Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (22 page)

‘Yes,’ said Serov, ‘their portraits are certainly worth doing. Take almost any of our Leningrad soldiers. Usually quite an ordinary face, and nothing in the least heroic about the shape of his nose – but – have a look at him, and he’s a lion!’

There was much other talk, but I forget all the details. Somebody again mentioned the German leaflets that were now being dropped over the Russian lines. ‘They must certainly be hard up for cheerful thoughts. … The other day our soldiers laughed when the Germans thought they would overwhelm them with the terrific news that Mussolini had been captured by the S.S. ‘Serves him bloody well right,’ they said. Better still, the Germans have now been frightening our soldiers with, if you please, the counter-revolutionary activities of the Soviet Government. In connection with the election of the Patriarch in Moscow they announced in their leaflets to our soldiers: ‘After the war you will again be ruled by the priests!’

We adjourned to the beautiful dining-room with its white-and-golden upholstery – only the paintings had been removed to safety from the otherwise exquisitely furnished building (I didn’t ask whose mansion it was before the Revolution) – and here we had a typically Russian party, with lots of food, and vodka and wine. There were first the usual toasts to Anglo-Russian friendship, to speedy victory, to Stalin, to Churchill, to Leningrad, to the Red Army, then, half-way through the supper, Mr. Eliasberg drank a heartfelt toast to Sir Henry Wood; somebody else to a highly elaborate death of Hitler! Then I stood up and quoted words of wisdom from Mr. Eden’s latest speech on Anglo-Soviet relations, and everybody drank to Mr. Eden; somebody then said that the Finns had such cold feet that for two months now they had stopped their Russian broadcasts; so we drank to the perdition of the Finns! From across the table Sayanov, with the blond Budienny moustache, proceeded to prove that Keats was a much greater poet than Byron, and it was unfortunate that most people in Russia were unaware of it; so we drank to the memory of Keats. It was altogether a very jolly party.

Then somebody – it must have been Vishnevsky – told funny stories; for instance, one about a soldier who boasted about all the things he would do to the German women when he got to Berlin; he was charged with the use of obscene language, but the colonel intervened and said the soldier had proved himself a true patriot, and one with a solid faith in victory and in the stupendous might of the Red Army. The two or three ladies at the table pretended not to listen. Altogether, I noticed that they drank very little and looked on tolerantly at the rest of the company, though perhaps with a slight touch of disapproval. Heaven knows what else we talked about – Priestley and Hemingway, I think, and Kipling, who for nearly three generations now has been a Leningrad favourite, and the Second Front, and the German working-class’s share of responsibility for what had happened, and the London blitz, and the British Navy, and how nice it would be after the war to sail from Leningrad straight to London, and about
Mr. Bunting,
the one English wartime novel everybody had read. The whole party was, to everybody, a deliberate escape, and they were glad to have a complete change for a few hours.

The party broke up a good couple of hours after curfew. I was in the hands of the military, and our car drove us to the Astoria through the blackout without incident. How the civilians at the party got to their respective homes I don’t know.

I woke up the next morning with a doubly unpleasant sensation. I had a hangover, and Leningrad was being heavily shelled. I had been wakened by this loud thumping noise of shells exploding some distance away. And all that day the thumping went on, non-stop, with often as many as three or four thumps to a minute. The area most heavily shelled was about two miles away, somewhere round the Narva district and the Obvodny Canal. I kept thinking of the Putilov workers and of the children and staff of the Tambov Street school. When I suggested we go down to the shelled areas, Colonel Studyonov merely said: ‘Why look for trouble, when for all you know, the trouble may come to you anyway?’ Which, I suppose, was reasonable enough.

Altogether it was a disappointing day – I mean the first half of it. Our programme was the sort of programme that would have been dished out in the normal course to the visiting ambassador of a friendly power, or to a delegation of the T.U.C. We spent a couple of hours in a military hospital on the other side of the river, and another hour in a large air raid shelter in the basement of a seven-storey block of flats in the centre of the town (there wasn’t a soul there, except the woman in charge of it – even though the shelling outside was pretty heavy) and another half-hour in a training centre for civil defence instructors and instructors in elementary military training. In all three everything was thoroughly organised and the people in charge were thoroughly competent, and that’s about all there is to say about it.

The chief surgeon of the military hospital took us round the delousing rooms, and the operating rooms, and the X-ray rooms, and the blood-transfusion place – in fact all the things one was quite prepared to take for granted; they were, to the layman, exactly the same as in any good military hospital in Moscow. He said the hospital had been getting a certain amount of British and American equipment and other supplies and that there was no shortage of anything, except X-ray plates. There was also a physiotherapy department and a mud-bath installation. The hospital had had eight direct hits from shells, but the building was solid and the damage slight and nobody had been killed. There were strong air raid shelters and all the wounded could be taken down there in a very short time. Only a few things in the hospital were peculiar to Leningrad. With the front so close it was adapted to receiving far more wounded in case of emergency than it normally held – three or four times as many. Further, it had its emergency power station, and its emergency water supply, straight from the nearby Neva. The hospital also had its own vegetable gardens – twelve hectares of them, and in a pinewood outside Leningrad a convalescent home. It seems that during the blockade this hospital carried on almost normally; it had enough coal for its central heating, and received absolute priority in everything. Now everything, to use the old cliché, was spotlessly clean – the long white-washed corridors, and the wards overlooking the Neva – most of the windows were intact – and the white overalls of the doctors and surgeons.

Most of the wounded here were officers with arm and leg wounds requiring lengthy surgical treatment, and the hospital specialised in the ‘restoration’ of hands. Nearly all the wounded with whom I talked had been wounded in the big Mga battle in the early summer; nearly all of these had had their legs damaged or blown off by anti-personnel mines. The proportion of Russian casualties resulting from mines during offensive operations was clearly very considerable and probably even greater in the large sweeping offensives in the south than in the more restricted and more concentrated operations around Leningrad. One or two of the men I saw had been in hospital for a long time, since the famous Schlusselburg rupture of the Leningrad blockade in February 1943. The losses were very heavy then, but the result had more than justified the losses suffered in that bold storming of the German positions across the ice of the Neva.

One of the casualties in that operation was a young officer from Odessa, with a dark, sad face; he said he had always dis-liked unlucky thirteen; he had never had a scratch; but in the thirteenth attack in which he had taken part he had lost his right leg. He said he had come to love Leningrad more than any other place in the world; he had fought here for two years, and he hoped to stay here after the war; he had only an old mother in Odessa, and he had little hope of her having survived the German occupation. But there was another Odessa lad, a fair and blue-eyed Ukrainian, and as typically Odessa as you make them, in the same ward, speaking that superbly picturesque Odessa jargon which is not only a linguistic but even more so a psychological blend of Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Armenian and possibly Greek. Odessa is Russia’s Marseilles, and for the picturesque exuberance with which he told it, no
histoire de Marius
ever surpassed this lad’s story of how he and his pals made a surprise attack on the headquarters of an S.S. brigade: ‘We came out of the high cornfield – yes, the corn was one and a half metres high – just as the S.S. men were sitting down to supper, see? They just hadn’t an idea we were coming. They were sitting around in the garden lolling about in armchairs, waiting for their supper, see? and talking and behaving as though they weren’t giving a damn about anything. And just as the soup was being brought in, see? we turned our machine-gun on them. We killed nearly the whole damn lot of them, among them the chap with the soup tureen. And only two ran away, and lord, didn’t they run; and suddenly there was one more whom we saw running away. We hadn’t seen him before, a great big brute of an S.S. man he was! You see, he had been sitting inside the privy, see? and had realised that something was going on, so he thought he’d better run too, but he hadn’t fastened his pants properly, so as he ran they came down, and while he was trying to pull them up again a bullet got him, see? right in his bare behind! Damn fool; if he’d stayed inside the privy, we mightn’t have noticed him. Of course, they were going to counter-attack, but by that time we had beat it; it was no use waiting; we had done the job we had come for.

‘Our chaps are doing well in the south,’ the Odessa lad continued. ‘I soon hope to be back home in Odessa-Mamma. Great place, Odessa; the sea is so blue, and the sun warms your bones, and there are all those nice streets in Odessa, the Pushkinskaya and the Deribasovskaya. Nothing like it in Leningrad.’ ‘Come, come,’ I said. ‘I know, I know,’ he said, ‘it’s a better-looking city, more cultured, and all that, it’s got historic monuments – Peter the Great and Catherine, and Lenin – a more cultured city, one might say, a more historic city. But I don’t like it. The climate is all wrong. There’s no warmth here as there is in the south, it’s kind of damp here all the time. But I’ll grant you – Leningrad would be a very nice city – if you put it on the spot where Odessa stands.’

Never mind about the air raid shelter and the civil defence instructors’ training centre. But what was interesting that day was our visit to the great Leningrad Public Library. This great library, at the corner of the Nevsky and the Sadovaya – one of the ‘danger corners’ during the shelling – claims to be, with its nine million volumes, the largest library in the world, or at any rate in Europe, with the exception of the British Museum. In recent years, it is true, the Lenin Library in Moscow is believed by some to have surpassed the Leningrad Library, but nowhere in Leningrad did I find any support for that view. At any rate, for its immense collection of incunabula and first editions, Leningrad is certainly still miles ahead of Moscow. Even Moscow admits that.

It was a beautiful sunny day when we drove up to the public library, but as the Sadovaya street corner is a dangerous one, and shelling had been going on since morning, it was decided that we park the car in the Alexandrinka Square on the other side of the library. Here we were, standing outside the car, and looking at the beautiful building of the Alexandrinka, with its freshly repainted yellow stucco, and with the whole exquisite ensemble of Rossi’s stucco buildings beyond, and to the left of us the little square in front of the Alexandrinka Theatre, with the bottle-shaped monument of Catherine, with Rumiantsev and Potemkin and other great men nestling below the sovereign’s equally bottle-shaped skirt. It seemed almost miraculous how this beautiful corner of old St. Petersburg had escaped without a scratch. Although the streets were now very deserted – for the shelling was becoming heavier and heavier – this Alexandrinka Square looked more beautiful than it had ever looked. And just then one shell, and then another, crashed into something quite near, perhaps 500 yards away, on the other side of the Nevsky, somewhere behind the enormous granite pavilion with its plate-glass windows, which was once the most Gargantuan delicatessen shop in Europe – Eliseyev. Two clouds of what looked like brick dust shot up into the air. The tramcars in the Nevsky stopped and the few passengers came running out and dived into houses. A few other people could also be seen running for cover. We waited beside the car for a few minutes, not feeling too comfortable, but perhaps reassured by the extraordinary ‘luckiness’ of the Alexandrinka Square. An ambulance dashed past, turning into the Nevsky. I uncomfortably recalled Major Lozak’s experience of the man who had staggered two steps down the Nevsky already without his head. The firing continued, but the shells were no longer exploding in this part, so we walked into the Nevsky – I had the feeling of slinking rather than walking – and round to the other ‘unlucky’ side of the State Library at the corner of the Sadovaya where, according to Leningrad hearsay, the Germans had a special knack of landing their shells in the middle of the crowd at the tramstop. Actually it did happen once or twice – hence the legend.

But now there was no crowd at any tramstop, the Nevsky was still deserted except for an occasional army car, half a dozen people on the allegedly more sheltered side of the street, and a policewoman who continued to stand on point duty. Then one of the tramcars with two passengers inside began to move. Clearly Leningrad had learned not to be too lighthearted about shelling.

We were taken up a narrow staircase into the office of the chief librarian, a pedantic-looking young woman with masculine manners, and wearing the Leningrad medal. Her name was Egorenkova. A sort of hard defiance was written on her face, as on so many other Leningrad faces. She showed neither pleasure nor displeasure at seeing us, and simply treated our visit as a small job that had come into her day’s programme. Like every other job, she would do it competently. Personally, I had the impression that she was a woman with whom personal reactions no longer mattered; her whole existence had become public service and nothing else. Her one aim in life was to save the Leningrad State Library, and it was a sufficiently large task for any ordinary human being. She was defending 9,000,000 books against 80,000,000 Germans – against those creatures who, for the first time in many centuries in Europe, had made bonfires of books. Leningrad is, in many ways, a fanatical city – only a city with a touch of divine fanaticism could have done what Leningrad did – but in this rather frail, overworked young woman who was the chief librarian of the Leningrad State Library was this inner fanatical fire, a fire of devotion and a fire of hatred particularly noticeable. She said nothing to indicate it; her remark about a shell that had killed a lot of people in the Sadovaya, just outside the library, was made almost casually, with a complete air of ‘objectivity,’ but I felt she would gladly make any German suffer all the torments of hell for what Germany had done to Leningrad and had tried to do to the State Library.