Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (24 page)

‘The Palace is more than ever the Children’s Club – or whatever you like to call it. Here are some of the things the children do when they come here. They have been doing a lot of amateur theatrical work, and they have done their rehearsing here, under the supervision of expert teachers. As a result, in the last eighteen months, they have given as many as 200 theatrical shows to soldiers in the hospitals and to army units not immediately in the front line.

‘Most of the children have a father, sometimes a brother, at the front, and there is the closest personal bond, anyway, between the children of Leningrad and the Leningrad front. The children worship the soldiers. Our teachers have been helping them here a great deal in one of their main occupations – the making of presents for the soldiers. They knit and sew, and chisel cigarette holders, and make cigarette cases out of wood, with often quite elaborate designs. They also make and collect all sorts of gifts which they send to the children of the liberated areas. They, and especially the boys, also do bigger jobs; they were, for instance, of enormous help in repairing the serious damage caused to the Anichkov Palace by a bomb.

‘They love their palace, and all the children would like to be here every day. But we have to space out their visits, because it is not safe to have too many children all in one building. What we are doing now is to set up a large number of branches of the Pioneers’ Palace in the various districts of Leningrad. Now take today, for instance. For seven hours they have been shelling the city – chiefly the Lenin district along the Obvodny Canal. We had to telephone urgently to all the schools in the southern part of the town not to allow any of their pupils to come here today, because the children love coming here; and you know what Russian boys, and especially Leningrad boys, are like; no shelling will stop them if they really want to get to a place. So we have decided, as a precaution, and also as a means of providing practically all the children of Leningrad with the necessary comfort, to open branches of the Palace of Pioneers, and we hope to open most of them by October 15th.

‘Comrade Zhdanov and Comrade Popkov are keenly interested in our work, and we are certainly getting every help from the Lensoviet.

‘One of our most painful tasks is looking after those little war cripples who have been injured in the bombings and shellings – there are children in Leningrad without arms and legs; though fortunately not very many. From the start our teaching staffs have taken every precaution to save the children from injury. But misfortunes will happen nevertheless. Our shelter rules are strictly observed in the schools.

‘But it isn’t all so easy for the children. Well, take today, for instance. There are many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children in this city who have spent the last seven hours in a shelter, with explosions going on around all the time. It does fray their nerves – it is no use pretending that because a child is tough, it can stand anything. And it is therefore terribly important that the Pioneers’ Palace and its branches should do everything to take the children’s minds off the grimmer side of things. So many of them have seen people lying dead in the street, and other terrible things. So we arrange concerts for them and theatrical shows, and we make them give concerts and theatrical shows themselves, and they come here and play games. But come and look for yourself,’ said Natan.

We walked over the parquet floors of several rooms of the Anichkov Palace. Outside, the shells were still thumping. ‘That’s more than seven hours now,’ Natan remarked. In one room a dozen boys were absorbed in games of chess. But several of the other rooms were empty, till we came to what must have been the sumptuous music room or ballroom of Maria Feodorovna’s palace. This room was packed. A variety show by the boys and girls themselves was in progress. All the boys, with closely cropped hair, were wearing little blue or grey blouses and red pioneer ties, and most of the girls, many of them with large silk ribbons in their hair, were remarkably tidily and neatly dressed – as though they had dressed up for a birthday party. Altogether, it was a much better-groomed children’s audience than you would find anywhere in Moscow, where clothes tend to be – even with children – on the untidy and sloppy side.

The late Maria Feodorovna, who was a kindly woman, would – I am sure – had she suddenly returned from the next world, been pleased to see such a charming children’s party in her palace, and also to see in what nice condition her palace was being kept, and to what good use it was being put.

What was going on was
samodeyatelnost,
or ‘self-activity.’ The children were doing things themselves. As we entered the ballroom, a fair-haired little boy in a blue blouse and a red pioneer’s tie was playing on a concertina, with great gusto, Tchaikovsky’s familiar little waltz from the
Children’s Album.
Then another little boy with a squeaky little voice sang, first a Russian soldiers’ song, and then an English romance called ‘Annie Laurie.’ ‘His father,’ Natan whispered, ‘was killed at the front last summer. A very fine man, a captain. He had the Order of Lenin.’

Then there was a comic, patriotic recitation from a bigger boy, with a lot of jokes about the Nazis. Outside the guns were going hard, but the children all laughed and clapped.

The rest of the programme was more ambitious. Four or five of the children played an amusing little sketch, with a ‘winter fritz’ as the funny man, and then an exquisite little girl of twelve or so gave a ‘rainbow dance,’ juggling deftly with streams of multi-coloured ribbons and ending up with wonderful vitality in a graceful whirlwind of colour. The child’s dance was clearly the product of professional ballet training. ‘Yes,’ said Natan, ‘one of our best Leningrad ballet people comes here regularly and gives lessons to the most promising children.’

The rainbow dance brought the house down. The children clapped and screamed for more, and the dance was repeated, with a middle-aged woman with a red face and a mop of peroxided hair playing on one of Maria Feodorovna’s cream-coloured Bechstein grands. Then a tall handsome boy of eleven or twelve played the violin very nimbly – a Weniawski mazurka, and one of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances. ‘He’s studied the violin for three years now in the musical studio of the Pioneers’ Palace,’ Natan explained.

It was good to see how happy and cheerful these children were, and how fit they all looked. But one could not help thinking with a pang of the other children who were now spending their eighth hour since morning in an air raid shelter, while shells were smashing houses and killing people around them. Nor could I help thinking of that infernal foundry in the Putilov works. What was happening there? The answer really was that one took things as they came to one. Today it was they; tomorrow it might be these. And, after all, there was no guarantee whatsoever that a shell would not come through the window at any moment and spoil the variety show at the palace completely. One just took chances – within reason – and did not worry.

When we got back to the Astoria about six o’clock there was a message for Major Likharev. His wife had phoned. Had anything happened? He rang up. Five shells had landed all round the house, and had smashed all the windows in his flat. Fortunately nobody had been either killed or even injured. He drove home as his wife, he said, had sounded ‘a little upset.’ However, he returned in a couple of hours, as we were getting ready to go off to the Smolny.

Two men are largely responsible for the survival of Leningrad – Zhdanov, Leningrad’s party chief who also, as a member of the Politburo and as a member of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, could act with all the authority of the highest party and governmental organs behind him; and Popkov, president of the Leningrad Soviet (the Lensoviet) or mayor of Leningrad as he liked to describe himself the night he received me at the Smolny. Actually his opposite number in London (if one can speak of ‘opposite numbers’ at all) would be the chairman of the L.C.C. rather than say the predominantly decorative Lord Mayor. These were the two men who, together with Marshal Voroshilov, at that time commander of the northern front, signed the famous ‘Leningrad in Danger’ appeal of August 21st, 1941.

I had seen Zhdanov only once in the distance, at the meeting of the Supreme Council when it was called in June 1942 to ratify the Anglo-Soviet Alliance. I did not see him during my visit to Leningrad, and Zhdanov has thus remained in my mind something of a legend: the man who conceived the Ladoga lifeline, and the man who, in the defence of Leningrad, had shown, in his more limited field, the same qualities of energy, self-possession, and organisational genius that Stalin had shown in the conduct of this war and the leadership of the country generally. To save Leningrad militarily was Zhdanov’s primary concern; I have heard it said that if he had been prepared to take a risk in December 1942, he could have permitted the civilian population slightly larger rations than he actually did permit; but the future of the ice road was still uncertain, and as long as that was so, Zhdanov decided to save up every possible ounce of food for the army, rather than save a few thousand civilian lives. For if these lives had been saved, and at the end of a few weeks the efficiency of the Leningrad front had been impaired through the necessity of applying starvation rations to the front itself, the damage to the country as a whole – and to Leningrad itself – would have been infinitely larger. It was just possible that a German breakthrough at that time, at this or that point of the front, would have rendered the Ladoga ice road impracticable or delayed it, and Leningrad would have had to continue without outside supplies. In other words, more generous rations for civilians in those weeks of uncertainty might have meant the end of everything, and Zhdanov was going to take no such chances. But it takes a man of iron will to take the hardest, most ‘civic’ and, on the face of it, least ‘humane’ line when in a grim dilemma of this kind.

So I did not see Zhdanov, the man whom many, thinking in terms of fifteen or twenty years hence, already regard as one of the two most likely successors, or even as the most likely successor. But I was invited to spend an evening at the Smolny as the guest of Popkov, who is, in effect, Zhdanov’s second-in-command.

The Smolny is the young gentlewomen’s high school, which became, in October 1917, the headquarters of the Bolsheviks. From here they directed the Revolution, and on the 25th the Smolny became the seat of the first Soviet Government. The famous building was wrapped in complete darkness as we drove up to it that night – the night after the eight hours’ shelling. A sentry with a flashlight took us across the yard into the main building and there, along those long vaulted corridors through which triumphant Lenin had briskly walked to his office in those historic autumn days of 1917, we were conducted to Popkov’s study.

Then, in October 1917, the whole neighbourhood of the Smolny and the long vaulted corridors were swarming with armed Red Guards and sailors of the Baltic Fleet. Now the corridors were empty except for a sentry here and there.

Popkov was a little different from so many of the other Leningrad bosses I had met. He also had a strong, fine face, but it was softer, and brightened by a friendly smile. Often his eyes twinkled, and he smiled almost boyishly, displaying two rows of perfect white teeth. He had one of those good Russian faces that make one feel at ease at once. His whole bearing had a natural simplicity, without any sophistication or the slightest trace of a pose. He was, no doubt, a ‘tough baby,’ as everybody in Leningrad has to be, especially in a job like this, but he did nothing to emphasise it. And what startled me, this great Leningrad leader did not speak with the usual, rather cold Leningrad precision but in a softer and more flowing Russian, of a kind spoken on the Volga. Actually, as he later told me, he was born in 1903 in the province of Vladimir, between Moscow and Nizhni-Novgorod. ‘I come from the family of a very poor carpenter,’ he said, ‘for two years I worked as a farm labourer, and then for two more years as a baker. Then in 1926 I came to Leningrad to study.’ Here he completed his course at the Workers’ Faculty, and then at one of the technical institutes. And then – ‘Then I just stayed on here, and became a member and then the chairman of one of the District Soviets; then I became first deputy to the chairman of the Lensoviet, and, for six years now I have been mayor of Leningrad! I was thirty-four when they made me mayor.’ He liked calling himself the mayor.

The day before my visit, Popkov had asked me to send him a list of questions. Now, as we sat down, he laid the list before him and proceeded to talk. There were several other people in the room to whom I had been presented, several military men, and an elderly man, Professor Moshansky, the head of Leningrad’s health department, and Comrade Bubnov, Popkov’s secretary, an enormous lanky young fellow with a large turned-up nose and with something of the same
bonhomie
as his chief.

What I had really asked Popkov to give me was a general view of Leningrad both as a city and as one of the key-points of the Soviet–German front. There were also a number of specific questions, answers to which would fill in a few gaps in my reading of the situation. To the question: ‘How many people actually died in Leningrad during the winter of 1941–2?’ I received no answer, except that ‘a few hundred thousand’ was as much as could be said for the present. Also, when I asked: ‘What is the present population of Leningrad?’ Popkov smiled and said, ‘Is it really necessary for you to know?’

My own guess was between 600,000 and 800,000, but I did not press the point. ‘I’ll give you an indication, though,’ said Popkov. ‘It has a population only a little less than Hamburg.’ ‘What,’ I said, ‘before the recent R.A.F. raids or since?’ – at which everybody laughed gleefully and Popkov replied, ‘No, I wouldn’t have compared Leningrad with a rubbish heap.’

For the rest, he talked very freely; though there are one or two points I am omitting at his request.

As regards the military situation of Leningrad, Popkov said: ‘The military situation of Leningrad today is more solid and stable than it has ever been since the beginning of the war. This can be proved by a whole series of facts. For months the Germans prophesied the imminent fall of Leningrad, and were planning their great victory banquet at the Astoria. All these plans have fallen through. First, our soldiers and workers smashed the German attempts to take Leningrad by storm. Then the Germans tried the blockade. The blockade also failed, though we lived through some very difficult hours, as you know, especially during the month when Tikhvin was in German hands and we were literally isolated, except for some transport planes. In making the Ladoga ice road we established a narrow link, but still a vital link with the outer world. In this way the German attempt to starve us out, to deprive us of communications, food and fuel, fell through, just as the attempt to take us by storm had failed.