For Lidiya Ginzburg’s starvation-numbed ‘Siege Man’ the first emotions to return were irritation — at leaking galoshes, broken spectacles, clumsiness in handling gloves and shopping bag in a crowded food shop — and impatience, the ‘sense of lost time’. Next came grief, and its close companion, guilt:
Siege people forgot their sensations but they remembered facts. Facts crept slowly out from the dimness of memory into the light of rules of behaviour which were now gravitating back to the accepted norm.
‘She wanted a sweet so much. Why did I eat that sweet? I needn’t have done. And everything would have been that little bit better.’. . Thus Siege Man thinks about his wife or mother, whose death has made the eaten sweet irrevocable. He recalls the fact but cannot summon up the feeling: the feeling of that piece of bread, or sweet, which prompted him to cruel, dishonourable, humiliating acts.7
One such guilt-ridden survivor was Olga Berggolts, whose epileptic husband Kolya had died in hospital in February. She poured sorrow and remorse into her diaries — why hadn’t she visited him every day? Why hadn’t she been there at his death? Why hadn’t she taken him some of the biscuits her sister sent from Moscow? How, most of all, should she feel about her colleague at the Radio House, Yuri (Yurka) Makogonenko, with whom she was still conducting a passionate affair?
Today, all day, I’ve had visions of Kolya, of how he was when I made my second visit to the hospital on Pesochnaya. His swollen hands, covered in cuts and ulcers. How he carefully gave them to the nurse so that she could change the bandages, all the time anxiously mumbling, making it hard for me to feed him, making me spill the precious food. I was in despair and in a fit of anger bit him on his poor swollen hand. Oh you bitch!. . I was tired of him. I betrayed him. No, that’s not right. I didn’t betray, I just proved weak and callous. How Yurka calls me now! But this means cheating on Kolya! I DID NOT CHEAT. Never. But to give my heart to Yurka is to cheat on him. . I’m unhappy in the full, absolute sense of the word. . I hope that every terrible thing that can happen, happens to me.
This torrent of emotion coincided with the popular and official success of her long poem
He writes ‘Contact whoever you can — Beria etc. — but get me out of here’. He has been travelling since 17 March. They are fed once a day, and sometimes not even that. In his wagon six people have already died, and several more await their turn. . My God, what are we fighting for? What did Kolya die for? Why do I walk around with a burning wound in my heart? For a system under which a wonderful person, a distinguished military doctor and a genuine Russian patriot, is insulted, crushed, sentenced to death, and nobody can do anything about it.8
Though she managed to get a meeting with the secretary of the NKVD Party organisation it achieved nothing: ‘We had a “chat” (I can’t even talk about this without shaking with hatred). He took my petition and promised to pass it on to the Narkom this evening. Will they do anything? Hard to believe.’ The case was indeed shuffled back to Leningrad (‘simply to rid themselves of the bother’) and her father not allowed to return home until the war was over.
Berggolts’s despair was compounded by Muscovites’ ignorance of events in Leningrad. Like the military disasters of the war’s first months, starvation had been kept out of the news. Though newspapers mentioned ‘food shortage’ they did so seldom and in passing, instead making ghoulish play of civilian deaths by German shelling and bombing.9 Internally, euphemisms were coined to disguise the tragedy’s stark simplicity: instead of ‘hunger’ or ‘starvation’ (the same word,
