by Anna Reid
Reunions (for those lucky enough to have them) were often difficult. Children failed to recognise their parents, parents no longer knew their children, spouses found each other changed and alien. Even the city looked different – lean and hard, hollow-eyed, gap-toothed, shrapnel-pocked. Elated to be home again, Anna Akhmatova was met at the railway station by her pre-war lover, the pathologist Vladimir Garshin. They had agreed, via letters, to marry, and that Akhmatova would take his name. Now she discovered that he had changed his mind. Akhmatova pretended to herself that Garshin had lost his reason (‘The man who means/Nothing to me now . . . Wanders like a ghost on the outskirts/The back streets and backyards of life’) but in fact he had simply fallen in love with someone else.Humiliated, Akhmatova cut all dedications to him from her poems, and moved back into her old room next to Nikolai Punin’s in an annexe to the Sheremetyev Palace. Its windows were repaired thanks to Olga Berggolts, who begged help from a conservator at the Public Library. When she stressed Akhmatova’s importance, the man told her not to insult his intelligence – ‘I am literate!’ – and removed the necessary glass – ‘I think they will forgive us’ – from some framed prints of great nineteenth-century writers.
Churkin, both of his sons having died at the front and his wife of starvation, had nobody to come home to at all. Put up by friends, it was three days before he could bring himself to visit his own flat. It had been broken into:
An awful mess; the thieves had turned everything upside down. All the clothes – suits and coats – and valuables gone. Everything that didn’t interest them strewn about the floor . . . All I took was our photo album. Here they are, my darlings, looking silently up at me. I’ll never see them again. I felt such pain that I burst into tears.10
Out in Yaroslavl, Irina Bogdanova was luckier. Though she too had lost her whole immediate family, she remembered the address of some family friends – four spinster sisters, of aristocratic Polish background, in whose tar-paper cottage in a dacha village east of Leningrad she had once stayed for the summer. On receiving Irina’s letter – written in a childish hand, with polite enquiries as to the health of their cat and dog – the two surviving sisters (the others had died of starvation) immediately made the journey to Yaroslavl and took Irina home, subsequently bringing her up as their own. As they saved her so she now preserves the memory of them – a clutch of turn-of-the-century studio photographs, printed on gilt-edged board, of handsome young women with tiny waists and thick, upswept hair. Their hats, wide and white, are topped with doves’ wings.
Leningrad also, of course, needed physical repair. Though nothing like flattened Kharkov, Minsk or Stalingrad – or even, according to people who saw both, London – it had been hit by over 150,000 heavy artillery shells and over 10,000 bombs and incendiaries during the siege.11 Few were the unbroken windows, uncracked walls, roofs that did not leak. The Hermitage, miraculously only directly hit twice during the siege, put in a bill for sixty-five tonnes of plaster, a hundred tonnes of cement, six thousand square metres of glass, eighty tonnes of alabaster and six kilos of gold leaf.
As the city refilled, demand for undamaged housing increased, sharpening disputes between returnees and the new occupants, legal or otherwise, of their vacated flats. Ex-servicemen, and civilians who had been evacuated individually (the political and cultural elite), in theory got back their pre-war accommodation automatically, but civilians who had been evacuated with their workplaces (the rank and file) did not. In practice, even for the first two categories restitution often required bribery and pull. A law forcing the return of valuables bartered away at knockdown prices was not properly enforced either, and it was a common post-war experience to see a familiar picture hanging on the wall of a hard-currency shop, or a mother’s brooch on the lapel of a stranger.12
The worst architectural losses were the imperial summer palaces. One of the first to see Pavlovsk, eight days after its liberation, was Anna Zelenova. Given permission, but no transport, to go and find out what had become of it, she set out on foot. It wasn’t a lonely walk, she gleefully wrote to a colleague in evacuation, because she was kept company by flocks of crows, circling above all the unburied German corpses. One had been propped up against a fence and a note attached: ‘Wanted to get to Leningrad. Didn’t make it’. At the entrance to Pavlovsk park she saw that the central pillar of its double gates had been demolished to make way for tanks. The park itself was cut about with shell craters, tree stumps, dugouts and firing points. In one bunker she found tapestries with swastikas cut out of them, in another oil paintings and a grand piano. Inlaid doors had been used to make footbridges across ditches, mahogany wardrobes turned into latrines. The palace itself – torched, like Peterhof, by the Germans on departure – had been burning for ten days:
The dome has gone, and the clock towers, and the Rossi library has burned to the ground, including its walls. There’s no right wing or throne room, no trellised gallery above the colonnades. The picture gallery has gone, the chapel, the whole Palace . . . Looking in through the ground-floor windows you can see the sky, and the only way you can tell which room is which is by the remaining fragments of plasterwork on the walls.
Inside, Zelenova found graffiti, remnants of parquet flooring like half-done puzzles, and piles of empty wine bottles. Charred beams still smoked and molten lead dripped from what was left of the roof on to her camera. The statue of Tsar Paul in front of the main entrance had been turned into a telegraph pole, his bicorne hat draped with cables. (‘I’m so glad that Pavel stands with his back to the palace.’)
In flattened Pushkin, the Catherine and Alexander Palaces stood equally in ruins, the Catherine in part because the Red Army had failed to defuse two sets of delayed action bombs, the second of which exploded on 3 February, more than a week after liberation: ‘A shameful disgrace – people should have been at their posts in the first few hours’, Zelenova’s colleague wrote back when she told him the news.13 For years after the war his own job would be to scour the roads to Berlin for looted imperial treasures. Among those never found were the delicately carved panels of the Catherine Palace’s fabled Amber Room, given to Peter the Great by Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Hidden behind fake walls, they had quickly been discovered by the occupying Nazis, who packed them into crates and sent them to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in Eastern Prussia. Last seen in Königsberg’s castle, what happened to them next is a mystery. Treasure-hunters notwithstanding, today’s best guess is that they were destroyed by a fire which swept through the building a few days after it fell to the Red Army in April 1945.14
The palaces’ deliberate destruction, according to the journalist Alexander Werth, ‘aroused among the Russians as great a fury as the worst German atrocities against human beings’. Like most, he initially assumed them to be unrestorable. Standing at the top of Peterhof’s grand cascade, soviet chairman Petr Popkov is said to have waved a hand at the blackened shell in front of him and declared ‘This will all be razed!’15 Others thought the ruins should be left as a monument to Nazi brutality, or replaced by workers’ housing.
The decision to rebuild, taken by Stalin himself, was in tune with a new public mood that swept over the whole Soviet Union at the end of the war. First, everyone simply yearned for an easier, pleasanter, ‘normal’ life. Olga Grechina, scratching around for a respectable wardrobe for her new start at university, acquired new boots by taking the blades off a pair of skates. Marina Yerukhmanova, sacked from the Yevropa, adopted a stray St Bernard – the same breed her grandparents had owned – which she fed Eskimo ice creams and hoisted on to pavement weighing machines. (It had been rescued, she liked to think, by victorious tankisti from some abandoned German Schloss.) Nikolai Ribkovsky, the apparatchik who dined off ham and turkey at a Party rest-house in the middle of the mass death, looked forward to the day when he could afford to take a girl to the Mariinsky and treat her to coffee and cake in the interval. Botanists at the Botanical Gardens drew up a wish list of sunny countries to which they wanted
to launch new plant-collecting expeditions – India, Madagascar, Java, Australia and Ceylon.16
Second, people realised that Communism was here to stay. Before the war, it had been possible to regard the regime as something temporary. The conversational code for tsarism had been ‘the peaceful time’, implying the possibility of return to a natural order. Now the phrase fell out of use: Leningrad had permanently replaced Petersburg. But third, people wanted this Communism to be of a different sort. Having fought, worked and suffered for their country for four years, they felt that they had earned the right to be trusted by its government. They longed for the ordinary decencies of civilised life – security, comfort, entertainment – but also for freedom to express their opinions, explore the outside world, and genuinely to participate in public life. In the first post-war elections to the Supreme Soviet Leningraders defaced their ballots, scribbling ‘When are you going to abolish Communist serfdom?’ ‘Give us bread and then hold elections’; ‘Down with hard labour in the factories and collective farms’, or even crossing out the candidate’s name and writing ‘For Adolf Hitler’. ‘It’s humiliating’, an actor at the Aleksandrinka was overheard to exclaim. ‘You feel like a machine, a pawn. How can you vote when there’s only one name on the list?’17
Alexander Werth, allowed briefly to report from Leningrad in September 1943, had sensed the yearning for change. A banquet in his honour at the Writers’ Union featured the usual toasts to Churchill and Eden, but he detected behind them ‘more even than in Moscow . . . a real thirst for close future contacts with the West. They thought in terms of harbours and ships – ships carrying passengers to and fro, and goods, and books and music, and paintings and gramophone records.’ Interviewing Popkov, he was struck by the fact that he called himself Leningrad’s ‘mayor’ rather than chairman of its soviet, and, visiting an airbase, by the mottoes pinned up in the mess, which were drawn not from Lenin but from an etiquette manual of the pre-revolutionary Corps des Pages (‘Avoid gesticulating and raising your voice’, and ‘An officer’s strength lies not in impulsive acts, but in his imperturbable calm’). His elderly chambermaid at the Astoria, accepting a Lucky Strike, reminisced about the Egyptian Tanagras she had smoked when in service with a Princess Borghese, and of annual trips to Paris to buy lingerie at Paquin and Worth. On his final evening, Werth was taken to see a packed-out stage adaptation of Frank Capra’s comedy It Happened One Night, complete with show tunes, millionaire, detectives and gangsters – ‘all dressed like “real” Americans in the brightest light-blue and purple suits’. Everywhere, he noticed, pictures of Zhdanov outnumbered those of Lenin and Stalin. All in all, he came away with ‘the curious impression that Leningrad was a little different from the rest of the Soviet Union’, its traditional superiority complex heightened by awareness of having fought its ‘own show’, without Moscow’s help. There was even a rumour that it might become the capital again – if not of the whole Soviet Union, then of the Russian Republic.18
These hopes – for comfort, a degree of political pluralism, contact with the outside world and a special role for Leningrad – were almost entirely disappointed after the war. Living standards did – agonisingly slowly – improve, but for Leningraders, as for other Russians, the early Cold War years brought only renewed repression, reaching a climax in the late 1940s and early 1950s before falling sharply off with Stalin’s death in 1953.
With hindsight, that this would be so had always been obvious. No longer constrained by the war effort to pay heed to public opinion, and aware that soldiers returning victorious from Europe had a history of fomenting revolt, Stalin had no intention of loosening his grip. Though the Leningrad NKVD arrested fewer people than usual for political crimes in 1944 (373 in total), this was only because it was busy hunting down collaborators in the newly liberated towns round about. Arrests rose again in 1945.19 Censorship, having slackened slightly during the war, became stricter, especially in regard to 1941–2’s mass death. A handicapped twenty-year-old’s diary recorded, alongside her father’s death from starvation, the discovery of dismembered bodies in a musician neighbour’s flat. She read it aloud to friends; one of them informed on her and she was sent to the Gulag for six years. Violinists, in the official version, hadn’t spent the siege eating children, but playing Shostakovich in fingerless gloves.20 Inber criticised Berggolts for continuing to produce ‘sad, old-fashioned’ poetry, only to find that a Writers’ Union meeting damned her own work as ‘repulsive’, ‘clinical’ and ‘torture to read’.21 At the Radio House, staff were ordered to destroy wartime recordings of unscripted interviews with ordinary members of the public; instead, they took the reels home hidden under their coats, or filed them in boxes labelled ‘folk music’. Fridenberg, commissioned (by, she was appalled to discover, the NKVD) to collect accounts of ‘Leningrad heroines’, was steered towards ‘favourites and pets of the authorities . . . Everything living, everything genuine was inadmissible . . . Though much that was unbelievably tragic was conveyed to me orally, nobody dared write down the truth.’22
Remaining hopes for a ‘Leningrad Spring’ were dashed, very publicly and deliberately, in the summer of 1946, by a crackdown on the Leningrad intelligentsia. Initiated by Stalin, it was deputised to Zhdanov, by now back in Moscow and widely touted as Stalin’s successor. He chose as his victims Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, picking them out for their popularity (‘I knew I was doomed the moment a girl ran up to me and dropped on her knees’, Akhmatova said of a triumphant public poetry reading) and because they embodied the clever, sceptical, Europhile Leningrad spirit. As the writer Konstantin Simonov put it in his memoirs:
I think the attack against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko was not concerned so much with them in particular . . . Stalin was always suspicious of Leningrad, a feeling that he had retained since the ’20s . . . I thought then ‘Why Akhmatova, who hadn’t emigrated, who gave so many poetry readings during the war?’ . . . It was a way of putting the intelligentsia in their place, of showing them that the tasks before them were just as clear as ever.23
The blow fell on 15 August, in the form of a resolution by the Party’s Central Committee. Akhmatova’s work was condemned as ‘empty and frivolous . . . permeated by the scent of pessimism and decay’, Zoshchenko’s as ‘putrid, vulgar nonsense’, liable to lead astray Soviet youth. Both displayed ‘cringing servility towards the bourgeois culture of the West’. One of two Leningrad magazines that published them was closed down, and the other put under the editorship of a Central Committee propaganda chief. A week later Zhdanov flew to Leningrad to anathematise the pair in person, in a speech to the Writers’ Union. As the significance of his words (he described Akhmatova as ‘half whore, half nun’ and Zoshchenko as ‘a trivial petit-bourgeois . . . oozing anti-Soviet poison’) sank in, the audience froze into silence – ‘congealing’, as one of its members put it, ‘over the course of three hours into a solid white lump’.24 One woman tried to leave the hall, but was prevented from doing so and sat down again at the back. There were no other protesters and a vote to expel Akhmatova and Zoshchenko from the Union was passed unanimously. The meeting ended at one o’clock in the morning, the assembled writers filing silently out into the warm summer’s night. ‘Just as silently’, remembered one, ‘we passed along the straight avenue to the empty square, and silently went off in late trolley-buses. Everything was unexpected and incomprehensible.’25 Akhmatova herself, magnificently contemptuous, claimed to have been unaware of the resolution’s existence until she saw it printed on a sheet of slimy newspaper from which she had just unwrapped some fish. Simonov’s interpretation of the affair is borne out by the fact that despite Zhdanov’s blood-curdling rhetoric neither she nor Zoshchenko was arrested, but both were reduced instead to their old pre-war existence of secrecy and penury, burning notebooks and living off the kindness of friends. One of the few brave enough not to drop Akhmatova was the much younger Olga Berggolts, who in consequence lost her position on the board of the Writers�
�� Union.
In August 1948 Kremlin politics were upended by Zhdanov’s death (without outside help) from a heart attack. Malenkov and Beria immediately began to reassert themselves, broadening the highly publicised crackdown on the Leningrad intelligentsia into a secret purge of Zhdanov’s protégés at the Kremlin and the whole Leningrad Party.
What became known as the ‘Leningrad Affair’ began in February 1948, with the dismissals from their posts of Zhdanov’s wartime deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov, who had followed him to Moscow and been given oversight of the NKVD, of ‘Mayor’ Popkov, who had taken over as Leningrad’s First Party Secretary, and of Nikolai Voznesensky, a clever young economist who had ridden on Zhdanov’s coat-tails to become head of the State Planning Commission. ‘The Politburo considers’, ran a secret resolution, that ‘Comrades Kuznetsov . . . and Popkov have [demonstrated] a sick, un-Bolshevik deviation, expressed in demagogic overtures to the Leningrad organisation, unfair criticism of the Central Committee . . . and in attempts to present themselves as the special defenders of Leningrad’s interests.’26
Though ‘the hunt was on’, as Khrushchev later put it, the Leningraders were initially left at liberty; Voznesensky was even still invited to Stalin’s drunken midnight dinners. Finally, on 13 August, Kuznetsov, Popkov and three others were invited to Malenkov’s office and arrested on arrival by his bodyguard. Though Voznesensky wrote a grovelling letter to Stalin – ‘Please give me work, whatever’s available, so I can do my share for Party and country . . . I assure you that I have absolutely learned my lesson on party-mindedness’ – it did him no good.27 He was arrested in turn on 27 October and joined Popkov and Kuznetsov in a special prison. In September 1950 they were put on closed trial in Leningrad, in the old Officers’ Club building on the Liteiniy. Kuznetsov refused to confess and was immediately executed – according to Khrushchev ‘horribly, with a hook in the back of his neck’.28 Voznesensky may have been kept alive for a little longer. There is a story that a few months after the trial Stalin asked Malenkov what had become of the famously workaholic Planning Commission head, and suggested that he be given something to do. Malenkov replied that this would not be possible, since he had frozen to death in the back of a prison truck.29 Altogether, sixty-nine Leningrad-connected Party officials were executed, imprisoned or exiled between 1949 and 1951, plus 145 of their relatives. Least deserving of pity was P. N. Kubatkin, head of the Leningrad NKVD. The standard mugshots taken at his arrest – facing the camera and in right profile – show him haggard and dishevelled, just like his thousands of wartime victims.