Leningrad-headquartered Russian (as opposed to all-Union) Communist Party, and by a friendly visit to the city by a delegation from Tito’s independent-minded Yugoslavia.30 Revisionists argue that the purge was a shrewd power play, reasserting Stalin’s supremacy and balancing the Kremlin factions. Conventionally, and more convincingly, it was simply one of the last spasms of an ageing, paranoid mind.
In parallel with the ‘Leningrad Affair’, Stalin also launched, again with Malenkov’s and Beria’s encouragement, a Union-wide ‘war on cosmopolitanism’. Wartime harnessing of traditional values — the return of military ranks and insignia, honours named for Suvorov and Nevsky — now curdled into virulent anti-Westernism. It was the era of crackpot pseudo-genetics, of ‘city’ instead of ‘French’ bread, and of boasts that Russians had invented the radio, the aeroplane and the light bulb. People with foreign connections or Jewish surnames began to vanish daily (‘It used to be a lottery’, quipped one, ‘now it’s a queue’),31 and at Leningrad University colleagues gathered once again to accuse each other of ‘formalism’, ‘bourgeois subjectivism’ or ‘bowing to the West’. ‘All the professors’, Olga Fridenberg wrote of her classics department,
were ritually humiliated. Some, like Zhirmunsky, endured it elegantly and with flair. . but Professor Tomashevsky, a man not yet old, of cool temperament and caustic wit, very calm and unsentimental, walked out into the corridor of the Academy of Sciences after his examination and fell into a dead faint. The folklorist Professor Azadovsky, already weakened by heart disease, lost consciousness during the meeting itself and had to be carried out.
It has been calculated that Union-wide, so many Jews lost their jobs that by 1951 they held less than 4 per cent of senior government, economic, media and university posts, down from 12 per cent in 1945.32 The highest- profile victim was Molotov’s luxury-loving fifty-three-year-old wife Polina, formerly People’s Commissar for fisheries. A grotesque pseudo-prosecution, involving accusations of Zionist espionage and group sex, ended with her divorce from Molotov and a five-year sentence to the camps. For all the ugliness Fridenberg found an ugly new word — ‘
Akhmatova, though left at large, was made to suffer by proxy. One of the thousands arrested was her thirty-seven-year-old son Lev Gumilev, not long demobilised having fought all the way to Berlin. He had spent several years in the Gulag before the war, now he was sentenced to another ten, and, despite his mother’s petitions and obedient hackwork (a cycle of patriotic poems titled
The same year another old man died alone — Josef Stalin. The news was met with a mixture of stunned silence and intense, cathartic emotion. In schools, teachers led their pupils in mass lamentation; in communal apartments, people struggled to look solemn or burst into tears; in the camps, guards gathered in nervous huddles as prisoners yelled and threw their hats in the air. Hysterical crowds followed the great dictator’s funeral cortege in Moscow, but in Leningrad a man lost his Party card for twice turning off the radio during the orations and quietly carrying on with his work. ‘We were doubly besieged’, Likhachev had written, ‘from within and without.’35 The ‘siege within’ was not yet over: the Soviet Union would remain, and remain greyly repressive, for almost another forty years. But it would never be as bad again.
23. The Cellar of Memory
The chief memorial to the siege of Leningrad is the Piskarevskoye cemetery, in the city’s housing project and ring road-busy north-east. Opened in 1960, it is by Soviet standards a rather self-effacing complex, emphatically a place for mourning rather than victory celebration. The mass graves — big, grass-covered barrows, each marked (symbolically, since the burials were never so tidy) to a particular year — line a long central avenue. At one end an eternal flame wavers, transparent in the sunshine; at the other a statue of a broad-hipped woman in a long dress stands outlined against clouds and sky. The frieze behind her is carved with famous, untrue words from Berggolts: ‘No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten’.
Away from the central avenue, the mounds go on, shaded by limes and birches. Here they are less closely mown, and the dips between them soft with buttercups and cow parsley. One has a rabbit hole in its side. There are individual graves, too — nineteenth-century ones left over from the site’s days as an ordinary cemetery, and hundreds upon hundreds belonging to soldiers who died in Leningrad’s military hospitals, their young faces — handsome, jug-eared, freckled, Asian, with spectacles and without — gazing in fuzzy black and white from oval ceramic medallions. A loudspeaker system hisses into life — Beethoven’s Funeral March, the solemn chords distorted by the breeze and long use. When it snaps off again, the sounds are of birdsong and distant traffic.
Like all such places, the Piskarevskoye fails. Statues, landscaping, poetry — nothing can say all that should be said and felt about a tragedy on the scale of Leningrad. Perhaps, for a modern visitor, no adequate response is possible anyway. All one can do is take time, bring to mind, pay respect. Memorialising the siege has been problematic for the Soviet — now the Russian — state, too. Until Stalin’s death it was pushed into the background, an embarrassing reminder of the disastrous opening stages of the war. No memorial to the starvation dead was erected, they were cited but substantially undercounted at Nuremberg, and anti-begging decrees swept thousands of disabled ex-servicemen off the streets to the old monastery islands of Valaam in the far north of Lake Ladoga. The mass graves were fenced off and left to sprout nettles and brambles.
Some of the undergrowth was cleared under Khrushchev, who allowed the construction, following lively public debate as to a suitable site, of the Piskarevskoye complex, and the publication of Dmitri Pavlov’s outspoken (for the time) account of wartime food supply. It grew back again, in different form, under Brezhnev, who conscripted the siege into his cult of the Great Patriotic War, designed to substitute for the fading charms of Marxism-Leninism. In this version civilian suffering took the foreground again, but in abstracted, sanitised form. Extremes of horror were reduced to easy shorthand — cold, dark, a child’s sledge, a
Attempts to restore some reality to the siege story met determined resistance. When Harrison Salisbury published his classic (but itself romanticised, particularly as regards Voroshilov and Zhdanov)
The floodgates opened in the late 1980s, with Gorbachev’s policy of
