Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (9 page)

To the south towards Pushkin and Pavlovsk, the front was six kilometres away. Further west, on the shores of the Uritsk inlet, the front was no more than three kilometres distant. Here they had been stopped literally at the gates of Leningrad, and for two years they had not been able to advance another step.

‘He’s a good fellow, the captain,’ said the sturdy major, in an aside to me. ‘One of our best people. Quite recently he knocked out a German observation post just over there, near the Pishmash – one of the hardest places to get. Knocked it out with a direct hit.’ ‘Haven’t they tried,’ I asked, ‘to knock you out?’ The major laughed. ‘Sometimes they fire several hundred shells a day at us, but it doesn’t do much good. They hit the tower in several places, but have never been able to knock us out. Of course, we’ve had splinters, right up here, and some dead and wounded – the captain himself got a splinter in his head just the other day – but he’s carrying on as you see. Aren’t you, Comrade Captain?’ The captain with the patch over one eye smiled a little grimly. ‘The doctors say they’ll save my eye,’ he said. As on nearly all Leningrad faces, the captain’s had two hard little lines on each side of the mouth.

We looked through the telescope sights and rangefinders at the German positions and were struck by the fact that everything seemed completely deserted: there was no trace of any living being. ‘That’s because of our snipers,’ somebody said. ‘They never even put their heads out if they can help it. This has been the greatest front for sniping. But it has become a disappointing trade; they’ve become so infernally careful now. They’ve got stuff about ‘Scharfschützen’ written up all over the place.’ ‘For the rest, it’s not so difficult now,’ said the captain. ‘We bomb them every day so that keeps them fairly quiet most of the time, and when we answer their shelling, they soon shut up. They stay in their rat-holes now; in the past they would run around quite openly, gathering in hay, Katyusha had a crack at them on one occasion. It made a nice hay-crop of dead fritzes! They use their six-barrel mortars against us – nasty stuff – but nothing like our Katyusha. Oh, Lord, when Katyusha starts her song, it makes us all dance about up here, with concussion and excitement! And Katyusha has a nice long range – get right to Uritsk!’ I noticed a large bell – formerly a church bell – on top of the tower stair and marked ‘Chemical alarm.’ ‘You don’t think they’ll use gas, do you?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said the captain, ‘not now, but there was a time when we couldn’t be sure of anything.’

We were about to leave when things began to happen. A white cloud – a smoke screen – suddenly rose around the Pishmash building on the other side of the water. ‘Aha,’ said the captain, ‘I bet you they’ll start some nonsense in a minute or two. They want to hide their gun-flashes. I had better get busy.’ Then the German guns suddenly went off with one or two gunflashes faintly visible to the side of the smoke-screen. The Russians got ready to answer. Somewhere high up, a German shell whined, harmlessly, like a mosquito. Then, looking back over the panorama of Leningrad, dominated by the large brown dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, we saw it land about a mile away, right inside the city. A brown cloud of smoke – or was it dust? – rose from among the houses. ‘Fontanka way,’ somebody remarked. The major, captain and the soldiers were now busy with their optical instruments, and the captain was shouting instructions’ into a telephone to the neighbouring batteries. And these batteries – whose whereabouts could just be guessed, so well were they camouflaged – began to fire. It was pleasantly exciting to see the gunflashes, to hear the loud reports of the shells going off towards the German lines, and a second or two later to see little clouds of smoke rise from the other side of the little gulf. A few shells landed in the water, raising fountains of spray. ‘Fifty metres out,’ the captain with the black patch and the bandaged head cried into the telephone. ‘Fifty metres out!’ Again the batteries fired, and this time all the shells could clearly be seen landing and exploding on the other shore, inside the German positions. The Germans were firing back, and we saw two shells again land a mile away, inside Leningrad. It was odd to think that this seemingly harmless spectacle – as harmless as a game of tennis – might mean death to ten, twenty, a hundred people, if either side was lucky. Then a moment later we observed how the Germans were extending their smoke-screen further west. Would the firing die down as a result, or grow in intensity? It might be either. Actually, it died down, and soon stopped completely. ‘There’s no accounting for what they’ll do,’ said the captain. ‘I think this was just a little nuisance shelling, and when they saw we were answering back at once, they soon stopped. They’ve got no system. The whole thing is pretty pointless. They can’t achieve anything, anyway, and they know it. I shouldn’t like to be in their place. Must make them mad to have to live in their rat-holes, with no prospect of any kind, except being sooner or later trapped by us, and to feel that
we
are living in a city, with theatres and cinemas and real houses! They’re shelling us now simply out of spite. Miserable idiots!’

We took leave of the major and the captain and the men – all of whom had by this time relaxed – and walked down the winding stair into the street, where the driver was reclining in the car. We drove back into town, past the Narva Arch, and along the Obvodny Canal, with its cabbage-tapestried slopes, and past the shattered Baltic and Warsaw stations – it was from the latter that all the express trains went abroad – to Berlin, Vienna, Flushing and Paris. Less than two days to Paris by the Nord express. And then we drove along the wide Ismail Avenue with the large church with the blue dome and golden stars, built, I believe, in memory of the Balkan War of 1877–8.

In front of it used to stand an enormously tall column with an angel of peace standing on one toe on top of it, and the subject of a lewd quatrain wherein the angel of peace figured as the ‘cancan-ballerina.’ The famous column had disappeared. Tramcars were running down the Ismail Avenue, and most of them half-empty – how different from Moscow! The trams were driven by women, and at street corners smart young policewomen in white gloves were standing on point-duty. Right at the corner of the Ismail Avenue and the Fontanka stood the wreck of a large six-storey block – it had been destroyed by that direct hit which was one of the most amazing shots in the ‘Leningrad Fights’ documentary. We then drove down the Voznesensky, with the Admiralty spire at the end of it, and turned into the Sadovaya, that long crescent-like street, running parallel to the two rivers on either side of it, the Fontanka and the Catherine Canal. The Sadovaya had changed almost beyond recognition. The houses were mostly the same, and what gave the Sadovaya its character was not its houses but its traffic, the Eastern-bazaar-like bustle of the great Haymarket through which it runs, and the noisy and vociferous life of the Apraxin Bazaar, with its endless rows of cheap clothes shops and soft goods shops and wholesale fruit and vegetable stores. And then, beyond the Apraxin Market, came two seats of dignity and architectural restraint – the two great stucco buildings of the State Bank on one side and the Corps des Pages – the guards officers’ school – on the other. But no sooner had one passed these than one came to the Gostiny Dvor, the middle-class shopping-centre – a vast quadrangle of arcades with its best side facing the Nevsky. The Sadovaya Street meant trade, it was the great trading street of St. Petersburg. The vociferous calico merchant of the Apraxin Market lacked the gentility of the St. Petersburg shop assistant. He was a byword of Moscow-like coarseness.

As for the Haymarket – the Sennaya – it was overflowing with literary associations and old memories. The Sennaya and the streets around it used to be a chaos of clanging tramcars and hundreds of
izvoschiks
and carts or sleighs laden with food of every description – a Covent Garden that was more like an oriental bazaar, with vociferous old women with shawls round their heads, operating on huge sacks of cranberries and barrels of salt herring and mounds of apples piled up on the pavements. Moreover, there were the covered pavilions with their butchers and grocers and fishmongers – pavilions that filled up a good part of the Sennaya. And to either side of the Sennaya, along the noisy Sadovaya, were rows and rows of other shops. I remembered how on the way to the skating pond in the Yusupov Garden further down the Sadovaya – I was only eight or nine then – I would carefully avoid looking out of the tramcar window lest I caught sight of that most terrifying picture in the big ikon shop at the corner of the Sadovaya and the Haymarket, a crazy-eyed head of John the Baptist floating in its bloody gravy. I had once seen it, and was frightened lest I saw it again. I remembered the exact place of the shop but this time, summoning up my courage, I looked, and was not surprised to find that there was no ikon shop left. Indeed the street was empty; there were no shops of any description anywhere, except an occasional bakery or other food-distributing centre.

The whole nature of the Sennaya had changed even before this war had begun. It was now an ordinary, spacious square, with the same church at one end and ordinary dwelling-houses around it. The pavilions had gone; there was hardly a soul around. Haymarket – the centre of the wild, slummy, picturesque St. Petersburg of
Crime and Punishment!
In the old days it still had all the character of Dostoievsky’s Sennaya – with its shouting tradesmen, its tangle of droshki and horse-carts, its dark, deep slums all around where old female money-lenders might well be axed to death by starving ‘Nietzscheanising’ university students, and with those tea-rooms on the first floor where everything seemed chaos, and where between the bellowing of the barrel-organ and the shrieks of drunken prostitutes, profound, nightmarish conversations were perhaps still going on at a far-off corner table between Marmeladov, the sententious dipsomaniac
chinovnik,
and Raskolnikov, or between Raskolnikov and the sinister Svidrigailov, that strange bubble of the St. Petersburg earth.

The shelling had started again by the time we arrived in the Morskaya, outside a sumptuous old building, almost a little palace, which was now the architect’s house. The shells whined overhead, and blew up somewhere not far away. ‘Let’s get inside quickly,’ said Colonel Studyonov. He looked slightly agitated. I knew exactly how he felt. He did not want any trouble this time, after the tragedy of the Belgorod road earlier in the month. It was he who had to keep a stiff upper lip during that ghastly night as he sorted out the dead and the wounded. In the large spacious rooms of the architect’s house, several people were working at desks, drawing plans and working on blueprints. There was a business-like air about the place and nobody seemed to be taking any notice of the shelling or worrying about the uncomfortably large brightly polished plate-glass windows looking on to the sunny Morskaya. The walls were covered with charts and plans, and one of the architects who took me round showed me various plans for new streets which were going to be built immediately after the war on the south side of Leningrad. It was clear that an enormous amount was being done even now in this planning work. The plans for one of the large avenues on the south side were typical of the conflicting tendencies still existing among Soviet architects. The main tendency of modern Leningrad architecture was clearly to keep to austere classical lines; of the three projects two were classical, with one putting strong emphasis on trees and open spaces, while the third was much more ‘Soviet,’ with the long row of buildings ending up with a giant Paris-1937-like statue of a worker, or
komsomolka,
or something, sticking a mile out. ‘How many houses,’ I asked the chief architect who had been accompanying us all morning, ‘have been destroyed by bombing and shelling?’ He said the destruction of actual housing space did not exceed eight per cent, which, incidentally, was considerably less than the destruction in London, and negligible compared with the fearful destruction of Voronezh, Stalingrad, Rostov, Orel or Kharkov. ‘There hasn’t been so much bombing,’ said the other architect, a little man with pince-nez, and hair turning grey. ‘Shells damage a house, but unless it’s a very small one they don’t destroy it.’

At the architects’ house they had elaborated plans for 300 large new buildings and 300 of more ‘local importance.’ They were working out all the restoration plans for important buildings that had been damaged, such as the Engineers’ Castle, the former Mikhailovsky Castle that Emperor Paul had built for himself, the Ermitage, the old Catholic Church in the Nevsky, and others. It was interesting to learn that, of some of the most famous buildings that had been more or less completely destroyed, they had already – before the war – drawn up exact blueprints, so that they could be very accurately rebuilt. They had blueprints of the Pavlovsk, Pushkino and Gatchina palaces; unfortunately, they had none of Peterhof, the greatest loss of all.

‘The most difficult problem will be to restore the interiors,’ said one of the architects. ‘We have full inventories of the things destroyed or looted by the Germans, but it may be difficult to recover everything. We shall have, to a large extent, to work on the basis of equivalent value. What they can’t give back they’ll have to replace out of their own museums and private collections.’ ‘You see,’ said another man, ‘we went on with this blueprint work throughout the winter of 1941–2. It was a double blessing. On the one hand the blueprint collection was by no means complete when the war started, and the work had now become really vital. It was also a blessing for us architects. It was the best medicine that could be given us during the famine – gave us work for which we were fitted. The moral effect is great when a hungry man knows he’s got a useful job of work to do. The Leningrad Soviet gave us a credit of one million roubles for this work, and we were thankful to get it. There’s no doubt about it: a worker stands up better to hardship than an intellectual. A lot of our people stopped shaving – the first sign of a man going to pieces.