Independent congregations, in contrast, were still ruthlessly persecuted. Typical was a small underground group discovered and liquidated in the summer of 1942. It was led, the NKVD’s case report tells us, by a sixty-year-old known as Archimandrite Klavdi, who had already served time in prison for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ and was now living in Leningrad illegally. His elderly, mostly unemployed followers included ‘kulaks’, former nuns, ‘monastic elements’ and a nurse from the Lenin Hospital. Their crimes, according to Klavdi’s confession, included ‘illegally trying to recruit believers’, ‘praising the pre-revolutionary order and living standards’, and ‘voicing disapproval of the methods of Soviet power’.34 What became of them we do not know, but it was probably similar to what happened to Berggolts’s doctor father, who in early 1942 was deported to Siberia for refusing to inform on a Father Vyacheslav, an old friend with whom he used to enjoy playing cards.35
How many Leningraders actually attended services during the first siege winter is hard to say. Though one memoirist movingly describes services at the St Vladimir Cathedral — choir wrapped in shawls and felt boots, oil in the icon lamps frozen solid, the sacraments taken with beetroot juice in place of wine — the diarists of the time make no remark, even when recklessly frank on other matters. Perhaps the packed Vladimirsky was a benevolent trick of the memory; perhaps it only attracted crowds from the spring onwards, when surviving Leningraders had the strength to begin mourning their dead; or perhaps it was simply that it was the intelligentsia, on the whole, who kept diaries, and the working class who went to church. Educated Leningraders may have also found it harder to maintain what faith they had. Berggolts — Jewish by background and an idealistic Communist in youth — saw the siege as a collective punishment for having allowed the Revolution to be perverted, for the lies and moral cowardice of the purge years:
What unhappy people we are! What did we wander into? What savage dead end and delirium? Oh what weakness and terror! I can do nothing, nothing. I should have ended my own life, that would have been the most honest thing. I have lied so much, made so many mistakes, that can’t be redeemed or set right. . We have to fight off the Germans, destroy fascism, end the war. And then we have to change everything about ourselves. . (Just now Kolka [her husband] had [an epileptic] fit — I had to hold his mouth shut so he wouldn’t frighten the children in the next door room. He fought terribly.) Why do we live? Oh God, why do we live? Have we really not suffered enough? Nothing better will ever come.
She had caught her mood from a friend, a traumatised survivor of the naval retreat from Tallinn, who had visited earlier in the day, incoherently mumbling ‘For twenty years we have been in the wrong, and we’re paying for it now.’36
Others found themselves returning to faith as their fear and suffering increased. Party members whispered prayers and crossed themselves in the air-raid shelters; Georgi Knyazev, self-styled humanist and worshipper of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov, by the depths of January mused through the eighteen-hour nights on the strength of the light fitting in his ceiling — he would hang himself, he had decided, if his wife died before him — and his ‘favourite theme of Christ, that amazing teacher of love and mercy from faraway Galilee’.37 A painter, dying alongside his wife, drew sketches of a fiery angel, of Christ — his skull-shaped head resembling those of the starving — and of the Virgin spreading her protective veil over the well-like courtyard of a blacked-out apartment block.38 Old Believers and Seventh Day Adventists continued, as they had done since 1938, to hold services in secret, in their homes. The mother of one such family (whose husband, a priest, was already in prison) made her six children kneel for long hours on the floor, praying. When they became emaciated she let them kneel on pillows (two out of the six died).39 Muslims and Buddhists also had to worship in secret, despite the fact that thousands were serving on the Leningrad front, and that the city possessed both a mosque and a magnificent Buddhist temple, built during the reign of Nicholas II and the tethering point of the barrage balloon that served as its wartime radio mast.
In sum, religious faith remained a private, risky source of consolation during the siege. Stalin’s relaxation of the rules was opportunistic and temporary, and Leningraders knew it. A ten-year-old girl, taken into one of ninety-eight new orphanages that opened between January and March 1942, woke one night to see her class teacher kneeling, head bowed, at the dormitory window. The teacher whispered that she was praying for her son, who had gone missing at the front — and begged the girl not to tell anybody what she had seen.40
*The system was admired by Hitler, who planned to install a loudspeaker in every Ukrainian village. They would not broadcast news, but ‘cheerful music’, giving Ukrainians ‘plenty of opportunities to dance’.
13. Svyazi
A not quite translatable word meant a great deal in the Soviet Union: svyazi, or ‘connections’ — the combination of string-pulling, exchange of favours and bribery by means of which citizens were able to work their way round the state’s monopoly on goods and employment to get themselves everything from jobs, telephones and university places to a bucket of potatoes or a new pair of shoes. In peacetime, astute use of svyazi improved one’s standard of living; during the siege it meant the difference between life and death.
If the typical Leningrader’s first line of defence against starvation was immediate family, the second was his or her network of friends. Especially among the city’s close-knit intelligentsia families, friendships — based on several generations of connection by marriage, education and profession, plus shared experience of fear and impoverishment — could be both extensive and remarkably strong. Not unusual was the experience of widowed, childless Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, who was given small but heartening presents of food by old colleagues from her late husband’s chemical research institute. ‘My friend Petr Yevgenevich visited today’, she wrote on New Year’s Day 1942. ‘He brought a handful of oatmeal for kisel [a thickened fruit drink], and Ivan Yemelyanovich brought three sprats.’ The pair reappeared a few weeks later, this time with 200 grams of bread, dried onion, mustard powder, ‘a tiny piece of meat, four dried white mushrooms, and four frozen potatoes (the first we’ve seen since the autumn). This is priceless treasure, and I was extremely grateful, especially since for the past week all we’ve had to eat is seaweed. . A celebration!’1 Similarly loyal were the retired railway clerk Ivan Zhilinsky and his wife Olga, who looked after an old friend whose family had departed into evacuation. They invited him to share wine and duranda at New Year — painstakingly cleaning their room and clothes beforehand, and giving him a wash and shave on arrival — took him in when his flat was made uninhabitable by shelling, and finally traded bread so as to give him a proper grave. If Olga had not also died of starvation, and Ivan been arrested by the NKVD, they would have adopted his children. Smaller acts of kindness could make all the difference, too: one siege survivor remembers the teenage girl next door bringing firewood filched from her job at a lumberyard — ‘Not a lot of it, but for us it was everything.’2 On a different level, Olga Grechina — aged nineteen and living completely alone — found human comfort in brief, heartfelt conversations with strangers on the street, who in January and February tended to walk together in pairs for fear of mugging: