The political situation, however, made a dispassionate aesthetic discussion of the symphony’s merits unfeasible, which had a negative effect on its postwar reputation. For many years it disappeared from the repertory of Western orchestras, a victim of both artistic ostracism and cold war mentality. But the symphony’s startling and, for many, unjustified move beyond the notice of connoisseurs to the large Western audience during the Allied coalition became an important support for the international fame of Leningrad as a martyred city. The Seventh Symphony became an acceptable universal symbol of Leningrad’s suffering. Its success in America and Britain boomeranged back to the Soviet Union and forced
This “love for Leningrad,” decreed from on high, was the result of the city’s special status as a strategic besieged fortress, symbolizing the heroic efforts of the Soviet people to repulse the German invaders. The German blockade lasted from September 1941 until January of 1944. Those twenty-nine months were the most tragic in the city’s existence and entered history as the 900 Days, during which between one and two million of the almost three million inhabitants of the city were lost to bombings, shellings, disease, and, most of all, to starvation. The exact figure for the victims of the blockade will probably never be determined, like that for the victims of the city’s original construction. Soviet statistics are notoriously unreliable and, in the case of the siege of Leningrad, the authorities tried to hide and distort the actual situation for political reasons, so that the hopelessly muddled existing data will always be open to different interpretations. In those months the 240-year-old curse of Eudoxia seemed about to come true: “Sankt-Peterburg will stand empty!”
Historians continue to debate whether the defense of the city was needed or justified from a military point of view. Should Stalin have ceded the city and thereby spared the civilian population its suffering? It is almost certain that Leningrad’s capitulation would not have saved it. Hitler thirsted for its destruction more than Stalin had before the war. The two evil spirits hovered over the city, nearly annihilating it by their joint efforts. Many other cities might have succumbed under such pressure. But Leningrad’s stubborn, proud spirit prevailed.
The worst scourge was hunger. Workers were given 200 grams of bread per day and members of their families, 175 grams (two thin slices). White-collar workers received the same rations. Shostakovich, who had been evacuated to Kuibyshev, wrote to a friend in 1942, “I get occasional letters from Leningrad that are incredibly painful to read. For instance, my dog has been eaten, several cats have been eaten.” An eyewitness recalled the conversation of some students in a bread line: “They found that cat meat was quite good—like rabbit. The unpleasant part was killing the cat. It defends itself desperately. If you go about it wrong, you can get seriously scratched.”141
In the first months of the blockade, pet birds were eaten, canaries and parrots; then came the turn of street birds, pigeons and crows. Then the hungry turned to the mice and rats. With amazing inventiveness, people tried to extract the edible components of everything around them: they scraped flour paste from wallpaper and book bindings, boiled leather belts, used up all kinds of medicines and drugs, petroleum jelly, and glycerine. They ate dirt—the peat around Leningrad was considered nutritious and one could trade a piece of bread for two mugs of peat.
There were periods when up to thirty thousand people a day died of hunger. Yevgeny Shvarts recalled, “The first to die of hunger in our building was a young actor named Kramskoy, who was rumored to be the artist’s grandson. He died instantly—fell down in the hallway.”142 Olga Freidenberg wrote of the same thing:
People walked and fell, stood and toppled. The streets were littered with corpses. In pharmacies, doorways, entries, landings, and thresholds there were bodies. They lay there because people threw them there, like foundlings. The janitors swept them out in the morning like rubbish. Funerals, graves, and coffins had been forgotten long ago. It was a flood of death that no one could handle. The hospitals were crammed with mountains of thousands of corpses, blue, emaciated, horrible. People pulled bodies silently down the street on sleds. They sewed them up in rags or simply covered them, and they were all long, dried out somehow like skeletons.… Whole families vanished, whole apartments with several families. Houses, streets, and blocks vanished.143
