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
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.
1 Dmitry Likhachev, Reflections on the Russian Souclass="underline" A Memoir, p. 215.
2 Yelena Skrjabina, Siege and Survivaclass="underline" 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.
11 Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, pp. 401–2; Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 37.
12 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944, p. 24.
13 Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, eds, The Halder War Diary, 1939–1942, p. 313.
14 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 11; Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 14–15; Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, pp. 142, 147.
15 Field Marshal von Kleist, in Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hilclass="underline" Germany’s Generals, Their Rise and Fall, p. 182.
1 Yelena Skrjabina, Siege and Survivaclass="underline" The Odyssey of a Leningrader, p. 4.
2 Andrei Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade: sbornik dokumentov, doc. 197, p. 466.
3 Richard Bidlack, ‘The Political Mood in Leningrad during the First Year of the Soviet-German War’, The Russian Review, 59, January 2000, p. 99.
4 Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, doc. 197, p. 466.
5 Interview with Dr Lyuba Vinogradova, Moscow 2007.
6 Andrei Dzeniskevich, ‘The Social and Political Situation in Leningrad in the First Months of the German Invasion: The Social Psychology of the Workers’, in Robert Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds, The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, p. 78.
7 Lidiya Ginzburg, Chelovek za pismennym stolom, p. 579.
8 Ibid., p. 91. Notes to Pages 28–40
9 Katherine Hodgson, Voicing the Soviet Experience: The Poetry of Olga Berggolts, p. 67; Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, pp. 121–2.
10 Leon Gouré, The Siege of Leningrad, p. 59.
11 Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, p. 151.
12 Skrjabina, Siege and Survival, pp. 10–11 (1 July 1941).
13 O. I. Molkina, ‘Nemtsy v koltse blokady’, Istoriya Peterburga, 3, 2006, pp. 62–4.
14 These numbers are derived from two NKVD documents. The first, in Dzeniskevich’s document collection Leningrad v osade, p. 442, of 1 October 1942, gives a total of 58,210 Finns and Germans deported to date. The second, in Nikita Lomagin’s document collection Neizvestnaya blokada, vol. 2, p. 37, of 4 April 1942, gives a total of 35,162 Finns and Germans deported during the second half of the previous month. The March 1942 deportations were mostly from towns and villages around the city.
15 Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds, Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose, pp. 37–9.
16 Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, pp. 441–2; John Barber and M. Harrison, eds, The Soviet Home Front 1941–1945, London, 1991, p. 66; Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, pp. 385–6.