Like the Gulag’s ‘goners’, the still-starving acted as fearful reminders of mortality, objects of scornful mockery as much as of compassion. Lazarev’s daughter and niece learned the following popular rhyme, adapted from the words of a pre-war children’s song:
A dystrophic walked along
With a dull look
In a basket he carried a corpse’s arse.
‘I’m having human flesh for lunch,
This piece will do!
Ugh, hungry sorrow!
And for supper, clearly
I’ll need a little baby.
I’ll take the neighbours’,
Steal him out of his cradle.’52
To get rid of the physically useless, bosses used them to fill quotas of ‘volunteers’ for out-of-town logging camps and peat mines. Boldyrev, now enrolled at the Public Library, railed against the despatch to peatworks of a colleague, a ‘second-degree dystrophic’ and ‘sorry, clumsy creature’ quite incapable of digging for ten hours a day. ‘Work!’ he wrote angrily in his diary, ‘after a day of it they fall off their feet. Tomorrow she has to go. Cruelty, pointless cruelty.’ Four weeks later she returned and told him what it had been like:
For the strong it’s fine there — extra bread, lunch. The barracks are warm and have electric light. Many gain weight and apply to stay for the winter — the camp regime, of course, doesn’t bother them. But woe to the weak, because if you don’t meet your norm they cut your rations. Our unfortunate librarian — who could hardly stand even before she left — was down to a single bowl of wheat soup a day. And this on a first-category card — in other words, she wasn’t even being given the rations she was due. That’s the system. Everywhere, all the time, the weak are now being trampled and repressed, on principle. ‘Dystrophic’ has turned into a swear word — in workplaces, on the streets, on the trams. Dystrophics are despised, persecuted, beaten into the ground. If you’re applying for a job, the first requirement is not to look dystrophic. These are the morals of the second year of the siege.53
*In Moscow, Alexander Werth noted ‘cruel cardboard hams, cheeses and sausages, all covered in dust’.
20. The Leningrad Symphony
For the American and especially the British governments, the Soviet partnership had always been fraught with difficulty. For the first two years of the war (as even the least nationalistic Russians prefer to forget), the Soviet Union had not only been publicly dedicated to world revolution, but in alliance with Hitler. There had also been intense public anger at its invasion of Finland, during which the British and French governments seriously considered sending a joint expeditionary force to the Finns’ defence. Only when itself invaded by Germany did the Soviet Union abruptly turn from foe into friend.
Churchill, on hearing the news, immediately grasped that to sell this U-turn to the public he needed to draw a distinction between the Russian people and their government. He first did so in a speech broadcast on the very evening of Barbarossa, memorably declaring support for ordinary Russians — ‘I see the ten thousand villages of Russia. . where there are still primordial joys, where maidens laugh and children play’ — while continuing to condemn the regime — ‘No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I. . I will unsay no word I have spoken about it.’* Government information agencies were instructed to follow suit, but it was a hard balance to strike. The BBC, obliged to broadcast a generous quota of Russian material but to steer clear of ideology, stuck mostly to the nineteenth-century classics (a radio adaptation of War and Peace, starring Celia Johnson as Natasha and Leslie Banks as Pierre, was a hit), folk songs and Rimsky-Korsakov. It took the corporation six months to get permission to broadcast the ‘Internationale’ (‘we were asked not to overdo it’), and ‘talkers’ were restricted to distant historical topics, especially if left wing. Of Bernard Pares, distinguished founder of London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, it was decided that he couldn’t ‘do much harm on Peter the Great etc’.1 Mass starvation in Leningrad — beyond the occasional observation that the city was ‘in a bad way for food’ — was not mentioned at all. Stressed instead were the city’s cultural losses (Inber wrote a moralising article, for foreign consumption, about shell damage to a bust of Roentgen, inventor of the X-ray) and its stout defence. A Professor Ogorodnikov broadcast fraternal greetings — ‘wearing an infantryman’s greatcoat, with a rifle in my hands’ — to the Astronomer Royal.2 A proposal that the BBC broadcast its own Russian-language programmes direct to the Soviet Union got nowhere: when the suggestion was put to Maisky, according to Anthony Eden, the Soviet ambassador ‘shied like a young colt’.3
In early 1942 news arrived of something that promised brilliantly to transcend all these difficulties — a new symphony, written in besieged Leningrad, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Though he looked younger with his cowlick and owlish spectacles, Shostakovich was thirty-four when the war broke out. A child prodigy, he had entered the Leningrad (then Petrograd) Conservatoire at the age of thirteen and joined the Soviet musical establishment six years later, when his First Symphony was taken up by the great German conductor Bruno Walter. In 1936 his career went dramatically into reverse, when his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, successfully premiered two years earlier, was suddenly denounced by Pravda as ‘muddle instead of music’. Having spent the late 1930s in constant fear of arrest, he was (like Anna Akhmatova) brought back into the fold with the German invasion. As well as writing songs for the troops he very publicly joined in trench-digging, applied to join the People’s Levy and was photographed, wearing an absurd, old-fashioned brass fireman’s helmet, on the roof of the Conservatoire. On 17 September — just over a week after the siege began — he was summoned to the Radio House to make a national broadcast, from a text closely echoing Leningradskaya Pravda’s ‘The Enemy is at the Gates’ editorial of the previous day. He was speaking, he told listeners, from the front line. But though a battle to the death was joined outside the city walls, inside life went on as normal, as proven by the fact that two hours ago he had completed the first movement of a new symphony.
The first person to hear the symphony’s outline, on a ‘steel-grey, depressing sort of day’ six weeks before, had been his secretary, Isaak Glikman:
He told me that he wanted me to hear the first pages of his new work. After a moment’s hesitation he played the exposition and variation of the theme depicting the Fascist invasion. We were both extremely agitated; it was a rare event for Shostakovich to play with such manifest emotion. Afterwards we sat for a while in silence, which Shostakovich finally broke with the words (I wrote them down) ‘I don’t know what the fate of this piece will be.’ After another pause he added, ‘I suppose that critics with nothing better to do will damn me for copying Ravel’s Bolero. Well, let them. That’s how I hear war.’4
Equally moved was the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who was among a group of musicians Shostakovich invited to his flat to hear a fuller run-through two days after his broadcast.