Leningrad

Another writer who wrestled with the distinction between country and regime was the thirty-one-year-old poet Olga Berggolts. Out of fashion today, Berggolts became famous with February Diary, a cycle of vivid and by the standards of the time outspoken poems, written during the siege’s first winter and broadcast early in 1942. At the war’s start she was still unknown, a junior staff member at the city radio station. Fair and delicate, with a gentle, oval face and wide blue eyes, she knew and admired Akhmatova, but was a generation younger and had grown up a believing Communist, during the idealistic decade after the Revolution. Disillusion had not come until 1937, when her ex-husband was arrested (he was later secretly executed) and she was expelled from the Party and from the Writers’ Union. Berggolts’s own turn came eighteen months later, when she was taken to the prison behind the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ headquarters on the Liteiniy, and kicked in the stomach until she suffered a miscarriage. Seven months later she was released — saved, ironically, by the Terror itself, which had just reached the upper levels of Leningrad’s security services, purging her gaolers in the process.

By the time war broke out two years later, Berggolts had returned to the normal concerns of everyday life — a boozy flirtation with a colleague at the city radio station, hazy thoughts on a possible novel, arrangements for an illegal abortion for her sister. Her diary entry of 22 June reads simply ‘WAR!’, but on that day she also wrote a new, unpublishable poem, which tried to reconcile her fierce disillusionment with Communism as practised under Stalin with her love for her country:

On that day too I did not forget

The bitter years of persecution and sorrow.

But in a blinding flash I understood:

It didn’t happen to me but to You;

It was You who found strength and waited.

No, I have forgotten nothing,

But even the dead and the victims

Will rise from the grave at your call;

We will all rise, and not I alone.

I love you with a new love

Bitter, all-forgiving, bright –

My Motherland with the wreath of thorns

And the bright rainbow over your head. .

I love you — I can do no other –

And you and I are one again, as before.9

The men in charge of making sure that public anger at news of the German invasion did not spill into disorder were Zhdanov (who made it back to Leningrad on 26 or 27 June), Petr Popkov, the hot-tempered chairman of the city soviet, and (with the declaration of martial law) Lieutenant General Popov, commander of the Leningrad garrison. Actual fulfilment of the city leadership’s orders rested with the executive committees of the regional, city and fifteen city district soviets. The entire structure took its cues from Moscow: Popov’s Order No. 1 of 27 June, for example, mandating longer working hours, tighter travel restrictions and a curfew, was a verbatim copy of one issued by the Moscow garrison commander two days earlier. ‘It is difficult to avoid the impression’, as one historian puts it, ‘that the Leningrad garrison commander actually copied his order from Pravda.’10

This machinery, with its overlaps and overdependence on the faraway Kremlin and on Zhdanov’s office in the Smolniy, the gaunt former girls’ school that housed the Leningrad Party headquarters, stayed in place almost until the city was surrounded. The creation on 24 August of a Military Council of the Leningrad Front, bringing together Zhdanov and army group commander Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, streamlined decision-making somewhat, but the problem of overcentralisation remained. Four days earlier Zhdanov had tried to offload some of his mountainous responsibilities by creating a second committee, not including himself, to have charge over the construction of fortifications, weapons production and civilian military training. Stalin immediately telephoned to complain that the new body had been formed without his permission, and insisted that Zhdanov and Voroshilov join it. Zhdanov was thus left with two almost identical committees, the second of which he wound up again ten days later. Fat, asthmatic, balding, his khaki tunic littered with dandruff and cigarette ash, he thereafter made no further attempts to delegate. The saying of the time — that not a volt of electricity was allocated without his consent — was almost literally true. Typical, among the mass of trivial documents in the archives bearing his signature, is an order that one factory deliver another nine tanks of oxygen.11