Leningrad

by Anna Reid

  Support for the authorities rose in December, with victory at Moscow, but fell again in January 1942, when Soviet offensives failed to lift the siege and a promised ration increase failed to materialise. The announcement of the increase, on 25 December, had been greeted with wild rejoicing: ‘They’ve increased our bread. Mama and I cried for joy . . . we’re so happy I can’t write!’ a woman wrote to her husband at the front.10 Vera Inber first heard of it from her maid, who had seen a man reeling out of a bread shop, laughing, crying and clutching his head.11 The announcement, though, was a propaganda ploy; in reality, even less food was distributed than before. At 6 a.m. on 29 December Ivan Zhilinsky went to wait outside his loathed Shop no. 44 on Moskovskaya Street for a rumoured delivery of American canned meat. When the shop opened at first light three and a half hours later he discovered that it only had enough for two hundred people. Being number 233 in the queue he decided that the wait was no longer worth it, and returned home empty-handed. That day he and his wife’s sole meal consisted of fifty grams of bread and a portion of ‘soup’ made from hot water, crumbs and cotton-seed oil. Two days into the New Year queues were forming at one in the morning, and growing disorderly. ‘Queue numbers’, he wrote

  are written down and handed out. When people have got theirs they hurry off to warm themselves up. But others, arriving later, sometimes weasel their way in, writing out new numbers . . . 6 a.m. arrives but still the shop is closed. It’s still shut at seven, at eight. Then at nine, if she feels like it, the manager finally opens up, and everyone pushes inside, packing it full to bursting. All the glass in front of the cash desk has been smashed, the counters are pushed aside and so on.

  The manager, a woman, used to sell vegetables out of a basket in the market . . . Her only worth, so far as I can see, lies in her Party card. Instead of trying to improve supplies, she spends her time serving friends through the back entrance. The whole 25th Section of the police get their rations at the back without queuing. There they fry up the newly-delivered meat, and wash it down with wine . . . The shop is on a sidestreet, and no inspector ever looks at it. But what could an inspector do? He’s hungry himself, and would sell his own father for a piece of meat.12

  On this day, too, Zhilinsky failed to collect any food at all, despite standing in line from five in the morning until seven in the evening.

  The effect on public opinion of such experiences was predictable. ‘If in the first days after the raising of bread norms the mood of the city’s population improved’, a Party report of 9 January noted, ‘more recently a large section of the population have displayed despondency and depression. This is due to the fact that no provisions have yet been given out on the January cards, and many people haven’t yet received meat, sugar or grains for the last third or two-thirds of December.’ Cited as typical was the following exchange between two women waiting outside a shop on International Prospect:

  ‘On the radio we’re always hearing that the population of Leningrad bravely and heroically bears all hardships. But what does this bravery cost? Every day more and more people die of hunger! Death – that’s the end of your bravery. Does the government know how many people are dying?’

  ‘Obviously our government hasn’t got anything to feed us with. Ordinary people die, but nobody from the government does. They’re well fed, they don’t care about us.’

  Queuers standing within earshot, the report went on, failed to contradict the women, listening instead in sympathetic silence. Shortly afterwards the shop manager appeared and announced that he had no food, whereupon the crowd began shouting angrily. He told them to go to the district soviet, where there were ‘people who should do something’.

  A fifty-gram increase in the non-manual worker’s ration from 24 January also proved illusory. Although by this time flour was arriving fairly reliably via the Ice Road, the improvement coincided with a breakdown in water supply to the bakeries, with the result that for several days at the end of January and the beginning of February almost no bread was distributed at all. When the manager of a shop on Sovetsky Prospekt announced that he had only enough bread left for a few dozen people the crowd ‘exploded in frenzied noise and shouting’: ‘They do what they want with us! Yesterday they gave us a ration increase, and today they take away all the bread!’ ‘They’re taking away the last of our rations. What do they really want? They want us all to die like animals!’ ‘They plug our mouths with this fifty grams, but you have to queue for five hours in the cold to get it!’ ‘There’s a war on, so they think civilians should die too!’13 A bookkeeper at the Comedy Theatre was overheard saying, ‘The people are starving, but they bring Zhdanov cocoa in bed.’ Ominously, his name is underlined in Zhdanov’s copy of the report.14

  On 13 January the chair of the city soviet, Petr Popkov, broadcast a speech in which he claimed that the worst was over, and that food supply was already beginning to improve. As an engineer rashly but rightly commented, these were ‘empty words, intended to pacify the population’.15 They had the opposite effect. Commentary from the crowd outside a shop on Dictatorship of the Proletariat (shortened, appropriately, to plain ‘Dictatorship’) Square was biting: ‘Of course Popkov’s got enough to eat – it’s easy for him to speak. I’d like him to come out here and see how we’re freezing.’ ‘They’re always saying that things are getting better. But how are they getting better exactly? I’ve already been waiting for bread for four hours, and there’s no sign of any.’ ‘Fine words from Popkov – he’s full, and he’s feeding us promises.’ ‘Soon they’ll be evacuating us to Volkovo cemetery.’16 The schoolgirl Klara Rakhman heard the speech on her family’s radio: ‘He says this whole story’s only going to last another few more days, that soon things will get better. But when? Probably when we’ve already kicked the bucket.’ Rumours circulated that Popkov had been arrested for sabotage, that Leningrad was about to be declared an ‘open city’, that Stalin was secretly negotiating peace or that he no longer cared about the city since it was to be handed over to Britain and America when the war was over.17

  Popkov’s hypocrisy stung some into threatening talk. ‘He’ll start talking sense’, said a theatre employee, ‘when we go and smash up the shops.’ ‘Look what our leaders have driven us to – people are killing and eating their children’, a housewife declared. ‘And we fools sit and say nothing. We need to rise up if we’re not all to die of hunger. It’s time to end this war.’18 Nonetheless, only two accounts exist of anti-government demonstrations. The first, described in a German intelligence report, is said to have taken place at the Kirov Works in mid-October 1941. Hearing news that a Kirov-staffed regiment had been annihilated on the Finnish front, workers reportedly downed tools and demanded peace. NKVD troops fired into the crowd, killing many, and took the ringleaders away in lorries.19

  The second account comes from a memoir written in emigration by Vasili Yershov, a former Red Army supply officer. He describes walking along Prospekt Stachek, the thoroughfare leading south towards the front line from the industrial Avtovo district, on the morning of Revolution Day, 7 November 1941, and seeing a crowd of several hundred ten- to fourteen-year-old children walking up to an army checkpoint. Reaching under their coats, they produced bundles of flyers bearing incitements to mutiny – ‘Twenty-four years ago you destroyed Tsarism! Please destroy the hated Kremlin-Smolniy executioners now!’ – and started handing them over the barrier to soldiers. A commissar ordered the soldiers to fire, and when they refused, fired himself. At the same moment a German artillery barrage began and the children scattered. Twenty children were arrested, together with the soldiers who had refused to shoot and several dozen of those soldiers’ relatives.20

  Since no reference to either incident has yet emerged from the (incompletely open) Party or security service archives, it is possible that they did not happen. The Germans’ informant may have been aiming to please; Yershov may have been exaggerating so as to boost his chances of getting US citizenship, or reporting hearsay. Leaflets urging Le
ningraders to revolt, however, did undoubtedly circulate. One such, stuffed into the blue-painted metal mailboxes in the entrance of an apartment building on Vasilyevsky Island, summoned residents to a ‘hunger demonstration’ on Palace Square at 10 a.m. on 22 January, whence they were to ‘proceed towards our fighters and ask them to give up this mindless resistance’. The troops would not fire since they were ‘our fathers, brothers, sons’, nor should the ‘worthless NKVD’ be feared since it had not the ‘strength to restrain the hungry masses’. Readers were to write out another ten copies of the pamphlet each, and post them in the letterboxes of neighbouring buildings.21 An engineer at a machine-tool factory was arrested for distributing a similar appeal:

  Working Leningraders! Death hangs over Leningrad. Two or three thousand people die daily. Who is to blame? Soviet power and the Bolsheviks. They assure us that the blockade will be lifted and food norms raised, but it turns out to be lies, as everything Soviet power promised proved to be lies. Seize the city leadership! Save yourselves and the Motherland, or death awaits!22

  Another pamphleteer, who signed himself Buntovshchik – ‘Rebel’ – regularly left bundles of Xeroxed leaflets in Moscow Station, as well as sending them direct to Popkov and Zhdanov. Despite extraordinary efforts to track him down, which included identifying all the sales outlets for a certain sort of envelope and handwriting checks on 13,000 people, he evaded the authorities’ clutches for almost two years. When finally run to earth he turned out to be an ordinary fifty-year-old ethnic Russian worker in the Bolshevik Plant’s steel foundry, his sole suspicious feature ‘relatives in Poland’. ‘What was Luzhkov’s official position in the workshop?’ Zhdanov’s deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov wrote angrily on the case report. ‘And what did the Party organisation know about him? Please check and inform me by word of mouth.’23

  17

  The Big House

  Leaflets and two unverifiable demonstrations aside, public anger never turned into organised revolt. This was in part a case of better the devil you know: Leningraders might have feared and distrusted their own leaders, but they also learned, as shells rained around them and news came through of the utter devastation of newly liberated towns round Moscow, thoroughly to hate the Nazis. It was also an achievement of the Soviet regime, which was well informed, commanded genuine loyalty from many (especially the young), remained firmly in control of the army and police, and had long since destroyed all potential institutional sources of opposition. If, as the Cold War Sovietologist Merle Fainsod put it, catastrophe and crisis are the severest tests of a political system, the fact that Leningrad held out suggested that the Soviet apparatus was tough, durable, and capable of sustaining great shocks. The siege, he concluded, should teach the West not to underestimate Russian totalitarianism.1

  Walk northwards up the Liteiniy, the broad Belle Epoque boulevard linking the Nevsky to Finland Station, and at the end of the street, just before the river, you reach a building known as the Big House – today the headquarters of the Federal Security Service and formerly those of its predecessors, the KGB and NKVD. Built in the 1920s, it is uncompromisingly modernist, its stark tiers of ox-blood marble a striking contrast to the florid grandeur of the preceding turn-of-the-century mansion blocks. When the air raids began, a siege survivor remembers, ‘all Leningraders very much hoped that bombs would fall on the NKVD building on the Liteiniy, and destroy all its records. But the building, with its grand marble entrance, remained standing – enormous and terrible.’2

  Terror, though particularly severe in the first twelve months of the war, continued throughout.3 The large-scale deportations of July and August 1941 were followed by mini-purges in September, November and March, the last of which swept up around a hundred scholars at a variety of academic institutions.4 By autumn 1942 more than 9,500 people had been arrested for political crimes, about a third of them intelligentsia or ‘former kulaks, tradesmen, landowners, nobles and officials’, the rest peasants and ordinary white- and blue-collar workers.5 For those put in front of the military tribunals that supplemented the regular People’s Courts, the chances of acquittal were extremely slim: only in 6 per cent of cases were not-guilty verdicts returned or the case dismissed. The civilian courts’ comparative laxity (20 per cent dismissals or not-guilty verdicts) earned reprimands from the military prosecutor.6

  Likhachev witnessed siege-time terror’s workings at Pushkin House, where Grigori Gukovsky (the same professor whom Olga Grechina had criticised for avoiding the draft, and who had joked that if the Germans came he would pass himself off as Armenian) was arrested and forced to denounce three colleagues, one of whom subsequently died in prison. Likhachev – himself a veteran of five years on the Solovetsky Islands – was unjudgemental. ‘At the time’, he wrote later,

  a conversation between two people about what they would do, where they would hide, if the Germans took the city, was considered little short of treason. I therefore didn’t think of blaming Gukovsky in the least, nor the numerous others who under duress put their signatures to whatever the interrogator-torturer wanted . . . It was the first time Gukovsky had been arrested and he obviously didn’t know that one should either refuse to answer the interrogator’s questions or say as little as possible.7

  Marksena Karpitskaya, another veteran of NKVD interrogation rooms as the daughter of ‘enemies of the people’, was called into the Big House and asked to join in the denunciation of a colleague at the Public Library, an elderly ex-officer in the tsarist army who helped out with small tasks in exchange for company and warmth. When she refused, the policeman sneered that this was only to be expected, given her parentage. Karpitskaya, to her own amazement

  exploded with rage. I said that nobody had yet proved that my parents were enemies of the people, and that what he was saying was itself a crime . . . Only the foolishness of youth could have possessed me to be so brave! He jumped up and lunged towards me, as if to hit me . . . I stood up and grabbed a stool . . . He came to his senses, sat down at his desk and asked for my papers.

  Though ordered to leave Leningrad, Karpitskaya managed to evade deportation with the help of her boss at the Publichka, who put her up in her own office, hiding her whereabouts from the authorities for the rest of the war.8

  The geography teacher Aleksei Vinokurov came to the attention of the security services when he posted up handwritten notices offering to buy landscape photographs of the Urals and Siberia. A scribbled response invited him to a flat on the Nevsky, where he was promptly handed over to a police lieutenant and escorted to the Big House. ‘It was tedious at the NKVD’, he confided to his diary. ‘The staff at that establishment amaze with their dullness. The stupid interrogation procedure went on for about three hours. With difficulty the lieutenant wrote out the protocol, which I virtually had to dictate to him.’ These were among the words underlined by Vinokurov’s investigator a year later, when his flat was searched and his diary confiscated. Also underlined were mentions of seeing corpses fall out of the back of a truck, and emaciated soldiers, marching along the Nevsky, step out of line to trade tobacco for bread. So too were criticisms of Sovinformburo for its ‘meaningless’ reporting, and references to the Germans as Europeans. Combined with a hint that he wished to join relatives in the Nazi-occupied town of Staraya Russa this was more than enough to condemn him, and on 19 March 1943 he was shot, having been convicted of ‘conducting counter-revolutionary agitation’ at his school.9 Cannier was Aleksandr Boldyrev, whose diary references to a ‘stupid’ English novel – title Two Trips to the Big House – were code for interrogation sessions.10

  Execution may have been a merciful end, since memoir evidence suggests that the large majority of those imprisoned in Leningrad during the first siege winter died of starvation. An inmate of the Kresty (‘Crosses’) prison, a vast, red-brick neo-Byzantine edifice next to Finland Station, had the job of removing corpses from the cells. He counted 1,853 between 16 October and 2 February:

  Every day we removed between twenty-five and forty d
ead. The insides of their clothes were covered in a moving crust of lice. The bodies weren’t marked or labelled in any way – these people were anonymous, nobody noted anything down. We carried them into the yard, where they were loaded on to lorries and taken away somewhere . . . And on 3 February I saw that the doors of all the cells in the prison corridor stood open. There was nobody left to lock up.11

  The account tallies with a report from the city statistical service on total numbers of deaths in Leningrad prisons, which rose from zero in March 1941 to 1,172 in December, 3,739 in January 1942 and over two thousand in each of the next four months.12 Prisoners were also put to work on the Ice Road and in Gulag enterprises within the siege ring, which included a logging camp, pig farm and power station as well as munitions, chemicals and cable-making factories. There, too, their chances of survival were slim: on 31 December the NKVD asked supply commissar Dmitri Pavlov to raise the bread ration for the 3,578 inmates of its labour camps from 250 grams a day to the manual workers’ 350 grams, pointing out that the existing arrangements led rapidly to ‘exhaustion’ and ‘unfitness for work’.13

  Death in prison or a labour camp was probably the fate of the railway clerk Ivan Zhilinsky. Fifty-one years old; decent, intelligent, resourceful and patriotic, he is typical of the thousands of ordinary Leningraders who met their end during the siege at the hands not of the enemy, but of their own government. By midwinter he and his wife Olga were swollen with oedema and walked with sticks, surviving from day to day on the dependant’s ration supplemented with cough drops, glycerine, castor oil, wallpaper paste and carpenter’s glue, washed down with hot water flavoured with orange peel, mustard powder, blackcurrant twigs or salt. To light their freezing rooms they burned splints of wood. Zhilinsky’s undoing, like Vinokurov’s, may have been a connection with photography. Having left his pre-war job when the trams stopped running, and not received his pay (a promised delivery of firewood) at another, in mid-January he started advertising himself as a passport photographer for departing evacuees. The room in which he set up a makeshift studio was also occupied by his dead mother, who lay hidden, dressed in her best clothes with an icon at her head, behind a cupboard and a piano. The scheme worked, earning 100 grams of bread per photograph. But it came too late for Olga, who died in her sleep on 20 March. ‘With Olya’s death’, wrote Zhilinsky, ‘has come the spring thaw, of which she dreamt all winter.’ She also died just too soon to receive a backlog of letters and money orders from relatives in evacuation, by whom the couple had mistakenly felt forgotten and deserted.