Akhmatova, though left at large, was made to suffer by proxy. One of the thousands arrested was her thirty-seven-year-old son Lev Gumilev, not long demobilised having fought all the way to Berlin. He had spent several years in the Gulag before the war, now he was sentenced to another ten, and, despite his mother’s petitions and obedient hackwork (a cycle of patriotic poems titled
The same year another old man died alone — Josef Stalin. The news was met with a mixture of stunned silence and intense, cathartic emotion. In schools, teachers led their pupils in mass lamentation; in communal apartments, people struggled to look solemn or burst into tears; in the camps, guards gathered in nervous huddles as prisoners yelled and threw their hats in the air. Hysterical crowds followed the great dictator’s funeral cortege in Moscow, but in Leningrad a man lost his Party card for twice turning off the radio during the orations and quietly carrying on with his work. ‘We were doubly besieged’, Likhachev had written, ‘from within and without.’35 The ‘siege within’ was not yet over: the Soviet Union would remain, and remain greyly repressive, for almost another forty years. But it would never be as bad again.
The chief memorial to the siege of Leningrad is the Piskarevskoye cemetery, in the city’s housing project and ring road-busy north-east. Opened in 1960, it is by Soviet standards a rather self-effacing complex, emphatically a place for mourning rather than victory celebration. The mass graves — big, grass-covered barrows, each marked (symbolically, since the burials were never so tidy) to a particular year — line a long central avenue. At one end an eternal flame wavers, transparent in the sunshine; at the other a statue of a broad-hipped woman in a long dress stands outlined against clouds and sky. The frieze behind her is carved with famous, untrue words from Berggolts: ‘No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten’.
Away from the central avenue, the mounds go on, shaded by limes and birches. Here they are less closely mown, and the dips between them soft with buttercups and cow parsley. One has a rabbit hole in its side. There are individual graves, too — nineteenth-century ones left over from the site’s days as an ordinary cemetery, and hundreds upon hundreds belonging to soldiers who died in Leningrad’s military hospitals, their young faces — handsome, jug-eared, freckled, Asian, with spectacles and without — gazing in fuzzy black and white from oval ceramic medallions. A loudspeaker system hisses into life — Beethoven’s Funeral March, the solemn chords distorted by the breeze and long use. When it snaps off again, the sounds are of birdsong and distant traffic.
Like all such places, the Piskarevskoye fails. Statues, landscaping, poetry — nothing can say all that should be said and felt about a tragedy on the scale of Leningrad. Perhaps, for a modern visitor, no adequate response is possible anyway. All one can do is take time, bring to mind, pay respect. Memorialising the siege has been problematic for the Soviet — now the Russian — state, too. Until Stalin’s death it was pushed into the background, an embarrassing reminder of the disastrous opening stages of the war. No memorial to the starvation dead was erected, they were cited but substantially undercounted at Nuremberg, and anti-begging decrees swept thousands of disabled ex-servicemen off the streets to the old monastery islands of Valaam in the far north of Lake Ladoga. The mass graves were fenced off and left to sprout nettles and brambles.
