bitter tone acting like paint-stripper on the Brezhnevite myth of universal staunchness and self-sacrifice. Adamovich and Granin were able to fill out their Book of the Blockade with sharper diary extracts (such as those of Yuri Ryabinkin, the teenage boy abandoned by his mother), and with material on cannibalism and the ‘Leningrad Affair’. Several revelatory document collections appeared, most startlingly from the archives of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the NKVD. Zhdanov’s reputation — hitherto that of a wise and beloved war leader — took a plunge, and his name was removed from schools, factories, a battleship and the Black Sea port of Mariupol. The biggest renaming was that of Leningrad itself, which on 1 October 1991, after a closely fought referendum, became again Sankt-Peterburg — to English-speakers, St Petersburg.4
Still important guardians of the siege story are the dwindling band of blokadniki themselves. For them the siege is not history but acute, lived experience, and their memories of it, as Olga Grechina puts it, ‘a minefield of the mind. You only have to step on them, and you explode. Everything flies to hell — quiet, comfort, present-day happiness.’5 Memory triggers lurk in wait all around — a particular outdoor tap or fire hydrant, the drone of an aeroplane or the squeak of sled runners, the smell of joiner’s glue or just the sight of untrodden snow on a city pavement. One man never puts up a New Year’s tree, because it reminds him of the one underneath which his father lay dying of hunger; others always detour round particular streets or bridges. For Grechina, one day in 1978, it was the smell of a bonfire, drifting in at her window. Having for years given the conventional version of the siege in talks to students, she sat down at her desk and wept and wrote for two days and nights, releasing a torrent of long-pent-up grief and anger. Siege-time behaviours have stuck, too — blokadniki say they cannot leave food on their plates, throw away even the stalest bread, or pass a discarded piece of wood without wanting to take it home to feed a non-existent burzhuika. Survivors’ guilt, though never given this name, is common, expressed in many cases as distress at not having secured a relative a proper burial. One woman, not knowing where her father is buried, visits the Piskarevskoye each year on his birthday, and lays flowers on every individual grave she can find whose occupant had the same Christian name or date of birth. She never, she remarks, has flowers enough.6
Many survivors have blocked out the siege entirely, never talking about it even to close friends and family. Others — as Grechina once did — have adopted the possible-to-live-with Brezhnevite version, subsuming their own acutely painful memories into a larger, safer story. But even for those who wanted to talk frankly, making themselves heard could be difficult. ‘Inside’, wrote Marina Yerukhmanova, there was always this question — Can’t I just talk about it how it was? Sometimes I wonder why we kept quiet. Probably because it was somehow not done to talk about it. . Every time conversation touched on the blockade, it seemed that everybody knew everything already — they’d read about it, heard about it, seen the films — and repetition of the details would give neither satisfaction to the teller nor understanding to the listener.
We too watched the films, read what was written about those times. But though your stomach turned upside down, somehow none of it put across the feeling of those days.
Blokadniki often complain that nobody is interested in the siege any more. ‘Each generation has its own wars — Afghanistan, Chechnya’, says one. Another describes giving a talk about the siege to young offenders, and getting no reaction except when she showed them how scurvy had left her with only six teeth.7 Grechina stresses the tension between siege veterans and post-war incomers to Leningrad, who she claims used rudely to grab blokadnik-reserved seats on public transport, justifying themselves on the grounds that in their villages ‘everyone starved too’.8
That the siege took a back seat was true in the 1990s, when the fashionable subjects were the Terror and the Gulag, but is not so now. The last decade has seen the publication of dozens of memoirs and diaries, albeit usually in tiny print runs or in academic journals. The flood continues: just in the time it has taken to research this book several important new accounts have appeared, and more will doubtless continue to emerge from dusty files and top-of-the-wardrobe suitcases.
There has also been a last-minute effort to collect oral testimonies from the remaining siege survivors. Though interviewing blokadniki often tells one more about the strategies the mind employs to make the unbearable bearable than about the siege itself, it is nonetheless a compelling exercise. Sitting at a zakuski-covered kitchen table, in a mahogany-panelled backroom of the Public Library or in a shiny new cafe, these women — they mostly are women — were actually there. They were the muffled black and white figures shuffling along a snowy street, they themselves queued outside the bread shops, hoisted buckets of water up ice-covered stairs, watched their own flesh fall away and discolour, their parents and siblings fade and die. The events of the siege are distant and strange, but they happened not so very long ago, to that woman sitting right in front of me, insisting that I take another slice of bread and butter and a fresh cup of tea.
Blokadnik interviewees are, by definition, psychological survivors, people who have adapted or come to terms with tragedy to the extent of being able to relate it on demand to a stranger with a notebook. It is nonetheless immensely touching how they tend to stress the positive — the bits of luck that came their way, the self-denial of mothers, the kindnesses of strangers. They dislike being labelled heroes — they were just children, they point out; the heroes were the adults who saved them. Irina Bogdanova, rescued from her corpse-filled flat seventy years ago, keeps saying ‘I was lucky’ and ‘I was blessed’ — blessed to have been picked up by conscientious Komsomol girls, blessed to have been adopted by the spinster sisters who became her new family. The only time tears come to her eyes is when she tells of a petty cruelty — that of the new occupants of her family’s flat, who, when she called round at the end of the war, refused to let her in. The sole personal possession she retains from childhood is a brass crucifix of her mother’s, which they handed her, wrapped in newspaper, through a crack in the door.
This reluctance to judge, this magnificent determination to focus on scant human kindness rather than abundant human callousness, is a different thing from Soviet-era pasteurisation. Ironically, it is not the siege survivors themselves but their sons and daughters — the generation currently in their sixties and seventies rather than eighties and nineties — who are most protective of the conventional Soviet narrative. Actual blokadniki are anxious to stress the siege experience’s closed, stony quality; its complete lack of redemptive value and the depth of damage done. I interviewed the historian Anzhelina Kupaigorodskaya, who lived through the first siege winter entirely alone save for occasional visits from her factory-tied father, sitting rather awkwardly on a sofa in a corridor in the Academy of Sciences. ‘All those stories’, she said, ‘of girls too weak to stand roped to lathes, clutching their dolls — they’re just post-war sentimentality.’ In reality the siege was drab, hard and horrible. No human being should have to live through such a time. As we parted she struggled to her feet, gripping my arm. Now that my questions were over this was the important thing, the point she was determined to get across.
Russians’ attitude to the Second World War in general is uncomplicated: fierce pride in having won a just war; fierce hatred of an enemy who wanted to destroy them. Other considerations — the pre-war purge of army officers, the Nazi — Soviet pact, the military blunders, the massacre of Polish POWs at Katyn, the wartime arrests and deportations — are (sometimes reluctantly) acknowledged, but beside the point.
The fact remains that Russia’s Great Patriotic War — as it is still mostly called — was won at unnecessarily huge cost. Of this the blockade of Leningrad is perhaps the most extreme example. Nazi Germany initiated the siege, with purposive and inhuman deliberation, but it was the Soviet regime that failed to evacuate the civilian population in time, to lay in food stocks, to stamp out food theft or to organise the Ice Road properly. It was also the Soviet regime that threw away thousands of young lives in the People’s Levy, and continued to imprison and execute its own humblest and most patriotic citizens even as they died of hunger. Had Russia had different leaders she might have prepared for the siege better, prevented the Germans from surrounding the city at all, or, indeed, never have been invaded in the first place.
Counter-factual history only takes one so far. This book is designed in part to correct Soviet myths, and as such, dwells on the negative. What it does not argue is that Leningrad should have been surrendered. The Nazis, too, would have let civilians starve to death, as they did in other Russian cities they occupied. All the city’s remaining Jews would have been rounded up and murdered. The 300,000 Axis troops pinned down outside Leningrad (15–20 per cent of the Eastern Front total) would have pushed further east, meaning a longer war, even greater swathes of Russia fought over and occupied, and a heavier burden on the other Allies. Finally, Leningrad
