‘That night,’ says Valechka, ‘was the only night when I did not want morning to come.’ She said that line with such pure sadness and you forgot she was just an actress… Next morning her father leaves to fight at the front, leaving two weeping women behind. Some unknown time later you see Valechka fill a bowl with water and walk over to the wall to scrape some of the wall into the water, making it white, like milk. She places it under the table and stays there a bit, waiting for the domovoy.
By this stage there is nothing to eat. When hunger started in Leningrad, people ripped wallpaper off their walls and ate the flour paste with which they were initially plastered.
Then you can see the shots of these endless planes dropping bombs in lots of hundreds, blowing up Leningrad. Bombs start blowing up near Valechka and her mum, and suddenly a bomb blows up right where they are. ‘Mamochka (Mummy),’ cries out the small petrified voice of Valechka, ‘Mamochka, Mamoch… kkka…’ Valechka can barely whisper and her only reply is cold heartless silence and more bombs, her mother’s murderers. Valechka comes up to a small shattered window and opens it and whispers into the dark night, ‘Domovoy, domovoy, prixodi ko mne domoy.’ (’Domovoy, domovoy, come to my house.’) Then Valechka hides herself in the cupboard. The image zooms out, making itself seem further away and suddenly a puppet appears. The puppet is the domovoy.
The domovoy, with his vast, piercing eyes and rough, greying beard, looks like a friendly janitor. His hands grip a broom. He exudes sadness and bewildered, steadfast devotion. He is visibly tired. This war is ophaning his building – those inhabitants who have not left are dying one by one. Valechka is the last one of his wards. As long as she is alive, he will not abandon his duties.
Before I saw this play I had seen rather primitive puppet plays that were not well crafted or just stupid, so I was worried that it would be the same in this play, but I was so mistaken I cannot describe it. The puppets were detailed and intricate, realistic yet out of this world. Handmade by a master with so much care and love it was like in Pinocchio – they were the creator’s children. They were everything I could have dreamed of and more. I shall not continue describing the play but will tell you that the show continued and only got sadder and sadder. Other puppets are revealed – the selfish rat, HUNGER, and a Nazi soldier who opens his coat and inside is another puppet, COLD. The play was so touching that in the end there was not a single person dry-eyed.
In Russia, there is a longstanding puppeteering tradition. During the Siege of Leningrad, puppet plays continued to be performed in the city by Demmeni Marionette Theatre at 13.00 on the dot, when the punctual German military would take a lunchbreak and the bombing of the city would temporarily subside. Poet Samuil Marshak even wrote a satirical play entitled Young Fritz, especially for the theatre. After a long season in the city, it toured the frontline in the Leningrad region and Karelia. More than six hundred performances starring the puppets of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and the rest of the gang were staged in the forests of the region. According to eyewitnesses, during those performances whole forests would be shaking with laughter. OK, this was during the war; but in peacetime, all those years later, who would have thought that a puppet play about the Siege of Leningrad could be so unforgettable?
As words, statistics, images, even eyewitness accounts, HUNGER and COLD have become deeply ossified, but as puppets they come to life. They are terrifying and real, but they are also small, inept and childlike. Other puppets in the show are just as affecting – a lonely tram that crosses the city; a sledge that in the siege woud have been used for transporting water and corpses; a truck carrying mandarins to the kids of Leningrad across the thin ice of Lake Ladoga via the legendary ‘Road of Life’ (Doroga Zhizni), the only route that connected the besieged city with the mainland. The ice breaks and the truck with its precious cargo sinks. The puppets are so ‘intricate’ (as Billie says in her diary entry), so tiny and fragile, they are the opposite of the standard larger-than-life stories of the siege, its victims and survivors. Everything is scaled down. The large historical canvas is replaced by the intimacy of the room and the puppet play. The shouting is brought down to a whisper.
After the show, Billie can barely move. Slowly, as if she has not walked for months, she comes to me and sits on my lap, hugging me tightly and letting go of all the tears she has tried hard to ration during the performance – the room is small and, being in the first row, she knew that this was not the time or place for uncontrollable sobbing. This is the best, the tightest, the most gut-wrenching hug of our trip. We do not move for a long time. Through my own tears I see Marina watching us, moved by the way Billie has been unravelled by the story of her city. All she says when Billie separates herself from me is, ‘Billie, you need to know about what happened here.’ And then all of us get up, keeping that slowness in our bodies, and walk outside, carefully hanging on to each other. After days of constantly harassing Billie because of my insatiable desire to see her floored by history, pinned to her chair by some cultural artefact, affected with a capital ‘A’, I feel deeply ashamed of myself. All this prodding of my daughter’s ‘thick skin’, breathing disappointment on her withdrawn face, willing her to surrender to the power of Art. Get off her case, you fool. Stop stalking her, I say to myself. Love her, trust her and, for crying out loud, just let her be.
‘The heroism of defenders and residents of Leningrad, who had endured the toughest of ordeals but did not surrender our native city to the enemy, will forever remain in the memory of our people.’ These words were in the history text we used at school. I repeat them to myself the night after the play, noticing something I had never noticed as they were hammered into me in my youth: the city’s defenders come first, and only then its residents. The three million Leningradtzi are lumped together with the Leningrad Front soldiers – exhausted, undernourished and outnumbered as we were constantly told – as well as the entire Soviet people united in their ‘heroic quest for liberation’. Blokadniki in this formula are no more than a part of the great heroic whole. The not too subliminal message is clear – without the entire nation fighting, suffering and dying together, Leningrad would have been starved to death. The suffering of blokadniki is diluted and dispersed. This suffering seemed inevitable and unsurprising when I learned about it at school. It strikes me now as maybe one of the greatest injustices in twentieth-century history.
The rest of the Soviet nation was not to learn about Leningrad’s plight before January 1942. The official story of the siege, which emerged straight after the war and persisted more or less unchanged for decades, went as follows: Leningrad did not fall, not because of its people but thanks to the visionary leadership and the colossal assistance provided to the city by the Party and by Comrade Stalin personally. Of course after 1956 and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, at which Khrushchev made his famous repudiation of ‘certain aspects of the cult of personality’, the figure of Stalin was less often centre stage, but until his death in 1953 Stalin had to be inserted right at the heart of this and every other victorious war narrative. The Siege of Leningrad was formally recognised as an expression of the heroism of the Soviet people, wrote Granin and Adamovich, but ‘in reality, all the top officials of the city, all the people who attempted to get the defence and provisions going and then the evacuation; all the people who organised the work of factories, the rebuilding of the destroyed parts of the city and electrostations – were subjected to repressions’. This wave of top-secret repressions against the city’s leading officials and community leaders, which occurred between 1948 and 1950, became known as the Leningrad Affair or Leningrad Case (Leningradskoe Delo). Its victims’ alleged ‘crime’ was a concerted campaign to oppose the city of Leningrad to the Party, the Soviet people and to Stalin himself, drunk as they were on ‘the self-delusional’ and self-congratulatory perception of the city’s achievements in the war and during the siege most particularly. To put it bluntly, in all its obscenity, they were accused of conspiring to use the Leningrad Party cell as the basis for the subversion of the Party’s Central Committee.