Leningrad

For Leningrad — now down to a fifth of its pre-war population — the second winter of the siege was nothing like the first. Again, households retreated into single rooms heated by smoky burzhuiki; again, they sealed up their windows and laid in stocks of food and firewood. But the winter was a mild one, more flats now had electricity and water, and ration levels were the same as Moscow’s: there was no repeat of 1941–2’s mass death.

While the battle of Stalingrad was still at its height, Stalin ordered another push to liberate Leningrad. Code-named Operation Iskra, or ‘Spark’, it was essentially a better planned, better equipped repeat of the previous August’s Sinyavino offensive. The Leningrad armies would force the Neva at three points along the river south of Shlisselburg; the Volkhov armies would thrust westwards, meeting up with them south of Ladoga. A preliminary attempt to drive tanks across the Neva failed, the ice proving not yet thick enough to bear their weight, and the operation was put off to 12 January, by which time the temperature had fallen to - 15 °C. Overseen by Zhukov, it began at first light, with a two-hour barrage from more than 4,500 guns. This time the tanks got across, on ingeniously designed pontoons that had been moved into place under cover of darkness and frozen into position with water sucked from under the ice. By the end of the day a bridgehead five kilometres long and one kilometre deep had been established on the Neva’s southern bank. By the 14th the two Soviet fronts were only three miles apart, and at 9.30 in the morning of the 18th they finally met, at peatworks that have gone down in history as ‘Workers’ Settlements nos 1 and 5’, but which were in reality outposts of the Gulag. Later the same day the Red Army liberated Shlisselburg. It was almost empty, all but a few hundred of its inhabitants having died of starvation, been sent away as slave labourers or fled together with the Germans.

In Leningrad, crowds gathered round the street-corner loudspeakers. ‘An extraordinary day’, wote Vera Inber on the 16th:

The entire city is waiting. . Any moment now! People are saying that our fronts — the Leningrad and the Volkhov — have joined up. Officially nothing is known. .

Somewhere guns are booming. The all-clear has just sounded. Ordinary siege life goes on, but everyone is waiting. Nobody says anything — nobody dares to, in case a wrong word gets to wherever our fate is being decided, and changes it all. I’m perplexed and bewildered. I can’t find a place for myself. I try to write and can’t.7

The official announcement came two days later, pasted up in massive lettering on posters all over the city. ‘The blockade is broken! The blockade is broken!’ exulted Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva. ‘What happiness, what joy! All night nobody slept. Some wept for joy, some celebrated, some just shouted. . We’re no longer cut off from the Motherland! We share a pulse!’8 ‘Everybody congratulates each other’, wrote Dmitri Lazarev, ‘recounts how and from whom they heard the news — how women ran out of the building managers’ offices, who kissed who, who crossed themselves. . Never mind the raids and the bombardments, however hard or frequent. The blockade is broken — it’s the beginning of the end!’9

It was the beginning of the end, but only that. The victory was cheap by Soviet standards (34,000 killed, missing or captured) but far from complete.10 The Red Army had broken the German hold on Lake Ladoga, but had cleared only a fragile corridor to the ‘mainland’, just five miles wide at its narrowest point. South and west of Leningrad, the German armies still crouched in the outer suburbs. (Fritz Hockenjos, peering from his new observation post — another monastery bell tower — on the Gulf of Finland, could see cars and pedestrians moving along the streets, and count the windows in a government building.11) In February 1943 a second operation, ‘Polar Star’, aimed to lift the siege completely by encircling Germany’s Eighteenth Army to the west, cutting its railway connection to the rear at Pskov. It failed thanks to rain, Hitler’s belated caution after Stalingrad, and to the Spanish Blue Division, which successfully defended its positions in vicious hand-to-hand trench fighting. (Hockenjos, who had earlier dismissed the Spaniards as ‘a great bunch of caballeros, dagger- wielders and operetta tenors’, presumably had to eat his words.)

The corridor did, however, allow the construction of a new thirty-four-kilometre temporary railway line into Leningrad, via a pontoon bridge over the Neva. The first train direct from the ‘mainland’ rolled into Finland Station on 7 February, to speeches, bunting and a brass band. Decorated with oak-leaf-wreathed portraits of Stalin and Molotov and a banner proclaiming ‘Death to the Fascist German Usurpers!’, it is said to have carried butter (‘for Leningrad’s children’) and kittens, the latter in great demand thanks to a plague of rats. Vulnerable to shelling until the Germans were finally pushed off the Sinyavino ridge in September, the line supplemented what were now well-organised ice and barge routes over Lake Ladoga.

Inside the city, the mood of 1943 became one of strained, wrung-out waiting — for a second front, for shelling and air raids to stop, for the war to end and normal life to resume. Everyone still suffered nagging hunger. The librarian Mariya Mashkova was overwhelmed by waves of depression, unable to take an interest in anything and exhausted by unshakeable thoughts of bread and kasha. Though her flat was now clean and warm, with working electricity, lavatory, telephone and radio, she felt constant exhaustion and irritation. At work tasks ‘slipped through her hands’, at home she felt guilty at her inability to take pleasure in her children. Her emaciated, rheumatic husband had closed in on himself, speaking little and sleeping ‘like a marmot’ in the evenings, while she resentfully darned socks or read The Brothers Karamazov. Her friend Olga Berggolts’s gossip about flirtations and jealousies at the Radio House she found incomprehensible, and the sight of a woman breast-feeding in a doctor’s waiting room almost repulsive. The baby would have been conceived, she calculated, in February or March of the previous year — ‘the months when people were collapsing in hundreds of thousands, dying of hunger, the morgues full, bodies everywhere, black wrinkled faces. And together with that, the start of a new life! Where did they find the strength, the desire?’

Shades of the mass death were still everywhere, most of all in the wrecked and filthy ‘dead’ flats from which it was Mashkova’s job to rescue books for the Public Library. Each had its tale of death, looting, suicide; of children arrested, gone to orphanages or simply missing. On 7 April 1943 she visited three such, one in particular ‘typical for Leningrad’:

Once there was a family of six. The father and eldest daughter leave for the Red Army and no more is heard of them. Nobody knows if they are alive or dead. The mother stays on in Leningrad with three children — mentally handicapped Boris, aged eight, Lida, aged thirteen, and Lyusya, fifteen. Bravely she tries to save them from death’s clutches, but can’t do it. In December Boris dies, in January Lida, and then, of hunger diarrhoea, the mother herself. The only one left is Lyusya — on a dependant’s card in a dark, cold, wrecked flat, covered in muck and soot. She drags herself to the market, sells things, then as a last resort, starts stealing from the neighbours. She was caught with stolen food cards and arrested; there’s been no news of her since March of last year. Perhaps she’s dead too. And what remains is a frightening, dystrophic room, full of filth and rubbish. No family — just two empty beds amid the chaos — all that’s left of a once-cosy home. Oh how familiar this is!

There were shades, too, of terror: Mashkova was summoned to the Big House four times, always late at night, in February and March. One meeting lasted an exhausting nine hours. Though she refers to the encounters only briefly and vaguely in her diary (‘I came home angry; I’m sick of complicated relationships’) she was almost certainly being asked to inform on friends and colleagues.

As winter turned to spring her life became superficially more cheerful. On Easter Sunday she and her husband got tipsy on five litres of beer and went shopping for clothes; on May Day they spring-cleaned their flat, had friends round to eat pirozhki and watched the children perform in a school concert. But her depression and self-disgust failed to lift.

Where can we find the strength to live happily, joyously, without endless worry? Why can’t the children be the basis for happiness? They are good children after all, and we should be living just for them. Why can’t we suppress the fear that the rest of our lives will be nothing but strain and effort?. . Is it really just the lack of a piece of bread and a bowl of soup? Are our inner resources really so meagre that this defines everything around us? 12