Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (53 page)

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 her old room next to Nikolai Punin’s in an annexe to the Sheremetyev Palace. Its windows were repaired thanks to Olga Berggolts, who begged help from a conservator at the Public Library. When she stressed Akhmatova’s importance, the man told her not to insult his intelligence – ‘I am literate!’ – and removed the necessary glass – ‘I think they will forgive us’ – from some framed prints of great nineteenth-century writers.

Churkin, both of his sons having died at the front and his wife of starvation, had nobody to come home to at all. Put up by friends, it was three days before he could bring himself to visit his own flat. It had been broken into:

An awful mess; the thieves had turned everything upside down. All the clothes – suits and coats – and valuables gone. Everything that didn’t interest them strewn about the floor . . . All I took was our photo album. Here they are, my darlings, looking silently up at me. I’ll never see them again. I felt such pain that I burst into tears.
10

Out in Yaroslavl, Irina Bogdanova was luckier. Though she too had lost her whole immediate family, she remembered the address of some family friends – four spinster sisters, of aristocratic Polish background, in whose tar-paper cottage in a dacha village east of Leningrad she had once stayed for the summer. On receiving Irina’s letter – written in a childish hand, with polite enquiries as to the health of their cat and dog – the two surviving sisters (the others had died of starvation) immediately made the journey to Yaroslavl and took Irina home, subsequently bringing her up as their own. As they saved her so she now preserves the memory of them – a clutch of turn-of-the-century studio photographs, printed on gilt-edged board, of handsome young women with tiny waists and thick, upswept hair. Their hats, wide and white, are topped with doves’ wings.

Leningrad also, of course, needed physical repair. Though nothing like flattened Kharkov, Minsk or Stalingrad – or even, according to people who saw both, London – it had been hit by over 150,000 heavy artillery shells and over 10,000 bombs and incendiaries during the siege.
11
Few were the unbroken windows, uncracked walls, roofs that did not leak. The Hermitage, miraculously only directly hit twice during the siege, put in a bill for sixty-five tonnes of plaster, a hundred tonnes of cement, six thousand square metres of glass, eighty tonnes of alabaster and six kilos of gold leaf.

As the city refilled, demand for undamaged housing increased, sharpening disputes between returnees and the new occupants, legal or otherwise, of their vacated flats. Ex-servicemen, and civilians who had been evacuated individually (the political and cultural elite), in theory got back their pre-war accommodation automatically, but civilians who had been evacuated with their workplaces (the rank and file) did not. In practice, even for the first two categories restitution often required bribery and pull. A law forcing the return of valuables bartered away at knockdown prices was not properly enforced either, and it was a common post-war experience to see a familiar picture hanging on the wall of a hard-currency shop, or a mother’s brooch on the lapel of a stranger.
12

The worst architectural losses were the imperial summer palaces. One of the first to see Pavlovsk, eight days after its liberation, was Anna Zelenova. Given permission, but no transport, to go and find out what had become of it, she set out on foot. It wasn’t a lonely walk, she gleefully wrote to a colleague in evacuation, because she was kept company by flocks of crows, circling above all the unburied German corpses. One had been propped up against a fence and a note attached: ‘Wanted to get to Leningrad. Didn’t make it’. At the entrance to Pavlovsk park she saw that the central pillar of its double gates had been demolished to make way for tanks. The park itself was cut about with shell craters, tree stumps, dugouts and firing points. In one bunker she found tapestries with swastikas cut out of them, in another oil paintings and a grand piano. Inlaid doors had been used to make footbridges across ditches, mahogany wardrobes turned into latrines. The palace itself – torched, like Peterhof, by the Germans on departure – had been burning for ten days:

The dome has gone, and the clock towers, and the Rossi library has burned to the ground, including its walls. There’s no right wing or throne room, no trellised gallery above the colonnades. The picture gallery has gone, the chapel, the whole Palace . . . Looking in through the ground-floor windows you can see the sky, and the only way you can tell which room is which is by the remaining fragments of plasterwork on the walls.

Inside, Zelenova found graffiti, remnants of parquet flooring like half-done puzzles, and piles of empty wine bottles. Charred beams still smoked and molten lead dripped from what was left of the roof on to her camera. The statue of Tsar Paul in front of the main entrance had been turned into a telegraph pole, his bicorne hat draped with cables. (‘I’m so glad that Pavel stands with his back to the palace.’)

In flattened Pushkin, the Catherine and Alexander Palaces stood equally in ruins, the Catherine in part because the Red Army had failed to defuse two sets of delayed action bombs, the second of which exploded on 3 February, more than a week after liberation: ‘A shameful disgrace – people should have been at their posts in the first few hours’, Zelenova’s colleague wrote back when she told him the news.
13
For years after the war his own job would be to scour the roads to Berlin for looted imperial treasures. Among those never found were the delicately carved panels of the Catherine Palace’s fabled Amber Room, given to Peter the Great by Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Hidden behind fake walls, they had quickly been discovered by the occupying Nazis, who packed them into crates and sent them to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in Eastern Prussia. Last seen in Königsberg’s castle, what happened to them next is a mystery. Treasure-hunters notwithstanding, today’s best guess is that they were destroyed by a fire which swept through the building a few days after it fell to the Red Army in April 1945.
14

The palaces’ deliberate destruction, according to the journalist Alexander Werth, ‘aroused among the Russians as great a fury as the worst German atrocities against human beings’. Like most, he initially assumed them to be unrestorable. Standing at the top of Peterhof’s grand cascade, soviet chairman Petr Popkov is said to have waved a hand at the blackened shell in front of him and declared ‘This will all be razed!’
15
Others thought the ruins should be left as a monument to Nazi brutality, or replaced by workers’ housing.

The decision to rebuild, taken by Stalin himself, was in tune with a new public mood that swept over the whole Soviet Union at the end of the war. First, everyone simply yearned for an easier, pleasanter, ‘normal’ life. Olga Grechina, scratching around for a respectable wardrobe for her new start at university, acquired new boots by taking the blades off a pair of skates. Marina Yerukhmanova, sacked from the Yevropa, adopted a stray St Bernard – the same breed her grandparents had owned – which she fed Eskimo ice creams and hoisted on to pavement weighing machines. (It had been rescued, she liked to think, by victorious
tankisti
from some abandoned German
Schloss
.) Nikolai Ribkovsky, the apparatchik who dined off ham and turkey at a Party rest-house in the middle of the mass death, looked forward to the day when he could afford to take a girl to the Mariinsky and treat her to coffee and cake in the interval. Botanists at the Botanical Gardens drew up a wish list of sunny countries to which they wanted to launch new plant-collecting expeditions – India, Madagascar, Java, Australia and Ceylon.
16