Leningrad

less than 650,000 and not much more than 800,000. If a single figure must be given it should probably be about 750,000, or between one in three and one in four of Leningrad’s immediate pre-siege population.

*V.M. Kovalchuk and G.L. Sobelev ‘Leningradsky “Rekviyem”: o zhertvakh naseleniya v Leningrade v gody voiny i blokady’ Voprosy istorii 12 (1965) p191. Nadezhda Cherepenina ‘Assessing the Scale of Famine and Death in the Besieged City’ in John Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich (Eds.) Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941–44 London 2005, p28. See also Eleanor Martineau ‘Blokada mezhdu geroizmom i tragediyei (k metodike voprosa)’ Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Muzeya Istorii Sankt Peterburga 5 (2000) p253.

Appendix II

The Neva embankment, summer 1941

Newsboard outside the offices of Leningradskaya Pravda, July 1941

Rally at the Kirov Works, June 1941

September 1941: bomb damage, and peasant refugees outside the Hermitage

October 1941: courtyard of the Young People’s Theatre, after shelling

St Isaac’s Cathedral and Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great, boarded and covered with earth

Listening horns on the walls of the Peter and Paul fortress

Washing clothes at a broken pipe, and scavenging meat from a horse killed by shelling

A ‘well-fed type’ and a ‘dystrophic’; Ligovsky Prospekt, December 1941

The Nikitin family, January 1942. Nikolai Nikitin, a railway engineer, died of starvation related illness in April 1942, as did his mother, seated left. His wife and children survived and were evacuated from the city the following December. Th e picture was taken by Nikolai’s brother Aleksandr, who disappeared without trace during the winter of 1942–3.

February 1942, the peak of the mass death. In January, February and March 1942 at least 100,000 Leningraders died of starvation each month.

Evacuees on the Ice Road across Lake Ladoga, April 1942

Some of the thousands who died en route; Kobona, April 1942

Summer 1942: though outwardly the city returned to life, mortality remained high.

Victory salute; Troitsky Bridge, 27 January 1944

Reconstruction: Nevsky Prospekt, opposite the Beloselskikh-Belozerskihk Palace, 1944

Coming home: demobilised soldiers, July 1945

Notes

Introduction

1 Olga Berggolts, ‘Tragediya moego pokoleniya’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 18 July 1990, p. 5.

2 Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945, p. 238. The death rate among Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Nazis is reckoned to be even higher, at 55 per cent.

3 Professor Ulrich Herbert, interview with the author, Freiburg, April 2008.

4 The Times, 19 January 1943.

5 Commander Geoffrey Palmer; interview with the author, Sherborne, July 2007. Commander Palmer, who sadly passed away before this book was completed, was probably the last Englishman to have met Stalin. He described him as resembling ‘a benevolent grocer; someone who would make a good godfather to one’s children. He looked you straight in the eye, but then you realised that he was looking right through you and out the other side. It was rather uncanny.’

6 The diarist Vera Inber describes visiting the museum on D-Day: see her Leningrad Diary, p. 204. For an interview with the curator at the reopened museum see Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds, Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose, p. 170. See also Lisa Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments, p. 144. The book is a fascinating analysis of siege memorialisation up to the present — the ‘story of the story of the siege’, as Kirschenbaum calls it.

7 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, p. 14.

8 See Sergei Yarov, ‘Rasskazy o blokade: struktura, ritorika i stil’, Nestor, 6, 2003, p. 422.

Part 1. Invasion: June — September 1941

Chapter 1: 22 June 1941

1 Dmitry Likhachev, Reflections on the Russian Soul: A Memoir, p. 215.

2 Yelena Skrjabina, Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader, p. 3.

3 Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, A Book of the Blockade, p. 236.

4 Edward Crankshaw, ed., Khrushchev Remembers, London, 1971, p. 135.

5 Harold Shukman, ed., Stalin’s Generals, pp. 2, 319–20.

6 Solomon Volkov, St Petersburg: A Cultural History, p. 425.

7 G. Kulagin, Dnevnik i pamyat: o perezhitom v gody blokady, Leningrad, 1978, p. 17. Notes to Pages 14–28

8 Elliott Mossman, ed., The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910– 1954, p. 203.

9 Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945, p. 8.

10 John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany,vol. 1, p. 105.