They lived across the landing from us, on the same staircase of number 11 Nevsky Prospekt. .
There were three children, two boys and a three-year-old girl. The two older ones, twelve and sixteen years old, sometimes used to come round. I took German lessons from their mother and aunt, such beautiful, elegant, intelligent women. The boys’ mother was especially kind, as well as highly intellectual. The elder son seemed to have inherited all his mother’s talents, and those of his father too, an engineer who spoke several European languages. I can say with certainty that the country lost a future scholar when it lost this young man.
More precisely, it lost them all. This is how it happened:
In 1938 they arrested the father
In 1941 they likewise arrested the mother
In 1944 she was shot.
The sons were left orphans with nothing whatsoever: all their possessions were confiscated. As a consequence, the older son died from starvation, since they had nothing to trade for bread. The younger son remained with his aunt and her little daughter. They were living shadows: a woman dying from starvation and two dystrophic [emaciated] children. In this condition they were deported from Leningrad — over the ice of Lake Ladoga.
During the journey the aunt died and the two surviving children were separated, never to meet again. Thus perished a family, as the neighbour drily noted ‘during the last war with the Germans, but not, strictly speaking, at the hands of the Germans’.15
Also deported or arrested in large numbers (71,112 up to October 1942, according to security service documents) were ‘socially alien’ and ‘criminal-felonious’ elements among the general population. In practice this meant the same sorts of people targeted during the 1936–8 purges: members of the old bourgeoisie (‘de-classed elements’), peasants (‘former kulaks’), ethnic minorities (‘nationalists’), churchgoers (‘sectarians’), the wives and children of earlier repression victims (‘relatives of enemies of the people’), and anyone with foreign connections or knowledge of a foreign language (‘spy-traitors’). As usual it could be fatal simply to air a grumble or state the obvious — the Soviet Union’s first execution for ‘spreading defeatist rumours’ was recorded in Leningrad at the beginning of July. Hundreds of ordinary people were arrested for complaining about their working hours, predicting a bad harvest, or passing on news of the bombing of Kiev and Smolensk.16
One of the most notable Leningraders to vanish at this time was the absurdist writer Daniil Yuvachov, better known by his pen-name Daniil Kharms. A relic of the avant-garde 1920s, he cultivated a range of eccentricities, studying the occult, drinking nothing but milk and parading the neighbourhood around his Mayakovsky Street flat in a deerstalker, shooting jacket, plus-fours, saucer-sized pocket watch and checked socks. His scraps of prose and dialogue — unpublished until the late 1980s — capture the drabness and mad bureaucratic violence of his times with nightmare black humour. In one, a man dreams again and again of a policeman hiding in the bushes, and gets thinner and thinner until a sanitary inspector orders him to be folded up and thrown out with the rubbish. In another, inquisitive old women lean out of a window, tumbling one after another to the ground. In a third, friends quarrel over whether or not the number seven comes before the number eight, until distracted by a child who ‘fortunately’ falls off a park bench and breaks its jaw. Kharms was arrested in August and sent to the psychiatric wing of the Kresty prison, where he died, of unknown causes, two months later. Why was he picked out? ‘Perhaps’, as the siege historian Harrison Salisbury put it, just because he ‘wore a funny hat.’
The volunteerism of the first few days of the war swiftly became mandatory. On Friday 27 June — before the rest of the Soviet Union17 — the Leningrad city soviet issued an order mobilising all able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and fifty, and all women, except for those caring for young children, aged between sixteen and forty-five, for civil defence work. Most were sent to the countryside to dig anti-tank ditches; the rest were put to work in the city digging air-raid shelters, camouflaging public buildings (the entire Smolniy was draped in netting, and amateur mountain climbers painted the Admiralty’s gilded spire grey), and manning new fire-fighting, bomb-disposal and first-aid teams, as well as replacing factory workers drafted into the army. Much of the responsibility for making all this happen fell on the ubiquitous, disliked upravdomy, or apartment block managers, who were given the power to assign civil defence duties as well as to check residence permits and report on draft dodgers.18
For children, all this novel activity was rather fun. Yuri Ryabinkin helped build bomb shelters near the Kazan cathedral — ‘now I have blisters and splinters on both hands’, he wrote proudly — loaded sand — ‘the boys modelled Hitler’s ugly mug out of sand and started whacking it with spades’ — played pool and more chess at the Pioneer Palace and read David Copperfield.19 Little Igor Kruglyakov, finding himself left to his own devices, went out exploring — to the Tavrichesky Gardens, where silver barrage balloons swum like great whales above the gravel paths, and to the Suvorov Museum, whose janitor let him on to the roof to look at his racing pigeons. Blackouts — not very effective in the short, light summer nights — were introduced on 27 June, and phosphorescent badges, shaped like fireflies and roses, issued to children so as to prevent accidents. Attics were filled with sand and painted with flame-retardant limewash, and window glass pasted over with strips of paper or gauze, so as to reduce splintering. Applying the strips, wrote Lidiya Ginzburg, ‘had a soothing effect, distracting people from the emptiness of merely waiting. But there was something poignant and strange about them too, reminiscent of a sparkling surgical ward, where there were as yet no wounded, but soon would be.’ To others the strips looked light and decorative, like garden trellising or the carved window frames of prosperous peasant cabins. Some designs were imaginative — the inhabitants of a building on the Fontanka did theirs in the shape of palm trees, with monkeys sitting underneath — but the commonest pattern was two simple diagonals, and the resulting white St Andrew’s Cross became a visual leitmotif of the siege.
Dmitri Likhachev, exempted from call-up for medical reasons, did military training alongside his colleagues from Pushkin House.
We ‘white-ticketers’ were enlisted into the Institute self-defence detachments, issued with double-barrelled shotguns and drilled in front of the History Faculty building. I remember B. P. Gorodetsky and V. V. Gippius among the marchers. The latter walked in comical fashion on his toes, leaning his whole body forward. Our instructor laughed silently along with everyone else. .
Far-sightedly, Likhachev also stocked up on food, insisting that his family claim their whole, initially generous, bread ration, and dry slices on a sunny windowsill until they had enough to fill a pillowcase, which they hung on a wall out of reach of mice. He also insisted that they buy everything they could from the rapidly emptying shops, whose windows were now blocked with double screens of earth-filled planking. Later, he was to wish that they had bought more.
In winter, lying in bed, I thought of one thing until my head hurt: there, on the shelves in the shops, there had been canned fish. Why hadn’t I bought it? Why had I bought only eleven jars of cod-liver oil, and not gone to the chemist’s a fifth time to get another three? Why hadn’t I bought a few vitamin C and glucose tablets? These ‘whys’ were terribly tormenting. I thought of every uneaten bowl of soup, every crust of bread thrown away, every potato peeling, with as much remorse and despair as if I’d been the murderer of my own children. But all the same, we did as much as we could, and believed none of the reassuring announcements on the radio.20