Leningrad полностью

Most poignant, perhaps, of the yellowing papers in Zhilinsky’s prosecution file is an inventory of the contents of his flat. ‘The furnishings’, typed a policeman, ‘consist of two cupboards, two metal beds, a sofa upholstered in a checked fabric, a piano, a table, five chairs, a nickel-plated samovar, a hand-operated sewing machine, a lamp, a Red Guard gramophone and a circular wall clock.’ The wooden building in which he and Olga lived is long gone; at one end of the street there now stands a shopping centre, at the other a car dealership, shiny bonnets ranged at the diagonal against smooth new asphalt. Less changed, a block to the north, is the Serafimovskoye cemetery, its leafy muddle of headstones washed by a quiet flow of strollers, flower sellers and old women with besoms. A lumpen Brezhnev-era memorial inside the main gates commemorates the starvation dead, but the actual mass graves — a stretch of rough ground at the cemetery’s boundary with a timber yard — have been left to themselves. To people like Zhilinsky — innocent victims not of the war, but of wartime terror — there is no monument at all.

‘Will trade for food’, February 1942. On offer are gold cufflinks, a length of navy blue skirt material, patent leather boots, a samovar, a camera and a hand-drill.

For the rest of the world, Leningrad’s agony took place out of sight and largely out of mind. Once the immediate threat to the city had receded, Allied eyes turned first to the battle for Moscow, then to an avalanche of losses in the Far East and elsewhere. The first month of Leningrad’s mass death — December 1941 — coincided with the fall of Hong Kong; the second with heavy losses of Atlantic shipping to German U-boats; the third with Japan’s capture of Singapore, together with 70,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen. As regards the Soviet Union, Britain and America’s aim was simply to keep her from collapsing altogether or making a separate peace, while resisting Stalin’s — and the British left’s — increasingly importunate calls for a second front. The first of the Arctic convoys carrying tanks, Hurricanes and other military supplies diverted from Britain’s Lend-Lease programme arrived in Archangel at the end of August, the prelude to four long years of acrimonious diplomacy. ‘Surly, snarly and grasping’, Churchill wrote later, ‘the Soviet Government had the impression that they were conferring a great favour on us by fighting in their own country for their own lives.’1

All along the Eastern Front, in January 1942, the Wehrmacht ground to a halt. Analysts have made fun of the Nazi generals’ post-war tendency to lay the blame for ultimate defeat in the East on the weather, the roads and Hitler’s bullying — on anything, in fact, except for their own mistakes or superior Russian skill in the field. This is unfair: even by Russian standards, the winter of 1941–2 was punishingly cold, and hit the German armies hard, most of all those of Army Group North. The sudden plunge in temperature, Hitler stormed over dinner at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ on 12 January, was an ‘unforeseen catastrophe, paralysing everything. On the Leningrad front, with a temperature of 42 degrees below zero, not a rifle, not a machine-gun nor a field-gun has been working on our side.’2 Aircraft were grounded, tank and truck engines refused to start and horses waded in snow up to their bellies, so that to move from place to place troops had to shovel a path by day along the route their transports were to take at night. Soldiers stole clothes and bedding from local peasants (Soviet cartoons guyed them as comical ‘Winter Fritzes’, dressed in headscarves and frilly bloomers), or fell prey to frostbite and exposure. The Spanish ‘Blue Division’, despatched by Franco to aid the war on Communism, were so named, the press jeered, for the colour not of their shirts but of their faces.