As Mr Randolph Churchill expressed a desire to see the 'inside of a Soviet home', which he had not succeeded in doing in Moscow, I asked Mr Rakhlin, who happened to be in bed with a cold, whether he would care to be visited by Mr Churchill and talk to him about his experiences during the blockade, on which he is very interesting. Rakhlin seemed to welcome the suggestion and Mr Churchill and I visited him on 16 November at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Rakhlin was in bed but talked with irrepressible vivacity about himself and the blockade, and answered all Mr Churchill's questions with great readiness and ease. His wife presently entertained us handsomely with vodka and a solid meal of fish and chicken. The flat, which is off the Nevsky, consisted of three rooms; it was small and gloomily but not uncomfortably furnished, and was approximately such as might have been found in Clerkenwell or Islington, though very much barer, furnished with the heavy German furniture of the 1880s and '90s common in Russia, with no bric-a-brac of any kind. Rakhlin spoke of the days during the siege when 125 grams of bread and no other food was the maximum and total ration allowed civilians, and of the fact that although a great many books were sold to him at that period by families of the dead and evacuated, his customers were too feeble for lack of food to be able to carry away heavy books, and chose either thin volumes or tore chapters out of novels or histories to carry away separately through the frozen streets. He gave gruesome details of the difficulties of burial of the dead, and a very graphic account of the taste of carpenters' glue, which he used to dilute with a little cold water to drink as a soup.
Although stories have reached Moscow that Popkov1 and not Zhdanov was regarded by the citizens as the saviour of Leningrad, Rakhlin confirmed the general view that Zhdanov was regarded as having been, more than any other man, responsible for keeping up morale in the city, and said that without Zhdanov's convoys across the frozen Lake Ladoga, he, Rakhlin, could not have saved the life of his old mother, who had miraculously survived. Old people and children died in their thousands during this period, everyone assured us, the total number of dead from hunger alone being somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200,000 to зоо,ооо.2 Among his customers Rakhlin proudly claimed Molotov, Beriya (the head of the NKVD), the Patriarch Aleksis,3 and the Leningrad Rabbi - he said that he himself frequently attended services at the Central Synagogue in Leningrad, which was normally very crowded and was getting a particularly good 'cantor' from Odessa that year - and wondered if he could be invited to England one day to see how 'real' bookshops were run. Towards the end of the visit he presented Mr Churchill with a volume on Leningrad for himself, and one published in 1912 and commemorating the retreat of Napoleon in 1812 for Mr Winston Churchill, who, his son had earlier remarked, was a passionate collector of Napoleoniana.
Rakhlin's harrowing story of the blockade was more than confirmed by others. The critic Orlov told me that virtually all children born during that period had died. He himself had been able to keep alive only as a result of the special rations issued to intellectuals thought to deserve them, for example himself as well as
Petr S. Popkov, as First Secretary of Leningrad's Provincial Committee (i.e. mayor of Leningrad), was responsible for maintaining the supply lines across Lake Ladoga, organising rationing and evacuating writers. Stalin, who had always felt theatened by the power of the government in Leningrad, and jealous of Popkov's status as local hero, later had him liquidated - along with most of Leningrad's wartime city government. Popkov was shot after being tried in the famous 'Leningrad Affair' of 1949-50.
This estimate was far too low: today the figure is believed to be nearer one million.
Aleksis Shimansky, Metropolitan of Leningrad, elected Patriarch February 1945.
Rakhlin, who was rated for rationing purposes as a 'second-rate writer' (the 'first-rate' and 'classical' authors are relatively well off). The only persons actually evacuated by special aircraft first across the German lines to Moscow and later to Tashkent were Zoshchenko, the short-story writer, and the poetess Akhmatova, on direct orders of Stalin. Both had at first refused to leave but ultimately bowed to authority. They and Orlov said that most of their friends died during the blockade, since, being non-essential civilians, they were virtually condemned to death by the order of priorities for food and fuel. One of them remarked that to him personally Leningrad was now a graveyard. Miss Tripp was told that many people who had been through the blockade were still subject to fits of giddiness, and that general health had steeply declined as a result - a rise in mortality was expected during the next few years, unless nutritional measures are taken to prevent this, which seems unlikely.
All the writers to whom I spoke begged for English books, which they said had been singularly difficult to obtain through VOKS,1 which was an inefficient and obstructive organisation; and indicated methods by which this might be done. We talked at great length about English and American literature, and three out of the four writers with whom I had more than casual conversations spoke of Mr Priestley's recent visit and address to the Writers' Club; and indicated very insistently that they did not rate him too highly as a writer, although he did obviously possess a high degree of professional skill. They found it hard to believe that he was really regarded in England as one of the greatest of her authors, and the heir to the great Dickens's mantle - though he told them that that had been said of him. While they found him affable enough personally they thought it queer that in his article for the Moscow Literary Gazette, in dealing with the present state of English letters, he should have damned every one of his contemporaries with praise of varying degrees of faintness, conveying throughout that their later works invariably represented a decline from sometimes promising
1 Acronym of 'Vsesoyuznoe obshchestvo kul'turnoi svyazi s zagranitisei' (All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries).
beginnings. One of them finally asked outright why His Majesty's Government should have chosen Mr Priestley, whose achievement as a dramatist is neither ideologically nor artistically so very important (his novels are not known widely), as the literary ambassador of Britain. I tried to explain that it was VOKS and not His Majesty's Government which had arranged Mr Priestley's trip, but this was met with scepticism both in Leningrad and in Moscow, where Mr Priestley's criticisms of the British social order did not seem to register and very similar views of him are to be heard, at any rate among the well- established writers.
During one or two frank conversations about the condition of Russian life and letters which I had with the Leningrad writers, they said that they knew of no exceptionally gifted Russian authors under forty, although there was a great deal of enthusiasm and energy and considerable industry among them. The 'line' at present was to devote attention to the lesser-known parts of the Soviet Union, such as Siberia or Tadjikistan, as the nursery of much brilliant new talent about to spring to life with the advance of education and civic consciousness; and that while this might be repaid in the long run, it led for the moment to the encouragement of, and publicity for, a mass of pseudo-archaic lyrics and bogus ballads and epics and official poetry generally, which were driving out whatever originality there was among these primitive or semi-medieval peoples. They asserted with much pride that the Leningrad literary papers were commend- ably free from this incubus, which cluttered up the pages of the Moscow literary weekly, although they made an exception in favour of Georgian and Armenian literature, which contained works of true genius. For their own part they are not ashamed of the tradition of Pushkin and Blok, Baudelaire and Verhaeren, and would not exchange them for all the poetical treasures of Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan, whatever might be the fashion 'in Moscow'; and more on the same lines.