Some of the undergrowth was cleared under Khrushchev, who allowed the construction, following lively public debate as to a suitable site, of the Piskarevskoye complex, and the publication of Dmitri Pavlov’s outspoken (for the time) account of wartime food supply. It grew back again, in different form, under Brezhnev, who conscripted the siege into his cult of the Great Patriotic War, designed to substitute for the fading charms of Marxism-Leninism. In this version civilian suffering took the foreground again, but in abstracted, sanitised form. Extremes of horror were reduced to easy shorthand — cold, dark, a child’s sledge, a burzhuika — and heartbreaking moral and social breakdown was transformed into an uplifting redemption story. Leningraders had been selfless, disciplined heroes, unwavering in their faith in ultimate victory. Simply by surviving in the city they had helped to defend it, and when they died of hunger they did so nobly, in a sort of ecstatic trance. From this martyrdom they had emerged tempered, purified, a special race. Leningrad boys and girls, the cult’s most extravagant rhetoricians urged, should only marry each other.1
Attempts to restore some reality to the siege story met determined resistance. When Harrison Salisbury published his classic (but itself romanticised, particularly as regards Voroshilov and Zhdanov) The 900 Days in 1969, it was attacked not only by Pravda, in an article signed by Zhukov, but by the Western left.2 It was not published in Russian until 1994, six months after Salisbury’s death. The ground-breaking oral history A Book of the Blockade, compiled by the historian Ales Adamovich and the novelist Daniil Granin, similarly came under fire when first published in 1979, despite over sixty excisions by the censors. The gag applied not only to the siege, but to particularist ‘Petersburg’ history writing in general. Shostakovich’s amanuensis Solomon Volkov, trying to get a book on Leningrad composers published in the early seventies, was faced with this ‘over and over. The very concept of Petersburg or Leningrad culture was being quashed. “What’s so special about this culture? We have only one culture — the Soviet one!”’3
The floodgates opened in the late 1980s, with Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost or ‘openness’, precursor to the collapse of Communism and the entire Soviet Union. Suddenly it became possible to subject the siege to genuine analysis. Wartime terror could openly be criticised for the first time; so could the senseless waste of the People’s Levy and the tragic inadequacies of the evacuation and rationing programmes. Uncensored personal accounts streamed into newspapers and journals, their unadorned fact-telling and often bitter tone acting like paint-stripper on the Brezhnevite myth of universal staunchness and self-sacrifice. Adamovich and Granin were able to fill out their Book of the Blockade with sharper diary extracts (such as those of Yuri Ryabinkin, the teenage boy abandoned by his mother), and with material on cannibalism and the ‘Leningrad Affair’. Several revelatory document collections appeared, most startlingly from the archives of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the NKVD. Zhdanov’s reputation — hitherto that of a wise and beloved war leader — took a plunge, and his name was removed from schools, factories, a battleship and the Black Sea port of Mariupol. The biggest renaming was that of Leningrad itself, which on 1 October 1991, after a closely fought referendum, became again Sankt-Peterburg — to English-speakers, St Petersburg.4
