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 Leningraders 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
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
