Leningrad

It took her all night to get there, stumbling in heeled shoes through fields and allotments, and crouching in ditches at the thump of artillery fire. On the way she passed the palace town of Pushkin, where the same sort of last-minute rescue effort — dinner services packed in new-mown hay, silver wrapped in Tsar Nicholas’s naval uniforms — had been taking place as at Pavlovsk. Crossing the Alexander Palace park she saw Rinaldi’s Chinese Theatre collapse in flames; at Kolpino the burning Izhorsky plant lit the sky like a false dawn. Nearer Leningrad the roads were less cratered, and she got a lift in an army lorry full of wounded, which dropped her where she could catch a tram into the city. At 10 a.m. she finally reached St Isaac’s Cathedral, in whose ‘dim, grim, cold and damp’ vastnesses she was to live, together with the staff and rescued contents of all the other abandoned summer palaces, for the whole of the siege.8

On the same day that the Germans entered Pavlovsk they also took Pushkin. Again their approach was acknowledged too late for orderly evacuation: at one point townspeople who fled to Leningrad were actually sent home again, because they lacked Leningrad residency permits. Fiercely anti-Bolshevik Lidiya Osipova watched with cynical detachment as friends and acquaintances tried to decide what to do. A split, she wrote on 17 August, had arisen between ‘patriots’ and ‘defeatists’: ‘“Patriots” try to get themselves evacuated as fast as they can, and the latter, including us, try by every means possible to evade it.’ Like many, she preferred to disbelieve reports of Nazi atrocities. ‘Of course’, she wrote in her diary, ‘Hitler isn’t the beast that our propaganda paints him. . People who feel sorry for Jews in Germany, negroes in America and Indians in India manage to forget our own pillaged peasants, who were exterminated like cockroaches.’ Even some Jewish friends agreed. ‘From many Jews we’ve heard this kind of thing: “Why should we go anywhere? Well, maybe we’ll have to sit in camps for a bit, but then we’ll be let out. It can’t be worse than now.”’

As the fighting grew nearer anxiety mounted. Osipova’s neighbour, a former Party member, spent the night of 2 September

running back and forth from her room to the rubbish dump in next-door’s courtyard, carrying armfuls of red-bound volumes of Lenin. In between chucking out the great genius’s works, she came up to us for chats and a smoke. She bemoaned her lot and Soviet rule. I can see now that Soviet power is not doing very well, because N.F. is not someone who is ruled by her emotions. She was brought up under the Soviets and has seen every rung of the Party ladder, from the highest to the lowest. All this has turned her into a cynic; she has completely lost her faith in all the Communist rubbish, the idealistic dream. It’s amusing to watch her, but she should beware of the Germans, since she’s been a wife to three Jews and her daughter is half-Jewish. And she’s got Communist feathers on her muzzle herself.

In the crowded half-darkness of the air-raid shelters, conversation became unusually free. People talked, Osipova wrote, ‘about things that before the war we wouldn’t have discussed even in our sleep, or when very drunk, except in the company of people we knew intimately. I’m sitting here writing my diary quite openly and nobody pays any attention.’ As shells began to fall in Pushkin itself, she and her neighbours moved permanently into their cellars. Privately, Osipova longed for what she regarded as liberation. ‘We sit here all day’, she wrote on the 15th. ‘The impression is of complete confusion. We asked — Where are the Germans? At Kuzmino. That means they’ll get to us in about two hours.’ Two days later the streets were still empty:

No Germans yet. We walked into the town. Overwhelming silence. . No sign of the authorities at all. If they are here, they are hiding. Everyone’s afraid that it might be our lot coming, and not the Germans. . If it is the Germans — a few unimportant restrictions, and then FREEDOM. If it is the Reds — more of this hopeless vegetable existence, and most probably repression. .