In the endlessly repeated summations of what had happened in Leningrad and what it all meant, heroism overpowered human suffering, finally swallowing it altogether. This was what always happened. As I was growing up, the mantra of heroism was like a stick with which we were constantly hit over the head, rendering us incapable of making sense of the war in almost any other terms. But, in reality, the Siege of Leningrad could not begin to be contained by the story of high patriotism. It was too devastating, too confronting, too awful for that. What were people to eat when there was nothing to eat, when their daily ration was the legendary one hundred and twenty-five grams of bread – if you had a ration card, that is. But what if it was stolen, or you were not entitled to one, like many temporary residents stranded there by the war? Before their mothers’ eyes, the malnourished children of the city shrivelled into dystrophic old nannas and grandpas, then died from hunger and cold. (The first winter of the siege was the worst in living memory.) One by one, people of all ages simply collapsed in their homes, on the streets and stairwells, and died on the spot, their bodies lying around until trucks traversing the city for no other purpose than this finally arrived to collect them. Officially, around six hundred and fifty thousand lives were lost in besieged Leningrad. The real figure is more than one million, and some estimates even push it close to two million. Which means, at the very least, every third resident of the city.
In the 1970s Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich, two writers who had themselves fought in the Great Patriotic War, decided to collect stories of blokadniki, the name given to the survivors of the siege. Their Book of the Blockade remains the best account of the siege I have read to date. Initially published in a heavily censored form, it was reissued unabridged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Granin had been a soldier on the Leningrad Front, Adamovich a partisan in the Belarusian forests. But even those experiences could not prepare them for the stories they heard. In the end they found that the heroism of the siege survivors and victims was of a domestic quality, ‘an intra-family, intra-apartment’ type, rather than a patriotic mass sacrifice on the altar of embattled motherland. The heroism of blokadniki unfolded not in the ideologically inscribed public sphere of conflict but within homes and families. Private and interior, it inevitably coexisted with other hidden aspects, far more unsavoury, that were also absent from the patriotic history of the siege: the lesser parts of human nature that sometimes could be traced to the sheer extremity of the siege experience and sometimes to people’s rotten insides, as in the case of some privileged cadres who kept themselves warm and fed at the expense of others, or of the scum who killed people for their ration cards. Inevitably, there were cases of cannibalism too.
After everything they had heard, exhausted and made ill by the stories of people’s suffering, Granin and Adamovich became convinced that during the siege people treated each other ‘much more sincerely, humanely and mercifully than at the end of the 1970s’. So many blokadniki managed not to become indifferent to the suffering of others, despite being pushed to the absolute limit by their daily experiences. In contrast, that very indifference gradually became accepted as the social norm in the decades after the war. Heartlessness was no longer seen as a great personal failing. As they were going from one apartment to another (often the very same apartments in which blokadniki had lived through the siege, and which decades afterwards were for the most part in a terrible, shameful state of disrepair) they asked themselves what their book was ultimately going to be about. After circling around, Granin and Adamovich invariably would come back to the same thing. Their Book of the Blockade was, first of all, about the intelligentsia. Leningrad was a city with a very strong tradition of intellectual, cultural and spiritual life. The fact that this tradition persisted right through the siege is well-known. Its most celebrated manifestation is, of course, Dmitry Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, written and first performed in the besieged city. But there were other remarkable signs of this life: new theatre plays were staged, museums were opened and well-patronised, students continued their education, Leningrad radio kept on broadcasting, and a group of architects worked on the plans for the city’s revival after the war.
Dear Diary,
Last night we went to see Leningradka – a puppet show about the blockade of St Petersburg (Leningrad at the time). It was amazing, stunning, touching, intelligent, creative, heartbreaking, terrifying and unlike anything I’d seen before.
‘Leningradka’ is the word for a female resident of Leningrad. The play’s subtitle is ‘Puppet Parable for Adults’. Leningradka, which fuses puppetry and cinema, is based on a real-life story about a young girl left all alone during the siege. She survived by hiding in a wardrobe and staying there throughout the siege. So as not to go insane, she made up fairy tales.
When you entered the small room, which contained seating for less than fifty, all there was was a large see-through screen, a speaker in front of it and a phone at the side, but otherwise that was all. When it began you saw an old woman with a mischievous smile, the type that says, ‘I know something you don’t know.’ I, as a child, was sitting in the front row, and so it felt like I was in the projection with the old lady walking around the black-and-white ruins where she used to live. As the old woman continues to walk, she becomes a child again.
The mischievous old lady goes back to being a twelve-year-old girl, Valechka, in Leningrad during the war.
Valechka the child creeps through her house past her distressed sleeping mother into the hallway. Her mum is lying with her back to Valechka, but there is a shot in which we can see she is crying. Valechka creeps into the kitchen and you can see her father. Her narrative voice starts telling us, ‘For the last few days Papa just sits with a smile on his face and barely talks. Mamma cries and doesn’t want him to go. They don’t speak to each other.’
Papa is about to leave for the front, and Mamma cannot bear to see him leave.
Valechka’s father has a lolly in the palm of his hand, just one lolly, so small, for us it is nothing but for them it is the size of a day’s food. The lolly is from the domovoy – a little creature that guards their building. ‘You put milk under the table, and when you wake up in the morning the milk is gone and in its place is a lolly,’ Papa says to Valechka.
A domovoy is a house spirit, a poltergeist that looks after a building and its inhabitants, engaging them, regularly but rarely in the flesh, in the intricate rituals of give-and-take. Normally, which is to say in peacetime, a domovoy manifests itself playfully by knocking, slamming doors and, when no one is looking, gobbling up treats left for him, most commonly milk.