The Siege

This week marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Leningrad in 1944, ending the worst siege in human history; an 872 day long blockade which directly resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million people, and whose events command roughly the same amount of interest from the average Western person as the history of professional snooker in Botswana. In fact, so concerned are we by the sacrifice of ordinary Soviet citizens between 1941 and 1945 - a colossal continent-wide struggle which helped preserve Britain from invasion, bought the United States time to fight a war on two fronts, and eventually paved the way for the D-Day landings - that when we think of the matter at all, we even do our best to habitually confuse the cities of Leningrad and Stalingrad, mentally merging them into a sort of Wherefuckingevergrad, amidst whose ruins merry Red Army troops fought evil Nazis alongside malnourished workers and malevolent commissars. And when we do this, we prove Stalin absolutely correct: "If one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If one million die, that is a statistic."

If we mark the timeline of the siege out as dates in my own journal - taking today as the end of the blockade - then the Nazi invasion of the USSR happened on this day; the complete encirclement of Leningrad and destruction of the food warehouses took place on this day; the first hospital opened for the treatment of starvation here; the city ran out of running water, heat and electricity here and the death toll reached 20,000 a day here. Those alive were allotted a fluctuating bread ration according to available supplies, which dropped as low as 125 grams a day (four or five modern slices) at the worst points of the siege, and was usually mixed heavily with sawdust and wood shavings to make up the weight. People braved the farmland near the German lines to scavenge rotting potatoes in the fields; some gathered pine logs to gnaw at the bark and drink the resin. Family pets were slaughtered; cats and dogs gradually disappeared from the city altogether. When word spread that joiner's glue contained animal proteins, citizens peeled wallpaper from the walls to boil up and eat with vinegar or mustard. German intelligence quickly ascertained the locations in the city where food was distributed, and began shelling the ration-lines. Elena Skryabina, who kept a diary during the siege, commented: "People are so weak from hunger that they are completely indifferent to death. They die as if they are falling asleep. They are apathetic, knowing that such a fate awaits everyone, if not today then tomorrow. When you leave the house in the morning, you come upon corpses lying in the street. They lie there for a long time. There is no one to take them away." Valia Chepko, sixteen years old in 1941, planned out the meal she'd enjoy when the siege was finished; a first course of soup - cabbage, potato or mushroom - with a main course of mincemeat and sausage. Then, days later, she scratched through this entry in her diary and wrote beneath: "I no longer have such dreams. I will not ever live to see this." The NKVD - Stalin's secret police - summarised the effect of increasing starvation inside the city with the depressingly insane internal memo: "BECAUSE OF THE REDUCTION IN THE BREAD RATION, THERE HAS BEEN A SIGNIFICANT EXPANSION OF NEGATIVE ATTITUDES."

Elsewhere, the NKVD were aware of more troubling activity. One report describes a cab driver's horse collapsing from exhaustion in the street, and a crowd swiftly emerging to hack off chunks of meat from the dying animal with hatchets and knives. Other accounts were more heavily censored, and took decades to emerge from the fog of repression: reports from neighbours of citizens behaving strangely; a housing administrator, Maria Ivanovna, visiting a family and finding meat cooking on the stove which she was told was mutton, only to ladle the mixture and uncover a human hand; a memo from Red Army food supply officer Vasily Yershov describing organised bands of cannibals within the city, murdering for meat; one mother reported her daughter missing, and was told by the NKVD to search through several crates of children's clothes in their storeroom. The instruction they gave her: "If you find your daughter's underwear, remember the number of the crate. Then we can tell you where they killed her, and ate her."

From the Pulkovo Heights to the south of the city, German observers with binoculars watched and recorded, with cold scientific detachment, the breakdown of law and order within Leningrad. They were eager to see how long it took for the Slavic population to abandon all pretence of humanity. But in spite of everything they inflicted on the city, humanity remained. One day, fourteen year old Zoya Taratynova was in charge of a cart delivering bread to the hospital, when a ragged crowd began to gather aggressively around her; when her strength ebbed, the cart overturned in the street and the crowd pounced. Zoya shouted: "Please don't take the bread - it's for the hospital!" and after several moments of silent hesitation, the crowd shuffled forward, gathered the bread and put it back in the cart. Not a single loaf was stolen. One young mother recounted the tale of how an old woman in the middle of an impossibly long queue for a dwindling supply of macaroni spotted her crying in the street; after explaining to the old woman that she had a small child at home who she couldn't feed, the babushka declared for the benefit of all around: "You're in front of me in the queue!" The mother was, eventually, the last person in the line to receive any food; the old woman went away empty-handed. Fatherless twelve year old Andrei Krukov was amazed when a group of people he'd met by chance in an air-raid shelter showed up at his door one day with all the rations they could muster, to share with him.

The heroism shown by ordinary Soviets in response to the encirclement of Leningrad didn't just occur within the city; the ingenious ice road across the frozen Lake Ladoga allowed convoys of trucks to ferry supplies past the siege lines in the face of German bombardment and the constant risk of the heavily-laden vehicles breaking through the ice and carrying their drivers to a cold, deep death at the bottom of the lake. Likewise, attempts were made to secure a bridgehead on the southern bank of the River Neva which could break the siege and open up a supply corridor to the rest of the USSR. This bridgehead was called the Nevsky Pyatochok, a strip of land three kilometres long and one kilometre wide. Over the course of two and a half years, under a constant storm of shelling and sniper fire, nearly half a million men died on that narrow patch of riverbank; unidentifiable skeletal remains still routinely emerge from the ground to this day, along with the personal belongings of long-dead frontoviks. One water flask recovered there in the last decade was engraved as an 18th birthday present to its owner, Viktor Krovlin, on 29th September 1941. Krovlin's entire brigade was wiped out over the following month. In October 1941, nurse Elena Svetkova established a medical station on Nevsky Pyatochok to attend to the constant flood of wounded troops; most could not be saved. Of the very few who made it back across the river to receive proper medical attention, one was a young marine named Vladimir Putin. That marine would go on to have a son whose hobbies included fly-fishing and intensely homophobic legislation. The accidents of history.

The corridor was eventually established, the siege eventually lifted. Even now, you can see the seventy-year-old signs on Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg warning you that the northern side of the street is the one most exposed to shellfire. So take a few moments from your day to acknowledge that this human tragedy really happened, all those years ago. If you ignore it, if you sweep it under the carpet, you relegate the warm, dangerous, kind, terrifying, inspirational humanity of all those who lived through it to the status of a statistic.

And on that day, the war will finally have been lost.