medieval, like it was in the winter’, wrote Berggolts in July,
but almost every day you see someone lying propped up against a wall — either exhausted or already dying. Yesterday on the Nevsky, on the steps of the Gosbank, a woman lay in a puddle of her own urine. A pair of policemen were hauling her up by the armpits, and her legs, wet and reeking, dragged on the asphalt behind her.
And the children, the children in the bakeries! Oh this pair — a mother and three-year-old daughter, with the brown motionless face of a monkey. Huge transparent blue eyes, frozen, staring straight ahead with accusation and contempt. Her taut little face was turned slightly upwards and to the side, her dirty, inhuman brown paw held out motionless in a begging gesture. . What an accusation of us all — of our culture, our life! What a judgement — nothing could be more merciless.50
Lazarev was haunted by a starving teenage girl who approached him outside a food shop, begging for a piece of bread to go with a herring head and telling him that she ‘lived without cards’. He gave her the makeweight from his family’s ration and looked out for her the next day, but never saw her again. The editor of a factory newspaper picked up a starving child in the street:
In the morning on the way to work, I saw a little boy all on his own. Now and again he sobbed, and I was struck by his odd, uncertain gait. I approached him, and he disconnectedly muttered that his mother had gone, that he wouldn’t have anything to eat until the evening. It was immediately obvious that he had lost his reason. His mind was wandering. He kept telling me about his father, and asked me to show him the way to the front. He was on his way to find him, but didn’t know how to get there.51
Like the Gulag’s ‘goners’, the still-starving acted as fearful reminders of mortality, objects of scornful mockery as much as of compassion. Lazarev’s daughter and niece learned the following popular rhyme, adapted from the words of a pre-war children’s song:
A dystrophic walked along
With a dull look
In a basket he carried a corpse’s arse.
‘I’m having human flesh for lunch,
This piece will do!
Ugh, hungry sorrow!
And for supper, clearly
I’ll need a little baby.
I’ll take the neighbours’,
Steal him out of his cradle.’52
To get rid of the physically useless, bosses used them to fill quotas of ‘volunteers’ for out-of-town logging camps and peat mines. Boldyrev, now enrolled at the Public Library, railed against the despatch to peatworks of a colleague, a ‘second-degree dystrophic’ and ‘sorry, clumsy creature’ quite incapable of digging for ten hours a day. ‘Work!’ he wrote angrily in his diary, ‘after a day of it they fall off their feet. Tomorrow she has to go. Cruelty, pointless cruelty.’ Four weeks later she returned and told him what it had been like:
For the strong it’s fine there — extra bread, lunch. The barracks are warm and have electric light. Many gain weight and apply to stay for the winter — the camp regime, of course, doesn’t bother them. But woe to the weak, because if you don’t meet your norm they cut your rations. Our unfortunate librarian — who could hardly stand even before she left — was down to a single bowl of wheat soup a day. And this on a first-category card — in other words, she wasn’t even being given the rations she was due. That’s the system. Everywhere, all the time, the weak are now being trampled and repressed, on principle. ‘Dystrophic’ has turned into a swear word — in workplaces, on the streets, on the trams. Dystrophics are despised, persecuted, beaten into the ground. If you’re applying for a job, the first requirement is not to look dystrophic. These are the morals of the second year of the siege.53
*In Moscow, Alexander Werth noted ‘cruel cardboard hams, cheeses and sausages, all covered in dust’.
20. The Leningrad Symphony
For the American and especially the British governments, the Soviet partnership had always been fraught with difficulty. For the first two years of the war (as even the least nationalistic Russians prefer to forget), the Soviet Union had not only been publicly dedicated to world revolution, but in alliance with Hitler. There had also been intense public anger at its invasion of Finland, during which the British and French governments seriously considered sending a joint expeditionary force to the Finns’ defence. Only when itself invaded by Germany did the Soviet Union abruptly turn from foe into friend.
Churchill, on hearing the news, immediately grasped that to sell this U-turn to the public he needed to draw a distinction between the Russian people and their government. He first did so in a speech broadcast on the very evening of Barbarossa, memorably declaring support for ordinary Russians — ‘I see the ten thousand villages of Russia. . where there are still primordial joys, where maidens laugh and children play’ — while continuing to condemn the regime — ‘No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I. . I will unsay no word I have spoken about it.’* Government information agencies were instructed to follow suit, but it was a hard balance to strike. The BBC, obliged to broadcast a generous quota of Russian material but to steer clear of ideology, stuck mostly to the nineteenth-century classics (a radio adaptation of
In early 1942 news arrived of something that promised brilliantly to transcend all these difficulties — a new symphony, written in besieged Leningrad, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Though he looked younger with his cowlick and owlish spectacles, Shostakovich was thirty-four when the war broke out. A child prodigy, he had entered the Leningrad (then Petrograd) Conservatoire at the age of thirteen and joined the Soviet musical establishment six years later, when his First Symphony was taken up by the great German conductor Bruno Walter. In 1936 his career went dramatically into reverse, when his
