For those of you expecting one of my usual lighthearted, sardonic posts, you might want to go back and reread your favorite instead of reading this one. It's kind of a downer. I'm fine, it's just the subject matter isn't really something I feel comfortable cracking jokes about. Which is saying a lot, if you know anything about me and my sense of humor.
Today, we (Corinne, Alexandra, Brenda, and I) had an interactive history lesson about the Leningrad blockade of 1941-1944. I dimly recall Mr. Crile mentioning the siege of Leningrad once or twice in IB American History senior year, so I was aware that this event occurred, but you just don't appreciate the scale of something like that until you visit the city itself. It is a powerful story of human perseverance in the face of profound tragedy; there is a monument, erected in 1966, not far from the heart of St. Petersburg memorializing the struggle, and it is one of very few sites bearing Communist images, symbols and rhetoric in the city, a block or so south of the infamous statue of Lenin pointing westward on Moscow Square. That one was preserved because it has artistic and historical merit. This monument stands because the memory is that important.
On September 8, 1941, Hitler's invading troops surrounded the city. The strategy for Leningrad was a war of attrition, rather than attacking the city outright. To that end, the Nazis blockaded Leningrad and destroyed the food supply. Then they started printing up invitations to their victory banquet at the Hotel Astoria in the heart of downtown, across the square from the then-German Consulate, believing that the city would surrender within weeks. The hotel is only seven miles from the front, and the Nazis never reached it.
The city was under siege for 900 days (until January 27, 1944). It began in September, and the city's supply of oil and coal ran out within weeks, just as winter began. There was no electricity, no central heating, no running water. Food was strictly rationed; within two months, the rations were cut to 1/3 the daily requirements for an adult. By February 1942, bread rations were down to a mere 125 grams, or 1/4 pound, per person per day. Infants were the first to die, as their mothers were too malnourished to produce milk to feed them. In 900 days, it is estimated that one million civilians died. 95% succumbed to starvation and exposure; the rest were killed as a direct result of artillery fire. More people were buried every day of the siege--about 4,000 people per day--than died in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks (about 3,000). Cats, rats, pigeons, horses, dogs, and crows were all eaten over the course of the siege, because 125 grams of cellulose-bread cannot sustain anyone for long. No cats survived the blockade; after it was over, a truckload of two hundred cats was brought in and released into the city, because what is a city without cats?
Tens of thousands of people were dead by the end of 1941, but because it was winter, it was impossible to bury them. Bodies piled up in the streets; there were people whose job it was to find corpses and take them to holding centers until the ground thawed enough to bury them. As the siege went on and more and more people died, people would bring the bodies of their loved ones that had died at home to a designated collection spot, where they were loaded onto trucks and taken closer to the front. They used bombs to break through the frozen ground and tossed the bodies into mass graves. They did the same for soldiers; it is estimated that 1.5 million soldiers died defending the city from the Nazis. 500,000 people are buried at the Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery, civilians alongside soldiers, and almost all of them anonymously, in mass graves. At first people were buried individually, but very quickly there were too many dead for those tasked with digging graves to keep up. Some people, knowing they were not long for this world, would go to the cemetery and sit there, just waiting for their bodies to finally give up; at least, that way, they knew they would be buried.
But even in the face of such crippling hardship, the city worked on. The war industries continued to produce artillery and armaments; many factories had workforces made entirely of women, children, and the elderly, because all able-bodied men had been conscripted to fight at the front. The city was not immediately evacuated, because, Stalin reasoned, the soldiers would fight harder and would not retreat if they knew their mothers, wives, sisters, and children were behind them. The logic was sound, I suppose, because ultimately it worked.
The arts also survived the siege; the Philharmonic was active, and the troupe from the neighboring Comedy Theater, although they could not use their own facility, performed comedies on the stage of the Philharmonic for the people. It was during the siege that Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 7, also known as the Leningrad Symphony. New seasons at the Philharmonic still open in the fall with a performance of that piece, an impressive work on its own that is only magnified by the fact that it was produced under such circumstances. Here's the first movement on Youtube. The memorial I mentioned at the beginning of this post has a museum under it, and among the articles preserved there is a violin belonging to Shostakovich.
In that museum is also a small, unassuming notepad. This pad of paper was the diary of a young girl named Tanya Savicheva. She and her family aided the war effort; among Tanya's responsibilities were digging trenches and disarming firebombs, work undertaken chiefly by young women and girls. During air raids, it was their job to don helmets, grab fire axes and special tongs, and head up to the roofs of the buildings to grab and neutralize so-called "residual bombs" or "firebombs" before they went off. Many women died doing this. Tanya managed to survive that job, however; her record lists the dates and times of German air raids, as well as a log of when and how each of her family members died over a span of about 4 months in 1941-1942. First her sister Zhenya, then her grandmother, followed by her brother Leka, then Uncle Vasya, Uncle Lyosha, and finally her mother. The final page of her diary reads "All the Saviches are dead. Only Tanya remains." She lived long enough to be found by clean-up crews checking apartments for bodies, but succumbed to tuberculosis at age 14. Her diary was used as evidence during the Nuremburg Trials. Sergei, our tour guide, told us this story; we didn't have enough time to look at all of the things in that museum, but I'm not sure anything else would have stood out to me quite as strongly.
We also visited a memorial to the civilian, volunteer militia that worked to defend the city, situated at the very front itself; a small river (right now it's not much more than a creek) marks the boundary, and there are anti-tank obstacles adorning the site with iron plates bolted to them. The plates have the names of regiments, squads, and battalions of these civilian corps on them. It was eerie.
Our final stop for the day was at the previously-mentioned Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery. There is a small information center by the entrance; among the things in that room is a slideshow of photographs. These photographs show locations in and around modern-day St. Petersburg, overlaid by photos of Leningrad during the siege in the same location. It is one thing to merely be told all of these things about what is certainly still a huge event in the cultural memory of the city; it's quite another to see photographs of places you walk through every day from seventy years ago, full of corpses and debris. "Here is a place that is a stone's throw from your apartment building, American exchange student, a place which you see every day on your way to class," the photos seem to say. "Now there's a bar and a clothing shop there. Seventy years ago, it was full of rubble, and ashes, and emaciated bodies. Look, you can still recognize the buildings." That is a powerful statement; it certainly made an impression on me, as you can tell from the tone of this post.
Walking through the cemetery itself, though, really brought home the magnitude of the tragedy. We only walked along the main central path, between the entrance (where there is a memorial torch burning) and the back wall, which features a large sculpture depicting Mother Russia bearing a sprig of laurel, in remembrance of those buried here. On the wall behind her is a poem by Soviet poetess Olga Bergholz, which contains a line that goes approximately like this: "Many are buried here, and though we do not know your names, no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten." She helped keep morale up during the siege by reading her speeches and poetry over the city's public address system in the evenings; during the day, the sound of a metronome would be played, and that too lent the city's residents a measure of comfort. Like a pulse, the constant ticking was reassurance that the city was still alive.
The view from in front of the statue is humbling. A dozen huge rectangular mounds on either side, probably 35x20 feet, with granite plaques marked with a hammer and sickle if it is a civilian grave and a star if it contains soldiers, as well as the year. And more rows of mounds behind each of them. There are more mounds like this, only smaller, outside the cemetery, dotting the outskirts of the city in this general area. Some of them are marked. Some aren't. Somehow, the unmarked ones are more disturbing to me than the marked ones, although I was ill at ease even in the very well manicured environs of Piskariovskoye--meticulously trimmed and skeletal linden, willow, and oak trees, as well as the culled stubs of rosebushes and the first green peeps from tulips planted near the Mother Russia statue. Everything has been recently cleaned in preparation for the May 9 Victory Day celebration, which is one of three days out of the year that this place sees heavy traffic. The other two are the anniversaries of the beginning (September 8) and end (January 27) of the siege.
As I finish this post, it's around 3 AM. I returned to my apartment about eleven hours ago after this tour, and I was only just able to begin writing about it about an hour ago. The whole experience was incredibly powerful, and I just feel drained thinking about everything I learned today. History is intense, man.
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