The city cannot—whatever losses it sustained in the nine hundred days of the blockade—weaken its historical push, its drive, its will. It is used to being in the front ranks—always, unfailingly. This city on the Neva has been entrusted by the people to bear Lenin’s name, to protect his name—and the city has responded worthily…. O father city, accept my filial greetings, offered with trembling heart! The whole country honors you, your medals and wounds, your victories and your labor, which serve as examples for all. And everyone knows that you will speak bravely to the country once again.1
Vishnevsky, a crafty propagandist, offered an artful mix of truth and lies. It was true that Leningrad’s moral status after the war against Hitler was higher than ever. There was briefly no impediment for the nation’s heartfelt respect for Leningrad’s suffering to surface unchecked. This allowed the mythos of Leningrad the martyr city to take root in the national consciousness. Additionally, the mythos took on international resonance—an extremely important circumstance for Russia, which even under Stalin jealously followed its image abroad.
The result was a radical change in the city’s image from that of the previous hundred years or so. A symbol of oppression turned into a symbol of suffering. Morally and culturally, this was an incredible triumph. Now Leningrad wore a double halo: an architectural marvel celebrated in story and song and a city of majestic exploits and unmatched suffering.
But did Leningrad, exhausted by the Great Terror and the siege, have the strength for the “historical drive” so grandiloquently described by Vishnevsky?
The truth was that the stifling of the city, which began after the capital was moved to Moscow from Petrograd in 1918, had continued unabated for many decades. It was a process initiated by Lenin and continued after his death by Stalin. Culture was the great victim because in a centralized state it was supported exclusively by subsidies from above. The artist Milashevsky observed, “The great city dried up like a great river. Water was leaving the soil. There was no cash or it was cut. Moscow was taking all the money and all the people’s energy and initiative.”2
Back in 1919 a clever poet had suggested joining Petrograd and Moscow and calling the new city Petroscow. (This project was resuscitated a half century later; then the megalopolis was to be called Moscowleningrad.) Nothing came of this plan, but it reflected the spirit of the times and the desire of some Leningraders to at least retain a link with capital status.
In practice, the stifling process involved a shift of talent out of Leningrad into Moscow. In the early thirties several leading Leningrad ballet dancers, including Marina Semyonova and Alexei Ermolayev, moved to Moscow. Leningrader Viktor Semyonov became the new artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater’s ballet school. Fyodor Lopukhov even became (albeit briefly) the chief choreographer of the Bolshoi.
The Petersburg poet Mandelstam ended up in Moscow, trying to explain it thus:
It was then too that Mandelstam wrote, “Living in Petersburg is like sleeping in a coffin.” The writer Valentin Kataev called the Leningrad of that era a “strange, half-dead kingdom.”
Stalin’s Great Terror and the almost nine-hundred-day German siege of Leningrad had together ruined the city almost irreversibly. In 1944 there were fewer than six hundred thousand people left. The city’s water, sewage, and central heating systems were destroyed, its trolleys and buses not functioning. When the writer Ilya Ehrenburg came to the city in 1945, he was stunned: every house was scarred. But the passersby on Nevsky Prospect depressed Ehrenburg even more. There were so few native Leningraders! Kataev imagined that the soul of Leningrad had “flown away like a bee swarm that abandoned its lovely hive.”
Anna Akhmatova returned from evacuation in June 1944 and later recalled how she had been struck by the “terrible ghost that pretended to be my city.” Akhmatova told a friend then, “The impression of the city is horrible, monstrous. These houses, these two million shadows that hover above us, the shadows of those who starved to death. It should not have been allowed to happen. It was a monstrous mistake by the authorities.”
But Leningrad, revived, albeit slowly. The moral basis of that rebirth was the growing awareness of the city’s heroic survival. The poet Olga Berggolts put it thus:
