Leningrad

Far-sightedly, Likhachev also stocked up on food, insisting that his family claim their whole, initially generous, bread ration, and dry slices on a sunny windowsill until they had enough to fill a pillowcase, which they hung on a wall out of reach of mice. He also insisted that they buy everything they could from the rapidly emptying shops, whose windows were now blocked with double screens of earth-filled planking. Later, he was to wish that they had bought more.

In winter, lying in bed, I thought of one thing until my head hurt: there, on the shelves in the shops, there had been canned fish. Why hadn’t I bought it? Why had I bought only eleven jars of cod-liver oil, and not gone to the chemist’s a fifth time to get another three? Why hadn’t I bought a few vitamin C and glucose tablets? These ‘whys’ were terribly tormenting. I thought of every uneaten bowl of soup, every crust of bread thrown away, every potato peeling, with as much remorse and despair as if I’d been the murderer of my own children. But all the same, we did as much as we could, and believed none of the reassuring announcements on the radio.20

Georgi Knyazev, director of the Academy of Sciences archive, was confined to a wheelchair by paralysis of the legs. Each day he pushed himself along the same 800-metre stretch of the Vasilyevsky Island embankment, from the bronze-plaqued ‘Academicians’ Building’ where he lived, past a pair of sphinxes imported from Luxor by Nicholas I, the gabled Menshikov Palace and lime tree-filled Rumyantsev Square to the portico of the Academy. On the opposite bank spread the classic Petersburg panorama: to the left, beyond Palace Bridge, the rococo hulks of the Hermitage and Winter Palace; just visible behind them, the Palace Square angel and topmost candy-swirl of the Cathedral of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood; ahead, the Admiralty building with its needle spire; to the right, the egg-shaped dome of St Isaac’s and Falconet’s famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great — the ‘Bronze Horseman’ — rearing from its granite boulder. This stretch of pavement, this view, was what Knyazev called his ‘small radius’, the narrow aperture through which he was to observe the whole of the siege. Prosy and conventional (his diary is addressed, with unintentional irony, to ‘you, my distant friend, member of the future Communist society, to whom all war will be as inherently loathsome as cannibalism is to us’21), he spent the first days of the war listening to the radio (‘The peoples of Europe must surely rise in rebellion!’) sorting out a first-aid kit (‘for use in the event of burns or wounds’), and attempting to energise his staff, who showed a tendency to ‘guard the sofa in the President’s office’ instead of the archive’s depository. On 2 July he visited the archive administration headquarters, in the old Senate Building:

On the staircase which once heard the rap of Guards Officer Lermontov’s sabre. . there now hangs a length of rail on a thick cord, and next to it a metal rod — a beater. This is for use in the event of a gas alarm. On the upper landing it was dark, although blue lamps were burning. Walking along the corridor, which was in almost total darkness, I felt as though I were in a Meyerhold production.

The IRLI [Institute of Russian Literature] repository was a dreadful sight. I hardly recognised the workrooms. Everything was in chaos. . Behind a statue of Aleksandr Vsevolovsky stood two large barrels of water, one of which was already leaking. There were boxes of sand and spades all over the place, and a fire hose stretched along the corridor. Outside the Pushkin room stood storage boxes, some empty, some full. I had to do them justice — Pushkin’s manuscripts were packed perfectly. . But there was a lot of fuss and agitation. Right next to the boxes, a staff member was dictating an article on fascism to a typist. Someone else was writing out a list of what had to be packed. . Everywhere, there were crowds of people carrying sandbags.