russia was in the balance. The Germans were already at Viasma then. Then, as now, we flew under a ceiling of heavy leaden clouds, driven on by a cold north wind, and below there was the same vast expanse of dark-green fir trees with patches of fluffy yellow birches. But what a difference! Then, this country was in mortal danger, today it was in its hour of triumph.

The girl with the white coat and the red beret was dozing, at the back of the plane the middle-aged woman was playing with her two children – another one had turned up from somewhere – and in the front seats were three men with caps, two of them with Orders of the Red Banner, who looked like engineers or factory executives. The worst of air travel is that you never get to know your fellow travellers. Dangulov, sitting beside me, was talking excitedly about the trip, and also said that ‘next time we must try to go to the Caucasus together.’ He is a stocky little dark-skinned Circassian, with a passion for his native Caucasus, full of Caucasian stories, and altogether very good company. One day he told me the story of his family. It belonged to one of the few hundred Moslem families who, during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, embraced the Orthodox religion, came down from the mountains, and founded the town of Armavir in the Kuban Steppes, as a result of which they acquired Cossack privileges. Armavir was burned down by the retreating Germans early in 1943. Dangulov had been a war correspondent of the
Red Star
until earlier this year, when he was ordered to return to his old job at the Foreign Office.

It was nearly four o’clock. We were over the great forest area, somewhere east of Kalinin. The sun had come out, and over us was a blue, almost cloudless sky. The country was a greenish-brown, and in this marshland the fir trees were small and meagre. Then we flew over a string of dazzlingly blue little lakes; and then over many more miles of forest. There had been few villages on our route, but here was one at least – a large village of log huts by the side of a large blue lake, and a big white church with golden crosses glittering in the sun. By the side of the lake a herd of cows was grazing. But how thinly populated this area is between the two capitals of Russia! And small wonder, when you look at these vast expanses of marshes and forests, stretching as far as the horizon, that there should be in existence whole partisan regions in northern Russia, almost inaccessible to the enemy for lack of roads. And how depressing these endless forests of northern Russia must have been to the German invader!

Another half-hour or so, and then we flew along a wide blue river, with reedy banks, winding its way through the marshes and forests. On these marshy banks were several little log-hut villages, undamaged by war. And then we flew over the still blue waters of another lake in which were reflected the autumn tints of the red and golden trees. We were flying towards Tikhvin.

Somewhere not far from Tikhvin we stopped for half an hour at an aerodrome that looked from the air like an ordinary field. The soil was sandy, and around the airfield were tall slender pine trees. It was still sunny, but cold, much colder than in Moscow. ‘Beautiful air,’ I said, breathing the cold scent, of the pines. ‘Rubbish,’ said Colonel Studyonov, ‘you’re in the Leningrad Province now, and Leningrad is notorious for its foul air and filthy weather.’ He was an incorrigible Muscovite, and provided the first example that day of the old rivalry between the two capitals. Three sturdy youngsters, attached in some capacity to the airfield, came up and scrounged a few cigarettes from us. ‘Miserable trees,’ said the colonel.

There was something pleasantly leisurely about that flight to Leningrad. We walked among the pine trees for half an hour; then we were told to take our seats on the plane, but the girl with the red beret had disappeared behind the trees and we had to wait for a few minutes till she turned up, looking slightly embarrassed. Then we took off and again flew low over miles of forest. At one point we crossed a railway – was this the Tikhvin–Vologda line? Forests, marshes, little lakes. It was from this soil – ‘from the darkness of the forests, from the soft watery marshes’ as Pushkin wrote – that St. Petersburg rose, ‘proud and luxuriant.’

At sunset we landed at another airfield. It also looked like an ordinary field, without hangars, and with only foliage-covered netting forming camouflaged sheds for the aircraft. Around was the real north Russian scenery, with a very muddy road fringed by small fir trees and yellow birches, and a few
izbas,
some of which had been destroyed by bombs and other badly damaged. ‘Where’s the buffet?’ said the colonel. A bearded old man pointed to a dilapidated
izba
on the other side of the road. Here, at several rough wooden tables, some people were drinking tea. We sat down at the same table as a podgy little man with a high starched collar, a tie and a tie-pin, and a little Hitler moustache. The hut must have been newly repaired. The walls of the large room were covered not with wallpaper, but with newspapers of May 1943 – the
Front Paper,
the
Red Star,
and
Pravda,
the last containing pictures of the speakers at the All-Slav meeting in Moscow – among them the Metropolitan Nikelai and Wanda Wassiliewska. This was a sort of air force canteen, but passengers of the Leningrad plane – who were all more or less privileged persons – were allowed in. And what an introduction to Leningrad – hungry, half-starved Leningrad, as some still imagined it to be! The
devushka
always bright and cheerful like all canteen
devushkas,
brought us three big mugs of very sweet tea, and with it three large slices of very black and damp rye bread, and three enormous pats of butter, nearly the size of the hunks of bread, nearly a quarter of a pound each. It was a case of eating butter and bread rather than bread and butter. No doubt this was a privileged air force canteen – but still, things couldn’t be very desperate at this rate. The ceiling of the hut was made of new plywood, and on top of the newspapers pasted on the walls a poster had been pinned with a Russian soldier trampling on a swastika, beside which also lay a dead and particularly loathsome-looking Hun. Through the only glass pane in the window – the rest had been replaced by plywood – we could see the crimson sunset with the fir trees silhouetted against it. ‘Pleasant evening’ observed the podgy man with the tie-pin, wiping his penknife on the bread and closing it, and abandoning half his butter in the unequal struggle.