diary references to a ‘stupid’ English novel — title
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 dead. 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.
Zhilinsky was arrested without warning a week later, possibly at the instigation of hostile neighbours. Again, the police pounced on his diary, in which he had recorded his rather shrewd forecasts for the war. The Germans, he thought, had made a mistake in thinking they could ‘take a stroll, as if in Poland, to the Urals’, since the Russians, though not natural Bolsheviks, had a historic hatred of invaders and the advantages of boundless space, a ‘special psychology — “he’s a fool but he’s our fool”’, and the ability to do without. The Allies were drip-feeding the Soviet Union just enough aid to keep her fighting, but not enough to allow her to launch a major counter- offensive. After the war, they would turn Leningrad into an ‘international port’ and put pressure on the government to allow freedom of speech and religion, ‘in the full sense of those words. . Our lot, of course, will wriggle about just enough so that America and England back off and leave us to stew in our own juice. . In the end, we’ll find ourselves alone again with our Comintern, while the rest of the world remains democratic, parliamentary and capitalist, as we are accustomed to call the other side.’14 On the basis of these comments Zhilinsky was accused of ‘slandering Soviet reality’ and sentenced to death, later commuted to ten years’ imprisonment.
Most poignant, perhaps, of the yellowing papers in Zhilinsky’s prosecution file is an inventory of the contents of his flat. ‘The furnishings’, typed a policeman, ‘consist of two cupboards, two metal beds, a sofa upholstered in a checked fabric, a piano, a table, five chairs, a nickel-plated samovar, a hand-operated sewing machine, a lamp, a Red Guard gramophone and a circular wall clock.’ The wooden building in which he and Olga lived is long gone; at one end of the street there now stands a shopping centre, at the other a car dealership, shiny bonnets ranged at the diagonal against smooth new asphalt. Less changed, a block to the north, is the Serafimovskoye cemetery, its leafy muddle of headstones washed by a quiet flow of strollers, flower sellers and old women with besoms. A lumpen Brezhnev-era memorial inside the main gates commemorates the starvation dead, but the actual mass graves — a stretch of rough ground at the cemetery’s boundary with a timber yard — have been left to themselves. To people like Zhilinsky — innocent victims not of the war, but of wartime terror — there is no monument at all.
Part 4. Waiting for Liberation: January 1942–January 1944
Today I went to the clinic. Two topical notices had been posted up. The first — ‘Report children left without care due to death of parents to room no. 4’. The second — ‘The polyclinic does not issue exemption notes for labour duty’. And on the way home a notice pinned to a fence: ‘Light coffin for sale’. .
Dmitri Lazarev, April 1942
‘Will trade for food’, February 1942. On offer are gold cufflinks, a length of navy blue skirt material, patent leather boots, a samovar, a camera and a hand-drill.
18. Meat Wood
For the rest of the world, Leningrad’s agony took place out of sight and largely out of mind. Once the immediate threat to the city had receded, Allied eyes turned first to the battle for Moscow, then to an avalanche of losses in the Far East and elsewhere. The first month of Leningrad’s mass death — December 1941 — coincided with the fall of Hong Kong; the second with heavy losses of Atlantic shipping to German U-boats; the third with Japan’s capture of Singapore, together with 70,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen. As regards the Soviet Union, Britain and America’s aim was simply to keep her from collapsing altogether or making a separate peace, while resisting Stalin’s — and the British left’s — increasingly importunate calls for a second front. The first of the Arctic convoys carrying tanks, Hurricanes and other military supplies diverted from Britain’s Lend-Lease programme arrived in Archangel at the end of August, the prelude to four long years of acrimonious diplomacy. ‘Surly, snarly and grasping’, Churchill wrote later, ‘the Soviet Government had the impression that they were conferring a great favour on us by fighting in their own country for their own lives.’1
All along the Eastern Front, in January 1942, the Wehrmacht ground to a halt. Analysts have made fun of the Nazi generals’ post-war tendency to lay the blame for ultimate defeat in the East on the weather, the roads and Hitler’s bullying — on anything, in fact, except for their own mistakes or superior Russian skill in the field. This is unfair: even by Russian standards, the winter of 1941–2 was punishingly cold, and hit the German armies hard, most of all those of Army Group North. The sudden plunge in temperature, Hitler stormed over dinner at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on 12 January, was an ‘unforeseen catastrophe, paralysing everything. On the Leningrad front, with a temperature of 42 degrees below zero, not a rifle, not a machine-gun nor a field-gun has been working on our side.’2 Aircraft were grounded, tank and truck engines refused to start and horses waded in snow up to their
