Russia at war 1941-1945

possible that the flow of supplies from Britain and the United States would slow down as a result; but this consideration was outweighed by the immense fact that the USA had now entered the war and that the drive of the Japanese armed forces to the west and south had, at least for the time being, removed the threat of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union.

On December 16 Roosevelt wired to Stalin proposing that the Russians take part in a

conference at Chungking, along with Chinese, British, Dutch and US representatives.

Stalin, in his reply, dodged the issue, though he added: "I wish you success in the struggle against the aggression in the Pacific."

[Stalin-Roosevelt Correspondence, p. 18.]

PART THREE The Leningrad Story

Chapter I THE DEAD OF LENINGRAD

There were many mass tragedies in the Second World War. There was Hiroshima, where

200,000 people were killed in a few seconds, and many thousands of others were maimed and crippled for life; there was Nagasaki, on which the second atom bomb was dropped.

In Dresden 135,000 men, women and children were killed in two nights in February

1945. At Stalingrad on August 23, 1942, 40,000 people were killed. Earlier in the war, there had been the London Blitz and "small stuff" like Coventry, where some 700 people were killed in one night. There were the massacres in hundreds of "Partisan" villages in Belorussia; and there were the Nazi extermination camps where millions perished in gas chambers and in other horrible ways. The list is almost endless.

The tragedy of Leningrad, in which nearly a million people died, was, however, unlike any of the others. Here, in September 1941, nearly three million people were trapped by the Germans and condemned to starvation. And nearly one-third of them died—but not as German captives.

[In the words of Harrison Salisbury, one of the best foreign observers of the Russian wartime scene: "This was the greatest and longest siege ever endured by a modern city, a time of trial, suffering and heroism that reached peaks of tragedy and bravery almost beyond our power to comprehend... Even in the Soviet Union the epic of Leningrad has received only modest attention, compared with that devoted to Stalingrad and the Battle of Moscow. And in the west not one person in fifty who thrilled to the courage of the Londoners in the Battle of Britain is cognisant of that of the Leningraders." (New York Times Book Review, May 10, 1962.)]

Leningrad—the old St Petersburg—had been the capital of the Russian Empire for over

two centuries. With its Neva embankments, its bridges, its Winter Palace and Hermitage and dozens of other palaces, with its Admiralty and St Isaac's Cathedral, and its Bronze Horseman (the famous statue of Peter the Great), its Nevsky Prospect, its Summer

Garden and its canals, with their hump-backed granite bridges, it was—and is—one of

the most beautiful cities in the world.

For two centuries it had been not only Russia's capital, but its greatest cultural centre. No Russian city had so many literary associations as St Petersburg. Pushkin, Gogol,

Dostoevsky, Innokenti Annensky, Blok and Anna Akhmatova, to mention only a few,

would never have been what they were but for that haunting city— so dazzling in its

grandeur, grace and harmony to Pushkin; so mysterious, so sinister, so surrealist, if one may say so, to Gogol and Dostoevsky; the Gogol of The Nose; the Dostoevsky of The Idiot and Crime and Punishment.

St Petersburg—Petrograd at the time—was also where the two Revolutions of 1917 had

begun. In 1918, the Soviet Government moved Russia's capital to Moscow, and for three or four years afterwards, Petrograd was almost a dying city, hungrier than most. From 1919 to 1921 more than half its population had fled, and of those who had stayed behind, many thousands died of hunger. So hunger was not new to Leningrad. However, by 1924, its revival—above all, its industrial revival—began, and, by 1941, it was a flourishing industrial and cultural centre again and the greatest educational centre in the Soviet Union, with, proportionately, a larger student population than any other city.

Though no longer the capital of Russia, it had its own, slightly snobbish local patriotism, and tended to look down on Moscow as an upstart. It had, too, had its bad spells under the Soviet régime. Kirov had been assassinated here in December 1934, and that had

started the Great Purges of the late thirties. Leningrad had had its share, perhaps more than its share, of the Stalin-Yezhov Purges. Characteristically, a gifted writer and poet like Olga Bergholz, who was to play so important a part as one of the principal

"Leningrad-can-take-it" speakers on the Leningrad radio during the famine winter of 1941-2, had spent several months in prison in 1937 on some fantastic trumped-up charge.