‘She wanted a sweet so much. Why did I eat that sweet? I needn’t have done. And everything would have been that little bit better.’. . Thus Siege Man thinks about his wife or mother, whose death has made the eaten sweet irrevocable. He recalls the fact but cannot summon up the feeling: the feeling of that piece of bread, or sweet, which prompted him to cruel, dishonourable, humiliating acts.7
One such guilt-ridden survivor was Olga Berggolts, whose epileptic husband Kolya had died in hospital in February. She poured sorrow and remorse into her diaries — why hadn’t she visited him every day? Why hadn’t she been there at his death? Why hadn’t she taken him some of the biscuits her sister sent from Moscow? How, most of all, should she feel about her colleague at the Radio House, Yuri (Yurka) Makogonenko, with whom she was still conducting a passionate affair?
Today, all day, I’ve had visions of Kolya, of how he was when I made my second visit to the hospital on Pesochnaya. His swollen hands, covered in cuts and ulcers. How he carefully gave them to the nurse so that she could change the bandages, all the time anxiously mumbling, making it hard for me to feed him, making me spill the precious food. I was in despair and in a fit of anger bit him on his poor swollen hand. Oh you bitch!. . I was tired of him. I betrayed him. No, that’s not right. I didn’t betray, I just proved weak and callous. How Yurka calls me now! But this means cheating on Kolya! I DID NOT CHEAT. Never. But to give my heart to Yurka is to cheat on him. . I’m unhappy in the full, absolute sense of the word. . I hope that every terrible thing that can happen, happens to me.
This torrent of emotion coincided with the popular and official success of her long poem February Diary. In late March she was flown (chased by six Messerschmitts) to Moscow to attend a round of readings and receptions, including one at the headquarters of the NKVD (‘I suppose there were some human beings among them. But what oafs, what louts they are.’). The event gave her the opportunity to petition on behalf of her father, at that moment on a prison train on his way to Minusinsk in southern Siberia.
He writes ‘Contact whoever you can — Beria etc. — but get me out of here’. He has been travelling since 17 March. They are fed once a day, and sometimes not even that. In his wagon six people have already died, and several more await their turn. . My God, what are we fighting for? What did Kolya die for? Why do I walk around with a burning wound in my heart? For a system under which a wonderful person, a distinguished military doctor and a genuine Russian patriot, is insulted, crushed, sentenced to death, and nobody can do anything about it.8
Though she managed to get a meeting with the secretary of the NKVD Party organisation it achieved nothing: ‘We had a “chat” (I can’t even talk about this without shaking with hatred). He took my petition and promised to pass it on to the Narkom this evening. Will they do anything? Hard to believe.’ The case was indeed shuffled back to Leningrad (‘simply to rid themselves of the bother’) and her father not allowed to return home until the war was over.
Berggolts’s despair was compounded by Muscovites’ ignorance of events in Leningrad. Like the military disasters of the war’s first months, starvation had been kept out of the news. Though newspapers mentioned ‘food shortage’ they did so seldom and in passing, instead making ghoulish play of civilian deaths by German shelling and bombing.9 Internally, euphemisms were coined to disguise the tragedy’s stark simplicity: instead of ‘hunger’ or ‘starvation’ (the same word, golod, in Russian), government reports talked of ‘exhaustion’, ‘avitaminosis’, ‘the cumulative effects of malnourishment’, ‘death due to difficulties with food supply’, or most commonly of ‘dystrophy’, an invented pseudo-medical term which passed into common parlance and is still current today.10 Though Berggolts was able to talk freely to her Moscow friends — and found herself doing so unstoppably, with the same ‘dull, alienated sense of surprise’ she had felt when released from prison in 1939 — her broadcasts were heavily censored. ‘I’ve become convinced’, she wrote,
that they know nothing about Leningrad here. No one seems to have the remotest idea of what the city has gone through. They say that Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what this heroism consists of. They don’t know that we were starving, that people were dying of hunger, that there was no public transport, no electricity or water. They’ve never heard of such an illness as ‘dystrophy’. People ask, ‘Is it dangerous?’. . I couldn’t open my mouth on the radio, because I was told ‘You can talk about anything, but no recollections of starvation. None, none. Leningraders’ courage, their heroism, that’s what we need. . But not a word about hunger.’11
Bearing crates of lemons and tins of condensed milk, Berggolts returned to Leningrad on 20 April, to find that winter had ended and the air raids had resumed. She moved with Makogonenko out of his attic room with its view of shell-damaged roofs, down two floors into the flat of an actor recently killed at the front. Full of the actor’s possessions — photographs, books, ‘a mass of little saucers, two matching cups and a rusty mincer’ — it increased her sense of disconnection, of having stepped into somebody else’s life or into a life after death. Writing was impossible — ‘like pulling ticker-tape out of my soul, bloodily and painfully’. A writers’ conference held on 30 May should have been a magnificent occasion, a defiant celebration of the power of the word. But in reality it was ‘organised hypocrisy’ — dull, political and overcast by colleagues’ dangerous envy of her sudden new fame.12
Six weeks later Makogonenko temporarily lost his job at the Radio House, for inadvertently allowing the broadcast of a banned poem, Zinaida Shishova’s Sassoonesque Road of Life. With its reference to a corpse stored on a balcony, and deliberately trite, heavily sarcastic final couplet — ‘Rest, son, you did all you had to/You were at the defence of Leningrad’ — it had been deemed ‘odd’ and ‘almost mocking’ by the censors, and was taken off air mid-verse by a telephone call direct from the city Party Committee.13 Berggolts’s own February Diary was published but bowdlerised, a thrice-repeated line — ‘In this dirt, darkness, hunger, sorrow’ — made bland by the replacement of the words ‘hunger’ and ‘dirt’ with the safely abstract ‘bondage’ and ‘suffering’.14 Consolation came from ordinary members of the public, who wrote to Berggolts in their hundreds. Some of the letters were semi-official group efforts, from Red Army units or collective farms, but others were from private individuals, thanking her for putting their experiences and feelings into words. One woman described how Berggolts’s broadcasts had helped her bear news of a son’s death at the front, another how they calmed her as she tried to feed her dying husband in the darkness, the spoon often hitting his nose instead of his mouth. ‘This is something truly splendid’, wrote Berggolts:
The people of Leningrad, masses of them, lay in their dark, damp corners, their beds shaking. . (God, I know myself how I lay there without any will, any desire, just in empty space). And their only connection with the outside world was the radio. . If I brought them a moment’s happiness — even just the passing illusion of it — then my existence is justified.
Like others, she also found symbolism-freighted comfort in the coming of spring, in the greening of the city square limes (their buds stripped to the height of an upstretched hand), and in the sprouting of coltsfoot and camomile amid bomb-site rubble. One of her very few truly joyful diary entries was written on a warm June night while Makogonenko stood outside on the roof watching for incendiaries: