Leningrad Under Siege: First-Hand Accounts of the Ordeal

By Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin

A vivid and harrowing account of ordinary Russians caught in the deadly WW2 siege, based on interviews, diaries, and memoirs. Includes photographs.
 
Leningrad was under siege for almost three years, and the first winter of that siege was one of the coldest on record. The Russians had been taken by surprise by the Germans’ sudden onslaught in June 1941. This book tells the story of that long, bitter siege in the words of those who were there.
 
It describes how ordinary Leningraders struggled to stay alive and to defend their beloved city in the most appalling conditions. They were bombed, shelled, starved, and frozen. They dug tank-traps and trenches, built shelters and fortifications, fought fires, cleared rubble, tended the wounded, and—for as long as they had strength to do so—buried their dead. Many were killed by German bombs or shells, but most of them died of hunger and cold.
 
Based on interviews with survivors of the siege and on contemporary diaries and personal memoirs, this book focuses primarily on three people: a young mother with two small children, a boy of sixteen at the outbreak of war, and an elderly academic. We see the siege through their eyes as its horrors unfold—and as they struggle to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 26, 2007
• ISBN: 9781781597354

Ales Adamovich

Known for his straightforward character, Ales Adamovich (1927-1994), an award winning Belarusian author, screenwriter and literary critic, was an active public figure and teacher in the former Soviet Union where he wrote his most influential war novel Khatyn. During WWII he fought as a partisan; this experience became the basis for Khatyn. After WWII he went on to receive his PhD in philology from Belarusian State University and also took graduate courses in directing and screenwriting at the prestigious Moscow film school VKSR. Adamovich was a professor and a member of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. As a result of refusing to testify against his colleagues and to sign letters condemning political dissidents he was barred from teaching at Moscow State University. However, he was a member of many public and professional unions. In 1989 he was one of the first writers to join the Belorussian PEN Center, and in 1994 the Center instituted the Ales Adamovich Literary Prize. Ales Adamovich's works are still read widely and his legacy continues to be an important milestone in Belorussian history. His fiction and non-fiction titles make a profound case against the necessity of war, and are a testament to the kind of knowledge and wisdom being vastly sought after today. Awards: Award for Honor and Dignity of Talent, 1997 (posthumous) Order of the Red Banner, 1987 Order of the Patriotic War, 1985 Gold Medal of Alexander Fadeyev, 1983 Order of the Badge of Honor, 1977 Yakub Kolas Belorussian State Prize, 1976 (For Khatyn) Ministry of Defense Prize, 1974 (For Khatyn) Friendship Literary Prize, 1972 Partisan Medal, 1946

Book preview

evacuees.

1

Three Out of Three Million

This book is mostly about three remarkable people, two men and a woman. They never met; never knew anything about one another. The first, Georgi Alexeievich Kniazev, was a historian; the second, Yura Riabinkin, was a fifteen year old boy at the outbreak of war; and the third, Lidiya Georgievna Okhapkina, was the mother of two small children.

During the siege, many Leningraders kept diaries. Others would just jot down some experience they had undergone, while it was still fresh in their minds. People sent or brought their notebooks to us, often old accounts books in which they had recorded what they had lived through, written in pencil or in faded ink, neatly or hastily, briefly or in detail, sometimes with a numbed hand. From all these diaries and notes we selected the three accounts that had made the deepest impression on us. Not a word has been added to them, nor any changes made: we allowed ourselves to do no more than shorten them, omitting repetitions and entries that had nothing to do with the events of the siege.

In St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) memorial plaques tend to be distributed sparingly. There are simply too many places and buildings worthy of mention, of emphasis. This being so, there is a particular building on Vasilievsky Island that always attracts attention.

If you were to walk along the Neva embankment from the University towards the granite Sphinxes reclining above the waters of the Neva near the former Academy of Arts building – nowadays the Repin Institute – then immediately after the Sphinxes a three-storey building with a portico supported by four Doric columns would come into view. It is a building in the old-fashioned style – nice, unassuming, typically Petersburg architecture – renovated in 1806-1808 by the famous architect Zakharov. Its walls are hung all over with cast-iron memorial plaques. There is no other residential building in St Petersburg, nor in Moscow either – for that matter, probably nowhere else in the world – that has so many memorial plaques: it has twenty-seven of them. The building belongs to the Academy of Sciences and was home to many eminent Russian scholars and scientists: the philologist Yakov Karlovich Grot, for example; the Byzantine scholar Fyodor Ivanovich Uspensky; the physicist Boris Semyonovich Yakobi; Vasili Vladimirovich Petrov, the first Russian electro technical engineer and Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who lived there until his death in 1936. Whichever name you pick from the twenty-seven that are commemorated there, a whole branch of science opens up.

And it was in this building, which had become, to some extent, a symbol of Russian scientific endeavour, that Georgi Alexeievich Kniazev, the Director of the Archives of the Academy of Sciences, was living when war broke out. He could just as well have lived out his life in some other building and in it written his papers on the history of the Academy of Sciences and on aspects of archiving, but the fact that he lived in that particular building throughout the siege and that it was there that he wrote his diary – A Half-Century in the Life of a Middle-Ranking Russian Intellectual – takes on an unexpected significance.

Georgi Alexeievich Kniazev’s legs were partially paralyzed. He had difficulty walking and travelled from his home to work and back in a wheelchair. It was rare for him to undertake longer journeys. The Archives of the Academy of Sciences were situated on the same embankment, beyond the University, within the Academy building, about 800 metres from Kniazev’s home. In essence, that stretch of pavement along the embankment was Kniazev’s main road during the whole of the siege; the little segment of the city that was in his field of vision became the narrow backdrop against which the war unfolded for him: the siege, the shelling, the air raids, the famine, the evacuations.

Turning now to his diary:

23 June 1941. The 2nd day of the war. I never did manage to find out the details about the opening of Timur’s tomb. Military events pushed the information about the archaeological excavations in Samarkand into the background.

How everything in this world repeats itself! In the fourteenth century, Timur, or Tamberlane, conquered India from the Ind to the Ganges, and Persia, Syria, Turkey and southern Russia.

And now here comes another one – the upstart Hitler – who has gone far beyond Timur the Lame in bringing so much suffering both to his own people and to all other peoples, to the enslaved and the humiliated as well as to those fighting against his hellish regime.

The first of the wounded have been brought into Leningrad. The new Mannerheim Line beyond Vyborg has been broken through in several places by our detachments. A German airborne force of several thousand men has also been wiped out.

The second day of the Great Patriotic War has come to an end. It has exhausted me. The blood is throbbing in my head and there seems to be the sound of propellers droning in my ears all the