Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

Did you receive the money back? If you didn’t then there is no need to worry. I don’t need any money at all at the moment. And anyway I received twenty rubles in wages. How are you feeling, Mother? Is your arm quite better now?

I’ll finish now. I wish you health and happiness and I send you my love. All my love to the family, especially Auntie Beti, Uncle Syoma, Uncle Busya and Aunt Rosa, Lyonya and Lyolya.

Lyodik was mobilized straightaway and found himself in a war that hadn’t yet started. The letter above was written on his nineteenth birthday. German forces had already tightened their grip on Leningrad. The 286th Division was put together hastily from evacuees, boys barely out of their teens, local volunteers, whoever they could find. The 994th Rifle Regiment was part of this. They were thrown straight into battle.

There is a small river, the Naziya, in the direction of Mga Station, and all around, for up to twenty kilometers, spreads endless forest and boggy ground. Kirill Meretskov, who was in command of the Volkhovsky Front, and whose actions resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of soldiers in this area, wrote years later that “I have rarely been in an area less suitable for a military offensive. I will forever remember the endless expanse of forest, the impenetrable marshes, the standing water on peat bogs, the broken roads.” The 994th Rifle Regiment survived among these peat bogs for three years, holding and losing positions. It began in September 1941, when their troop train arrived in the fog. The train didn’t even reach the junction — the Luftwaffe was overhead, and there were no Soviet planes around. The soldiers disembarked under fire, slipping about, dragging carts and weapons into copses. They could barely tug the carts with their wooden axles to safety. Then there were weeks of nonstop air raids. Along with the bombs, barrels fell from the sky. The barrels had holes punched in them and as they fell they made an unbearable screaming noise. Sometimes field kitchens went missing in the forests, because the staff were afraid to cross open ground, and the soldiers went hungry. They were armed with nothing more than rifles. On 11 September, when the Germans attacked in tanks close to the village of Voronovo there was panic. Soldiers dispersed across the marshes. After a few days the division had lost half its men and a large number of officers.

Astonishingly, it is possible to reconstruct the events of these days and weeks with a fair amount of detail. A number of texts, interviews, and letters belonging to those who survived have been preserved. The Battalion Commander of the nearby 996th Regiment remembered that there was no artillery support for two months: in addition to a rifle, every man was given a hand grenade and a bottle of incendiary liquid. It got colder. There was no bread, only dried crusts. There were no spirits either. The soldiers got hot food once a day. Some took the greatcoats off corpses and wore them over their own coats. They slipped and slid through the snow to HQ and back. They shared things between the different companies and boiled the meat from dead horses.

There was a day when we didn’t receive any orders to attack. The Germans didn’t bomb us either, or shell us. You couldn’t even hear firing. There was a deep silence all down the line, through the Sinyavinsky marshes. Imagine that! A day of silence. After an hour or two the men were seized by panic, deep unease. […] Some men were on the point of throwing down their rifles and running back to the rear… We, the officers, walked the lines and calmed the men, for all the world as if we were facing German tanks.

In Lyodik’s letters there is nothing about this, not even a hint. Almost all the letters had the “checked by military censor” stamp on them, but the censor would have found nothing to concern him in these letters. In one of the accounts of the Volkhovsky Front there is a quote from a letter by a Lieutenant Vlasov written on October 27, 1941:

The first freezing temperatures and the snow is driving the Fascists mad. Especially when they look through their binoculars and see us with our padded clothes and our warm caps and a greatcoat over the top. We can see them, they’re still in short jackets… All I can tell you is that the military operations are currently going our way, and those officers of Hitler’s won’t be eating in the Hotel Astoria as they dreamed of doing.

I see this scene, the warm hats and snow drifts, as if through the same set of binoculars; the rather forced humor, the bravado, was usual for a commanding officer. Still, you might expect a lieutenant to be more open about the fact that he was actually “at war” in a letter to his wife.

This reluctance characterizes Lyodik Gimmelfarb’s letters, too: he is absolutely intent on saying nothing about himself. He asks endless questions, mostly about his mother’s health, which worries him terribly. Does she get tired at work? He asks her not to worry on his account, he is quite, quite well. If he is silent for longer than a month then it’s only because of his “shocking laziness in writing letters.” He is just as before. How are Lyonya? Lyolya? Their new baby? Sarra Abramovna? And how are Uncle Syoma and his wife? What has Uncle Busya written? How are you all, my dearest family? Please don’t worry about me. It’s completely unnecessary. Be happy, healthy. I have everything I need.

At the beginning of the war in Leningrad, Daniil Kharms and the artist Pavel Zaltsman met by chance at a friend’s house. We can imagine what they spoke about, since neither had any illusions, and Kharms at some point during the meeting said about the imminent future: “We will be crawling away, without legs, holding onto the burning walls.” Around the same time, in an air raid shelter on the Arbat in Moscow, Marina Tsvetaeva rocked to and fro, repeating to herself “and the enemy just keeps going…” Kharms’s wife, another Marina, wrote, of the day before his arrest, that they had had to move a chair in the corridor, and Kharms was “afraid that misfortune would come upon them if they moved the chair.” Kharms was arrested on August 23, 1941. Perhaps he could hear the muttering in the clear sky from his cell on September 8 as the planes flew overhead to bomb the Badayev food storage warehouses.

Many people remembered that sunny day. Nikolai Nikulin, an officer cadet at the time and future art historian, whose memoirs were published posthumously, watched the antiaircraft shells exploding in the blue sky like cotton wool clouds.

The antiaircraft guns fired a wild uncoordinated barrage, missing the bombers. The planes didn’t even break formation, they flew on toward their target as if they barely felt the antiaircraft fire. […] It was very frightening and I suddenly found myself hiding under a piece of tarpaulin.

The incendiary bombs hissed and went out in the sand. When it was finally quiet a black cloud half-covered the sky over the city. Sixty-one-year-old artist and diarist Lyubov Shaporina looked out her window:

High in the air the white balls of explosions and the desperate antiaircraft fire. Suddenly a white cloud began growing up from behind the houses and roofs, bigger and bigger. Other white clouds piled up around it, lit golden in the sunset. They filled the whole sky, the clouds were bronze and a black stripe rose from below. It was so unlike smoke that for a long time I couldn’t believe it was a fire. […] The picture was grandly, sublimely beautiful.

In the diaries and notes written during the Siege of Leningrad in the terrible winter of 1941 (known from then on as “The Terrible Winter”), there are often “zones” that are utterly different from the rest of the text. Resembling the bubbles forming under ice, these zones are the spaces set aside by different authors for the seeing and describing of beauty. The starving city was completely taken up with the business of survival, but from time to time it fell into deep contemplation, just as its people sometimes fell into deep sleep in the freezing cold, no longer afraid to die. The tempo of the writing changes: what had been a hasty noting down of details, conversations, anecdotes — chronicles of daily dehumanization undertaken in order to save these experiences from oblivion — suddenly changes the pace of its breathing and becomes a meditation on the clouds or the effects of light. This is even more striking when you consider how the writers of these texts were entirely occupied by the exhausting labor of survival. Their acts of witness are addressed to a future reader who will be able to grasp the situation in all its horror and shame, who will see the arrests and the exiling, the nightly air raids, the streetcars standing silent, the baths filled with frozen sewage, the fear and hatred felt by those standing in bread lines.