Read Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege Online

Authors: Alexander Werth

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Military, #World War II, #Russia, #World, #Russia & Former Soviet Republics

Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (7 page)

No statue had ever become so much the symbol of a great city as this, or had given men so much food for thought. To Pushkin, Peter was right to have built this strange city, which symbolised, like Peter himself, the new era of Russian history, the ‘Window into Europe.’ He was right, though it was built on the bones of thousands of serfs who had died in the inhuman effort of turning the swamp into an island of granite. Pushkin knew that Peter’s work was ruthless, but he knew that it had to be, and that it was good and right. He loved the city’s severe, graceful harmony.

During the nineteenth century the city grew – grew into a city of close on two million people. It was no longer entirely a city of ‘severe, graceful harmony,’ it had become a centre of trade and industry with hundreds of thousands of newcomers – of traders, and a proletariat, a city of fearful variety, full of human contrast and human conflicts and insoluble contradictions. The white mists of the Neva were blackened by the fog of factory chimneys. Instead of the crisp sunny, winter days of Pushkin came the eerie rainy autumn nights of Dostoievsky and the shadowy unreality of Blok’s St. Petersburg poems. And before his death in 1909, Innokenti Annensky wrote his tragic prophecy – his poem ‘St. Petersburg’ – in which he spoke of Peter’s ‘cursèd error.’ It was no longer the misty lilac St. Petersburg of Blok but a city of cadaverous yellow water, ‘yellow’ snow. ‘And even in May, when the shadows of the white northern night are spread over the waves of the Neva, I feel no more the magic of spring, but only the poison of fruitless desires.’ A ‘cursèd error!’ So the poet felt. Perhaps in terms of geography and economics it was even more so. From 1918 to 1921 Petrograd nearly died of hunger. Thousands died of hunger and two-thirds or more of its population scattered. The first Soviet Government moved ‘temporarily’ to Moscow. Petrograd was not only threatened with starvation, but with invasion. It was much more hungry than Moscow. Not until several years later did it become again a great city of three million people. But ten or twelve years passed, and again came invasion, and again came hunger, this time far more terrible than the hunger of the first years of the Revolution. The ‘cursèd error’ again?

But if so, thousands fought for this error, and died for it. And those who survived meant to persist in it. And yet, will Leningrad, sad and half-deserted and beautiful, be Russia’s capital again? I asked many people that question. They all shook their heads, some of them with a faint, slightly defiant smile.

There were ships on the Neva, anchoring in midstream, or moored to the granite side of the quay, opposite the long line of small half-deserted palaces. The ships were painted grey, a few naval craft among them, but mostly former cargo ships. Were they all being used for anti-aircraft batteries? On board, sailors of the Baltic Fleet were busy doing things. Where was the rest of the Baltic Fleet? Kronstadt, perhaps. But I preferred not to ask. And how much of the Fleet was left? Even less did I like to ask that. All I knew was that the Baltic Fleet had done wonders, but that in the early days of the war, in the Gulf of Riga, and at Tallinn, it had suffered many great losses through air bombardment. Today its submarines still continued to be active in the Baltic, and the naval marines, fighting on the Leningrad front, were among the toughest Russian troops. The Germans had an almost superstitious fear of these men who were reputed to be desperate characters, who preferred knifing Germans to any other form of slaughter. In 1917, the bourgeoisie regarded the sailors of the Baltic Fleet as a new variety of
apache.

And true enough, there were many thugs among them – like the twelve of Blok’s poems – apostolic thugs which any Revolution not only produces but needs. They could look ruthless and frightening, and rather romantic. With that long forelock coming from under the sailor’s cap, worn at such a rakish angle, with their tattooed chests showing above their striped blue and white jerseys, and that devilish swagger of theirs, they drove all the dishonest women of Petrograd crazy and many an honest one too.

But the Baltic Fleet today was different. Much of the old swaggering tradition was still alive, but they were highly disciplined men now, with infinite devotion and a record of courage and self-sacrifice that matched the record of their southern comrades, the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet and of the marines who fought and died at Sebastopol.

We drove in the car along the quay to the Summer Garden, over the little humped granite bridges across the Venetian-like Winter Canal and the Swan Canal, past the Winter Palace, with its now dirty-grey walls chipped by shell splinters, past the grey Marble Palace overlooking the vast Champ de Mars parade ground, now turned into a huge cabbage field. In the wide space between the Marble Palace and the building formerly the British Embassy, the residence of the last British Ambassador in Petrograd, Sir George Buchanan, stood the statue of Suvorov, clad in Roman armour after the fashion of 1800, and looking as unlike the most popular general of the Russian Army as Nelson would look his own self wearing a bowler hat. Nevertheless, the ‘odd’ sculptural convention was accepted by the people of Leningrad. Baranov remarked that the authorities were going to sandbag Suvorov, but the soldiers of the Leningrad front asked that this should not be done as they liked to visit the Suvorov statue when on leave.

The famous tall golden railings of the Summer Garden with the shiny granite urns on top were still much the same – those railings which an eccentric English yachtsman had come specially to see. He stepped ashore outside the Summer Garden and, having examined the railings, went aboard his yacht again fully satisfied, and sailed back to England. A favourite, if improbable, St. Petersburg story. So here was the Summer Garden, that piece of primeval forest with lime trees many centuries old, which at Peter the Great’s behest a master gardener from Hanover had turned into one of the most famous parks in Europe. In the north-east corner of the garden, beside the little humped granite bridge, Peter had built himself a little house, Dutch in its simplicity. There it still was. During the first half of the eighteenth century the pleasure-loving Empresses had built grottoes and fountains in the park, and they called the little river to the east of it Fontanka, because its waters fed the fountains. Catherine had the fountains and the grottoes scrapped, and the Summer Garden then acquired its definite character – with dark leafy alleys lined by maples and the many centuries-old lime trees. Round it ran a riding path – the Rotten Row of St. Petersburg, and across it, from its pond in the south up to the Neva Embankment ran the famous main alley with its white marble statues of Diana and Apollo and other Greek gods on either side. And near the centre of the garden was the large playground for children, and here in 1855 was erected the large bronze statue of Krylov, the Russian La Fontaine, with bas-reliefs round the pedestal, illustrating his most celebrated fables known by every Russian child. The garden was full of historical and literary memories and was the scene of the first act of Tchaikovsky’s
Queen of Spades.

To me, the Letni Sad, the Summer Garden, was also full of childhood memories – for I was taken there every day for years (at first, no doubt in a pram), in spring, autumn, and even winter, when little wooden houses were put over the Greek gods and goddesses to protect them from ice and snow. But I shall not bore the reader with stories of how I built snowmen or played hide-and-seek among Peter the Great’s old lime trees with playmates most of whose names I no longer even remember, and who today may, for all I know, be heroes of the Soviet Union, or white
émigrés,
or nobodies, or merely the flimsy remains of Leningraders who died in the famine.

Through the half-closed main gate on the Neva Embankment, we walked into the garden. It was the same, and yet very different. The alley of Greek gods and goddesses had disappeared. Not only the statues but the alley itself had almost vanished. The statues had been removed to safety, and much of the width of the famous alley was now being used for growing cabbages. There were cabbages everywhere – even in the shaded parts among the old trees, and naturally, over the whole area of ‘Rotten Row.’ These were plots that had been lent by the Town Council to hundreds of private families. It was hard to find one’s bearings. We walked, however, along a narrow path which was the middle of the former main alley, with cabbage beds on both sides, and came to the children’s playground around ‘Grandpa Krylov.’ It was astonishing: all the trees, even the centenarian lime trees, some of them propped up as before with rusty iron supports, were intact except for a few that had been shattered by shells. The truth is – and this ranks as a particularly remarkable fact – that although in the winter of 1941 thousands died of cold, nobody was even tempted to cut a tree in any of Leningrad’s historic parks. Krylov still sat on his pedestal, reading his own fables. The statue had been sandbagged only half-way up. ‘You see,’ said the architect, ‘we started on this job during the worst possible time. And people were just too weak and too hungry to finish it. And later there were more important things to do, so the job was never completed.’

The garden was almost deserted. There were few people around and there was a strange stillness everywhere, except for the distant thud of exploding shells. There was scarcely any sound of traffic, and that most familiar sound of the Summer Garden was absent – the harsh cry of the hundreds of crows that used to live on the tops of the old trees. I remembered those crows, fluttering among the bare tree-tops in the early purple twilight of St. Petersburg’s winter evenings which came about three in the afternoon. There were no crows in the Summer Garden now, and one could guess their fate. No birds, and few people. Only at the far end, near the pond whose large slopes presented a curious decorative pattern of very regular carrot and cabbage beds, and with the famous granite vase sandbagged in front of it, we came across some people – half a dozen cheerful and healthy-looking little children from a children’s home, accompanied by a young woman teacher, and two elderly women digging cabbages. The children joyfully surrounded our majors and insisted on playing with their medals and decorations. The shelling had by now become louder – the shells were exploding in a part of the town much nearer the centre, but nobody seemed to worry. We were now on the Moika River at the south end of the garden. On the other side of the granite-lined river rose from among the autumn trees the majestic red stucco building of the Mikhailovsky or Engineers’ Castle – more a castle indeed than a palace – once the residence of Catherine’s heir, the ‘mad Tsar,’ Paul the First. It looked all right from here, except for broken windows, but Comrade Baranov remarked that the building had been very badly damaged by a ton bomb on the other side, and that it had suffered greater damage than any other historic building in Leningrad.

We had told the driver to meet us at this end of the Summer Garden, and we then drove from here to the house where I had once lived. This was a very badly bombed area – no one could quite say why. And it all looked wretchedly shabby and deserted – the narrow Panteleimon Street running east from the Summer Garden, a street – as l knew it before – of elderly and rather nondescript large houses and smallish shops, mostly grocers’ shops, bakeries, and small haberdashery and iron-mongers’ establishments, and at right angles to it, the sedate and wealthy Mokhovaya. Now it all looked deserted and pitiful. Not only had all the shops disappeared – both streets, formerly so different in character, being united in the same drabness – but this was the nearest I saw in the centre of Leningrad to a blitzed area. Half a dozen houses in the Panteleimonskaya had been wrecked by large bombs and in the Mokhovaya eleven houses – all four- or five-storey buildings – had been destroyed. When we turned into the Mokhovaya, I saw the tall bay-windows of number twenty-nine, a hundred yards down the street, and the top one of these bay-windows had been my own room. It came back very vividly – the nickel bed in the corner nearest the door, and the open fireplace with a framed photogravure of the Bay of Naples above the mantelpiece, and the two large cupboards full of Russian, English, French and German books, and the desk inside the bay-window and on it a large, bronze electric lamp with its large orange shade with silk tassels. The best things in the room were a big Persian rug my father had brought back from the Caucasus, and the all-round view from the three windows round the desk – I watched from here the rioting and shooting going on during the February Revolution with excited crowds running this way and that, and one day smashing up a police station just a little down the street. The worst things in the room were the above-mentioned photogravure of the Bay of Naples, a pair of stuffed squirrels I had shot myself, and two monstrosities somebody had brought from Egypt – a stuffed baby crocodile which stank, and some sort of unusable Oriental smoking contraption made of ivory and an ostrich egg. How different from the charming collection of Japanese ivories and embroideries and Chinese paintings and wood carvings my father had bought during his five years in the Far East many years before, and which were assembled in the little yellow ‘boudoir’ (as it was called) next to my room. The house opposite, a plain square box of a house with dirty-yellow stucco walls, was now partly smashed by a bomb. It was notable only for the marble memorial plate outside it – Dargomyzhsky, the composer who wrote
Rusalka
, had lived here in the fifties or sixties of last century. From my window I could also see on its second floor the large shop sign, ‘Rau Relieur,’ French, like so many other shop signs in St. Petersburg. In the next house was another shop with, similarly in French, ‘Fleurs de Nice’ above it. The mysterious ‘Rau Relieur’ was actually an old Jew who looked like Socrates; he never managed to fill his orders in time, and, wringing his hands, he always blamed his dark, sulky daughter for what he called the ‘chaos’ in his bookbindery.

Number twenty-nine was part of what was known as the ‘House of Russia,’ ‘Russia’ being the name of the insurance company which owned it, and had built it in 1899. The date was still marked on the little weathercock on the roof. Number twenty-nine was composed of three large flats, each with very high ceilings which accounted for this three-storey house being as high as most other four-storey houses. On the ground floor lived some Baltic baron called Osten Sacken, and on the first floor an extremely senile former Tsarist Minister of Finance, called Timiriazev. He lived there, seemingly in great seclusion, with an old spinster of a daughter to keep him company and to play the piano to him. The top floor had been my home. Number twenty-nine was separated from number twenty-seven – which was also part of the ‘House of Russia’ – by a large courtyard with a garden and a big clock in the middle and separated from the street by tall iron railings and a gate. In the block at the back of the courtyard there used to live the notoriously reactionary former Minister of the Interior of the name of Durnovo. I remembered the servants referring to this wicked pillar of Tsarism with anger and derision. In number twenty-seven there used to be the Tagentsev Gymnasium, the once well-known girls’ high school. My cousin, Olga, used to go to it. After the Revolution she became a doctor and a whole-hearted supporter of the new régime, and the last I heard was that she was working on the Volga during the famine of 1921. I never learned what happened to her afterwards. Rumour had it that she died of tuberculosis a year or two later at the age of twenty-four, but where or in what circumstances I was never able to discover.

Other books

Lavender-Green Magic by Andre Norton
Fighting Hard by Marysol James
Trial and Terror by Franklin W. Dixon
A Signal Victory by David Stacton
After the Fall by Morgan O'Neill
Uncle Dynamite by P.G. Wodehouse
Fat Angie by e. E. Charlton-Trujillo


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024