Leningrad

Sketch for a proposed memorial to the liberation of Leningrad (Aleksandr Vasilyev, February 1943)

22. Coming Home

The end, like the end of all great conflicts, left a vast silence — the silence of hushed sirens and guns, of the never-to-return missing and dead, and in Leningrad’s case, of grief and horror unexpressed, of facts falsified or left unsaid. It also meant new beginnings — militarily, of the great Soviet push to Berlin; privately, of facing up to loss and rebuilding lives; publicly, of repopulating and repairing an emptied and damaged city; politically, of new rounds of repression.

The end of the siege was not the end of the fighting. It took the Red Army only three weeks to push von Kuchler’s Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies back to the Estonian border, but until July 1944 to break the Panther Line and to expel them from the border citadel of Narva, dogged German resistance exacting a massive military death toll to book-end that of the opening months of the war. One of the fallen was Vasili Churkin’s seventeen- year-old son Tolya. In his free time, Churkin searched for his corpse, until he realised that ‘if I wanted to turn over every dead body on this little piece of ground it would take months and months. They were everywhere — along both sides of the roads, in the woods, in clearings. The Narva bridgehead was swallowing division after division.’1 In the six months from the start of Leningrad’s liberation offensive, more than 150,000 Soviet troops were killed, captured or went missing — often in the same sort of clumsy infantry charges that had cost so many lives two years earlier.2 Rejoining his men at Gatchina after Christmas home leave, Hockenjos was told ‘over and over how they had shot the Russians to bits and sent them packing — the Leningrad Guards, who attacked in large, unmissable groups, waving red flags’. Was it ‘Russian stubbornness’, he wondered, that made ‘fifty men come out of the forest in the middle of the day and march towards us through the snow across an open field’, or was it ‘the ice-cold devilry of some Commissar, sitting at the edge of the trees and sending out a company just so as to test our defences? Either way, we picked them all off easily with rifles, and didn’t even have to bother with our guns.’3

Commissar or no, the Red Army was advancing and the Wehrmacht retreating, scorching earth as it went. (‘I could shoot those Brandkommando lads’, Hockenjos worte in disgust, ‘running from house to house with their bundles of burning straw. Of course they’re following orders but they’re enjoying themselves too.’4) Fittingly, Army Group North met its end under siege itself, trapped on Latvia’s Courland Peninsula. Unable to admit that the war with Bolshevism was lost, Hitler did not allow it to start evacuating by sea until January 1945, by which time the Red Army was already entering Germany. More than 200,000 German troops were still defending the peninsula on VE Day — 9 May rather than 8 May to Russians — when they surrendered to General Govorov. A separate Soviet drive northwards through the Karelian Isthmus, led by Meretskov, ended with the Finnish armistice of 19 September 1944. (Churkin, quartered in an astoundingly neat Finnish farmhouse, saw Mannerheim’s plane flying overhead to Berlin, escorted by three Soviet fighters.) The border was redrawn as at the end of the Winter War, leaving Finland’s second city of Viipuri to Russia — where it remains, lovely but dismally neglected, to this day.

Leningrad’s liberation found now twelve-year-old Irina Bogdanova still with her children’s home in the Yaroslavl countryside. The announcement, she remembers, was greeted with shrieks of joy and flying pillows:

Then after a few minutes, in a corner of the dormitory, someone started crying. Then in another corner, another child, until we were all crying. And none of us wanted any breakfast or any lunch. Not until suppertime were the teachers able to coax us into the dining room. It was because we suddenly realised that nobody was waiting for us. Living in the children’s home we hadn’t thought about this, we’d just been waiting for the war to be over. Only with victory did we have to come to terms with life again, with all that we had lost.5

Olga Grechina, serving out her last months at Boarding School no. 43, celebrated with her colleagues:

The staff gathered together in the evening, instead of eating in their separate corners as usual. People brought out vodka; we sang, cried, laughed; but it was sad all the same — the losses were just too large. A great work had ended, impossible deeds had been done, we all felt that. . But we also felt confusion. How should we live now? For what purpose?6

Olga Fridenberg mourned her mother, spending long hours curled up in bed with her face to the wall, or mechanically tidying and sweeping:

Now I have so much time, I feel cast away in it. All around me it stretches away into infinity. I want to fill it by doing things, by moving about in space, but nothing helps. . Only late in the evening do my spirits revive somewhat — another day is over. Relieved, I lie down and for seven hours am blissfully unaware of time. . Waking up in the morning is frightful — that first moment of consciousness after the night. I am here. I am in time again.7

Evacuees started returning in large numbers in the summer of 1944, more than doubling Leningrad’s population in twelve months and bringing with them breaths of Central Asia and the deep Russian countryside. One girl, fresh from a farm on the southern steppe, missed riding horses bareback out to pasture and instead took to climbing the city rooftops — ‘five floors or higher, and the steeper the better’. A friend of Vera Inber’s brought home a spinning wheel, which she plied in between playing Beethoven sonatas.8 Soldiers started coming home a year later, in the summer of 1945. Brought up to believe in the backwardness of capitalism, they had been astonished by their glimpse of German living standards, even in wartime. Why, many wondered, had the Germans bothered to invade, when they already had so much themselves?

Slowest to return were surviving POWs. Of the approximately 4.5 million Soviet servicemen taken prisoner in total during the war, about 1.8 million were still alive at its end, the remainder having been executed (if Jewish or Party members), or killed by starvation and disease. Many died on forced marches westward as the Wehrmacht retreated. The Red Army, when it reached their camps, promptly reinterned the survivors and subjected them to ‘filtration’. Standard questions were ‘Why didn’t you shoot yourself instead of surrendering?’ ‘Why didn’t you die in the prisoner-of-war camp?’ and ‘What assignments were you given by the Gestapo and the Abwehr?’ — plus, for those liberated by the Allies, ‘What assignments were you given by Anglo-American intelligence?’ Lev Kopelev, a politruk arrested for protesting at the Red Army’s mass rape of German and Polish women, found himself sharing a cell with two young Leningraders. Captured at the age of twelve, when the Wehrmacht overran their Pioneer camp near Luga, they had been sent as slave labourers to Germany, then back to the Russian front to work as spies, at which point they immediately crossed to the Russian lines and gave themselves up to the first Red Army unit they found. Though Kopelev assured the boys that they would soon be freed and allowed home, what in fact happened to them he never knew. He himself was convicted of the usual ‘anti-Soviet activity’ and sent to the Gulag, where he remained until 1954.9

Reunions (for those lucky enough to have them) were often difficult. Children failed to recognise their parents, parents no longer knew their children, spouses found each other changed and alien. Even the city looked different — lean and hard, hollow-eyed, gap-toothed, shrapnel-pocked. Elated to be home again, Anna Akhmatova was met at the railway station by her pre-war lover, the pathologist Vladimir Garshin. They had agreed, via letters, to marry, and that Akhmatova would take his name. Now she discovered that he had changed his mind. Akhmatova pretended to herself that Garshin had lost his reason (‘The man who means/Nothing to me now. . Wanders like a ghost on the outskirts/The back streets and backyards of life’) but in fact he had simply fallen in love with someone else.Humiliated, Akhmatova cut all dedications to him from her poems, and moved back into