Like all such places, the Piskarevskoye fails. Statues, landscaping, poetry — nothing can say all that should be said and felt about a tragedy on the scale of Leningrad. Perhaps, for a modern visitor, no adequate response is possible anyway. All one can do is take time, bring to mind, pay respect. Memorialising the siege has been problematic for the Soviet — now the Russian — state, too. Until Stalin’s death it was pushed into the background, an embarrassing reminder of the disastrous opening stages of the war. No memorial to the starvation dead was erected, they were cited but substantially undercounted at Nuremberg, and anti-begging decrees swept thousands of disabled ex-servicemen off the streets to the old monastery islands of Valaam in the far north of Lake Ladoga. The mass graves were fenced off and left to sprout nettles and brambles.
Some of the undergrowth was cleared under Khrushchev, who allowed the construction, following lively public debate as to a suitable site, of the Piskarevskoye complex, and the publication of Dmitri Pavlov’s outspoken (for the time) account of wartime food supply. It grew back again, in different form, under Brezhnev, who conscripted the siege into his cult of the Great Patriotic War, designed to substitute for the fading charms of Marxism-Leninism. In this version civilian suffering took the foreground again, but in abstracted, sanitised form. Extremes of horror were reduced to easy shorthand — cold, dark, a child’s sledge, a burzhuika — and heartbreaking moral and social breakdown was transformed into an uplifting redemption story. Leningraders had been selfless, disciplined heroes, unwavering in their faith in ultimate victory. Simply by surviving in the city they had helped to defend it, and when they died of hunger they did so nobly, in a sort of ecstatic trance. From this martyrdom they had emerged tempered, purified, a special race. Leningrad boys and girls, the cult’s most extravagant rhetoricians urged, should only marry each other.1
Attempts to restore some reality to the siege story met determined resistance. When Harrison Salisbury published his classic (but itself romanticised, particularly as regards Voroshilov and Zhdanov) The 900 Days in 1969, it was attacked not only by Pravda, in an article signed by Zhukov, but by the Western left.2 It was not published in Russian until 1994, six months after Salisbury’s death. The ground-breaking oral history A Book of the Blockade, compiled by the historian Ales Adamovich and the novelist Daniil Granin, similarly came under fire when first published in 1979, despite over sixty excisions by the censors. The gag applied not only to the siege, but to particularist ‘Petersburg’ history writing in general. Shostakovich’s amanuensis Solomon Volkov, trying to get a book on Leningrad composers published in the early seventies, was faced with this ‘over and over. The very concept of Petersburg or Leningrad culture was being quashed. “What’s so special about this culture? We have only one culture — the Soviet one!”’3
The floodgates opened in the late 1980s, with Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost or ‘openness’, precursor to the collapse of Communism and the entire Soviet Union. Suddenly it became possible to subject the siege to genuine analysis. Wartime terror could openly be criticised for the first time; so could the senseless waste of the People’s Levy and the tragic inadequacies of the evacuation and rationing programmes. Uncensored personal accounts streamed into newspapers and journals, their unadorned fact-telling and often bitter tone acting like paint-stripper on the Brezhnevite myth of universal staunchness and self-sacrifice. Adamovich and Granin were able to fill out their Book of the Blockade with sharper diary extracts (such as those of Yuri Ryabinkin, the teenage boy abandoned by his mother), and with material on cannibalism and the ‘Leningrad Affair’. Several revelatory document collections appeared, most startlingly from the archives of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the NKVD. Zhdanov’s reputation — hitherto that of a wise and beloved war leader — took a plunge, and his name was removed from schools, factories, a battleship and the Black Sea port of Mariupol. The biggest renaming was that of Leningrad itself, which on 1 October 1991, after a closely fought referendum, became again Sankt-Peterburg — to English-speakers, St Petersburg.4
Still important guardians of the siege story are the dwindling band of blokadniki themselves. For them the siege is not history but acute, lived experience, and their memories of it, as Olga Grechina puts it, ‘a minefield of the mind. You only have to step on them, and you explode. Everything flies to hell — quiet, comfort, present-day happiness.’5 Memory triggers lurk in wait all around — a particular outdoor tap or fire hydrant, the drone of an aeroplane or the squeak of sled runners, the smell of joiner’s glue or just the sight of untrodden snow on a city pavement. One man never puts up a New Year’s tree, because it reminds him of the one underneath which his father lay dying of hunger; others always detour round particular streets or bridges. For Grechina, one day in 1978, it was the smell of a bonfire, drifting in at her window. Having for years given the conventional version of the siege in talks to students, she sat down at her desk and wept and wrote for two days and nights, releasing a torrent of long-pent-up grief and anger. Siege-time behaviours have stuck, too — blokadniki say they cannot leave food on their plates, throw away even the stalest bread, or pass a discarded piece of wood without wanting to take it home to feed a non-existent burzhuika. Survivors’ guilt, though never given this name, is common, expressed in many cases as distress at not having secured a relative a proper burial. One woman, not knowing where her father is buried, visits the Piskarevskoye each year on his birthday, and lays flowers on every individual grave she can find whose occupant had the same Christian name or date of birth. She never, she remarks, has flowers enough.6
Many survivors have blocked out the siege entirely, never talking about it even to close friends and family. Others — as Grechina once did — have adopted the possible-to-live-with Brezhnevite version, subsuming their own acutely painful memories into a larger, safer story. But even for those who wanted to talk frankly, making themselves heard could be difficult. ‘Inside’, wrote Marina Yerukhmanova, there was always this question — Can’t I just talk about it how it was? Sometimes I wonder why we kept quiet. Probably because it was somehow not done to talk about it. . Every time conversation touched on the blockade, it seemed that everybody knew everything already — they’d read about it, heard about it, seen the films — and repetition of the details would give neither satisfaction to the teller nor understanding to the listener.
We too watched the films, read what was written about those times. But though your stomach turned upside down, somehow none of it put across the feeling of those days.
Blokadniki often complain that nobody is interested in the siege any more. ‘Each generation has its own wars — Afghanistan, Chechnya’, says one. Another describes giving a talk about the siege to young offenders, and getting no reaction except when she showed them how scurvy had left her with only six teeth.7 Grechina stresses the tension between siege veterans and post-war incomers to Leningrad, who she claims used rudely to grab blokadnik-reserved seats on public transport, justifying themselves on the grounds that in their villages ‘everyone starved too’.8