Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (20 page)

Curious, all the same, how in a corridor, outside this inferno, we saw a wall newspaper displayed on a noticeboard. It made one realise how all this human drama was really only part of the life of these people. It was not all heroics, this life of theirs. Much of it was plain, straightforward work, regulated by much the same rules as anywhere else in the Soviet Union. The wall newspaper contained funny drawings, and announcements of club meetings and political lectures, and praise for the Stakhanovites and others who had exceeded their norm, while one worker received a severe telling-off in these terms: ‘Shame! Shame that a highly skilled riveter like Comrade Gusev should have failed so miserably in the task which our comrades at the front were expecting him to fulfil without fail. We expect him to pull himself together in future. – T
HE
E
DITORIAL
B
OARD
.’

How lovely the blue sky seemed, and the golden autumn leaves as we came out of the dark foundry! But suddenly a strange thing happened. Unmistakably there was a bomber overhead, which in a flash brought back to my mind old memories of the London blitz. It was the same zooming sound of the dentist’s drill. I looked up, but the blue sky was all clear, and then glanced inquiringly at Puzyrev. He smiled – perhaps for the first time in two hours. ‘We’ve rung the bell – didn’t you hear it a few minutes ago? It’s a signal telling our people not to worry. There is no plane. But just beyond that building over there we are testing the diesel engines.’

We now came to the main building of the Kirov works, a large brick structure heavily battered by shells and with large pieces of its broad façade chipped off, and all its windows sandbagged. ‘But don’t you think this is symbolic, all the same,’ said Puzyrev, pointing to the top of the façade decorated with greatly enlarged reproductions, in coloured tiles, of the three great Orders of Merit the Kirov works had received from the government – the Order of the Red Banner and the two Lenin Orders. The Kirov works was
trizhdy ordenonosny
(thrice decorated). And here were the three enormous decorations on top of the battered building. And they were unscathed, though the whole wall around was badly chipped and blasted. As we went back to our car, we noticed, hidden in a safe place between two large buildings, a couple of ambulances. ‘We have them on duty day and night. One never knows. You’ve been very lucky. Actually, anything might have happened at any moment.’ Before saying goodbye Puzyrev said: ‘Now there are a few things concerning the exact sort of things we make here, and some other details, which I don’t want you to write about. It’s no good telling the b——s over there too much; for they’re sure to see your papers sooner or later, or listen to your radio talks.’ He enumerated a few points. ‘Is that understood?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s understood. And good luck.’ These people needed good luck.

Leningrad has its own literature, its own writers, and is a trifle snobbish about it. It is inclined to look down on Moscow, though heaven knows, some of the most famous Soviet writers of today, such as Sholokhov, Alexei Tolstoy and many others either haven’t lived in Leningrad for years, or never had anything to do with Leningrad. I am on dangerous ground here, and that is for a number of reasons. I am far from convinced that in the last ten years Leningrad has produced anything very superior to what Moscow or the rest of the country has produced, and I am not sure that Leningrad has remained anything like Russia’s literary capital which it certainly was throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and indeed, right up to the Revolution. I am not, however, sufficiently acquainted with Leningrad’s literature, least of all of the last two years, to express any considered opinion. This is not entirely my fault, because in the last two years it has been practically impossible to buy or otherwise obtain in Moscow the works of the Leningrad writers, with the exception of what is published in the national press and, occasionally, in the magazines and in small pamphlets.

Naturally, everybody knows the articles of Nikolai Tikhonov in which, month after month, he has reported to the national press the daily life of Leningrad since the war; everybody knows his little books of verse, ranging from what might be called patriotic poster work to a deeply inspired poem like ‘Kirov is with us.’ Vera Inber has more recently acquired nation-wide popularity with her truly remarkable poem
The Pulkovo Meridian,
that grim, tragic poem of the blockade, written in perfectly chiselled lines and a metre as light as the Byronic octave. The outer lightness of this tragic poem, with such lighthearted similes as that of ‘a little coffin like a violin case’ in which a Leningrad father takes his dead baby to the cemetery during the famine, not only places this poem in the Pushkin tradition, but reflects, probably more accurately than any louder poem, the ironic resignation with which so many men and women of Leningrad accepted the simple fact of death through hunger.

But it was really only through the fortunate accident of personally knowing Vera Inber, that little grey-haired woman with her fine and sensitive character, that I had a chance of reading the
Pulkovo Meridian
in a daintily published little volume, printed in Leningrad. Otherwise I should probably have read only a few extracts of the poem published in Moscow magazines. Ten thousand copies of the little book were printed in Leningrad and were sold out in two days, after which the ‘black market’ price of Inber’s poem ranged between 400 and 500 grammes of bread – or nearly a whole day’s ration. Yet thousands of copies changed hands that way. What poem anywhere outside Russia in recent years has sold 10,000 copies in two days? There are many other Leningrad writers and poets who are widely known throughout the Soviet Union – but more from their articles than from their books, or from occasional poems published in the national press – Alexander Prokofiev, and Sayanov, and Likharev, and Vychnevsky, and that very fine poetess, Olga Bergholz, and Golubeva who wrote
The Boy from Urzhum
(the story of Kirov), and Ketlinskaya who is today writing what promises to be one of the most important Leningrad novels. Of the older men, Lavrenev and Zoschenko, though no longer living in Leningrad, still consider themselves essentially Leningrad writers. And there are many others, for instance, Sergei Spassky, of whose existence I became aware only after hearing Yakhontov, I think, recite three of four of his poignant little Leningrad poems at a concert in Moscow, and which, hard as I tried, I could never find anywhere in printed form.

The truth is that Leningrad, which remained after the Revolution probably still the largest (at least purely literary) publishing centre in Russia, went on publishing quite a number of books even during the blockade. But paper and labour were limited, and what was printed was rapidly absorbed by Leningrad itself, and few of Leningrad’s wartime books reached the ‘mainland,’ except in driblets. But one still has the impression – and that appears to be the feeling among all the Leningrad writers of today – that the really big literature of Leningrad and about Leningrad is still in the future and that, except for a few small books, like the Inber and Tikhonov poems, and a few others, little of permanent importance has yet been written, and that the great books based on the experience of wartime Leningrad will be written later, with a full sense of perspective, without wartime inhibitions, without material and psychological handicaps. For one thing, a very large part of the Leningrad writers’ energies today is devoted not to writing literature, in the full sense of the word, but to lecturing in the army and in factories, and to writing day-today matter for local and army newspapers, etc.

The Leningrad Writers’ Union organised a reception one evening at which I was the guest of honour. It was a great event for me, and I was assured that it was also a great event for them. I believe it. Not because they considered me a famous journalist or eminent author – I don’t think any of them had ever heard of me before – but because I was the first British correspondent, in fact the very first person from England since the war, to have turned up in Leningrad. The fact that I was also originally a ‘native’ of Leningrad seemed to make me doubly welcome.

From numerous remarks that were made during the evening I felt how deeply Leningrad still felt its closeness to Europe, how very much alive the ‘Western’ traditions of the city still were – the traditions of Peter the Great and Pushkin – and what a large place was held in these people’s outlook by the sea. More even than in Moscow, perhaps much more than in Moscow, one was conscious, in talking to these Leningrad writers, of a real thirst for close future contacts with the West; they thought in terms of harbours and ships – ships that were carrying passengers to and fro, and goods, and books and music, and paintings and gramophone records. Perhaps I am imagining it, but I had a feeling that these Leningrad writers regarded the semi-isolation in which Leningrad had lived not only during the war, but also before the war, as a deep cause of a certain creative weakness from which the writers, and also the painters, were the first to suffer.

Like most Russians today, many of them felt that a constant flow of ideas between Russia and the West, a continuous contact with other countries, was important, both for the world and for Russia herself, and that, as history in the past had shown, Russia, with her genius for absorbing and transfiguring foreign cultural influences and ideas had flourished most and had herself contributed most to the general heritage of European civilisation when contacts were closest with the outer world. And Leningrad, which symbolised so well the transformation into something purely Russian of so much of European civilisation – Pushkin, for instance, was a typically Russian product of the French eighteenth century and, to a lesser extent, of the English Romantic Revival – felt perhaps more deeply than any other town in Russia its debt to Europe. Russia, though in the seventeenth century as barbarous in its own way as, say, Turkey, Persia or Afghanistan, showed in much less than a century that its soil was essentially
European,
and that European civilisation could flourish on it more luxuriantly than even in most European countries. If at first, therefore, there was above all a desire to learn from Europe, there followed a desire to exchange with Europe. The stage after that would be to want to teach Europe. That by the way is where the Comintern went wrong, because it turned out to be an artificial product, with no deep roots in Russia itself and no suitable soil outside Russia. That, after this war, Russia will have much to teach the world cannot be doubted; the very fact that Russia, despite terrible handicaps, is now winning the war, is enough to make the socially and politically curious ask: How did she do it? And many lessons will be contained in the answer to that question. But in the cultural field in Russia today there is no ‘superiority complex’ of any kind (except possibly in music), but there is a profound desire among many writers not only to ‘exchange’ ideas with Europe, but also to learn. When I say Europe, I naturally also mean America; nowhere among writers has Hemingway, for instance, aroused such interest as an artist and as a craftsman as among writers in the Soviet Union.

And all these people today regret the relative cultural isolation in which Russia lived in recent years.

I am not building up here a purely personal theory. During that evening at the Writers’ Union in Leningrad much was said precisely on these lines. What I say is also based on what I have been hearing for the last two years from people in Moscow. I think I am right in saying that Alexei Tolstoy’s ideas on the subject run on much these lines. And Alexei Tolstoy is, among other things, a political force.

Much was said during that evening at the Leningrad Writers’ Union, in their beautiful marble-pillared and marble-staired eighteenth-century mansion off the Liteiny Prospect – unfortunately I did not see the outside owing to the absolute blackout – but naturally, the main subject of conversation was still Leningrad and all its past and present experiences. I find it hard to record fully what was said, or to say exactly who said what. There were many people there; first we sat round a sort of conference table for about an hour, and then round a grand supper table – for a great deal more than an hour. A very large proportion of the talking was done by that tremendous figure, Captain Vishnevsky, in naval uniform and with a dazzling display of decorations. For irrepressible exuberance there was, I am sure, nobody like him for miles around. He had gone through thick and thin, lecturing to the troops, and fighting in the navy and on land, and writing pamphlets and booklets for the Russians and propaganda leaflets for the Germans, and also writing plays and a story or novel (as yet unpublished) about the Baltic Fleet in wartime. Almost equally exuberant was Sayanov, the poet and front reporter for the Leningrad and army press, young and jovial and with a superb blond moustache
à la Budienny.
His main subject was the Russian air force since its pioneer days. These did most of the talking about Leningrad, with a few additions from Alexander Prokofiev, Ketlinskaya and others. Tikhonov and Inber were, unfortunately, not in Leningrad at the time; I had seen Inber in Moscow just a day or two before I left. Heaven only knows what they did not talk about; much of what they said covered fairly familiar ground, but Vishnevsky, in particular, produced much human detail and some new angles. I shall try to restore a few notes I took down during the first part of the evening.

There was a lot of talk about the
levée en masse
and the
lutte à outrance
that had saved Leningrad.

‘It’s all very well,’ Vishnevsky exclaimed, ‘for the Germans now to say that the Leningrad line is much stronger than the Maginot line. At the beginning, when they were only approaching Leningrad, there was nothing, not a damned thing. What made Leningrad impregnable was that a million people went on working day and night on trenches and fortifications. Our youth went into the army like one man. Our Workers’ Divisions – and there were several of those – played quite a decisive part during those first stages of the battle for Leningrad. Bessonov, an old Obukhov worker of 67, and all his six sons went off to the front. The old man refused to be left behind. There was a tremendous exaltation among these people. Old veterans of the Putilov and Obukhov works went out to die. … I remember those days in August and September 1941, after the famous Voroshilov–Zhdanov–Popkov appeal. Last spring you could see some of those posters, gone grey with time, on some of the Leningrad houses. The Germans had thrown forty-five divisions against Leningrad. As they were approaching the city, they were setting fire to everything. There was a ring of fires round Leningrad – you could see them at night – it was the villages burning. But people here said, ‘We’re not going to budge.’ Nasty things happened. There were Fifth Columnists in Leningrad; they would fire rockets at night to give guidance to the German guns and planes. Many Fifth Columnists had come in together with the refugees; some conscious, other unconscious – that is, stupid old peasants who were filling everybody up with enemy rumours and enemy propaganda. In my street it was observed how somebody was firing rockets. Inquiries were made, and a bunch of enemy agents were caught.’