Leningrad

by Anna Reid

  10 Aleksandr Boldyrev, Osadnaya zapis: blokadniy dnevnik, p. 38 (31 December 1941). Anna Akhmatova’s nickname for the Big House was the ‘Royal Court of Wonderland’.

  11 Reznikova (Flige), ‘Repressii’, p. 103. There is also memoir evidence of cannibalism in the Kresty: in a commemorative brochure published to mark the 100th anniversary of the prison’s foundation, a siege survivor describes seeing a group of fifteen to twenty inmates sitting in a courtyard openly eating corpse meat (Richard Bidlack, ‘Survival Strategies in Leningrad’, in Robert Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds, The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, p. 107).

  12 Report by the Leningrad Statistical Service, 5 May 1944, in Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, doc. 156, p. 349. Deaths in prison dropped slowly through the rest of 1942, before peaking again, at 815, in January 1943.

  13 Petition from the Corrective-Labour Camps and Columns Directorate of the NKVD to State Defence Committee Emissary D. V. Pavlov, 31 December 1941, in Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, doc. 175, p. 413.

  14 Ivan Zhilinsky, ‘Blokadniy dnevnik (osen 1941 – vesna 1942 g.)’, Voprosy istorii, 5–6, 1996, pp. 3–7 (16 January 1942).

  Part 4. Waiting for Liberation: January 1942–January 1942

  Chapter 18: Meat Wood

  1 Winston Churchill, The Second World War, pp. 465, 467.

  2 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–44, pp. 200, 220 (12–13 and 17–18 January 1941). Notes to Pages 313–321

  3 Fritz Hockenjos, typescript, Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv: MSG 2/4034-4038 (5, 14, 16 January and 1 February 1942).

  4 Antony Beevor and Lyuba Vinogradova, eds, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–45 (September 1941); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–45, p. 167.

  5 Dmitri Pavlov, Leningrad 1941, p. 88.

  6 On desertion, see Nikita Lomagin, Neizvestnaya blokada, vol. 2, doc. 11, p. 40. On food theft and embezzlement among NKVD troops see orders of 1 February, 22 April and 16 July 1942. RGVA: Fond 32912, op. 1, delo 78, pp. 10, 39, 85. A report of 21 February complains that delivery drivers stop at villages en route, where they ‘behave improperly, get drunk and supply female acquaintances with food’. (RGVA: Fond 32904, op. 1, delo 80, p. 8.)

  7 ‘Dnevnik krasnoarmeitsa Putyakova S. F’, in Stanislav Bernev and Sergei Chernov, eds, Arkhiv Bolshogo Doma: blokadniye dnevniki i dokumenty, p. 382 (29 December 1941).

  8 NKVD report to Zhdanov, 22 December 1941, in Lomagin, Neizvestnaya blokada, vol. 2, doc. 59, p. 261.

  9 Vasili Churkin, http://militera.lib.ru (20 November 1941).

  10 See for example Yelena Skrjabina, Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader, p. 55 (18 January 1942).

  11 Vasili Yershov, untitled typescript, Research Program on the USSR, Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, pp. 40–41.

  12 Ibid., pp. 66–7.

  13 Stavka directive, 10 January 1942; David Glantz, The Battle for Leningrad 1941–44, pp. 149–50.

  14 See Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, pp. 544–5 for Mekhlis’s long history of recommending colleagues’ arrests. In the words of an associate he was ‘a remarkably energetic and vigorous man, as decisive as he was incompetent, the master of varied but superficial knowledge and self-confident to the point of wilfulness’. Donald Rayfield calls him ‘Stalin’s least-known but most vicious scorpion’.

  15 Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, eds, Franz Halder, The Halder War Diary, 1939–1942, p. 599 (5 January 1942).

  16 Hockenjos, typescript, Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv, pp. 69–70 (23 February 1942). Notes to Pages 321–333

  17 Burdick and Jacobsen, eds, Franz Halder, The Halder War Diary, p. 608 (2 March 1942).

  18 Hockenjos, typescript, Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv: p. 84 (13 and 16 April 1942).

  19 Glantz, The Battle for Leningrad 1941–44, pp. 202–3.

  20 I. I. Kalabin, in I. A. Ivanova, ed., Tragediya Myasnogo Bora: sbornik vospominanii uchastnikov i ochevidtsev Lyubanskoi operatsii, pp. 139–40. For similar accounts see Glantz, The Battle for Leningrad 1941–44, p. 204.

  21 In a letter to Zhdanov of 3 June 1942 Khozin defended himself against accusations of drunkenness and misbehaviour with two telegraph girls. The telegraph operators, he protested, joined him only to watch films, and though he took ‘100g of vodka before supper, sometimes even two or three little glasses’, he had never been drunk in his life. (RGASPI: Fond 77, op.3, delo 133.)

  22 I. I. Kalabin, in Ivanovna, ed., Tragediya Myasnogo Bora, p. 142.

  23 I. D. Nikonov, in ibid., p. 157.

  24 For a full account of Vlasov’s career see Catherine Andreyev, ‘Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov’, in Harold Shukman, ed., Stalin’s Generals, pp. 301–11.

  25 RGASPI: Fond 83, op. 1, yed. khr. 18, pp. 91–104.

  26 Glantz, The Battle for Leningrad 1941–44, pp. 207–8.

  27 Ilya Frenklah, www.iremember.ru

  Chapter 19: The Gentle Joy of Living and Breathing

  1 Alexander Werth, Russia at War, p. 399

  2 Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West, pp. 271, 287.

  3 Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, A Book of the Blockade, pp. 63–4; Geraldine Norman, The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum, pp. 257–8.

  4 Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, p. 89; Vera Inber, Leningrad Diary, p. 200 (25 May 1944). Fifty-two people died from eating poisonous wild plants (Andrei Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade: sbornik dokumentov, doc. 147, p. 312).

  5 Dmitri Likhachev, Reflections on the Russian Soul: A Memoir, p. 255.

  6 Vasili Chekrizov, ‘Dnevnik blokadnogo vremeni’, Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Muzeya Istorii Sankt-Peterburga, vol. 8, p. 79 (19 May 1942).

  7 Lidiya Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, p. 75. Notes to Pages 333–343

  8 Olga Berggolts, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, Zvezda, 6, p. 154 (3 April 1942).

  9 Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments, p. 52. See also William Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II, pp. 203–4.

  10 On 7 January 1942 Vera Inber attended a lecture titled ‘The Illness of Starvation’.

  11 Lev Markhasev, ‘Dva Leningradskikh radio’, in G. S. Melnik and G. V. Zhirkov, eds, Radio, blokada, Leningrad, St Petersburg, 2005, p. 96; Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–45, p. 165.

  12 Berggolts, Zvezda, 6, p. 163 (31 May 1942).

  13 Nikita Lomagin, Neizvestnaya blokada, vol. 1, pp. 227–8. Markhasev, ‘Dva Leningradskikh Radio’, p. 97.

  14 Aileen Rambov, ‘The Siege of Leningrad: Wartime Literature and Ideological Change’, in Robert Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds, The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, pp. 163–4.

  15 Berggolts, Zvezda, 6, pp. 160, 164 (13 May and 3 June 1942).

  16 Elliott Mossman, ed., The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910–1954, pp. 216–21.

  17 Anna Zelenova, Stati, vospominaniya, pisma: Pavlovsky dvorets, istoriya i sudba, p. 115.

  18 Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet, p. 269.

  19 Vera Inber, Leningrad Diary, pp. 60–61, 70–71 (19 and 20 February, 10 and 12 March 1942).

  20 Vasili Churkin, Voyennaya literatura: dnevniki i pisma, http://militera.lib.ru/db/churkin part 2, pp. 9–10 (27 May and 28 June 1942).

  21 Reeder, Anna Akhmatova, p. 277.

  22 Vladimir Garshin, ‘Tam gde smert pomogayet zhizni’, Arkhiv Patologii, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 83–8. (This short memoir was originally written in 1944.)

  23 OSBP and Burial Trust reports of 14 April 1942 and 5 April 1943, in Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, docs 141 and 153, pp. 299, 337–8.

  24 Reports to Zhdanov from Antyufeyev, head of the ‘instructors’ department of the City Party Committee, of 17 January, 28 March and 1 April 1942. TsGAIPD
SPb: Fond 24, op. 2v, delo 5760.

  25 Inber, Leningrad Diary, pp. 73–4 (28 March 1942).

  26 Olga Grechina, ‘Spasayus spasaya chast 1: pogibelnaya zima (1941–1942 gg.)’, Neva, 1, 1994, p. 269.

  27 Aleksandr Boldyrev, Osadnaya zapis: blokadniy dnevnik, pp. 76–9, 84 (26–31 March and 4 April 1942). Notes to Pages 344–352

  28 Norman, The Hermitage, p. 256.

  29 Letter to Zhdanov from Lieut Gen. Kabanov, 11 May 1942, in Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, doc. 144, p. 307. See also the city health department’s report to Kosygin and Popkov, of 31 March 1942, ibid., doc. 139, p. 296.

  30 RGASPI: Fond 17, op. 43, delo 1150; protocol 57, p. 54; Dmitri Lazarev, ‘Vospominaniya o blokade’, Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Muzeya Istorii Sankt-Peterburga, vol. 5, pp. 211–12.

  31 William Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II, p. 202; Richard Bidlack, Workers at War: Factory Workers and Labor Policy in the Siege of Leningrad, Carl Beck Papers, 902, p. 28.

  32 RGASPI: Fond 17, op. 43, delo 1138; protocol 45, pp. 13, 44; protocol 47, p. 162. RGASPI: Fond 17, op. 43, delo 1139; protocol 48, p. 32. RGASPI: Fond 17, op. 43, delo 1140; protocol 50, pp. 1, 3, 90.

  33 NKVD report to the Leningrad oblast Party Committee, Borovichi, 19 December 1942. TsGAIPD SPb: Fond 24, op. 20, delo 52.

  34 NKVD reports of 5 August, 5 September and 6 October 1942, Nikita Lomagin, Neizvestnaya blokada, vol. 2, docs 78, 79, 80, pp. 328–39.

  35 Vasili Chekrizov, ‘Dnevnik blokadnogo vremeni’, Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Muzeya Istorii Sankt-Peterburga, vol. 8, pp. 87, 97–8, 102 (29 June, 26 August and 21 September 1942).

  36 Inber, Leningrad Diary, pp. 110–11 (16 September 1942).

  37 Olga Grechina, ‘Spasayus spasaya chast 2: skazka o gorokhovom dereve (1942–1944 gg.)’, Neva, 2, 1994, p. 212. See also Lazarev, ‘Vospominaniya o blokade’, pp. 213–14, 216, and Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, pp. 111–12.

  38 Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Leningrad v blokade, pp. 280, 295 (17 April and 24 September 1942).

  39 Dmitri Likhachev, Reflections on the Russian Soul, pp. 256–7.

  40 City statistics department, 5 October 1942, in Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, doc. 148, p. 313; Bidlack, Workers at War, p. 27.

  41 Inber, Leningrad Diary, p. 101 (7 August 1942).

  42 Mossman, ed., The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910–1954, pp. 222, 225.

  43 Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, doc. 67, pp. 160–61.

  44 Pavel Gubchevsky, in Norman, The Hermitage, p. 257.

  45 Chekrizov, ‘Dnevnik blokadnogo vremeni’, pp. 94–5 (10 August 1942).

  46 Lidiya Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, pp. 37, 105. NKVD reports to Beria and Zhdanov, in Lomagin, Neizvestnaya blokada, vol. 2, docs 80 and 86, pp. 336, 353. Notes to Pages 352–360

  47 Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski, p. 286 (24 and 30 May 1942).

  48 Olga Berggolts, ‘Dnevnye zvezdy’, Ogonyok, 19, 5 May 1990, p. 16.

  49 See for example Aleksandr Boldyrev, Osadnaya zapis: blokadniy dnevnik, p. 191, 28 October 1942. See also Aleksei Vinokurov, in Arkhiv Bolshogo Doma: blokadniye dnevniki i dokumenty, p. 266 (17 June 1942).

  50 Olga Berggolts, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, Zvezda, 6, 1990, p. 166 (2 July 1942).

  51 Lazarev, ‘Vospominaniya o blokade’, p. 218 (December 1942); Vasilisa Malysheva, 23 July–7 August 1942; RGALI: Fond 2733, op. 1, yed. khr. 872, p. 160.

  52 Dmitri Lazarev, ‘Vospominaniya o blokade’, pp. 215–16. Similar rhymes of the time are given in O. E. Molkina, ‘Nemtsy v koltsye blokady’, Istoriya Peterburga, 3, pp. 62–4.

  53 Boldyrev, Osadnaya zapis: blokadniy dnevnik, pp. 148, 164–5 (28 August and 22 September 1942). The NKVD put it another way. Factory managers should stop sending their weakest, least skilled employees to cut logs, a report to Zhdanov of 9 January 1942 complained, because they failed to fulfil their norms and ‘sat idly about’ (TsGAIPD SPb: Fond 24, op. 2v). For another description of conscription to a peatworks see Valentina Bushueva, in Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds, Writing the Siege: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose, pp. 136–7.

  Chapter 20: The Leningrad Symphony

  1 BBC Written Archives Centre: E1/1270 Countries: Russia – Material for Use in Programmes, file 1, 1941–43.

  2 Aleksandr Rubashkin, Golos Leningrada: Leningradskoye Radio v dni blokady, p. 173.

  3 BBC Written Archives Centre: E1/1281 Countries: Russia; Russian Service (Policy) file 1, 1939–44.

  4 Dmitri Shostakovich, Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941–1975, p. xxxiv.

  5 Solomon Volkov, St Petersburg: A Cultural History, p. 429.

  6 Ibid., p. 433.

  7 Olga Berggolts, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, Zvezda, 6, 1990, p. 153 (29 March 1942).

  8 Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945, p. 272.

  9 BBC Written Archives Centre: R46/297: Leningrad Symphony 1942–44.

  10 Solomon Volkov, ed., Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, pp. 17, 104–6. Notes to Pages 360–368

  11 Berggolts, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, Zvezda, 4, April 1991, p. 140 (7 February 1942).

  12 Kseniya Matus, in Simmons and Perlina, eds, Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose, p. 149. See also Rubashkin, Golos Leningrada, pp. 163–73.

  13 Harlow Robinson, ‘Composing for Victory’, in Richard Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, p. 71; Volkov, St Petersburg, p. 442.

  14 Vera Inber, Leningrad Diary, p. 102 (9 August 1942).

  15 Volkov, ed., Testimony, p. 118.

  16 Nadezhda Cherepenina, ‘Assessing the Scale of Famine and Death in the Besieged City’, in John Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich, eds, Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad 1941–44, p. 36.

  17 Stanislav Kotov, Detskiye doma blokadnogo Leningrada, p. 20.

  18 Galina Vishnevskaya, Galina: A Russian Story, New York, 1984, pp. 30–35. Vishnevskaya went on to become one of Russia’s greatest lyric sopranos. She and her husband, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, defected to the West in the late 1960s, having courted official disfavour by befriending Solzhenitsyn. Their collection of Russian art, purchased by a Russian steel magnate in 2007, is currently on public display in St Petersburg.

  19 Kotov, Detskiye doma blokadnogo Leningrada, p. 86.

  20 Report by the City Executive Committee to Kosygin, 28 July 1942, in Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, doc. 154, p. 344. See also Kotov, Detskiye doma blokadnogo Leningrada, p. 149.

  21 Kotov, Detskiye doma blokadnogo Leningrada, pp. 78–84.

  22 Interviewed by the author, Vsevolozhsk, November 2006.

  23 James Clapperton, The Siege of Leningrad and the Ambivalence of the Sacred: Conversations with Survivors, Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2006, p. 393; Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, pp. 179–80.

  24 Clapperton, Siege of Leningrad, p. 120.

  25 Inber, Leningrad Diary, pp. 148–9 (28 May 1943).

  26 Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction, p. 201, quoting an article from The Times, 5 January 1944.

  27 Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, p. 183.

  28 Olga Grechina, ‘Spasayus spasaya chast 1: pogibelnaya zima (1941–1942 gg.)’, Neva, 1, 1994, p. 281.

  29 Grechina, ‘Spasayus spasaya chast 2: skazka o gorokhovom dereve (1942–1944 gg.)’, Neva, 2, 1994, p. 219 (11 May 1943).

  Chapter 21: The Last Year

  1 Führer Directive no. 41, 5 April 1942, Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s War Directives 1939–1945, pp. 116–17. Notes to Pages 370–379

  2 Führer Directive no. 44, 21 July 1942, ibid., p. 127. ‘Heavy Gustav’, which could fling a seven-tonne shell twenty-three miles, needed its own cranes and tracks and took a dedicated 1,420-strong team up to six weeks to assemble and disassemble. Though transported to within thirty kilometres of Leningrad before Nordlicht
was called off, it was only ever used at Sevastopol, where it was fired forty-eight times in total. One of its shells is on display in London’s Imperial War Museum.

  3 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–44, p. 617 (6 August 1942).

  4 Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, p. 363.

  5 Fritz Hockenjos, typescript, Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv: MSG 2/4034–4038 (28 February 1943 and 31 March 1944). For more on women in the Red Army, see Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939-45, pp.143–4.

  6 Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, p. 392.

  7 Vera Inber, Leningrad Diary, pp. 126–7 (16 January 1943).

  8 Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Leningrad v blokade (28 January 1943).

  9 Dmitri Lazarev, ‘Vospominaniya o blokade’, Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Muzeya Istorii Sankt-Peterburga, vol. 5, p. 219 (18 January 1943).

  10 G. F. Krivosheyev, ed., Rossiya i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: poteri vooruzhyonnykh sil, p. 283; Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, p. 549.

  11 Hockenjos, typescript, Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv, p. 10 (11 August 1942).

  12 Mariya Mashkova, ‘Iz blokadnykh zapisei’, in V pamyat ushedshikh i vo slavu zhivushchikh: dnevniki, vospominaniye, pisma, pp. 82–126 (February–May 1943).

  13 Air-defence dept report, in Andrei Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade: sbornik dokumentov, attachment to doc. 169, p. 398.

  14 For more detail see David Glantz, The Battle for Leningrad, 1941–1944, p. 130.

  15 Mashkova, ‘Iz blokadnykh zapisei’, p. 132 (8 August 1943).

  16 Vasili Chekrizov, ‘Dnevnik blokadnogo vremeni’, Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Muzeya Istorii Sankt-Peterburga, vol. 8, p. 141 (18 April 1943). Altogether 186 factories were now working again, compared to 368 pre-war. About 80 per cent of factory workers were semi-skilled women aged under twenty-four. (Richard Bidlack, Workers at War: Factory Workers and Labor Policy in the Siege of Leningrad, Carl Beck Papers, 902, pp. 32–3.)

  17 Chekrizov, ‘Dnevnik blokadnogo vremeni’, p. 145 (18 July 1943).

  18 Aleksandr Rubashkin, Golos Leningrada: Leningradskoye Radio v dni blokady, p. 195. Notes to Pages 380–393

  19 Marina Starodubtseva (née Yerukhmanova), Krugovorot (vremena i sudby), typescript held by the memoirist’s family, p. 550.