A few years ago I wrote a book about the siege of Leningrad, a brutal chapter of World War II history. Sitting in my office, working my way through dozens of heart-wrenching siege diaries, the cheerful noise of children in the school playground opposite came as a blessed relief. Today I’m at my desk in the same room. The playground — like the whole street — is oddly quiet; the school closed and neighbours behind doors so as to slow the spread of the coronavirus. And though the crises are so different as to make direct comparison absurd, in the silence faint — very faint — echoes can be heard of Leningrad’s great urban Calvary of nearly eighty years ago.
Starting in September 1941, when the Germans ringed the city, and ending in January 1944, when the Red Army finally smashed German lines and started pushing towards Berlin, the siege of Leningrad killed somewhere between 650,000 and 800,000 people. Some were killed by bombs or artillery, others by dysentery and typhus. But the large majority died of starvation. One can’t imagine a modern European city the size of present-day Chicago losing up to a third of its population to simple lack of food.
Civilian behaviours during the first siege winter that led to mass death went through distinct stages. First, as the Germans approached, came denial, bolstered by official insistence that the fashisti were on the run, and food stores full to bursting. Individuals havered between staying or going. Some panic-bought — prudently, as it turned out. Others took the opportunity to rent cut-price dachas for the summer holidays.
Second, once the siege ring had closed and government food stocks began to run low, came disbelief. How, people asked themselves when they encountered their first dead body lying in the street, could this be happening? Famine, in the words of the critic and memoirist Lidiya Ginzburg, belonged “in the desert, complete with camels and mirages”.
Third — as public transport and utilities packed up, personal stores dwindled and friends and family began to fall ill — came fear. And fourth, as severe malnutrition took hold and bodily functions began to fail, came the loss of all emotions save an overwhelming craving for food. Survivors talk about having been “like stones” or “like wolves”, without feeling. Non-survivors’ diaries stop abruptly, or peter out into wild, illegible scribbles.
Along the way, Leningraders’ worlds shrank — first to city districts within walking distance, then to apartment, bread queue and water source (usually a broken pipe or hole in the ice of a canal). As in a country village, they trod narrow paths through unswept snow, the drifts a pristine white for lack of factory smuts. Forgotten rural skills — chopping wood, carrying pails with an improvised yoke — were relearned. Public radio, broadcast over loudspeakers wired to lamp-posts, carried people from street corner to street corner, even when its content shrank to the sound of a ticking metronome.
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SubscribeThanks for a very well written and sane perspective that puts our current situation into context.
Agree with MD
This is fascinating. I read Lidia Ginsburg’s “Blockade Diary” in English translation. There was much about the Russian side during the siege of Leningrad that was heroic. Anna Chapman reminds us that it also had a darker and shabbier side. Just the same, I think Russians are justified in considering Leningrad a hero city for the way it held out during the war. I can’t put a hold on Ms Chapman’s book as long as COVID-19 is shutting down our public libraries but I look forward to reading it when things return to normal.
Back in the 1990s I was a caseworker for a (Labour) MP. One memorable case was a visa entry request from a Russian lady married to a local Brit, whose own mum in St Petersburg had recently passed away. This left her grandmother (who had been lodging with her daughter) high and dry. Now, securing an entry visa and “indefinite leave to remain” from the home Office immigration bureaucracy in Croydon for gran was hard to obtain at the best of times, and strictly speaking, Russia was not seen as a country on the favourable list, but given the sacrifices for her countrypeople and indeed, for us,that she had made (she was a teenage Leningrad tram conductor) this was one to get your teeth into and I and my employer enjoyed the little drinks party (and grans graphic memories of the seige ) bestowed on us by the re-united family when we succeeded.
Yes we have no idea how these people suffered.