Interesting fact. A girl came out of hospital, went to her hostel. It had moved. Where to, nobody knew. No belongings, money or cards. The district soviet sent her to us. Processing will take six days. She spent last night outdoors in a courtyard. Today is a Sunday, so we can’t register her, and without registration we can’t give her a place in our hostel. Nor can she get new cards. . I decided to send her to the allotment organisers, but even there she can’t get cards before Tuesday. Without cards she’ll go hungry, and in three days she’ll be back in hospital as before. . So I arranged with the canteen that they’ll feed her today and tomorrow, but will they actually do it? That’s an example of the kind of work I’ve been caught up in for the last ten days. Everywhere there’s a shortage of hands, and the ones we do have, we use unproductively.17
Alongside these routine concerns, Chekrizov also continued to play his part in the virtual reality of workplace politics. At a meeting in July, the shipyard’s Party organisation staged a mini-purge. One man was sentenced to death and seven to lengthy prison terms, for colluding in food theft with senior management and for ‘preparing to welcome the Germans’. Despite having been unjustly expelled from the Party himself in the 1930s, Chekrizov seems to have no doubts about the latter charge, asking his diary ‘How did the Partorg miss it?’
In other institutions too, repression ground on. Yakov Babushkin, the lively and outspoken radio producer who had organised the Shostakovich premiere, was sacked from the Radio House in April; he thus lost his exemption from the draft, and was killed at the front a few weeks later.18 At the Yevropa hotel-turned-hospital, Marina Yerukhmanova, the twenty-one-year-old who had survived the mass death working as an orderly, was called to give evidence in the trial of its senior administrator, a man adored by the staff for his fairness, openness and charm. Defended only by Marina — who had naively assumed that others would speak up for him too — he was found guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, ‘plus endless other numbers and letters. The whole alphabet, apparently, did not suffice to enumerate his crimes.’ Marina — stunned by the sight of her boss unshaven, beltless and with a look of bitter resignation on his face — was given the sack, together with her mother and sister.19
Following the partial breakthrough of January 1943 the north saw little serious fighting for several months. An early spring thaw hindered troop movements, and save for another unsuccessful attempt to widen the land corridor to the ‘mainland’ in July, attention turned to the centre and south, where the Red Army’s great post-Stalingrad counter-offensives were gathering speed. Rostov-on-Don was liberated in February; Kharkov, following July’s great tank battles outside Kursk, at the end of August. On 3 September Stalin finally got his second front, when the Allies landed in mainland Italy.
Outside Leningrad, meanwhile, trench life fell into a quiet routine. South of the Kirov Works soldiers treated visitors to home-made pickled cabbage and salted cucumbers. On the Volkhov, Vasili Churkin slept a lot, collected wild raspberries, watched his general exercising with dumbbells in the mornings and wrote his diary at a desk equipped with a kerosene lamp, inkwell, box for nibs and glass filled with wild flowers. Elsewhere soldiers used dynamite to fish for bream and pike, distilled
