The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

in which he had to take part while working in the political section at headquarters. He told us that his family’s apartment had been abandoned, that his parents left in a great hurry, leaving everything, and asked whether we could keep his notes and dissertation drafts. Should he live, he said, then he would resume his work where he had left off. We managed to do all that, and as a memento I received Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat with a personal inscription.

Dear friend, never again shall the three of us go for a boat ride as we used to, you and Andrei at the oars, myself at the tiller. Your notes have been left lying next to mine on the lower shelf of a bookcase in a house abandoned.

Lenia came by two more times and we expected him a third. But we never saw him again. The iron horseshoe of the German advance threatened to become an iron ring, and headquarters hurriedly retreated deeper into the rear.

Sinister conflagrations increasingly filled the sky as the retreating Red Army burned everything in its wake. And finally, the inevitable came.

An anti-tank gun thudded heavily at a nearby intersection. The staccato crack of machine guns burst through the still gardens. People instinctively inhaled deeply and whispered, “Here it comes.” The sky blazed all night; all night artillery thundered; all night people huddled against each other in slits in the raw earth. At dawn everything suddenly became quiet. Only below, along the river the snap of rifle fire continued and a German mortar stubbornly fired on the retreating troops. Then the whole earth shuddered from a powerful explosion—the gorgeous Dnieper bridges settled into the water. They had been dynamited while the last troops still crossed them. And again there was silence, full of anxiety and bewilderment.

We went out. Trolley cars, dispersed from the depots, were scattered everywhere along the streets. The water works and power plants had already been blown up, and the trolleys, empty and useless, seemed to have lost their way in the huge city. But there were many pedestrians—people with baby carriages filled with sacks of flour. We recalled how the day before the locals were hauling off bright blue beds with cheerful nickel-plated ornaments. Somewhere warehouses were being plundered, freight cars broken into. The “lumpen proletariat” were joyously dragging easy wartime booty to their lairs.

But the Germans were slow to appear. Rumor had it that they were already in the city. Wide-eyed, street-smart kids would announce that some guy named Joe had seen the hugest tank at the Haymarket. But in our district the Germans appeared only toward five in the evening. People poured into the street, examining the newcomers from the west with fear and curiosity. They marched handsome and huge in their strange grayish-green uniforms. Tired, covered with dust, but clean shaven, they smiled at the populace. They would

Tat’iana Fesenko, War-Scorched Kiev

235

pick up children, fearlessly enter yards and houses to wash themselves. They washed themselves with pleasure, pouring cold water over their taut, muscular backs.

But our own, our cherished army was marching eastward into a huge trap where it was to lose some 660,000 men.

The first evening star appeared in the sky, timid and small. The nineteenth day of the month of September of the year 1941 was nearing its end. Mother shut the gate, looked around our quiet green garden with its dahlias and nasturtiums and said with relief: “Well, the war is over for us.”

Poor mother, she had no way of knowing that the war had only just begun.

NOTES

1. Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890–1986), foreign minister of the Soviet Union 1939–1949 and 1953–1956; negotiated the Soviet-German non-aggression pact in 1939.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Elena I. Kochina, Blockade Diary

For 900 days during World War II German armies blockaded Leningrad. At least one-and-a-half million residents of the city died from starvation, the elements, and disease. Not realizing what war would bring, E.I. Kochina, a Leningrad schoolteacher, started a diary a few days before war commenced. The diary ends in 1942 when she and her family were evacuated while the siege was still in progress. She writes sparingly but with lucid insight and observation of the horror, brutality, dehumanization, and death in its many forms. Life in its very essence deteriorated around her. She wrote with no hope that her diary would ever be published. This is an intense document of human survival and of the human spirit, which also speaks for all the mute and dead who did not survive the siege. The original, Blokadnyi dnevnik [Blockade Diary] was published in the collection Pamiat’. Paris: YMCA Press, 1981.