Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

In mid-autumn the weather in the city was only just beginning to cool. People talked about the inevitable food shortages to come, but they were still serving food in the cafés. After the air raid they filled the bath and washed the children , but very soon the idea that you could turn on the tap and water would flow from it became inconceivable. The city was being bombed, the windows were taped over, and darkness filled the evenings, but the dark-blue streetcars continued to run until December. Food rations decreased. Instead of 600g of bread they now gave workers 200g. In September Lyubov Shaporina went shopping, got her bread ration, and stopped to read a newspaper board. Then she realized she’d forgotten to get the five eggs she was permitted. A few weeks later, the simple idea of forgetting to get one’s ration was in itself unimaginable. One person wrote that they had been sleeping in their clothes for many days, ready to go down to the shelter at night. That Terrible Winter they slept in their icy apartments fully dressed, pulling any rags they could find over themselves (when spring came and Lydia Ginzburg had survived, she found it hard to make herself take off her felt boots and change back into shoes). Fuel supplies ran out in September and it was becoming colder. Everyone was sent to chop wood: teenagers, girls in thin coats and light shoes. Snow fell for the first time on the night of October 7. The following day Lyodik turned up in the besieged city.

Purple ink on a small sheet of paper

October 8, 1941

Dear Mother,

Please forgive me for not writing more often to let you know I’m fine. I keep meaning to but just don’t get around to it. You do take things very hard, and there really isn’t any need.

I’m writing this letter from Auntie Lizochka’s house. I was close to Leningrad and thought I’d take the opportunity to go into the town. When I got to Auntie’s house I found Auntie Soka and Lyusya at home. You can’t imagine just how happy and pleased I was to see them!

They looked after me as if I’d been their own son. I was embarrassed. Lyusya sewed me a padded jacket I can wear under my coat.

Auntie Liza gave me some warm socks, gaiters, and handkerchiefs. All these things will come in so handy, I am very grateful to them. They put some good cigarettes in my pocket, so I’m a “rich man” now! But sadly this evening I have to leave them. I can’t do anything about it, it’s just how things are.

I received some postcards from you on the way and a few letters from Yalutorovsk. The last letter I received from you was written on September 25. I was very glad to hear you are doing well. I’m glad you’ve found work. It isn’t so much the money, it’s just you won’t be at home with nothing to do anymore. It’s wonderful news that Auntie Betya is staying.

I had a letter from Father, sent on September 27 from Moscow. He wrote that he would be called up soon. I have had nothing else from him. Has the new baby come yet? And if so, is it a boy or a girl? I wish you health and happiness. I send you all my love. Auntie Lizochka will write to you today.

At the very same time Lyubov Shaporina was writing in her diary that the stewed cabbage cores she’d found outside the city were very good, and it would be worth stocking up on them. It was evening. Lyodik had already left his aunts and he was walking down the unlit streets, returning to his unit. By nightfall the clouds had parted and the stars were bright. Shaporina was waiting for “surprises” — her euphemism for air raids. “Marina Kharms came to see me. Daniil Ivanovich [Daniil Kharms] was arrested six weeks ago, the building next to theirs has been destroyed and their house has a crack running through it. All the windows have been blown out,” she wrote. “Marina has nothing to live on, and her anguish over Daniil is killing her.”

On the same day German intelligence reported back to the High Command for the 18th Army on morale in the besieged city, and recommended broadening the approach to propaganda: “It is essential to use leaflets as a medium which is both unexpected and can bring about confusion among the enemy, by suggesting that Soviet measures are in the German interest. For example: workers should not refuse to take up arms, as at the necessary moment they can turn these against their red masters.” This is a strange echo of the words quoted in the case against Kharms. If we are to believe the unnamed secret police informant, Kharms once said: “If they force me to man a machine gun from the rooftops during street battles with Germans, then I will fire, not at the Germans, but at them.”

Secret Police reports, quoted in a book about the Siege of Leningrad by historian Nikita Lomagin, kept a precise record of defeatist attitudes in the besieged city. In October there were 200–250 manifestations of “anti-Soviet sentiment” a day. By November it was 350. In the shops where bread lines began forming at 2:00–3:00 a.m., and flocks of teenagers came begging for crusts, conversations were all about how “the Germans would come and restore order.” Shaporina wrote, and not unsympathetically, about a circulating myth: that special bombs would fall and cover the city with smoke, and when the smoke dispersed there would be a German policeman standing on every street corner.

I remember how in the first weeks of war Lev Rakov, the former lover of the poet Mikhail Kuzmin and a handsome scholar and Russian dandy, said reassuringly to a friend in a Leningrad café, still with all its windows sparkling and intact: “You worry too much. What if the Germans do invade. They won’t stay for long. And then the English will come in their stead, and we’ll all be reading Dickens. And anyone who doesn’t want to won’t have to.”

For many, Dickens was a savior in the besieged city, he was medicine for the soul, and a source of warmth. People read and reread his novels, and read them aloud to children, particularly Great Expectations with its ice-cold house and its wedding cake overhung with cobwebs; in sixteen-year-old Misha Tikhomirov’s diary he writes that he has kept for the evening’s reading (for added sweetness) “three scraps of dried bread (very small), a piece of rusk, half a spoon of caramelized sugar.”

Today I am rereading Lyodik’s letter from that October, with the padded jacket and the handkerchiefs. I want this blissful scene from Dickens to go on forever: the aunts giving warmth and succor to the freezing, half-animal soldier, fussing around him, dressing him in anything they can find, happy that he is alive and they are alive, and feeding him with their very last (or nearly last) provisions. And all this in the worst hours of war, in a city that has gone black from the inside out, where soon no one will be able to help anyone; all this in an apartment with taped-up windows, shining on the inside like an amber lamp.

The letter was passed between relatives and not subject to the censor so Lyodik could have written as he pleased, but he didn’t and wouldn’t have written freely. On the Leningrad Front in Autumn 1941, letters were increasingly being stopped by the censor. In the city alone the censored letters numbered in the thousands. Even those that reached their destination were different from Lyodik’s letters: most of all in their desire to share their experience of what was happening around them. Some ask for items of equipment or clothing or cigarettes; others describe the workings of gun batteries, or explain what a political officer’s job is. Some promise to beat the enemy to the last, and describe how it is to be done (“Dear Manya, dear sister, I’m on sentry duty a lot and it’s unbearable”). Leonid Gimmelfarb, Lyodik, is, as usual, very well, and the whole thing begins to seem more and more peculiar, especially after a month with no letters and then a new letter in which he mentions both his laziness and tonsillitis.