Nikto ne zabyt, i nichto ne zabyto. “Nobody is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten”. The words etched into the granite wall of the Piskarevskoe War Memorial have long been in general usage as the motto of the 900 days of the Leningrad Blockade.
Zabveniyu ne podlezhit, never to be forgotten… When it comes to the Siege of 1941-1944, the formulaic phrase keeps reverberating, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that Leningraders’ capacity for forgetting has been thoroughly exercised. The citizens in the Land of Amnesia have been repeatedly reminded to remember what to forget. And they have learned that lesson the hard way. For less naïve Russians at least, their periodically re-shaped history has always masked the face of another, more real history, which, thus denied, remained in the private sphere, to be accidentally discovered, or disclosed, in parts and in secret, or simply stayed blank, blind and silent. In the wake of the post-Soviet disenchantment with revolutionary rhetoric, the October Story (the main Leningrad myth providing the foundation for local patriotism pre-eminently among the older generation) has been gradually overshadowed by the Siege Story. One thing that has greatly contributed to shaping, telling and retelling the story of the Leningrad Blockade is, without doubt, the Leningrad Siege Museum, or more exactly the Memorial Museum of the Defence and Blockade of Leningrad. The museum’s destiny, intertwined with the Siege story, has been outlined in a booklet predictably entitled Zabveniyu ne podlezhit (1999), issued to celebrate the ten years since the reopening of the Siege museum.^[1]

The Museum Story

Remembrance of the Siege has been a sad saga of denials and forgettings. The story begins on December 4, 1943, when the Leningrad Front Military Council gave orders to prepare an exhibition dedicated to the heroic defence of Leningrad. During the first six months, 220,000 people visited the exhibition, which was opened on April 30, 1944. In October 1945, the exhibition was turned into a museum. The Memorial Museum of the Defence and Blockade of Leningrad (Memorialnyi muzei oborony i blokady Leningrada), was officially inaugurated on January 27, 1946, two years to the day after the Leningrad Blockade was lifted. The 60,000 exhibits collected in the Siege Museum were intended to commemorate the life of the city’s population and of Leningrad’s defenders during the two-and-a-half years of the Siege. Among the most heart-chilling pieces was a frosted bread-shop window with the minimal daily civilian ration displayed on the scales: 125 grams, a thin slice of something like bread, composed of defective rye flour, salt, cottonseed cake, cellulose, soy flour, reclaimed flour dust, sawdust and water.^[2] A visitor could imagine the unforgettable New Year’s dinner of 1941: yeast soup, potato-peel pancake, and glue jelly. One could wonder about a list of 22 ingenious dishes prepared out of pigskin, or about the culinary uses of the then highly desirable cakes made of duranda, stone-hard greenish briquettes of pressed sunflower-seed waste, normally used as animal fodder. The small homemade tin stove (where books and pieces of furniture could be burned for lack of other fuel) saved many a life when the indoor temperature crept below zero. In those days, a child’s sled was not a part of winter enjoyment; for its lucky owner it provided an essential means of transportation along the icy streets. It could help in bringing a tin canister with the precious water from the Neva, or in transporting a starvation-weakened, dystrophic family member, or carry away a corpse wrapped in a sheet. In the exhibition there were also letters and diaries bearing witness to the ordeal the civilian population went through in the cruel winter of 1941-42. Documents, pictures, posters, panoramas, maps and photos, military uniforms and ammunition, tanks and canons, petrol bombs, gas masks and fire extinguishers… The dreadful paraphernalia of military and civilian life under the extraordinary conditions of the Siege filled the dozen exhibition halls.
In 1946 the exhibition was turned into a museum. Thousands of personal archives, documents and trophies of the Blockade were kept there. But, notwithstanding its evident public success, in February 1949 the Siege Museum was closed without notice or public announcement, its archives seized and the Director, Lev Rakov, arrested and sentenced to 25 years in a prison camp in Siberia. In the name of the Kremlin-inspired Leningrad affair (leningradskoye delo), based on forged accusations of ideological heresy, steps were taken to destroy the historical documentation of the Siege, so that future generations would be unable to ascertain what really happened during the nine hundred days. Also, the official records were concealed or sequestered, placed in the Archive of the Ministry of Defence under a high-security classification, and so made inaccessible to historians.^[3] The head of the Siege Museum was accused of creating the myth of a “special destiny for the city of Leningrad”, and of neglecting the role of Stalin and the Communist Party during the Blockade and the war. Many of the original exhibits were disposed of, vanished, or were damaged through inadequate storage. Ironically, the date of the official act of liquidation of the Siege Museum was the day of Stalin’s death, March 5, 1953.
Thirty-five years passed before it became possible to initiate a discussion on the museum issue. Unsurprisingly, as a result of glasnost and democratisation in the late 1980s, public opinion urged the city authorities to restore the Siege Museum. In 1989, 37 exhibition rooms were opened in the old premises at Solianoi pereulok, 9. The second life of the museum commenced on the 48th anniversary of the beginning of the Siege, on September 8, 1989.^[4] Public interest in the various aspects of the Siege has been constantly growing and there is currently an abundance of popular and scholarly activity and publications connected with the Blockade period. The new Siege Museum could have become a centre for serious research; but alas, it is again marked by the one-sidedness so cherished by Soviet historiography. The Leningrad Blockade has been outlined quantitatively, but its essence has not been disclosed, and the faceless German fascist is presented in full concordance with the enemy stereotype.^[5]
In an interview, Valery Mikhaylovich David, the vice-director of the Siege Museum, explains:

We are now free to do whatever we wish, but the war veterans and even some of the museum people still believe in old concepts. We have our exhibition, where we show things in showcases not as works of art, but as part of real life. Outside their context they are just trash. But they are connected with the blockade, with people who survived the Siege. We do not know and will never know how many died in Leningrad. Some people lost their human dignity, but cannibalism was not a mass issue. Witnesses may tell stories about the things they saw, but there were also other things that they did not see. Only a historian can provide a generalised and comprehensive view. The archives have now been opened, and they will supply enough material for many generations of scholars.
Does the city need this museum? Perhaps, not. Strangely enough, when everybody wanted to forget about the war, in the late 1940s, lots of people were coming, both children and grown-ups. But not now. Pupils, students, do come in organised groups. And so do the veterans. It was due to their initiative that the museum was restored. They use to come in January, May and September. They want to remember and to have company, to read aloud their graphomaniac verses. The natives do not come at all, or very seldom. Neither do foreign tourists. For them, we should have prepared foreign-language booklets, we should have publicity – but there is no money. We have lots of problems and little money. The city’s finances are in a tragic state; no World Bank would have loans enough to help us. In the long run, it is society itself that has to decide what to remember and what to forget.^[6]

Ritualising the Siege

Over the recent decade, remembrance of the Siege has become part of the ritual life of the city. Three times a year (on September 8 and January 27, marking the beginning and end of the Leningrad Blockade, and on Victory Day, May 9) flowers, garlands and wreaths are brought to places telling of the terrible toll of the war. Among those most frequented are the Piskarevskoe Memorial, the Defence monument on Victory Square, and the memorial plaque on the Nevsky Prospekt, 14. There on the house wall is a painted blue-and-white wartime sign reading “Citizens: In case of shelling this side of the street is the most dangerous”. The sign had disappeared in 1949, but was carefully put back (as a reminder of the Nazi bombardment of Leningrad during the Siege) when the city celebrated its 250th anniversary in 1957.
The city is no longer called Leningrad. But each year since his election in 1996, the Governor Vladimir Yakovlev publishes a letter in the local Sankt-Peterburgskiye vedomosti on the Day of the Siege; there he addresses the citizens either as “Dear Leningraders-Petersburgers!” (1999), or just “Dear Petersburgers!”^[7] In 1990, on September 8, The Day of Sorrow became an official day of remembering the Siege for the first time. Ten years later, local newspapers report on the memorial programme:

9.30 Flowers and garlands placed by the memorial plaque on the Nevsky, 14, to commemorate the victims of the blockade.
11.00 Wreaths and garlands brought in procession to the Piskarevskoe and Serafimovskoye cemeteries, and to the Defence monument on Victory Square.^[8]

The amateur theatre “Born out of the Blockade” (Rodom iz blokady) gave the 900th free performance of its play showing the days and nights of the besieged city.^[9] The newspapers also mention the Memory Book (Kniga Pamyati: Leningrad, blokada 1941-1944), compiled by the City Committee for Labour and Social Aid. There the names of the perished are registered, starting from September 8, 1941. A data bank of over 600,000 names and 30 volumes of the Memory Book are planned by the City administration, and so far, 153,628 names have been entered in the eight volumes already issued.^[10] Copies are kept in the Siege Museum.^[11] “Children of the Blockade” (Deti blokady – 900), a local organisation headed by Galina Komarova, has been meeting for many years, in order to keep alive the memories of the war and the Siege: the common denominator of its members, the blokadniki.^[12] There is also an association called The Blockade Brothers, Blokadnoye bratstvo, founded in 1992 with a similar mission; in January 2000, they held an international congress.^[13]
As time goes by, a decreasing number of witnesses are able to tell their Siege stories in the first person. Even though a special clinic, St Yevgeniya’s, was opened in 1999 to serve 35,000 survivors, their number is steadily diminishing by 8,000 every year. The war invalids living in Petersburg are now in their 80s. Their former right to free medicine was taken away by Governor Yakovlev in 1999 with the motivation of saving cash. The money was, indeed, urgently needed for the Ice Palace that cost $80 million, and for the yet unfinished high-speed railway project ($50 million). But the problem of survivors will die away by itself: in 2002 there will be no one left, says the disillusioned newspaper Chas Pik.^[14] None the less, the Siege theme soars higher and higher – perhaps indicating a victim syndrome prevalent among the losers of perestroika, especially among the older generation unable to adjust to the post-Soviet transformations. It provides them with a glorified group identity supposedly making up for their feelings of loss. The fewer witnesses left alive – the more names of the dead enter the Memory book. By the city’s 300th jubilee, the Glory Alley at the Piskarevskoe War Memorial will have 300 memorial plaques for the defenders of the city. All the republics of the former Union are represented on the Piskarevskoe. Nowadays, religious ceremonies are held to commemorate soldiers of various confessions who died in the battles for Leningrad.^[15] Also, those who survived the Siege, the blokadniki, are now allowed to give their views on the frightening face of the Siege. This was preceded by long and successful attempts to conceal, ennoble and glorify the ghastly reality.
For the younger generation, the Siege is a story that they do not associate with the present city of St Petersburg, as letters in local newspapers revealed. Anatoly Aganin complained about the paradoxical confusion of name and time, when a museum director participating in a TV programme devoted to the Blockade called the besieged city Petersburg and its inhabitants Petersburgers.^[16] “The Petersburg blockade?” – wonders the author of the letter. The children of Leningrad-Petersburg simply do not know much about the Blockade. Like the war and the Holocaust, it seems to be beyond their horizon, even if some teachers take them to the Piskarevskoe Memorial.^[17] The long denial has created a black hole of collective amnesia.

View From Above

In the story of the Siege, the official heroic view from above and the tragic private view from below do not overlap; there is no consistent picture. All the available stories are more or less false, because partial. The full story of the Siege, including its oral history, has yet to be written. In order to make sense of the divergent stories, one has to consider the ideological underpinnings of the official macro-history that separates the military history of The Great Patriotic War from the history of civilian sacrifices. Civilian losses are seen as the inevitable price for the victory. The Russian wartime adage puts it bluntly: we do not care about the costs (my za tsenoy ne postoim). And costs they were. The monumental power interests of the Soviet leadership had once again rolled over human lives. Mythical claims and heroic formulas glorifying the winners masked the unsavoury reality of war. “Leningrad the Hero City” was the title of honour awarded after the war, along with the Golden Star and the Medal for Heroic Resistance During the Siege.^[18]
In official history, the civilian survivors of the Leningrad Siege were called zashchitniki, the defenders. Any opinions other than heroic ones were silenced and labelled anti-Soviet. And for all those civilians victimised by the Blockade there was neither compassion, nor charity, nor any real interest, as the post-war “Leningrad affair” clearly demonstrated.^[19] Nataliya Lebina, the Petersburg sociologist, argues in her article in “Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoy zhizni”, dealing with the norms and values of Soviet everyday life:

Monumental history in its Marxist version was (and is) typically concerned with myths about the past, while downplaying or totally omitting events and phenomena non-concordant with the given ideological position. The success of micro-historical research may be connected with emerging doubts about certain macro-historical descriptions. But, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, discrepancy between power discourses and practices is common, not just at the top, but also on the individual level. Even private sources such as diaries, memoirs, letters, interviews are never quite free from the ideological clichés. Still, non-standard documents may open up historical research for a scholarly discourse about the usually non-registered aspects of everyday life.^[20]

Even the rare private Siege memories printed before 1990 reflect a typically macro-historical approach. Revealing examples can be found in “The Defence of Leningrad”.^[21] Memoirs and diaries of military leaders, party officials and bureaucrats bear witness there to the Siege they endured in the “city of Lenin, the cradle of the revolution, the workers’ city, the major cultural and industrial centre of the Soviet state”. Soviet Marshal M. V. Zakharov declares in the pompous style of the period, in his opening words:

The heroic deeds of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War, the manliness and endurance of its citizens and its defenders who opposed the fascist occupants will never fail to move the hearts of people. Now that a quarter of a century has passed since the Leningrad Siege, many memoirs and books about its heroic past have seen the light. Each new story tells about the austere and truly legendary days of the besieged Leningrad, and they enhance our pride in Soviet man, who is capable of performing any great deed in the name of the glory and independence of our Motherland.^[22]

The closer to our time, and the farther away from those days, the broader the gap is between the view from above and views from below. Contemporary scholars maintain that grave initial mistakes by the Soviet leadership made the situation unmanageable, both for the army and for the population. To cut a long story short: on June 22, 1941, the war began with the Soviet army mobilising in response to German occupation of Russian territory. A couple of weeks later, in July, large groups of children were sent out of Leningrad; women were commanded to dig trenches; the irregular regiments (opolchenie) was spontaneously created; the museums started evacuating art treasures; the city monuments were covered, removed or hidden in protective graves and mounds. Apparently, nobody in the Kremlin could imagine that in three weeks’ time, the German army would approach the absolutely unprotected Western borders of the Leningrad region. The irregular regiments, opolchenie, hastily had to construct the Luga defence line, which withstood enemy attack for 40 days, and thus provided time to better organise the defence of the city. In August the front line came very close to Leningrad, and the city was almost surrounded. In September the enemy came close enough to be able to fire on the city; the first artillery attack was recorded on September 4. Two days later, the German air raids began.
The “Siege calendar” (Blokadnyi kalendar’), starts on September 8, 1941, when the key fortress, Schlüsselburg, on the eastern front fell, and the city was cut off from the rest of the country for almost three years. That same evening, massive bombing set fire to 178 buildings; the most disastrous target hit by an incendiary bomb was the Badaev warehouses, where food was stored. Fire spread quickly to old wooden storehouses put up one next to another, practically cheek by jowl. People watched the hellish red glow over the city develop into layers of phantasmagoric clouds in the evening sky. Everyone knew that the grain, flour, sugar, meat, lard and butter intended for distribution to the food shops were burning up. At night the burning warehouses glowed like a volcano. Two and a half thousand tons of sugar melted and flowed into the earth. After the fire, nobody doubted that the city faced famine due to the heedlessness of Leningrad leaders.
“Nevertheless, the very first day of the blockade revealed characteristic traits. There was no panic. Everybody tried to do the best in the catastrophic situation, with not enough food, and lack of ammunition to defend the city. But helping each other was the unwritten rule,” maintains the local paper on the Day of Commemoration of the Blockade, 59 years later.^[23] Once again, a selective and embellishing memory is at work in retrospect. Not all Leningraders were brave. There are reports of panic, despair, defeatism, madness, hoarding, speculation, looting, crime, murder, even cannibalism during the famine-struck months of autumn and winter 1941-42.^[24] Leningrad, surrounded and attacked by the enemy, lacking fuel, electricity, water and food, soon turned into a city of death.

View From Below

Literary attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible civilian sufferings in the besieged Leningrad were made by the Leningraders Olga Berggolts, Daniil Granin, Vera Inber, and outside Russia by Paavo Rintala, Eino Hanski, Harrison E. Salisbury, among others. But even in their books the story of the Siege is not fully revealed, either for fear of Soviet persecution, due to self-censorship, or for lack of reliable data. The familiar Soviet pattern of pressure from above and resignation from below has been at work. Also aestheticisation can have a distancing effect, and imply a concealment of the ugly and unmentionable. Death from starvation, lynching of a ration-card stealer by the hungry mob, robbery and murder for food, butchery of corpses, piles of frozen excrement in the streets… Things like that are not pleasant to remember or to write about, so they tend to be thoroughly repressed until they are forgotten. Food was the main concern for the famished civilians, and there was food on the black market, to be bought at hideous prices or traded for clothing, gold watches, jewellery and art objects.

Everything was for sale at the Haymarket. Here stone-faced men sold glasses filled with “Badaev earth” – plain dirt dug from the cellars of the Badaev warehouses into which tons of molten sugar had poured. After the great fire subsided, reclamation teams under Food Chief Pavlov pumped out molten sugar for days, but thousands of tons saturated the ashes and earth beneath the Badaev cellars. Alongside the official reclamation effort the unofficial digging went on.^[25]

In the Sennaya (Haymarket) people exchanged gold watches and wedding rings, diamonds or old silver for the miserable bread rations. Meat pies and jellies were offered and bought, even if suspected of being prepared from dog, cat or human meat. The dead were feeding the living. Corpses were frequently found with missing thighs, or arms and shoulders, the flesh having been used as food. Children were seized by cannibals, with young women the second choice – whether the rumours of cannibalism were true no one really knew. Cannibalism in Leningrad has been thoroughly concealed; acknowledgement of the fact seemed to be offensive to the survivors of the Siege, who usually avoid this topic. Recently, some basic documentary evidence has been supplied by A. R. Dzeniskevich, who informs us that the first (unconfirmed) case of anthropophagy was reported in November 1941; in January 1942, 366 cases were documented; in February, 494 cases. In that period, there were corpses piled up everywhere, and merciless hunger provoked this new kind of criminality. Since there was no actual law that forbade necro-butchery and cannibalism, it was qualified as “a special kind of banditry”. Altogether, in the time between July 1, 1941 and July 1, 1943, 1700 people were arrested and sentenced for this crime, 364 of them shot, and 1336 imprisoned. Of 2.2 million inhabitants in Leningrad, this amounts to 0.04 percent. Among the sentenced, only 17 percent were Leningraders, the rest provincials; this brings the number of citizens’ involved in cannibalism to 0.006 percent of the whole Leningrad population of the Siege period.^[26] But even apart from the anthropophagy, life was inhuman enough. The city was choked with filth, since baths, showers or laundries stopped functioning from the end of December. The streets were filled with corpses. They lay by the thousand in the hospital yards, in the ice, in the snowdrifts, in the courtyards and cellars of the great apartment houses. “More and more, Leningrad seemed to its residents to have become the city of white apocalypse where humans fed on humans and the very water they drank carried the sweet stench of human corpses”.^[27]
Unless the corpses, filth and debris could be removed, Leningrad would perish in the epidemics of spring. The cleaning job started on March 8, International Women’s Day. Everyone went into the streets – old women, men hardly able to hold a shovel, children.^[28] Also, the food supply gradually improved after the road over the Ladoga, the so-called Doroga zhizni (Road of Life), opened for regular traffic. The ice road, incessantly bombed by artillery and from the air, was the only artery that could bring the city food, medicine, letters, newspapers, and try to evacuate the sick, injured and dying. When Pravda (May 9, 1942) wrote that the city was equipped with everything necessary – this was propagandistic excess; but with the filth cleaned from the streets, with a better food supply, and with the cold finally receding so that people could grow vegetables in the city squares and parks, the worst period of the Siege was over.
The choice for the besieged Leningraders was either to die in German captivity, or to die (or perhaps, with a little bit of luck, to survive) in their own city. Local and Soviet patriotism, revolutionary idealism, stubborn resistance were interlocked in the spirit of Leningrad.^[29] Arts and music also helped survival; Vera Inber mentions concerts in her Siege diary:

December 7, 1941
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Chaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The Philharmonic’s gloomy. Hellish cold. Dim lights. Musicians in the orchestra in quilted jackets, some in sheepskin coats. The percussionist warmed himself by drumming.
August 9, 1942
The Philharmonic’s as full as before the war. The 7th symphony by Dmitry Shostakovich – I believed it was all about Leningrad.^[30]

On January 27, 1944, the Blockade was finally lifted. During its almost 900 days, 5,000 high-explosive fugas bombs, 100,000 incendiary bombs, and 150,000 artillery shells fell on the city; the 652 air-raid alarms lasted 724 hours and 29 minutes altogether. Vera Inber noted on January 28,1944:

Yesterday a great salute: 24 salvos from 324 guns. Signal rockets burned in the sky. A marine searchlight floodlit the spire of Peter-Paul, the light shone right on the angel. The embankments filled with people, tanks slowly moving between the crowds.^[31]

Death Toll

It has been said that more people perished in the Leningrad blockade than have ever died in a modern city – anywhere – anytime: more than ten times the number who died in Hiroshima. On the twentieth anniversary of the lifting of the blockade (January 27, 1964), Pravda declared: “The world has never known a similar mass extermination of a civilian population, such depths of human suffering and deprivation as fell to the lot of Leningraders.” But when it comes to the real numbers of casualties, witnesses’ memories and documents are unreliable, because in the worst winter period people cared little either to report, or to bury the corpses. In many cases, there was nobody left to report the dead. No exact accounting of bodies delivered to cemeteries was possible during the winter, when thousands of corpses lay in the streets and were picked up like cordwood, to be transported for burial in mass graves dynamited into the frozen earth by military miners. The official death toll says 632,253 perished in the besieged Leningrad. Though still repeated, this figure is nowadays challenged as being far too low. A witness and survivor, D. Kargin, observes that the death rate in the winter of 1941-42 was between ten and thirty thousand a day. He believes that corpses were burned in the electric plant like logs.^[32] A. Dzeniskevich mentions 6000-7000 corpses delivered daily to the Piskarevskoe cemetery in February 1942.^[33] In January 1944, Leningrad survivors of the blockade thought that the starvation toll might be around 2,000,000. This is what they told Harrison E. Salisbury, who was in Leningrad at the time. According to him, the most honest declaration was the official Soviet response published in Red Star, the Soviet Army newspaper (June 28, 1964), which said: “No one knows exactly how many people died in Leningrad and the Leningrad area.”^[34] D. G. Sotchikhin has calculated that 52,881 people died in December 1941; 96,751 in January 1942; 96,015 in February; 81,507 in March. The local brick factory was occasionally turned into a crematorium and cremated 131,985 corpses in 1942-43. Reliable estimates count 1,093,695 buried and 131,985 cremated; altogether 1,225,680 dead. But this number does not include the people who died during and after the evacuation, an additional 1,900,000. Plus 979,254 soldiers who perished, this figure is not reliably exact either. Altogether, 2 million 300 thousand lives was the human cost of the Siege, according to Sotchikhin.^[35]

Recent Revelations

Only reluctantly has the curtain of secrecy surrounding the Siege been raised and the facts of the less-than-heroic everyday life in the beleaguered city outlined. With the formerly secret archives on the Blockade now open, Russian historians are disclosing a terrifying version of the reality.^[36] The increasing flow of documentary publications and research shows that the image of the Siege was deliberately falsified. True, Leningrad kept the Nazi military forces tied down for over two years, and the outcome of the battle for Moscow, and of the war in general, depended on Leningrad’s resistance. At the same time, the Siege was the result of a great strategic mistake by the Soviet leaders; it caused senseless human losses, bringing the helpless civilian population to the verge of extinction. Responsibility for the defeat of 1941 is now placed on the party leaders, especially on the Leningrad leader Andrey Zhdanov, and on Generalissimus Stalin himself. His fundamental mistake in disregarding the Nazi threat in June 1941; outdated and insufficient ammunition; poor food supplies; the disorganised and disabled leadership of the Red Army, resulting from the political purges of 1937-8, are among the charges against him. In an article entitled “The Price of Victory”, Oleg Khlopotov says that the Soviet Army’s leaders had in fact surrendered two weeks after the war began.^[37] A fateful decision by the highest echelon of power about the transport of bread from (!) Leningrad amounted to a refusal to defend the city. Food reserves melted rapidly. Soon the Badaev storehouses were bombed, with disastrous results. German troops in the vicinity of Leningrad numbered 200-300 thousand; Soviet troops about 3 million; but the Soviet troops were immobilised. According to the author, the Siege tragedy happened not so much because the city was surrounded by an allegedly superior enemy, but because its defence was ill organised and conducted by third-rate commanders.
The topic of the Siege constantly expands as more and more private memoirs become available in print and on the Net. Searching for the “Siege of Leningrad” on the Internet in January 2001, I found 1750 English entries. One of them, chosen at random is: Siege of Leningrad Survivor Relives Her Childhood Terror. Lyudmila Anopova, then a nine-year child, remembers how she hated to get up in the middle of the night and go to the air-raid shelter along the dark road pockmarked with shell holes and with the smell of burning in the air. Famine descended upon the city, the water supply was cut off, and they had to go to the Neva to fetch water.

We lowered sledges, saucepans and milk churns from the fourth floor. We made our way slowly to the Neva, across the snowdrifts, and scooped the freezing water from the ice holes. On both sides lay the abandoned corpses of the dead. Some had clothes, others were covered in shrouds.
The windows are boarded up with plywood. It’s dark everywhere. The only warmth is in the kitchen by the iron stove, and a tiny wick is burning on the table. It’s just a twisted piece of cloth dipped in oil.^[38]

“I keep dreaming of chocolate and summer”, wrote another little girl in her recently published Siege diary.^[39] A diary that was also kept in the family, with no possibility of being published without cuts and changes, until now, is the Blockade Diary by Alexander Boldyrev. With its calm documentation of the life of one Leningrad family, day by day, written by a scholar, this is a unique document, in which the intellectual theme is overlaid by the food theme in a most striking and revealing way. Few people were then able to write diaries, and most of them were intellectuals like Boldyrev, whose physiological descriptions included no political evaluations, his attention focused on the simplest details of everyday life.
The diary describes his exhausting walks to and from the University, his searching for a cigarette or a lost ration card in the streets, the day-to-day scandals among the scholars and canteen personnel. Food is his main topic: an obsession with food, incessant concern about meals, registering of what was eaten, bought or exchanged for family silver, jewels, gold. In an attempt to fight his own hunger-induced diseases, he visits a special clinic for Academy personnel. “At the clinic anything can be bought: a diagnosis, a sick leave, a free pass from any kind of state coercion, naturally even an exemption from military service”, he said dryly after one such visit. Hunger madness, corpse butchery and rumours of anthropophagy are also quietly registered by Boldyrev, along with his own weaknesses and failing bodily functions. Only when the supply situation at last improved after the opening of the Ladoga road, and his own slavery to food gradually receded, did his intellectual interests and moral obligations again become important for him.^[40] Boldyrev’s diary presents a social cross-section through Blockade society: starving people, fat bosses, rosy-cheeked girls who had managed to get a job dealing with food. There were thousands of people in the besieged Leningrad who never went hungry, and who exchanged or sold surplus food for valuables.
Historians of the Blockade do not usually mention such things; neither do they seem to be concerned about looting and corruption, nor about restaurant dinners for the political elite, or about fresh fruit brought by air to Andrei Zhdanov personally. But rumours circulated, stories went by word of mouth, and negative opinions were observed by the ever-watchful and alert NKVD. In November 1941, a worker reportedly said: “If we could have a vote now, 99 percent of all Leningraders would choose to surrender; then we wouldn’t have to starve”.^[41] An publicly uttered word of suspicion against the leaders could lead to arrest, even during the worst period of the Siege.
N. A. Lomagin’s “In the Grip of Hunger” (V tiskakh goloda) is the most revealing collection of documents from the German Special Service and the NKVD’s archives. It throws light on the mentality of the population. Especially, on the question of Kto vinovat? – who is to blame for the Blockade. From private letters retained by the war censor, Lomagin quotes:

“Don’t call us heroes… We are doomed, we do not react to anything any longer; we just wait for death to release us from the nightmarish reality. Evidently, we will be sacrificed for the good of the country.” “Men and youngsters are all dead, only women left. When the blockade is lifted, Leningrad will be empty.”^[42]

Leningraders were Survivors proud of their ability to survive – later referred to as heroism. “It was only after we had left the tragedy behind us that we heard ourselves being called heroic. It never occurred to us while we lived there”, ponders another eyewitness.^[43]

The Art of Forgetting

Heroicisation, like aestheticisation, is a way to distance and sublimate. Inhibition, negation and other well-known psychological mechanisms of repression are also involved in post-traumatic disorder stress syndrome. To forget means to die a bit, in order to live a less stressful life. Survivors tend to speak reluctantly about the blockade. As if in tacit agreement, unsavoury degrading details are not mentioned. An attitude of merciful forgetfulness prevails. Viktor Vainshtein, Vice-president of the International Association of Blockade survivors of the Hero City Leningrad, thinks that the truth about the blockade is still a secret. The official 632,000 is a fictive sum, about a third of the real figure.^[44] The author also reckons that over two million people were victims of the blockade. But the Leningrad blockade is not even mentioned in the last, 1997 edition of the Russian Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary (BES). There is an entry about the battle for Leningrad, but not a word about the famine. Denial of the blockade is still going on.
Reluctance to remember the seedy side of the Siege is similar to the reactions of concentration camp prisoners who were divided into those who wanted to forget and those who wished to remember in order to bear witness: the latter believed that their sufferings were not accidental, as has been observed by E. Martino.^[45] There are two sides to the Siege, with the accent either on heroic action, or on passive suffering. The tragic experience tends to stay within the individual (oral) life-story, while the heroic one is preserved in the official (written, recorded, printed) memory promoted by the state. Victorious ends become more important than the tragic means.
All who lived or visited the city during the Siege are potential bearers of witness and memory: but some information inevitably gets lost since it is far too burdensome. Silence does not always mean forgetfulness, more often it points to self-censorship and/or official censorship. It is no longer possible to know the whole story of the Siege. The war generations are, in a way, victims of two divergent concepts of history: the tragic and the heroic. In the case of Leningrad, unlike the Nazi concentration camps, bearing witness could not lead to the finding and punishing of those responsible. Now, when there is nobody to be punished, the responsibility and the blame should perhaps be placed on the whole system? ^[46]
Leningrad was almost crushed in the clash between the bellicose Reich and the criminal Soviet leadership with its imperious contempt for human losses. The old eschatological prophecy of “the desert city” was all but fulfilled when Leningrad was on the verge of extermination.

Remembering

Among those who have stayed in the collective memory, a special position is held by Olga Berggolts (1910-1975), a Leningrad poet and writer. She returned to her city shortly before the war, after having spent two years, from 1937 to 1939, in prison and a labour camp, as one of many victims of Stalin’s endless purges based on false accusations. Already a legend in her own lifetime, throughout the Siege she worked at the Leningrad Radio, encouraging citizens with her poems and programmes. She reported from the front, she recited poetry, her voice was heard almost daily. It was a sign that the city was still alive. Through the apocalyptic winter of 1941-42, it was, in the belief of those who lived through the Leningrad Blockade, the radio that kept the city’s spirits up when there was no food, no heat, no light and practically no hope.

“Not a theatre, not a cinema was open”, Olga Berggolts recalled. “Most Leningraders did not even have the strength to read at home. I think that never before nor ever in the future will people listen to poetry as did Leningrad that winter – hungry, swollen and hardly living.”^[47]

For the survivors of the Siege, the lines of her poem, “Nobody is Forgotten” became a memento for those who did not survive. Her books “The Blockade Diary” (Blokadny dnevnik) and “Leningrad Speaking” (Govorit Leningrad) present a chronicle of the Siege. Of course, on the radio she could be nothing but emphatically pro-Soviet, partial and totally patriotic. There was no other choice, although she was literally falling apart; and she had to forget the bestiality of her own regime in the face of the no-less bestial enemy. Under the heading “Petersburg myths”, the literary critic Nikolay Kryshchuk in the Moscow newspaper, Obshchaya gazeta, discusses the myth of the Blockade Madonna, Olga Berggolts, claiming that her self-censorship was produced by the circumstances of the war. In her earlier poems, she had the courage to articulate her disillusionment, she dared to name the time of shame and sorrow (dni pozora i pechali). The Blockade turned her into the voice of resistance and, by the same token, into a supporter of the regime. In her war and post-war lyrics and diaries, she tried to be open, but could never be totally sincere. Her tragedy was to be torn between the two truths; what she had loved and praised she also felt was false. The last years of the Muse of the Besieged City were immersed in silence and alcohol. Her later poetry was not published, as it was deemed to be “out of touch with our heroic times”. This silence was for her both a disgrace (pozor) and an act of courage (muzhestvo).^[48] The Spiritual Mother of the Blockade Survivors, as she is now called, Olga Berggolts was honoured, but never really loved by the authorities. Nor is she forgotten. There is a street named after her; there are memorial plaques on her house (ul. Rubinshteina 7, jokingly named the Tear of Socialism), and on the wall of the Radio building where she also lived during the Siege. Flowers are offered and memorial meetings held by her grave in the literary section of Volkovo cemetery (literatorskiye mostki) in May and September, to commemorate her birthday and the day of her death. Her wish, however, was to be buried in the Piskarevskoe Memorial, where 470,000 victims of the Blockade are buried.^[49] On the Volkovo grave is a simple tripod with a portrait of the young, beautiful Olga. There is no grave monument, since the city is notoriously short of money. At the commemoration meeting held at her grave on September 7, 2000, 25 years after she died, the members of the Siege Society (Obshchestvo zhiteley blokadnogo Leningrada) asked the public and the city authorities for financial help to put up a grave monument to Olga Berggolts.^[50]
Her verses Nikto ne zabyt… are etched on the granite wall of the Piskarevskoe War Memorial, behind the six-meter-high figure of Mother Russia guarding the eternal flame brought from the graves on the Mars Field. The Memorial was opened on May 9, 1960, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Victory, when thousands of the living came to remember the thousands of dead.^[51]

Our Dead and Their Dead

Nikto ne zabyt… – the theme of remembering war casualties was made topical by the dedication of a German war cemetery at Sologubovka near St Petersburg, in the Leningrad region.^[52] The memorial complex (including a park and a Russian Orthodox church), was blessed on September 9, 2000. No newspaper commented on the event on that day. A week later, on September 12, 2000, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti published a short notice on the Sologubovka, “Largest in the world”. The remains of 20,000 German soldiers and officers are buried there; 60,000 more will later be moved to Sologubovka from other graves, altogether a fifth of all the Germans who perished in the Leningrad battle.^[53] Three years earlier, a question was raised about placing a bronze sculpture in the cemetery, a gift from the German sculptress von Leisner, representing a sorrowful mother with a child. The Russian veterans refused to meet the German delegation to discuss the monument, and the question remained open.^[54] In 2000, the monument was not mentioned at all in connection with the German war memorial at Sologubovka. It was probably considered unfitting by those who associate the sculpture of the grieving mother and child only with their own losses. The old hatred of the enemy is evidently not forgotten. A cross was, however, erected and blessed at the Sologubovka cemetery on New Year’s Eve 1998.^[55]
As a gesture of repentance, the German delegation, consisting of high officials and of relatives of the interred soldiers and officers, totalling more than 300 people, laid flowers and garlands at the Piskarevskoe cemetery and at the Siege monument on Victory Square. In April 2001 the German Chancellor, Gerhardt Schröder visited the Piskarevskoe cemetery, together with President Putin, and laid a wreath on the graves.
A fundamental statistical study reckons the losses by the Soviet Army amounted to 2,148,961 people, the blockade victims not included.^[56] Also, 400,000 German soldiers perished in the battle for Leningrad. The responsibility for the unprecedented human losses has been laid on the enemy, while the Soviet leaders were promoted and rewarded. The Leningrad writer Daniil Granin wrote: “We are used to presenting our terrible losses as the superiority of our own grief… It never occurred to us that the sorrow of German widows was no less deep than the sorrow of our own widows. Soviet history has always been inhumanly one-sided.”^[57]

Nothing Forgotten?

NOTHING FORGOTTEN is a statement that can be true and false simultaneously. “Let no one forget, let nothing be forgotten” (in Harrison E. Salisbury’s translation of Olga Berggolts’ lines) fulfils the same role as a magical incantation; repeated by the Blockade survivors, those words are a plea for eternal life flung into the face of overwhelming death.
The Siege monument (The Monument to Heroic Defenders of Leningrad) was opened on Victory Day, May 9, 1975. There is an obelisk, a sculpture group “Victors” and the memorial hall “Siege” in the shape of a broken ring.

The unique exhibit in the Hall is the Chronicle of Heroic Siege Days. It was created by the collective of scholars from the State Leningrad History Museum. In 12 display cases the original documents and objects are kept. These objects and documents tell about the heroism of the citizens and the defenders of the city at the Neva river. The central place in the hall is occupied by the electronic map “The Heroic Battle for Leningrad”. Two documentary films, “The Memory of the Siege” and “Leningrad Fighting” are displayed in the Hall…^[58]

Together with the disappearance of Leningrad, the pride of the blokadniks has been taken away from them. Their lives and sufferings can hardly be identified with Petersburg. Their private life stories are not yet registered as oral history.
In the long run, the Leningrad story will be incorporated into the Petersburg story in the edited version of the Siege martyrdom. The rest of the Leningrad period is, for the time being, if not thoroughly forgotten, then officially unmentionable.
The Great Revolution has been reduced by post-Soviet historians to a coup, the cultural revolution has moved into the domains of art history, the victims of the purges of the 1930s merge with the martyrs of the Siege and war. We might be seeing the Orthodox idea of iskupleniie, redemption by suffering, in its secularised version. Not that Russian Orthodox Christianity is unaware of the connection. A new church dedicated to the victims of the Siege (Blokadnyj Khram) has recently been erected in St Petersburg.
Collective memory is not linear and dispassionate: it is selective, susceptible to emotional and political censorship. Simplification by reduction is the reason for and result of many selective memory processes. Abrupt changes in the power structure may suddenly reveal the political underpinnings of what we call history; parts of it may instantly become obsolete, while the rest acquires new meaning. And alternative pasts are necessary for the present justification of alternative futures. We need only think of T. S. Eliot’s famous comment in Tradition and Individual Talent: “the past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”
As Salisbury put it in his final comment,

The Leningrad epic was wiped out of public memory insofar as this was physically possible, and, as in Orwell’s “memory hole,” the building blocks of history, the public records, the statistics, the memoirs of what had happened, were destroyed or suppressed…^[59]

What to remember, what to forget? Who decides? What is to be saved from oblivion in the deposits of collective memory: museums, archives, libraries, collections, memoirs, letters, oral history, city lore, historical research, textbooks, films, photographs, art and literature… The Siege story in its many incompatible versions looms as a multi-layered structure pierced by memory holes; it is a mixture of true and false, partially repressed and twisted fragments, messy and mutilated as the debris of the post-Blockade city. But, just because the Siege theme employs the formative mythic structures pertaining to Petersburg’s self-identification – the heroic and the suffering – it is fully congruent with the Petersburg Text; nevertheless, the Siege story is usually excluded (like the Leningrad story in general is excluded) from the current cultural discourse about the city based on the imperial stories. The art of forgetting is being practiced once again, in a new context, by a new generation of image-makers once again eager to suppress essential parts of the city’s history.
Nikolai Antsiferov once called Petersburg (then Petrograd) the city of tragic imperialism.^[60] Additional imperial imprints, produced by the savage Nazi Reich and the criminal Leningrad leadership, left behind incurable wounds, the deepest in the city’s otherwise catastrophic history. In both cases, the imperial myth has taken over reality. The Leningrad Blockade is locked into the statist imperative of sustaining and defending the empire, at all costs. Russian and Soviet leaders without mercy sacrificed hecatombs of people for their imperial goals. Then, and until now, the inhuman reality of the Siege was and is concealed and consecrated by the glorious image of Rodina, the ultimate justification for all sacrifice. The hideous losses are always blamed on the enemy, and the glory still shines upon the victorious leaders. As everybody knows, History is written by the winners.