Frequent air raids added to the strain, alerts averaging slightly over one per night from January through to May.13 Shelling — worse in the first half of the year — became so accurate that tram-stops had to be moved and the newly reopened Aurora and Youth cinemas closed again.14 Barrages now fell into an established pattern, coinciding with morning and evening journeys to work. They were extra heavy on public holidays (on 1 May 1943 Vera Inber’s building ‘swayed and rocked like a swing’), and when news came through of (now frequent) Soviet victories. Well-established ‘lucky’ spots included Aleksandrinskaya Square, with its statue of Catherine the Great surrounded by her generals and courtiers, and the Radio House, said to have lead foundations dating from its days as the Japanese consulate. Unlucky ones were the Liteiniy or ‘Devil’s’ Bridge, the square in front of Finland Station, nicknamed ‘the valley of death’, and the corner of the Nevsky and Sadovaya, opposite the Public Library. On 8 August Mashkova’s children narrowly missed being killed there on their way home from a fishing expedition: ‘Suddenly they appeared, words tumbling out about severed limbs, blood, a crushed lorry — then all in the same breath about the three little fish they had caught, still flapping in their net. I kissed them, hugged them, was overjoyed and at the same time felt completely broken.’15
Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva still lived on the Vyborg Side with her maid Nyusha, whose only son had been killed at the front the previous year. During air raids they slept in the hallway, Ostroumova-Lebedeva on a folding chair, Nyusha on a trunk. With each impact the building ‘jumped’; pans fell off the shelves, spent shot from anti- aircraft guns pattered like dried peas on the roof and new cracks appeared in the ceiling. Once a bomb splinter flew in at the window and lodged in a chair, and they knew that if an incendiary landed in the attic the building would almost certainly burn down, since there were no other residents left to stand guard duty. In the mornings the pavements were covered with broken glass, crunchy and glittering. Ostroumova-Lebedeva was kept going by work — her first post-starvation woodcut was a special moment, tools slicing as surely as ever into smooth, golden board — and by the kindness of a loyal circle of friends, mostly younger women artists. For her seventy-second birthday, on 15 February 1943, they brought her a candle, half a litre of milk (for which the giver had walked five kilometres each way to a hospital), a small packet of tea, three sweets and two tablespoons of coffee. Nyusha presented her with a bar of kitchen soap. ‘All welcome and useful presents. . [We] didn’t talk about food, rations, bread, dystrophy and so on, but about books, creativity, art — about the things close to my heart, by which I live.’ In the summer she started going for walks, mourning damage to favourite buildings and picking the clover and buttercups that grew amidst tall grass along the edges of the pavements. The weeds made her feel as though she were walking on ‘free earth, in a field somewhere. . These humble flowers, so delicate and fleeting, bring my soul instant peace and happiness.’
There was more escapism in going over her girlhood diaries, with their notes on turn-of-the-century trips to Italy and watercolour sketches of Lugano and the Simplon Pass. On quiet days she wrote them up in the hospital gardens, amidst slit trenches and vegetable plots. During raids she sheltered in her windowless bathroom, writing on a board balanced across the washbasin. In the midst of a barrage on a hot night in late July a friend telephoned to ask if she was all right:
In between the whistles and bangs of the shells I shouted, ‘We’re still here! We’re still here!’ And remembering that she’d been abroad I added, ‘For God’s sake, tell me what those flowers are called, that grow high up in the snow, in the Alps. I’ve been trying to remember all day!’
‘Cyclamen!’
‘Yes, yes, cyclamen!’
A few days later she and Nyusha had a near miss when a shell hit the roof two rooms away and penetrated down to the bottom floor. Thereafter they went to a shelter during raids, but did not move out.
Barrages also disrupted work at the Sudomekh shipyard. On 18 April thirty-one shells hit Vasili Chekrizov’s workshop, forcing it to relocate. ‘My girls were in there when it started’, he noted approvingly, ‘but before they left they locked up. Good girls. . By evening everyone had turned glazier, boarding up the windows with plywood.’16 When not repairing bomb damage, much of his time was spent battling on behalf of his staff with bureaucracy:
Interesting fact. A girl came out of hospital, went to her hostel. It had moved. Where to, nobody knew. No belongings, money or cards. The district soviet sent her to us. Processing will take six days. She spent last night outdoors in a courtyard. Today is a Sunday, so we can’t register her, and without registration we can’t give her a place in our hostel. Nor can she get new cards. . I decided to send her to the allotment organisers, but even there she can’t get cards before Tuesday. Without cards she’ll go hungry, and in three days she’ll be back in hospital as before. . So I arranged with the canteen that they’ll feed her today and tomorrow, but will they actually do it? That’s an example of the kind of work I’ve been caught up in for the last ten days. Everywhere there’s a shortage of hands, and the ones we do have, we use unproductively.17
Alongside these routine concerns, Chekrizov also continued to play his part in the virtual reality of workplace politics. At a meeting in July, the shipyard’s Party organisation staged a mini-purge. One man was sentenced to death and seven to lengthy prison terms, for colluding in food theft with senior management and for ‘preparing to welcome the Germans’. Despite having been unjustly expelled from the Party himself in the 1930s, Chekrizov seems to have no doubts about the latter charge, asking his diary ‘How did the Partorg miss it?’
In other institutions too, repression ground on. Yakov Babushkin, the lively and outspoken radio producer who had organised the Shostakovich premiere, was sacked from the Radio House in April; he thus lost his exemption from the draft, and was killed at the front a few weeks later.18 At the Yevropa hotel-turned-hospital, Marina Yerukhmanova, the twenty-one-year-old who had survived the mass death working as an orderly, was called to give evidence in the trial of its senior administrator, a man adored by the staff for his fairness, openness and charm. Defended only by Marina — who had naively assumed that others would speak up for him too — he was found guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, ‘plus endless other numbers and letters. The whole alphabet, apparently, did not suffice to enumerate his crimes.’ Marina — stunned by the sight of her boss unshaven, beltless and with a look of bitter resignation on his face — was given the sack, together with her mother and sister.19
Following the partial breakthrough of January 1943 the north saw little serious fighting for several months. An early spring thaw hindered troop movements, and save for another unsuccessful attempt to widen the land corridor to the ‘mainland’ in July, attention turned to the centre and south, where the Red Army’s great post- Stalingrad counter-offensives were gathering speed. Rostov-on-Don was liberated in February; Kharkov, following July’s great tank battles outside Kursk, at the end of August. On 3 September Stalin finally got his second front, when the Allies landed in mainland Italy.
Outside Leningrad, meanwhile, trench life fell into a quiet routine. South of the Kirov Works soldiers treated visitors to home-made pickled cabbage and salted cucumbers. On the Volkhov, Vasili Churkin slept a lot, collected wild raspberries, watched his general exercising with dumbbells in the mornings and wrote his diary at a desk equipped with a kerosene lamp, inkwell, box for nibs and glass filled with wild flowers. Elsewhere soldiers used dynamite to fish for bream and pike, distilled
