Kingham, Victoria 2018 History Thesis
Title: Civilian Women in the Siege of Leningrad: Self-Understandings, Myths, and Narrative Constructions Advisor: William Wagner Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No
CIVILIAN WOMEN IN THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD: SELF-UNDERSTANDINGS, MYTHS, AND NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS
by
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Professor William Wagner, Advisor
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History
WILLIAMS COLLEGE
Williamstown, Massachusetts
16 April 2018
To Will, whose perseverance and courage will forever inspire me.
2
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………. 4
Introduction……………………………………………………….. 5 The Siege Begins
Chapter One ………………………………………………………15 Women’s Voices from the Siege: Experience and Self-Concept
Chapter Two ………………………………………………………45 The “Leningrad Heroine”: the Party’s Wartime Narrative
Chapter Three …………………………………………………….72 Memorials and Memories: the Party’s Postwar Narrative
Conclusion ………………………………………………………..103 Past and Present
Bibliography ………………………………………………………109
3 Acknowledgements
When I enrolled in Professor William Wagner’s “Fin-de-siècle Russia” Tutorial in the fall of my freshman year, I had no idea that it would instill in me a love for the puzzles and quirks of Russian history. But more importantly, I had no idea that it would introduce me to a Professor whose kindness, patience, and love for the discipline are without parallel. This project was made possible by Professor Wagner’s mentorship and insight, not only this year but over the course of my entire Williams Career.
I am very grateful for the assistance of Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer, who guided our Thesis seminar with calmness and clarity. Many thanks are due also to the other 2018 history thesis students, whose questions and comments were invaluable in helping me write with greater precision.
There are so many people in the Williams community to whom I owe gratitude.
Thank you to John, Marisa, and the other friendly faces at Tunnel City who greeted me almost every morning of this process with a coffee and a smile. I appreciated your inquiries about my progress on the project more than you know. Thank you to my teammates on the Cross Country and Track and Field teams; even though I know the plight of Leningrad’s women isn’t the best small talk for a run, I am so appreciative of your patience and willingness to listen. I am profoundly grateful for the support of my friends on campus, especially Anna Harleen, Emily Sundquist, Emily Harris, Calvin
Ludwig, Jack Greenberg, and Emmy Maluf, for providing me with pep talks and support when I needed it the most.
And finally, to my parents and my brother, Will. A “thank you” will never suffice.
Your love and support are the world to me.
4
Introduction:
The Siege Begins
The sounds of the military parade blare from the radio speaker in her kitchen. She moves slowly, with a limp and pained expression, as she brings the kettle from the stovetop to the table. She settles down and begins to read: “Dear Lenina Dmitrievna.
Allow me to congratulate you on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Great Victory. And our very best wishes.”1 It is a letter from the Kremlin, she says, that she received on the sixty- fifth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. The strains of the commemorative parade continue in the background; Lenina Dmitrievna sits in silent reflection; a housefly crawls on the table in front of her.
Lenina is a survivor of the siege of Leningrad: the 872 days during which the
Soviet city was surrounded by German troops, cutoff almost completely from the outside world. In the period from September 8, 1941, through January 27, 1944, the besieged city would lose over one million of its inhabitants—many to German bombs, but many more to starvation.2 Like so many Leningraders, Lenina lost her family members to the siege.
Reflecting on the day she lost her mother and sister, Lenina recalls: “Lyalenka was no more, and mama said she had nothing else to live for.”3 They died within minutes of each other. Lenina was left with their bodies for two days, until a neighbor came to check on them. Tragically, this was an experience shared by many Leningraders in the context of the siege.
1 Gorter, Jessica, dir, 900 Days, (Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 2012), 5:40 2 Beevor, Antony, “The Unmentionable Season of Death,” The New York Review of Books, January 18, 2018, accessed April 15 2018, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/01/18/leningrad-unmentionable- season-death/?sub_key=5a72110bea9c2 3 Gorter, 900 Days, 25:21.
5 While successive Soviet leaderships have honored women, such as Lenina
Dmitrievna, who lived through the siege of Leningrad, these women have long been prevented from publically narrating their experiences. The central aim of this thesis is to give voice to these women; it does so by examining women’s narratives from the siege, and comparing those narratives to the dominant, official narratives of the siege promoted by the Party during the wartime and the postwar eras. While women’s narratives provide us with insight into the material conditions of the siege, the main focus of the thesis is on how these narratives illustrate women’s conceptions of themselves within the context of the siege. Leningrad’s women exhibited complicated and nuanced understandings of their roles and responsibilities during the siege and, consequently, their experiences defy generalization. Part of the thesis’s work is thus to lay out the complexities—and, at times the incongruities—of women’s narratives from the siege, in order to represent the breadth of their perceptions of their experiences.
The comparative dimension of the thesis considers how state-sponsored narratives of the siege both differed from, and aligned with, the narratives of women themselves.
This comparison will demonstrate successive Soviet leaderships’ persistent, instrumental use of women’s siege narratives for political ends. It will also illuminate certain enduring qualities of Soviet idealizations of gender roles in the postwar period. Moreover, by considering the Party’s narrative of women’s roles in the siege across postwar political junctures, the thesis will reveal continuities between three political periods that historians generally view as discrete and discontinuous.
Recent years have seen a proliferation of historical works about the siege of
Leningrad, particularly with the availability of new source material from the former
6 Soviet Union. For example, David Glantz’s The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944 provides the military history of the battle that was fought between German and Soviet troops outside of the city. By presenting the state’s official communications from the siege, Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin’s The Leningrad Blockade illustrates the
Party’s attitude toward the events in Leningrad as they were unfolding.4 In Leningrad:
The Epic Siege of World War II, Anna Reid provides a detailed account of the experience of living in the besieged city.5 Polina Barskova’s Besieged Leningrad and Alexis Peri’s
The War Within take a more analytical approach to the siege, and consider the way in which Leningraders made sense of what was occurring around them.6 Finally, Lisa
Kirschenbaum’s The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad focuses on the Party’s contemporary and postwar memorialization of the siege, analyzing in particular the monuments erected to the siege in the postwar period.7
While this thesis builds on these works, its focus on women’s narratives and official representations of women presents a new perspective from which to consider the siege and its memorialization in the postwar period. So, too, does the emphasis on the
Soviet regime’s instrumental use of the narrative of women’s heroism for political ends.
In addition, existing scholarship on the Soviet Union generally considers the eras of
Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev as discrete historical periods. By tracing several
4 Glantz, David, The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002) ; Bidlack, Richard and Lomagin, Nikita, eds, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: a New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2012). 5 Reid, Anna, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944, (Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011). 6 Barskova, Polina, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster, (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2017). ; Peri, Alexis, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2017). 7 Kirschenbaum, Lisa A, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments, (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006).
7 themes that relate to the Party’s narrative of women’s roles in the siege between these eras, the thesis demonstrates that important continuities existed across the span of these three prominent Soviet leaders.
***
Understanding the meanings of women’s and state-sponsored narratives of the siege of Leningrad requires some background knowledge of the city, and an explanation of the origins of its 900-day tragedy. Leningrad was and is one of the principal symbolic centers of Russia, although it now goes by its original name of St. Petersburg. The city had been the seat of Russian imperial rulers from its founding by Peter the Great in 1703 until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Indeed, the city’s location on the Gulf of Finland was of strategic importance to the Russian Empire and meant that it served as both a major port and, eventually, industrial hub.8 The city also held symbolic importance for the Soviet Union: the 1917 Revolution had originated in its streets, when Bolshevik supporters seized key parts of the city and stormed the Winter Palace. On the eve of
World War II, it was widely understood among Soviet leaders that the city held strategic importance. Not only was it the second largest city in the Soviet Union, but it was also an important Soviet industrial center. In 1940, 91 percent of hydroturbines, 58 percent of steam turbines, and 20 percent of the country’s machine tools were produced in
Leningrad.9
Crucially, the Germans also understood the significance of Leningrad, and thus capturing the city was one of the central objectives in their plan to conquer and occupy the Soviet Union. As the Western gateway to the Soviet Union, Leningrad held both
8 Bater, James, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change, (London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1976), 25. 9 Salisbury, Harrison, 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, (Boston: Da Capo Press. 2003), 144.
8 physical and symbolic importance in Hitler’s plans. The city could serve as an industrial base from which to sustain the German war effort in the Eastern Soviet Union. It also housed the headquarters of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, and thus its capture would place the
Soviet Union’s navy under Nazi command. Furthermore, Hitler understood the cultural significance of Leningrad. In imperial times, the city had been considered to be on the leading edge of Russia’s transformation from backwardness to cultural enlightenment.
Local intelligentsia considered themselves to be the inheritors of a grand Russian imperial tradition, and conceived of their city as a major cultural center.10 As Hitler understood, the city also held significance in the Soviet context. Indeed, German conquest of the city at the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution and bearing Lenin’s name would signify the demise of Soviet Communism. Thus, on the eve of the War, the city of
Leningrad was at the symbolic as well as strategic center of the impending clash between
Germany and the Soviet Union.
This clash came unexpectedly for the Soviet military as well as for the Soviet people. May and June of 1941 had been particularly pleasant for Leningraders. By all accounts, the months had featured fair daytime weather and clear, crisp summer nights.
Having been guaranteed the strength of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact by no less than Stalin himself, Leningraders felt assured of their nation’s security.11 The German mobilization of Finnish troops in May of 1941 had caused some unease, even some rumors of the possibility of a German assault on the city. The Soviet press, however, was quick to assure Leningraders of their safety. On Friday, June 13, Leningrad Pravda ran an article that informed Leningraders that German mobilization could be explained “by
10 Lincoln, Bruce, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia, (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 11 Salisbury, 900 Days, 4.
9 other motives which have no connection with Soviet-German relations.”12 This statement elucidates much about the Soviet leadership’s attitude towards German mobilization.
Leningrad Party Secretary Andrei A. Zhdanov even left the city for a holiday on June 19, so convinced was he of Leningrad’s safety.13 But at 5:00 am on June 22, 1941, the
General Staff building in Leningrad received a call from troops at the Soviet Union’s
Western border: Fascist Germany had attacked.
According to the plans outlined in the Germans’ Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union proceeded along three fronts, with Leningrad being the objective of the Northwestern front. In the early days of the invasion, the German blitzkrieg strategy, coupled with Soviet unpreparedness, made for quick successes. The
Germans advanced quickly from their initial June 22 attack: as early as July 8, German troops had overcome the Baltic states to the west of Leningrad, and were only 250 kilometers away from the city.14 As Soviet troops and volunteer units from Leningrad haphazardly mobilized to the front, only to be rebuffed by the German enemy,
Leningrad’s officials grew increasingly concerned about the safety of their city.
In response to this threat, in mid-July the central leadership of the Party created the Leningrad Military Defense Council. Composed of civilians and military leaders, the
Council was tasked with the daunting proposition of preparing the city for possible conflict. Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s closest advisors, a Politburo member, and head of the Leningrad Party organization, was to lead the Council. Over the course of the War,
Zhdanov would serve as an extension of Stalin’s power in the city, directing almost all of the decisions that would be made there. Indeed, a report sent from the Kremlin (the seat
12 Salisbury, 900 Days, 41. 13 Salisbury, 900 Days, 41. 14 Salisbury, 900 Days, 115.
10 of Stalin’s power) in August of 1941 dictated that Zhdanov would be responsible “above all, for the entire defense of Leningrad.”15 While Zhdanov’s power in Leningrad remained largely unchallenged over the course of the siege, there were tensions between the Leningrad Defense Council and local officials of the Commissariat for Internal
Affairs (NKVD). The NKVD was technically subordinate to the Party, and was thus meant to answer to the authority of the Defense Council. However, local NKVD forces still exercised substantial surveillance and policing power within the city during the siege. Thus, as the Germans approached Leningrad, Party, military and NKVD leaders uneasily shared authority in the city.
The heroic defense of the territory west of Leningrad mounted by Soviet soldiers lies outside the purview of this thesis; it will suffice to say here that there were innumerable sacrifices made by soldiers and civilians alike in the effort to rebuff the
Germans. But in spite of these efforts, the Germans quickly advanced towards Leningrad.
The effectiveness of Soviet propaganda meant that, despite the rapidity with which the enemy approached the city, Leningraders heard only of Soviet military successes. Few
Leningraders had any notion that their city was in imminent danger. Thus, they reacted with shock and confusion to the Party’s August 20, 1941 broadcast that “the enemy [was] at the gates” of the city.16 Historians Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin describe the confusion provoked by the Germans’ approach: “people simply could not grasp what was going on. No one had any experience to go by.”17
15 Bidlack, Richard and Lomagin, Nikita, eds, The Leningrad Blockade: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, (New Haven: Yale UP,2013), 91. 16 Salisbury, 900 Days, 210. 17 Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 43.
11 Thousands of Leningraders joined volunteer defense brigades and mobilized to defend their city in the days immediately following the broadcast. The Leningrad
Defense Council oversaw the establishment of the People’s Volunteers, a hastily organized corps of civilians who mobilized to prepare the city’s defenses. The social composition of the Volunteers was highly diverse, and included schoolchildren, scientists, housewives, teachers, and industrial workers.18 Despite the impressive scale of the Volunteers’ efforts, their preparations were too late, and German momentum too great. By September 8, 1941, the Germans had reached the banks of the Neva River, the city’s northern boundary with Finland. The enemy was now, indeed, at the gates of the city, and all efforts went towards preventing the Germans from crossing the Neva.
Although the Germans would remain on their side of the river for the next 872 days, the circle around Leningrad had been closed: the siege had begun.19
On September 8, the date on which the siege officially began, the city of
Leningrad had approximately 3 million inhabitants trapped within the German encirclement.20 Over the course of the siege, from September 8, 1941, to January 27,
1944, over one million Leningraders would lose their lives. This high death toll was due in large part to two critical decisions by the city’s leadership. First, the leadership had not encouraged citizens to evacuate throughout the summer. Responsibility for this lay primarily with Zhdanov, who had informed Leningraders that leaving would be considered an act of cowardice. Second, the city’s leadership had left Leningrad’s food supply vulnerable to German attack, a danger that was realized by the bombing of the
18 Werth, Alexander, Russia at War: 1941-1945, (New York: Carol & Graf Publishers, Inc, 1964), 303. 19 Salisbury, 900 Days, 279. 20 Beevor, Antony, “The Unmentionable Season of Death”
12 Badaev warehouses on September 8. As Leningraders were aware, the warehouses held flour, sugar, meat, and other provisions for the city. The loss of the Badaev warehouses severely exacerbated a desperate situation: even as early as August 27, 1941, it had been estimated that the city had only 17 days’ supply of grain, 25 days’ supply of meat, and 28 days’ supply of butter on hand.21 The food crisis in Leningrad was an unmitigated disaster: during the worst period of the siege, from December 1941 through February
1942, food rations would drop to as low as 125 grams of bread per day for dependents.22
Although food supplies dwindled and rations reached unimaginable lows, the Party continuously assured Leningraders that if they remained “steadfast to the end,” “Victory” would be theirs.23 Of course, these ideological assurances did little to ameliorate the city’s lived conditions, which were so dire that by January 1942 Leningraders were eating soil and leather belts in order to survive.24
While life under siege was unfathomably difficult over the entire course of the siege, the months from November, 1941, through February, 1942, were the most brutal. It was these months that would come to be known as the “terrible winter”: estimates suggest that, in December and January alone, over 200,000 Leningraders lost their lives.
By January, the bodies had “begun to pile up in the streets,” serving as a grim reminder to surviving Leningraders of their likely fate.25 While this first winter of the siege saw the most significant loss of life, subsequent winters, too, would pose innumerable hardships for Leningraders.
21 Salisbury, 900 Days, 293. 22 Within the context of the siege, “dependents” referred to those who were not employed in the defense effort (primarily housewives). 23 Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 85. 24 Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 47. 25 Adamovich, Ales and Granin, Daniil, A Book of the Blockade, Hilda Perham, trans. (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1982), 58.
13 ***
Encouraged within these conditions by local Party and state officials to record their experiences, many Leningraders—especially women—did so. The first chapter of the thesis examines the narratives that were constructed by civilian women during the siege. The following two chapters explore the Soviet regime’s representations of the roles and responsibilities of women during the siege.
Chapter I will demonstrate the complexities and nuances of how women conceived of, and represented, their experiences under siege, by tracing several themes that appear in a number of women’s narratives. The focus will be on exposing the breadth and diversity of women’s self-understandings: their articulations of their roles and responsibilities. Chapter II will show how the Party’s official representations of
Leningrad’s women during the siege contrasted with women’s own narratives. It will demonstrate in particular how the Party employed an idealized account of the heroism of
Leningrad’s women as an instrument with which to inspire citizens’ mobilization for the
War. Finally, by tracing the evolution of the Party’s narrative of the siege under three postwar Soviet leaders, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev,
Chapter III will demonstrate continuities in the way in which the concept of female heroism was mobilized for political aims during the postwar period. The evolving place of Leningrad’s women in the postwar Soviet narrative, especially when compared to the narratives constructed by women themselves, tells us much about the implications of historical representation.
14 Women’s Voices from the Siege: Experience and Self-Concept
“Two Leningrad fronts exist[ed]: a battle front and a way of life.”1 -Vera Inber, 1942
On September 8, 1941, Leningraders awoke to a startling new reality: their city was surrounded by German troops, and thus had been separated almost completely from the Soviet Union. Life changed almost immediately for Leningraders, as disquieting rumors of potential German attacks swirled around the city with alacrity. The German bombing of the Badaev warehouses precipitated a general panic about food shortage, and long queues formed at every bakery in the city. During the days that followed September
8, able-bodied men enlisted for the military and were quickly sent to the battlefront surrounding the city. This induced a change in the social demographics of Leningrad: its populace was composed of the very young, the very old, and, especially, women of all ages. Consequently, tasks that traditionally had been assigned to men now fell to women, who were left to shoulder the burdens not only of domestic duties and motherhood, but also of tending to arms and munitions plants.2
As the conditions of the siege worsened through the month of September, women’s industrial responsibilities expanded. This mobilization of Soviet women into industry was not new; they had played important industrial roles since the early 1930s, when the breakneck industrial expansion mandated by Stalin’s Five Year Plans had mobilized the female workforce. Indeed, by 1937, women composed forty-two percent of all industrial workers in the Soviet Union.3 The male labor shortage during the siege,
1 Inber, Vera. Leningrad Diary, (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), 47. 2 Bidlack, Richard and Lomagin, Nikita, eds, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: a New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2012), 192. 3 Chatterjee, Choi, review of Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia, Institute of Historical Research, 2002, accessed April 16 2018, http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/315
15 however, precipitated unprecedented female participation in industry. By 1943, women comprised the majority of workers in every manufacturing sector in Leningrad, save armament production and shipbuilding.4 It is important to recall that, throughout the siege, women also retained primary responsibility for the domestic domain. Leningrader
Svetlana Magayeva, a child during the siege, recalls how her mother juggled her increased industrial tasks with her substantial responsibilities at home. Magayeva’s mother would work at the factory “for six days, return to the apartment on the seventh day and then go back to the factory early the following day.”5 As Magayeva’s recollections illustrate, the industrial demands made of women during the siege were significant—particularly within the context of the already heavy burdens of motherhood.
From the first days of the blockade, many of Leningrad’s women began keeping written records of their daily lives under siege. Indeed, local Party officials actually encouraged Leningraders to keep a record of their experiences. Some women chose to write letters to loved ones outside of the city. Others wrote either contemporary diaries or postwar memoirs; both of these types of sources provide historians with glimpses into day-to-day life under siege. It is important to note that the siege of Leningrad was not the first time that women in the Soviet Union had engaged in formal writing. The tradition of female authorship dated back to the Russian imperial era, particularly to the reign of
Peter the Great. One of the primary goals of the Bolshevik Party after the 1917
Revolution had been the eradication of illiteracy; thus Leningrad’s women were actually
4 Reid, Anna, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941-194, (Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011), 351. 5 Magayeva, Svetlana and Pleysier, Albert, Surviving the Blockade of Leningrad, Alexy Vinogradov, trans, (New York: University Press of America, 2006), 41.
16 contributing to an existent corpus of works written by other women during the Soviet era.6
The reasons for which Leningrad’s women wrote about the siege both contemporarily and in hindsight are as varied and numerous as the women themselves.
Two female survivors in particular, poets Vera Inber and Olga Berggolts, serve as good examples of this variability of women’s motivations for writing. For Inber, the process of writing did not involve the Party or its politics, but rather gave her the feeling of personal resistance. She described writing as her “battle”; it provided her with a way to fight the
German enemy, but using words rather than guns.7 The very act of writing enabled her to
“keep a clear head,” and thus to prolong her existence—this was in and of itself an act of resistance.8 In contrast to Inber’s perceptions of writing, Berggolts explained that her primary reason for writing was her desire to immortalize the siege. She sought to bring to light those aspects of the siege that were “unseen,” so that future generations might understand Leningraders’ realities.9 Berggolts’s aim was ambitious: she wanted to “share
[her] spiritual experience not only with contemporary compatriots but with the people of the whole world and their descendants.”10 She hoped that Leningraders’ trials, and the reasons for which they endured them, might never be forgotten. Inber and Berggolts’s narratives thus differed substantially in their objectives and scope: Inber sought to promote the chances of her own survival, while Berggolts sought to transmit her
6 Lapidus, Gail Wershofsky, “Sexual Equality in Soviet Policy: a Developmental Perspective,” in Women in Russia, eds. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, and Gail Lapidus, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1977), 120. For further information about traditions of female literacy and authorship in the Soviet Union, see Women in Russia. 7 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 95. 8 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 31. 9 Berggolts, Olga. Daytime Stars. Lisa Kirschenbaum trans, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Unpublished Manuscript, used with author’s permission, 107. 10 Berggolts, Daytime Stars, 108.
17 experiences to future generations. This contrast between the two women’s motivations for crafting their narratives demonstrates the diversity of objectives that underlay women’s writing, and the consequent diversity of narratives that they created.
Regardless of their particular motivations, the fact remains that many of
Leningrad’s women turned to the written word as a way to respond to the innumerable hardships of life under siege. In the context of this thesis, when analyzing these diaries and memoirs the central question being asked is not “what happened during the siege,” but rather “how did women understand what happened during the siege?” This approach assumes that women’s siege narratives were one part of a broader process of discovery, as women explored the bounds of the new material and symbolic spaces that the siege had created. This is not to suggest that Leningrad’s women self-consciously set out to construct a new narrative form. Indeed, as Inber’s sentiments indicate, women frequently understood writing as a mental exercise to enhance their chances of survival, rather than an intentional or artistic endeavor. However, because the process of recording their experiences during the siege necessitated that women engage with their dramatically altered living conditions, women inevitably discovered new avenues of expression and self-definition in their writing. One of the greatest paradoxes of the siege, therefore, was that human and material destruction coincided with narrative and creative construction.
Historian Polina Barskova examines this paradox of aesthetic construction existing with physical destruction in her recent work, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic
Responses to Urban Disaster. According to Barskova, in women’s narratives “the Siege space was featured as a space of openness, possibility, and knowledge, beauty and memory,” but was “[s]imultaneously depicted as a site of human limitation and
18 demise.”11 In other words, the complete upheaval of prewar normalcy that accompanied the siege opened symbolic space for the re-imagination of one’s role in society. To
Barskova’s argument I would add the important qualification that most women did not seek actively to exploit this new narrative space offered by the siege. Rather, it was during the process of grappling with the new living conditions produced by the siege that they discovered this space and, subsequently, wrote themselves into it as the protagonists of their narratives. In considering siege diaries and memoirs, it is therefore crucial to keep in mind that women generally used the process of writing to grapple with the unfamiliar conditions that they faced. The internal incongruities, incomplete thoughts, and conflicting opinions that can be found in most diaries all point to the difficulty of re- inventing language and identity.
Despite the complexity and variability of women’s siege narratives, there are several themes that emerge across the span of these works. Five themes are especially prominent and will be considered in this chapter: starvation, attitudes towards the Party, motivations for survival, notions of civic responsibilities, and the trials of motherhood.
Perhaps the most prevalent of these themes was starvation, the universality of which meant that it featured prominently in almost every woman’s narrative from the siege.
Although women did not understand the experience of starvation in any singular way, many cast themselves as victims either of its disruption of previously accepted moral norms, or the physical toll that it took on their bodies.
Many women’s diaries feature discussions of the perceived role of the Party during the siege, and in particular whether or not the actions that the Party undertook
11 Barskova, Polina, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster, (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2017), 6.
19 were crucial for the city’s survival. While Leningrad’s women did not provide a single answer to this question, most expressed dissatisfaction with what they perceive to be the
Party’s lack of preparation. Women’s narratives also tend to address the motivations that underlay women’s perseverance. Again, Leningrad’s women did not adhere to any universal set of motivations, but most generally understood themselves to be inspired by personal and familial connections.
The notion of civic responsibility features prominently in many women’s narratives. Within the context of the siege, this term generally meant the spoken and unspoken obligations that women felt toward fellow Leningraders. As will be demonstrated in this and the next chapter, the Party tended to ignore the importance of civic responsibility to women, and instead attributed women’s motivations to persevere as being tied with their loyalty to upholding Communism. Finally, the experience of motherhood forms a prominent theme in numerous siege narratives. A close reading of women’s narratives illustrates that many women chafed against the Party’s idealized conception of a perfect, self-sacrificing form of motherhood within the dire conditions of the siege.
These five themes formed the backbone of women’s understandings of the experience of the siege, and of their roles and responsibilities within it. Analysis of these themes—and the ways in which women’s accounts converge and diverge in relation to them—yields insight into the process of narrative building that occurred as women grappled with the conditions at hand. This chapter’s primary objective will be to illuminate the various and complex ways in which women addressed these themes, in
20 order to make manifest the richness and breadth of women’s self-understanding during the siege.
Starvation
“Heroism and self-sacrifice are only for those who are full.”12 Thus wrote Elena
Kochina, one of Leningrad’s technical intelligentsia-turned-civilian-defenders, in January
1942. Kochina’s sentiments point to a reality of life in the besieged city: as the crisis of starvation intensified, many of Leningrad’s women turned to deception, theft, and violence in order to save themselves and their families. Contradicting the Party’s idealistic insistences that women had found a “new moral strength” during the siege,
Kochina maintained that starvation removed “pangs of consciousness,” as human impulses toward self-preservation surmounted all else. 13 But Kochina’s sentiments do not tell the whole story. In her memoir of life under siege, Svetlana Magayeva attested:
“more people would have died had it not been for the people who through their heroic efforts provided friends and members of their family with their food.”14 Magayeva’s
Leningrad thus was one in which citizens practiced community-based resistance, pooling together their resources in the interest of defeating the common German enemy. The differences between Kochina’s and Magayeva’s accounts of civilian responses to starvation during the siege reflect both the variability of women’s understandings of the crisis, and the narrative latitude offered by the siege space.
12 Kochina, Elena, Blockade Diary: Under Siege in Leningrad, 1941-42, (New York: The Overlook Press, 2014), 82. 13 Fadeev, Alexandr, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade. R.D. Charques, trans, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971), 13. ; Kochina, Blockade Diary, 87. 14 Magayeva and Pleysier, Surviving the Blockade of Leningrad, 61.
21 In Magayeva’s telling, the innumerable hardships of acquiring food in Leningrad encouraged cooperation among the city’s inhabitants. As a ten-year-old living in a children’s home during the siege, Magayeva would nobly bring her own meager food rations to her hospitalized mother.15 She presents her own selflessness within the context of others’ similar actions; Magayeva’s recollections of how her circle of extended family and friends assisted each other, and displayed a genuine concern for the well being of
Magayeva and her mother, form a prominent component of her memoir. Magayeva seems to have understood the crisis of starvation as promoting connection among survivors, as she presents the struggle for nourishment as enhancing her family and friends’ willingness to care for each other.
In contrast, other women who chronicled starvation presented it as a force for violence and estrangement. Among these accounts, a common feature stands out: women tended to present themselves as victims of, rather than participants in, the violent measures undertaken by starving citizens. For example, Kyra Wayne, a hospital nurse during the siege, displayed in her memoir a definite fear of the starving populace. She carefully padlocked her door each time she left her apartment, sure that hungry neighbors and wandering thieves would steal her food if given the chance.16 She feared a trip to the river at night, because “bands of thieves” were always “ready to kill you for your belongings and food.”17 She learned to walk in the middle of the street, where one was less likely to be murdered by a hungry roamer.18 It is possible that Wayne’s fears were exaggerated, or even wholly unfounded; she offers no evidence that she was actually
15 Magayeva and Pleysier, Surviving the Blockade of Leningrad, 72. 16 Wayne, Kyra Petrovskaya, Shurik: A WWII Saga of the Siege of Leningrad, (Guilford: The Lyons Press, 2000), 5. 17 Wayne, Shurik, 22. 18 Wayne, Shurik, 42.
22 threatened at any point during the siege. But what is more significant than the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Wayne’s claims is the fact that she removed herself as an agent in all hypothetical acts of ignominy: she was never a perpetrator, but rather always a potential victim. Indeed, Wayne relates in detail how she burned all of her bookshelves and books before she even considered acquiring firewood by illegal means—in other words, she tried her best to abide by peacetime standards of morality even while those around her allegedly descended into starvation-prompted villainy. Wayne thus cast herself as a victim of others’ lawlessness, rather than a wrongdoer herself.
Elena Kochina’s diary adds a layer of complexity to this notion of female victimization. Unlike Wayne, Kochina participated in theft during the siege, and used her diary as a space in which to contemplate her actions. Over the course of the siege,
Kochina stole bread from a local bakery, while her husband, Dima, took part in particularly daring thefts from bread storehouses. However, the framework through which Kochina interpreted her actions is significant: she described stealing from the local bakery as stealing from the “faceless institution” that controlled Leningrad’s food supply.19 Consequently, as Kochina understood it, stealing bread did not mean taking food from fellow defenders, but rather from the amorphous entity that controlled the city’s rations. She understood the horrors of the siege as producing a new moral climate in which “the concept of honesty…bec[ame] a dead letter for [Leningraders].”20 For
Kochina, therefore, the extreme circumstances of the siege undermined traditional understandings of morality—and perhaps even negated its relevance entirely. Indeed, one could contend that Kochina’s thievery reflects the extent to which she herself was a
19 Kochina, Blockade Diary, 17. 20 Kochina, Blockade Diary, 100.
23 victim of this decay in prewar conceptions of morality. Further complicating potential censure of Kochina according to those standards was the fact that she stole food in order to prevent her daughter from starving to death. Her narrative implies that theft from a
“faceless institution” could be justified by the need to save a dying child.
The diaries of Magayeva, Wayne, and Kochina thus present three different perspectives from which women understood the experience of extreme starvation during the siege. For Magayeva, starvation fostered community-based resistance; for Wayne, it provoked fear, and the threat of imminent violence; for Kochina, it necessitated the abandonment of prewar conceptions of “morality.” These differing perspectives indicate the complexity and confusion of women’s responses to starvation, which forced
Leningraders to move into uncharted territory—“to reconfigure a way of life in order to survive.”21 The very existence of these differing conceptions points to the interpretive agency that women were afforded during the siege, as they wrote themselves as protagonists into the narrative space that the siege had opened. And, because women’s expressions of how they understood the experience of starvation necessitated that they consider their own roles in society, this process of articulation itself engendered self- definition within the context of the siege. Wayne, for example, cast herself as a victim of others’ ignominy. And although she participated in theft, Kochina described herself as a sort of Soviet Robin Hood, stealing from the faceless and corrupt functionaries to attend to the needs of her child.
While enabling us to examine the divergent ways in which women understood the experience of starvation, siege narratives also help us to understand the material conditions of starvation. As demonstrated in the Introduction, the food shortage in
21 Peri, Alexis, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016), 7.
24 Leningrad began in the very first days of the siege. This was not only due to the disastrous bombing of the Badaev warehouses, but also to the fact that the Party had emphasized industrial production, rather than food rationing, throughout the summer.22
The crisis of starvation only intensified as the siege went on, and by December, 1941,
Leningraders had begun to eat anything they could consume, including wallpaper paste, fermented sawdust, and cottonseed cake (which had generally been used as fuel for ships).23 There were reports of cannibalism as early as November 1941. While the extent to which cannibalism occurred has been a topic of historiographical debate, numerous women’s accounts testify that Leningraders cut flesh off of dead corpses in the street either to consume themselves or to sell on the black market.24 Compounding the crisis of starvation was the lack of heat and running water in the city. Because all fuel was being rationed to conserve operations at the front, Leningrad apartments were deprived of heat; as one siege survivor attested, “it was terribly cold.”25 Fuel rationing took a particularly hard toll during the winter of 1941-1942, when the average daily temperature was minus
2 degrees Fahrenheit. The simultaneous crises of starvation and hypothermia accelerated the death toll, and would forever be imprinted on the memories of those who survived the siege.
One of the primary effects of starvation’s dire conditions was a change in the way in which women understood, and related to, their own bodies. As women’s narratives almost universally convey, starvation caused bodies to lose their essential features—
22 Bidlack and Lomagin, The Siege of Leningrad, 262. 23 Bidlack and Lomagin, The Siege of Leningrad, 263. 24 Gorter, Jessica, dir, 900 Days, (Brooklyn: Icarus Films, 2012), 36:40 25 Gorter, 900 Days, 25:21.
25 “everyone look[ed] alike,” and resembled either “old people or children.”26 Just as age was obscured by the effects of starvation, so too was sex. According to Kochina, “one couldn’t tell” the difference between men and women, as bodies of both genders were equally swollen and unrecognizable.27 Kochina’s statements indicate the extent to which the human landscape of Leningrad was ravaged along with its material one. The besieged city was not populated by men and women, but rather by “skeletons wrapped in skin.”28
Kochina’s sentiments about the de-sexualization of Leningraders, and of the de- feminization of women specifically, have an interestingly ambivalent quality. She neither explicitly complained about her loss of femininity nor extolled it as an outward manifestation of her heroic survival. Indeed, she suggested that, just as long bread lines and paltry food rations defined life in Leningrad, so too did the bizarre blurring between the genders of its citizens.
By contrast, Olga Berggolts represented de-feminization as a manifestation of women’s heroism in her postwar memoir Daytime Stars. In perhaps the most evocative scene of the memoir, Berggolts reflected on the experience of being in a women’s bathhouse during the siege. As Berggolts described it, the image that most stuck in her mind was that of “Leningrad’s women’s famous eyes—empty, heavy and concentrated.”29 Berggolts’s diction here is significant: her use of the word “famous” points to her conception of women’s physical features as reflective of the valorous quality of their actions. In fact, for Berggolts it was in the bathhouse that one could see
26 Kochina, Blockade Diary, 104. 27 Kochina, Blockade Diary, 102. 28 Gorter, 900 Days, 31:17. 29 Berggolts, Daytime Stars, 248.
26 “what the war look[ed] like.”30 The war was not “in the shape of a soldier…but in the shape of [the] powerless bald, barely alive but living, deformed old woman” that she encountered in the baths. 31 Berggolts understood women’s “bony bodies” to be the scars left behind by their survival through the worst of conditions; a woman’s broken body was the external manifestation of her courage, rather than something about which she should be ashamed.
The contrast between Berggolts’s view of women’s bodies as reflecting their courage and Kochina’s more ambivalent conception of her de-feminized body points to the complexity of corporeality within the context of the siege. As women wrote themselves as protagonists into the new narrative space offered by the siege, they were forced to confront their de-feminized, ageless siege bodies, and to choose how they were going to represent those bodies in their narratives. A sort of dual “reinvention” occurred, in which women expressed how they had to re-learn not only their roles and identities, but also the very bodies that they inhabited. 32 As Kochina and Berggolts’s narratives demonstrate, there were numerous ways in which one could engage in the process of reinvention.
Adding further complexity to this process was the fact that women tended to conceive of their bodies and minds as distinctly separate during the siege. Most women did not put their own bodies at the center of their narratives: their voices transcended corporeality, as though emanating from an unknown source. Even if one’s body yielded to the brutality of day-to-day existence, one’s mind could remain critical and sharp. The aesthetic space brought about by the conditions of the siege thus enabled, as well as
30 Berggolts, Daytime Stars, 249. 31 Berggolts, Daytime Stars, 249. 32 Barskova, Polina. Besieged Leningrad, 10.
27 encouraged, women to reconsider their relationships to their bodies. For Kochina, that led to her separating her cognitions from the de-feminized body she inhabited; for Berggolts, it meant embracing her body as the outward manifestation of the innumerable hardships she had endured.
Conceptions of the Party
Siege narratives reflect not only the way in which women’s understandings of their bodies changed within the context of the siege, but also how their particular conceptions of the Party evolved over the course of Leningrad’s ordeal. The extreme conditions of the siege precipitated changes in the way that citizenry and Party interacted.
In a reflection of the greater openness enabled by the siege, for example, many women took to expressing their grievances with the Party in their narratives. Indeed, the fact that women directly commented on the inadequacies of city planning points both to their willingness to criticize the Party apparatus, and to the fact that the climate of the siege enabled them to do so. This is not to say that Leningrad’s women had been mere observers of the Party apparatus before the siege, but rather to suggest that the siege established a narrative space in which women could both express and grapple with those grievances.
Elena Skrjabina wrote with particular frankness about the inadequacies of the city’s siege preparation, and of the Party’s ability to aid its citizens more generally. A graduate student of French literature when the siege began, Skrjabina was also a mother of two young boys, which enhanced the desperate quality of her situation. Skrjabina questioned the efficacy of the Party apparatus from almost the first moment of the siege,
28 asking herself, “where are our defenses?” 33 She also questioned the city’s dearth of food, which she attributed to the fact that city planners had decided to place “all of the city’s supplies” in the Badaev warehouses: a location that the “Germans knew of” and destroyed early in the siege.34 Indeed, Skrjabina’s criticisms of city planning give a bitterly ironic tone to the chorus of a Soviet song about war preparations: “if it is necessary to go to war tomorrow, then we will be ready to fight today.”35 Skrjabina seems to have conceived of besieged Leningrad not as a city in which there was a
“readiness” to fight, but rather one that was rife with “puzzles,” and inexplicable shortcomings in preparation.36 Her sentiments thus pushed against, and called into question, the Party incessant claims regarding its ability to protect the Soviet people.
Indeed, her complaint that “no one [would] explain anything” indicates that she understood city officers as having failed in their basic obligation to keep the populace informed and safe. Her narrative therefore revealed not only her dissatisfaction with the
Party’s handling of the siege, but also her notion that the Party was failing to fulfill basic obligations to its citizenry in crisis.
Other female narratives similarly point to women’s general discontentment with the Party, specifically in relation to the corruption that became increasingly obvious during the siege. When faced with the prospect of yet another hungry day, Elena Kochina bitterly noted in her diary that “people who work in supply eat like kings”.37 Svetlana
Magayeva expressed frustration that Party-recognized academicians were awarded a
33 Skrjabina, Elena, Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader, Norman Luxenburg, trans, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2009), 46. 34 Skrjabina, Siege and Survival, 26. As discussed in the Introduction, the Badaev warehouses were the first targets and victims of German bombs, on September 9th, 1941. They held the city’s main food supply, and thus the loss of these warehouses intensified the crisis of starvation. 35 Magayeva and Pleysier, Surviving the Blockade of Leningrad, 33. 36 Skrjabina, Siege and Survival, 17. 37 Kochina, Blockade Diary, 105.
29 greater portion of bread.38 And, in the most damning example of officials’ corruption,
Kyra Wayne recounted an instance where one of the city’s foremost supply managers was found guilty of several counts of theft.39
To some extent, the frequency with which corruption appeared in women’s siege narratives can be attributed to the fact that the extreme conditions of starvation during the siege made corruption both more visible and more deadly than it had been during the prewar era. But women’s explicit complaints of corruption in their diaries are significant in that they reflect the authors’ tendencies to define explicitly their relationships to the
Party during the siege. Indeed, Kochina, Magayeva, and Wayne seem to have understood themselves as being victims of systemic corruption, perpetrated by a governing apparatus that had already failed them by its lack of preparedness.40
The distinction that Vera Inber established between the Party’s shortcomings and
Stalin’s personal greatness adds further complexity to women’s understandings of the
Party during the siege. Inber attributed the relative defenselessness of the city to inadequacies in local governance specifically. Like Skrjabina, she was perplexed that city planners had put all of Leningrad’s food supply in the Badaev warehouses; she expressed incredulity in her diary, noting that officials’ decision to make these warehouses the entire “larder of the city” made them an easy target for German attack.41 She also questioned why the petrol that had been promised to the city never arrived, and noted with bitter irony that the supposed “water board” was unable to repair the hospital’s water
38 Magayeva and Pleysier, Surviving the Blockade of Leningrad, 46. 39 Wayne, Shurik, 121. 40 It is interesting to note that, within the context of the Soviet regime, women’s expression of their discontentment with the Party could be considered a form of political action. Thus, while there is no indication that Leningrad’s women actively desired to transform their writing into a mode of political expression, it seems important to acknowledge that their comments on the Party’s effectiveness inherently politicized their narratives. 41 Inber, Leningrad Diary,15.
30 mains.42 But Inber consistently understood these inadequacies to be the result of shortcomings in local governance, rather than the logical outcome of Stalin’s personal stubborn refusal to take the German threat seriously. Indeed, Inber apparently absolved
Stalin of all blame for the Party’s inadequate preparations. She described hearing Stalin on the radio as a “shining consolation” for Leningraders’ troubles, and maintained that there was “something irresistible about Stalin’s voice.”43 The irony of her sentiments lies in the fact that, as supreme dictator of the Communist Party, Stalin himself was largely responsible for many of the shortcomings of which she complained. However, Inber’s praise of Stalin nonetheless demonstrates that it was possible to separate the mythologized leader from the Party’s daily blunders.
As has been demonstrated above, women’s siege diaries indicate that they were generally discontented with the local Communist Party organization, which they understood to be largely responsible for inadequacies in food rationing and the city’s overall lack of preparation. Crucially, in expressing their discontentment, women also revealed their conceptions of the Party’s obligations to its citizenry. Women’s attitudes towards the Party were influenced by a number of factors external to the siege, in particular their interactions with the Party during the prewar era. The extent to which they raised those grievances in their narratives indicates that the conditions of the siege prompted women to re-evaluate, and perhaps even redefine, the terms of their relationships with the Party. As the separation between Vera Inber’s feelings toward the
Party and her feelings about Stalin indicates, the siege space provided women with the
42 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 41, 80. 43 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 31, 117.
31 latitude to define for themselves how they wanted to relate to the Party and to its supreme leader.
Motivations for Survival
The frequency with which women’s narratives described their discontentment with the Party raises a question: if they were not inspired by the Party to defend their city, then what was their motivation to persevere? Indeed, the sheer brutality of day-to-day existence in besieged Leningrad raises questions about women’s motivations for survival.44 From the Party’s perspective, the answer was clear: women persisted in the face of adversity because they were “deeply conscious of [their] personal responsibility for the nation’s future,” and they knew that they must “safeguard the great gains of the
October Revolution.”45 The Party’s ideological explanations of women’s motivations evoke a female populace that was deeply inspired by the ideals of the 1917 Revolution, and was thus willing to suffer for the survival of Soviet Communism.
However, women’s siege diaries and memoirs lead to a different conclusion.
Although the explanations that women provided for their perseverance were numerous, and thus defy generalization, one trend is dominant: women rarely, if ever, ascribed their fortitude to their desire to defend Soviet Communism. Instead, women almost universally preferred more local, family-oriented explanations, which centered on their perceived need to survive in order to support those around them. The local motivations that women
44 This was particularly true for the first winter of the siege (November 1941 – March 1942), when Leningraders saw the highest rates of death by starvation and average daily temperatures of -2 degrees Fahrenheit 45 Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, David Skvirsky and Vic Schnierson, trans, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1946), 85.
32 cited as inspiring their survival indicate the extent to which they conceived of themselves as responsible for ensuring the survival of their families and friends.
Vera Inber, Elena Kozhina, and Elena Kochina presented their primary motivations for survival as the desire to support other Leningraders. In Inber’s telling, women persisted in the face of long odds “so that their fathers and brothers should win.”46 In other words, they conceived of their contributions at home as vital for success at the front; they endured life in the besieged city not for the survival of Soviet
Communism, even of the Soviet Union itself, but rather for the survival of their loved ones at the battlefront. In her memoir of life under siege, Kozhina portrayed women as similarly motivated. For example, she recounts how while women and children waited anxiously in bomb shelters for the threat of an aerial attack to pass, they would use their
“last drops of precious energy” to engage in conversation with each other, as they were acutely aware that “every person there needed somebody else.”47 In effect, Kozhina seems to have understood female survivors’ willpower as being derived from personal connections, rather than in their supposed desire to maintain the “great gains of the
October Revolution.”48 Kochina, too, weighed questions relating to women’s perseverance in her diary, and came to conclusions similar to those of Inber and Kozhina regarding the centrality of personal connection to women’s motivation to endure.
Notably, Kochina never used the terms “Revolution,” “Party,” “Communist,” or
“Socialist” in her narrative.49 The absence of this politically charged language in her account points to the primacy of personal connection, and challenges the Party’s
46 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 94. 47 Kozhina, Elena, Through the Burning Steppe: a Wartime Memoir, (New York: Riverhead Hardcover, 2000), 55. 48 Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 85. 49 Kochina, Blockade Diary, 19.
33 insistence that women rallied to defend Leningrad because of their devotion to Soviet
Communism.
Together, Inber, Kozhina, and Kochina’s narratives establish characteristics of a representative “Leningrad woman” within the context of the siege. This woman understood herself as the lynchpin not only of her family unit, but also of the city’s community at large. She was acutely aware of her responsibilities to those around her, and it was from these very responsibilities that she derived her inspiration to survive. In describing the traits of this “Leningrad woman,” Inber, Kozhina and Kochina eschewed the Party’s notions of women’s ideological motivations, and articulated instead the particular reasons for which they and other women of Leningrad persevered.
In her memoir of life under siege, Olga Berggolts expressed a more complicated conception of the reasons for which women endured: she presented herself as driven both by the desire to uphold the ideals of the Revolution and her commitment to ensuring the survival of those around her. Recalling a moment during the winter of 1942, Berggolts described how she passed some pro-Soviet graffiti on a building and Revolutionary sentiment “overtook [her] like a wave, and at once merged with [the siege’s] state of resistance, fearlessness, and limitless freedom.”50 Later in the memoir she again raised the issue of motivations for survival, but within a less ideological framework. “My main desire,” she wrote, “was to give back as much as possible, to give to my fellow citizens and my country the strength and words they needed.”51 Like Inber, Skrjabina, and
Kochina, Berggolts’s motivation thus also seemed to derive from her understanding of her own survival as critical for supporting that of her “fellow citizens.” But in keeping
50 Berggolts, Daytime Stars, 149. 51 Berggolts, Daytime Stars, 210.
34 with her prior, ideological sentiments, Berggolts understood her purview of responsibility as extending to the “country,” and to upholding its Revolutionary tradition.
Thus, in considering how women understood their own motivations for survival, we see two important trends: the centrality of personal relationships to women’s inspirations to persevere, and the Party’s tendency to overestimate the influence of its ideology on women’s consciousness. As has been demonstrated throughout this section, it was not the Party’s revolutionary invocations that most inspired Leningrad’s women to defend their city, but rather their personal attachments and obligations to their friends and families. This incongruity between the Party’s ideological explanations of women’s motivations for survival and those of Leningrad’s women themselves was a portent of the widespread misapprehension that would emerge between Party and populace in the postwar years, as will be discussed in detail in the following chapters. Interestingly, this incongruity also suggests that the Party’s conception of how Soviets should think of themselves had not completely permeated the consciousness of its female citizenry. In other words, women were able to separate their own motivations for survival from those that were prescribed by the Party (and with which they were confronted in siege propaganda). This is not to suggest that the separation between women’s self-described motivations for survival and those presumed by the Party was absolute. After all, women were operating within the Soviet context, and were thus influenced, at least to some extent, by Party dialogue. But, as illustrated above, women described their will to survive in their own terms, and according to their own understandings of themselves as support systems for those around them. In other words, their worldview was not exclusively
“Soviet.”
35 Notions of Civic Responsibility
As this discussion has demonstrated, a sense of personal connection toward one’s family and friends constituted one of the primary sources of motivation for Leningrad’s women to survive. So, too, did a sense of civic responsibility, or the commitment of oneself to actions that would benefit the public good. Siege narratives indicate that women understood themselves as offering certain essential services to Leningraders during the siege. Although these services were quite broad and included air defense, medical help, distributing food, and checking on elderly and infirm shut-ins, here the focus will be on two: women’s substantial industrial contributions, and their importance in tending to the dead. While these two services are ostensibly disparate, they were unified by the pride that women took in assisting those around them.
Female diarists and memoirists almost universally evinced an understanding of women’s industrial contributions as critical to the city’s survival. For example, Elena
Skrjabina understood women as being “the most durable” during the siege (as compared to men), which meant that their continued efforts were crucial to the survival of the city.52
A female worker’s 1942 radio report that Vera Inber related in her diary furthered the notion that women understood their contributions industry as significant, and deserving of pride. In the report, Tanya Serova encouraged her comrades to be optimistic, as she and other female workers had “gone without sleep and respite [for ten days and ten nights], to assemble fighting machines for the front.”53 Like Skrjabina, therefore, Serova seems to have understood her fellow female workers as hearty and capable, able to contribute to the defense without rest. Later in the report, Serova established a clear link
52 Skrjabina, Siege and Survival, 47. 53 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 128.
36 between women’s industrial contributions and eventual Soviet triumph by encouraging female workers to consider that they, too, were “participants in the great offensive,” because the products of their labor went “to the Front—for victory.”54 That Inber chose to include Serova’s report as part of her diary indicates that she felt it significant—perhaps even encouraging. It may have inspired Inber with pride for her fellow female defenders, because women made their industrial contributions on the same minimal rations as their male counterparts, who were generally deemed less “hearty” than they.
Women also tended to understand themselves as possessing central roles in tending to the dead during the siege. Women had played a prominent role in funerals and burials in traditional Russian culture—thus, their performance of death rituals in wartime
Leningrad was not a new role. The sheer number of deaths during the siege, however, meant that the duty of caring for the dead was of a new magnitude. Vera Inber expressed her notion of women’s central role in providing services for the dead quite bluntly. Her
February 1942 entry read simply, “women are the ones mostly responsible for pulling coffins around the street.”55 Numerous siege-era photographs that depict women pulling frozen, shrouded corpses on sleds through the dismal cityscape confirm Inber’s claims.
Elena Skrjabina displayed a similar understanding of women’s responsibilities in her diary, claiming that “the duties for burying the dead [fell] universally to women.”56
Skrjabina’s assessment that Leningrad’s women were “responsible for some of the dignity of death remaining” points to a more nuanced notion of why women tended to the dead: many understood burial, and last rites, as part of the broader service of retaining some of the city’s prewar dignity. In other words, during a time in which “death was not a
54 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 129. 55 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 39. 56 Skrjabina, Siege and Survival, 72.
37 casual visitor,” but rather so common that “people had gotten used to it,” women understood one of their primary responsibilities as maintaining certain components of prewar funeral rituals. 57 Indeed, Skrjabina’s sentiments indicate that women took pride in their civic contributions, and particularly in their ability to protect some of the remaining
“dignity” of death.
Other women shared this sense of pride in helping others, too—a pride not only in the formal roles examined above, but also in more mundane, everyday tasks. Vera Inber, for example, proudly reported in her diary that “all the moving was done by women” when one of her friends was forced to switch apartments during the siege. 58 This
“working Saturday,” as Inber called it, brought women together in the interest of helping a friend.59 We might also interpret women’s persistence in educating and safeguarding
Leningrad’s children as another manifestation of their sense of civic responsibilities.
During his April 1942 visit to Leningrad, for example, Party member Alexandr Fadeev encountered a woman who eagerly told him, “you simply must come see our kindergarten…you know…we didn’t let a single [child] die.”60 That women tended to describe explicitly, and take pride in, the services that they offered their fellow
Leningraders indicates that they understood those services as notable; though not necessarily new, within the conditions of the siege they took on novel dimensions and importance.
57 Kochina, Blockade Diary, 62. 58 Inber, Leningrad Diary,147. For further discussion of the ways in which women contributed to the material defense of the city, see Berggolts, Olga. Daytime Stars, 65. 59 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 147. 60 Fadeev, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, 11.
38 The Trials of Motherhood
While the sense of civic responsibility that tied Leningrad’s women to those around them was a prominent component of their self-concept during the siege, it paled in comparison to the obligations that Leningrad’s mothers felt toward their children.
Indeed, for Leningrad’s mothers, the near impossibility of self-preservation during the siege was compounded by the need to keep one’s children alive. City officials had ordered children’s evacuation in the days before the Germans closed the ring around the city. But for many mothers, most of whom had already lost their husbands to combat at the battlefront, separation from their children seemed unfathomable. Elena Kozhina’s mother expressed a sentiment shared among many mothers when she told her daughter,
“we will survive together, or we will die together, but we won’t separate.”61 Even when faced with the prospect of looming invasion, many mothers, like Kozhina’s, chose to ignore or circumvent official directives in order to preserve their families’ unity.
According to most female survivor’s narratives, Leningrad’s mothers would
“shoulder virtually every responsibility for [their] family’s survival” over the course of the nine hundred days of the siege. 62 Certainly, women’s “shouldering” of familial responsibility was not a new phenomenon: Soviet mothers had always served as both the primary caretakers of their children and the keepers of the domestic sphere. However, within the context of the siege, women came to identify the obligations of motherhood as distinctly burdensome: a burden even greater than the normal trials of motherhood absent a wartime siege.
61 Kozhina, Through the Burning Steppe: a Wartime Memoir, 57. 62 Kochina, Blockade Diary, 18.
39 As almost all siege narratives attest, women continued to “mother” their children: they fed them, provided them with what comfort they could, and sought to ease the pain of their physical and emotional suffering. But women tended to write about these actions as being acutely trying and, in doing so, implicitly illustrated the extent to which the siege offered a previously non-existent space in which to express grievances. It is also important to note that women were describing the experience of motherhood within the context of the Party’s particularly idealized conception of that duty during the siege. The
Party’s version of motherhood, for example, dictated that women “bring up the city’s orphans; carry on [their] shoulders the whole burden of maintaining the existence of the family in the besieged city.”63 Women’s descriptions of the burdens of motherhood in their narratives, therefore, can be seen, in part, as their response to the oppressive, idealized version of motherhood that they encountered in Party propaganda.
Soviet literary critic Lydia Ginzburg discussed motherhood with particular bluntness in her memoir, focusing on the seeming impossibility of providing for her family while fighting for her own survival. Ginzburg understood her family unit as necessitating “inexorable demands for sacrifice.”64 The unapologetic clarity of the word
“inexorable” reflects Ginzburg’s conception of the unremitting burden of caring for one’s family during the siege. However, Ginzburg’s narrative also elucidates the complexity of motherhood during the siege: “mothers shared their bread” while “writhing with pity or cursing.”65 Thus, in their actions, women did adhere to the Party’s “idealized” conception of motherhood in which women sacrificed their own wellbeing for that of their children.
But Ginzburg also attested that mothers “cursed” as they fulfilled that duty—in other
63 Fadeev, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, 62. 64 Ginzburg, Lydia, Blockade Diary, Alan Myers, trans, (London: Harvill Press, 1996), 7. 65 Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, 7.
40 words, they chafed against the expectations to which they nonetheless adhered. Ginzburg thereby established a particular identity for herself as a mother during the siege: she understood the demands of motherhood as acutely trying, but continued to meet those demands.
Elena Skrjabina evinced similar conceptions of motherhood in her diary, as she prominently featured the burdens and articulated the seeming impossibilities of the role.
Skrjabina hid her children from city officials during the initial period of citywide evacuation, valuing the unity of her family above all else. But she made that choice under impossible circumstances, in which there was “no good decision” to be made. 66
Skrjabina experienced motherhood during the siege as necessitating a series of similarly difficult decisions and negotiating impossible situations. A decision she encountered daily, for example, was whether she could afford to wait on a twelve-hour ration line, or whether that time spent away from home would result in one of her children freezing or starving to death.67
Together, Ginzburg and Skrjabina’s accounts seem to establish a sort of
“Leningrad mother” that emerged within the context of the siege. The “Leningrad mother” did not simply internalize the role that was expected of her, but rather engaged with it, and identified it as acutely trying. She understood that “if [she] should fail, the whole family [would] perish,” while also acknowledging that these substantial responsibilities threatened her own ability to survive.68 The “Leningrad mother” thus experienced a certain quality of internal incongruity: in her actions, she adhered to the
Party’s ideal of the self-sacrificing, devoted Soviet mother, who fed her children before
66 Skrjabina, Siege and Survival, 29. 67 Skrjabina, Siege and Survival, 70. 68 Skrjabina, Siege and Survival, 74.
41 herself, stood in ration lines for the whole day, and trekked “very far” to fetch water for her family.69 But she interpreted her role with a critical eye, aware of the extent to which it was burdensome. This incongruity reflects the complexity of the siege, and of women’s narratives as they sought to conceptualize it.
Conclusions
To return to Inber’s words from the chapter’s epigraph, “[t]wo Leningrad fronts exist[ed]: a battle front and a way of life.”70 Both of these fronts were contained within the city, and civilian women encountered them every day. They waited on line for bread rations between aerial bombardments; they were killed by unexploded shells while lugging buckets of drinking water from the Neva River back to their apartments. There was only a murky separation between the home front and the battlefront because the battle was manifest in Leningraders’ starving and freezing bodies. As one siege survivor described, “women and children defended the city, without any weapons.”71 Their perseverance, their very survival within the most extreme conditions, constituted their primary contribution to the defense of the city. It was within this context of total upheaval of home and family that Leningrad’s women wrote, and thereby expressed the way in which they understood themselves, and their roles and responsibilities, in the context of the siege.
By considering the five main themes that were prominent components of many women’s siege narratives (starvation, conceptions of the Party, motivations for survival, notions of civic responsibility, and the trials of motherhood), this chapter has elucidated
69 Kozhina, Through the Burning Steppe, 124. 70 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 47. 71 Gorter, 900 Days, 22:49.
42 the diverse ways in which women articulated their self-understandings within the context of the siege. While these five themes appear in numerous diaries and memoirs, there is no single, universal way in which Leningrad’s women related to them. Recall, for example, women’s differing conceptions of starvation, and its effects on Leningrad’s populace.
While Kyra Wayne understood herself as a possible victim of others’ starvation- prompted thievery, Elena Kochina—who herself participated in theft—considered herself to be a victim of moral degeneration in the context of the siege. In effect, the two women’s victimhood differed in important ways.
The chapter has also considered the broader process of narrative construction in which women engaged by recording their experiences during the siege. Here it is important to emphasize two trends: first, women generally did not consider themselves to be active participants in creative construction, but rather understood writing as a way to either enhance the chances of their survival, or to transmit their experiences to future generations. Second, in considering their identities through writing, women selectively employed and rejected existent Soviet and pre-revolutionary Russian cultural ideals. For example, while most of Leningrad’s mothers continued to adhere to the “idealized” motherhood role in terms of their self-sacrificing actions, they did not take on those roles unquestioningly (and rather described them as acutely burdensome). Thus, the diversity and range of women’s self-understandings (as expressed in siege narratives) can be attributed, in part, to the different ways in which siege women combined, modified and discarded the ideals and images with which they were confronted.
The chapter’s aim has not been to synthesize women’s experiences into one interpretive framework, but rather to elucidate the myriad of ways in which women
43 conceived of themselves, and of their experiences, within the context of the siege. It is important to reinforce the diversity—and, at times, the incongruity—of women’s narratives, as this breadth of understanding would be all but lost in the Party’s narrative of women’s mentalities and experiences during the siege. Indeed, as will be shown in- depth in Chapter II, one of the Party’s aims during the siege was to craft and cultivate the image of a single, uncomplicated “Leningrad heroine.” This trope of the idealized
“Leningrad heroine” was used as an instrument of political propaganda and, ultimately, would do much to obscure the complexity and nuance of women’s understandings and experiences during the siege.
44 The “Leningrad Heroine”: the Party’s Wartime Narrative
“And in the memory of humanity the beautiful and sublime image of the women and mothers of Leningrad will be preserved forever”1 -Alexandr Fadeev, 1943
On November 6, 1941, standing atop Lenin’s Mausoleum in the center of
Moscow, Joseph Stalin addressed the Soviet populace with a rousing call to arms. In a speech that was broadcast on radios throughout the Soviet Union, Stalin assured citizens that the nation was “standing firmly like a rock” against the Germans.2 British reporter
Alexander Werth, who was present for the speech, attested to the impact that Stalin’s words had on listeners—many of whom, according to Werth, wept “tears of joy” after hearing Stalin’s encouragements.3 Stalin affirmed to listeners that the country was engaged in an epic struggle: the “German invaders want[ed] a war of extermination,” and it was thus the task of Soviet citizens “to destroy every German, to the last man.”4 These sentiments tell us much about how Stalin characterized the war, and how he desired that
Soviet citizens also approach the struggle. Soviets were engaged in a “patriotic war of liberation, [a] war against the fascist enslavers.”5 Within the framework of this “great war,” it was of paramount importance to defend the key cities of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow to ensure the survival of the entire Russian people. 6 In effect, Stalin’s views on the defense of Leningrad were clear and uncompromising: the city had to be defended, no matter the human cost.
1 Fadeev, Alexandr, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971), 45. 2 Werth, Alexander, Russia at War: 1941-1945, (New York: Carol & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1964), 250. 3 Werth, Russia at War, 250. 4 Werth, Russia at War, 246. 5 Stalin, Joseph. “Brothers and Sisters!,” Radio Address to the Soviet People July 3, 1941, Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, accessed January 20, 2018, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1943-2/the-cult-of-leadership/the-cult-of-leadership-texts/stalin-brothers-and- sisters/ 6 Stalin, “Brothers and Sisters!”
45 Stalin’s prioritization of the defense of Leningrad demonstrated that he was unfazed by the prospect of mass casualties. The city’s symbolic and strategic importance justified the loss of any number of lives. In one of his few direct statements to Leningrad,
Stalin ordered that “all work” be “subordinated to the cause;” the actual impact of this measure on civilian suffering was of relatively little concern to the dictator.7 Insofar as this chapter will establish comparisons between the state-sponsored narrative of the siege and those of Leningrad’s women themselves, it is important to understand that the Party and Leningrad’s women approached the siege from different perspectives. While women in the city cited local, civic responsibilities as providing their motivation to endure, the realm of the “local” was barely even conceptualized by Stalin and other high-ranking officials. Whereas Leningrad’s women frequently attributed shortcomings in defense to failures of the local Party organizations, Stalin encouraged Party members to attribute failures to citizens’ inadequate devotion to the war effort. In other words, there were substantial differences in how Stalin and Leningrad’s women perceived the siege. It is the particularities of those differences that this chapter will elucidate, as a way to gain insight into how the regime conceived of women’s experiences during the siege and, more broadly, the roles of women in Soviet society during World War II.
This chapter examines representations of Leningrad’s women in the narrative that
Stalin and the Party apparatus crafted and cultivated during the War. One of the chapter’s primary objectives is to compare that narrative with the more complex accounts offered by Leningrad’s women themselves. The primary means of gaining insight into the Party’s narrative in this chapter is through siege propaganda—especially posters and films. Of course, visual propaganda had been one of the chief means of legitimizing Soviet rule
7 Stalin, “Brothers and Sisters!”
46 from the days of the 1917 Revolution. But there were significant differences between siege propaganda (indeed, Soviet World War II propaganda in general), and that of the prewar period. In particular, as historian Lisa Kirschenbaum has argued, wartime propaganda deemphasized depictions of the cult of Stalin, which had been one of the centerpieces of propaganda in the prewar era, in favor of expressing a variant of “new” nationalism. 8 In actuality, this “new” nationalism involved a return to “old” Russian, rather than Soviet, nationalism, in the hope that the traditions of the past would unify
Soviets in defense of their country.
In this vein, the regime’s propaganda tended to cast the struggle in Leningrad as an epic battle between the German and the Russian peoples. Hence, the Germans were seeking not to defeat the Soviet Communist state, but rather to crush the Russian people.
Consequently, Leningraders were fighting not for Stalin and the Party, but rather for the defense of their homeland. In this struggle for national survival, civilians became soldiers, and the home front a battlefront too. Civilian women were symbolic combatants, in whom was combined the “steadfastness and courage” of male soldiers with a vague
“indestructible Soviet femininity.”9 The very act of women’s survival would serve to inspire other Soviet citizens to display similar “steadfastness” and “courage,” and would prove to the Germans the strength of the Soviet Communist system.
State-sponsored propaganda from the siege provides two main insights: what the regime wanted to communicate to its citizens about women’s roles in the siege, and how the regime itself understood those roles and their importance. By both establishing and
8 Kirschenbaum, Lisa, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myths, Memories, and Monuments, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 50. 9 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 51.
47 representing the epic dimensions of the siege, and of women’s roles within it, the Party not only chronicled the history of women in the siege, but also constituted that history.10
To explain these insights, this chapter uses visual propaganda and official speeches to examine the terms in which the Party understood the siege, and the manner in which it presented the siege to Soviet citizens both inside and outside of Leningrad. The chapter begins by addressing the instrumental role played by images of women in siege propaganda. It will then elucidate the way in which Party propaganda created the image of a singular “Leningrad heroine”: the idealized female Leningrader who emerged in siege propaganda. Finally, the concluding pages of the chapter will center on Stalin’s attitudes toward Leningrad’s women, both during the siege and in the immediate postwar period. Throughout the chapter, the Party’s official narrative of the siege is compared against the narratives of women themselves, in order to determine the particular ways in which the state-sponsored narrative obscured or assimilated women’s own articulated experiences.
Women as Instruments to Inspire Mobilization
The 1942 propaganda film Leningrad in Struggle provides a starting point for understanding the instrumental role played by depictions of women in Soviet propaganda.
Released in July 1942, the film was meant to inspire those in and outside of the city to keep up the fight. A Party member’s report on the public reception of the film provides us with insight into the Party’s tendency to employ depictions of women for political ends.
Officer Bulgakov’s report began on a positive note, as he claimed that Leningraders
10 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 84.
48 “were giving the film high marks.”11 But the remainder of his report described
Leningraders’ criticisms of the film—in particular, the fact that, “in some viewers’ opinions, the film still [didn’t] show well enough the real life of the besieged city.”12
Bulgakov’s comments demonstrate the tendency of siege propaganda to downplay the city’s horrible plight—in particular, that of civilian women—in favor of depicting the battles and skirmishes on the front surrounding the city. Hardships on the battlefront were to be expected, and could be woven into the Party’s narrative of a determined Soviet populace fighting the German enemy. The agent of resident Leningraders’ suffering in the city, though, was much less clear. Unlike soldiers on the battlefront, whose wounds came from the Germans, Leningraders’ starvation-swollen bellies could not be so clearly attributed to the enemy’s actions.
By omitting footage that revealed physical agony and material hardship, and suggesting instead that Leningrad’s women were thriving under the siege, the creators of
Leningrad in Struggle used Leningrad’s women as instruments of state-sponsored propaganda. The film’s message was clear: Leningrad’s women were fully mobilized and committed to the war effort. Their selflessness and industriousness were meant to inspire the film’s viewers, and encourage those outside of Leningrad to display similar devotion to their country. In other words, the Party employed the image of women’s industriousness as a tool with which to encourage citizens to commit themselves to defending the Soviet Union.
Significantly, this image of Leningrad’s women was meant not only to inspire women outside of Leningrad to defend their nation; it was also to be used as a tool for
11 Bidlack, Richard, and Lomagin, Nikita, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2013), 359. 12 Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 356.
49 inspiring Soviet men, in particular those not yet mobilized for the front, to commit themselves to combat. In order to understand why this heroic image of Leningrad’s women could be used to inspire men to fight, it is necessary to return to the concepts of femininity and masculinity that predominated during the prewar period. Despite the
Party’s proclaimed “liberation” of the Soviet woman in the 1930s, assumptions of male superiority remained widespread in Soviet society throughout the Stalinist period. While women were afforded sufficient respect to be given certain jobs in industry, it was widely accepted that they needed the protection and guidance of their husbands and sons in order to assume those jobs.
The poster “We will give to young workers the experience of old production workers” from the 1930’s illustrates this common belief.
Figure 2.1 "We will give to young workers the experience of old production workers” 13
13 Poster from Professor Wagner’s slideshow. HIST 241 Spring ’15, Class 13, “Women,” slide 25
50 Although the poster represents a Soviet woman at work in a factory, she performs her task only under the watchful eye of an older man.
This notion of women as needing the protection and guidance of men, widely accepted during the prewar period, helps us to understand why propagandist depictions of
Leningrad’s women as fully mobilized for the defense of the city would have been such an effective means of inspiring men to fight. The corresponding conception of masculinity that it supported induced in men a desire not to be outdone by Leningrad’s women, as well as a sense of obligation to protect the Soviet Union’s women—to guide them through the struggle, just as men had guided them through the Revolution. While it is precarious to impute psychological frameworks to the men viewing these posters, it would seem that the Party sought to both inspire and shame men into action by portraying
Leningrad’s women as the exemplars of devotion to the war effort. This is because civilian Soviet men would not want to be outperformed by those whom, according to prewar conceptions of gender roles, were in need of their protection and guidance. The
Party’s propagandistic depiction of Leningrad’s female populace thus served as an instrument with which to inspire male citizens’ devotion to the war effort.
The 1942 account of the siege by Party member Dimitry Pavlov provides further insight into this instrumental role of idealized women in siege propaganda. On the surface, Pavlov’s account of women’s roles during the siege gave credit where credit was due. He lauded the fact that women took the “places of men called up for duty…worked in production and did the housework too,” thus acknowledging the industrial contributions in which women themselves frequently took pride.14 “[Women] fetched wood with great trouble and used every scrap of it sparingly,” Pavlov continued, “…they
14 Pavlov, Dimitry, Leningrad 1941: The Blockade, (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1965), 134.
51 would bring in buckets from the nearest river. They did the laundry and mended clothes…”15 This list of women’s tasks actually aligned quite closely with women’s conceptions of themselves as contributing significantly to both industry and domestic life during the siege.16 Significantly, though, at the end of this lengthy tribute to Leningrad’s women, Pavlov came to the grand conclusion that “[women’s] will to live, their moral strength, resolution, efficiency and discipline [would] always be the example and inspiration for millions of people.”17 By presenting women’s struggles as acts of
“inspiration,” and their survival as making manifest their inherent “moral strength,”
Pavlov imputed almost mythic significance to women’s persistence. Consequently, although Pavlov’s characterization of women’s actions during the siege was objectively positive, it was also instrumental: the idealized image of Leningrad’s women that he conjured was intended to inspire other men and women to attain similar levels of
“strength, resolution, efficiency and discipline”— to devote their whole beings to the war effort.
It is important to emphasize that this heroic characterization of women’s efforts differed significantly from how women themselves felt about their perseverance. As previously discussed, most of Leningrad’s women persisted out of a sense of responsibility to those around them—to return to Elena Kozhina’s words, “every person there needed somebody else.” 18 In their narratives, women did not describe their motivations as arising out of a strong desire to serve as an “inspiration” for current and
15 Pavlov, Leningrad 1941, 134. 16 Skrjabina, Elena, Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader, Norman Luxenburg, trans, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2009), 47. 17 Pavlov, Leningrad 1941, 134. 18 Kozhina, Elena, Through the Burning Steppe: a Wartime Memoir, (New York: Riverhead Hardcover, 2000), 55.
52 future generations. Those words were part of the lexicon of siege propaganda, and of the
Party members who created it, who sought to use the circumstance of women’s persistence as a means of inspiring those in and outside of Leningrad to commit themselves to the war effort.
Alexandr Fadeev, another siege-era Party member, gave a similarly idealized account of women’s roles in the siege in his 1943 report on Leningrad. Like Pavlov, he lauded the extent of women’s contributions to the war effort—in particular, “[a]t the lathe in the factory, by the bedside of the wounded soldiers, at the observer’s post on the roof, in offices, in schools…”19 Again, this conception of women’s roles as both various and significant aligned with how women conceived of their roles in their own narratives. But, also like Pavlov, Fadeev ultimately obscured women’s motivations for survival, and instead used the mere fact of their persistence as an instrument for inspiring Soviet citizens to mobilize. For example, he extolled the “nobility of [women’s] labours” as the supreme manifestation of their “devotion to the Fatherland, to [their] city, [their] army,
[their] family…”20 By placing women’s supposed devotion to the “Fatherland” as the first in this list of reasons for which women endured, Fadeev implied that it was the primary factor that motivated women to persevere—and, by extension, that other citizens should follow their example. However, as demonstrated in Chapter I, women were generally motivated to survive by the dual ties of civic responsibility and familial connection. In poet Olga Berggolts’s words, women desired “to give back as much as possible, to give to [their] fellow citizens….” through their survival.21 These ties of civic
19 Fadeev, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, 62. 20 Fadeev, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, 62. 21 Berggolts, Olga, Daytime Stars. Lisa Kirschenbaum, trans, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Unpublished manuscript, used with author’s permission, 210.
53 responsibility were not associated with Soviet ideology, as the terms in which Fadeev discussed women’s survival would indicate.
This instrumental use of the narrative of Leningrad’s women as exemplary Soviet citizens was widespread within the realm of officialdom. In his 1943 report on the film
“She Defends the Motherland,” for example, the Party’s political propaganda director G.
F. Alexandrov criticized the fact that the film’s female protagonist inspired “pity and compassion,” rather than “the idea of her as a conscientious soldier who defend[ed] freedom and the independence of the motherland.”22 As Alexandrov’s sentiments make manifest, the regime desired that the true plight of Leningrad’s women not be shown: the
Leningrad woman was not to be pitied. Rather, these women were to be upheld as the standard to which other Soviet citizens should aspire, especially with respect to their tendency towards self-sacrifice and persistence. By mandating that any footage that portrayed women’s suffering (and thus could inspire “pity”) be omitted from the film, the regime furthered the notion that women’s perseverance would be portrayed only insofar as it could be used as a political tool for inspiring others to mobilize. Because they too frequently discussed the city’s profound suffering, women’s own voices were lost in the
Party’s narrative.
The Heroism of Leningrad’s Female Defenders
The Soviet regime used visual propaganda as a means of deploying the image of
Leningrad’s women for political aims. Perhaps the most dominant image that the Party
22 Aleksandrov, G.F. “Report on the Film ‘She Defends the Motherland,” May 11, 1943, James von Geldern, trans, Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, accessed April 15, 2018, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1943-2/women-in-war-films/women-in-war-films-texts/ideological-flaws-in- she-defends-the-motherland/
54 crafted in this visual propaganda was that of the idealized Leningrad woman. This woman maintained her home while contributing to the city’s defenses. She shouldered the burdens of motherhood while continuing to perform “women’s work” in the factories.
Crucially, all of those actions were performed in the interest of defending the motherland.
The idealized Leningrad woman also exhibited corporeal resistance to the dire conditions of starvation: her body bore none of the signs of privation, but rather appeared to be robust and strong. Indeed, one could refer to this idealized woman that siege propaganda crafted and cultivated as the “Leningrad heroine”: over the course of the siege, this heroine would embody all of the positive traits that the Party desired that both its women and men emulate.
Figure 2.2 “We defended Leningrad, now we will rebuild it!”23
23 “We defended Leningrad; now we will rebuild it!” 1944, From: Cybrisky, Roman Adrian, Kyiv, Ukraine: the City of Domes and Demons from the Collapse of Socialism to the Mass Uprising of 2013-2014. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2016), 270.
55 The 1944 poster entitled “We defended Leningrad, now we will rebuild it!” provides us with insight into the particular qualities of this “Leningrad heroine.” The poster depicts a determined-looking woman of Leningrad with one hand on a brick wall that she is repairing, and the other pointing towards the city behind her. The woman does not show the corporeal weaknesses of starvation, but rather appears to be healthy and strong. The brick wall that she repairs seems to stand as a metaphor for national reconstruction, a process in which Leningrad’s women, as the poster suggests, were to play an import role. This “Leningrad heroine” displays commitment to the process of reconstruction and, by example, calls upon members of her sex to display similar commitment. Thus, this poster indicates certain qualities of the “Leningrad heroine”: she was both physically able, and ideologically committed to her nation.24
The film Leningrad in Struggle cast a similar representation of Leningrad’s women as heroines who worked arduously and efficiently to contribute to the defense of their country. One of the film’s opening images is of a brigade of women pasting propaganda posters onto buildings and scaffoldings. Triumphant music plays as a sped-up video reel shows women buzzing around Leningrad like bees, smilingly hanging posters in support of the war effort.25 The female populace’s ostensibly happy mobilization continues: they dig trenches to contribute to the defense of the homeland, and they help to clean the city at officials’ request.26
24 It is important to recall that Leningrad’s women did not consider their own motivations for survival on the level of national construction, but were rather inspired by notions of civic and familial responsibility. And, consequently, that this poster fundamentally misconstrued the reasons for which women endured. 25 “Leningrad in Struggle 1942,” YouTube video, 1:10:10, June 3, 2012, 5:33, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zISOOn3WvsI 26 Leningrad in Struggle, 11:04, 59:35
56 On the one hand, the film’s representation of these women aligns with how
Leningrad’s women conceived of their roles under siege: most women’s narratives describe, for example, how they tended to the dead, and cleaned up the streets.27 On the other hand, however, the women in the film bear no signs of starvation or suffering, whereas women’s diaries and memoirs universally maintain that starvation-swollen bellies and ankles made movement around the city painful and slow. The film obscured the fact that women themselves viewed their efforts to save the city as being accompanied by great pain and suffering. Indeed, the film’s footage of women working is sped up in order to give the impression of robustness and health—a certain able bodied- ness that, in reality, most civilian women found elusive. As diaries and memoirs attest, women conceived of themselves not as robust and healthy, but rather as akin to
“skeletons wrapped in skin.”28 In effect, although the film’s representation of the duties that women were performing during the siege may have aligned with the experiences of the women themselves, its depiction of the bodies in which they performed those roles obscured the reality of corporeal existence for women in the city. It was in this representation of female bodies that the film most clearly advanced the project of creating a “Leningrad heroine,” whose body was able to withstand privation without bearing any external physical symptoms.
Both “We defended Leningrad, now we will rebuild it!” and Leningrad in
Struggle portray women as having a desire to rebuild and repair their city. There is a way in which this desire to rebuild, or to contribute to the process of collective regrowth, recalls the spirit of civic responsibility that many women describe in their narratives as
27 See Chapter I, 5, 20 28 Gorter, Jessica, dir. 900 Days,( Brooklyn: Icarus Films, 2012), 11:17.
57 providing them with motivation to endure (recall, for example, the “working Saturday” that Vera Inber described in her narrative, in which numerous women came together to help their friend move her furniture from one apartment to another). However, there is an important distinction between the way in which the Party portrayed women’s desire to repair the city, and how women articulated it in their own narratives. In “We defended
Leningrad, now we will rebuild it!”, for example, a red flag waves above the woman’s head, symbolically linking her willingness to rebuild to her commitment to upholding
Soviet Communism. However, as noted above, women’s narratives indicate that their motivations lay in notions of local responsibilities, rather than in an acute desire to safeguard the world’s bastion of Communism. The Party’s tendency to represent women as being motivated by Communist loyalty reflects the extent to which it understood the defense in ideological terms, and willed that those viewing its propaganda do so, too.
Motherhood During the Siege
One of the most prominent extensions of the female heroism narrative was its application to the regime’s representations of motherhood. Propaganda tended to associate women with motherhood in two main ways: idealized depictions of Soviet women with children, and symbolic linkages between Soviet women and the defense of the “Motherland.”
58
Figure 2.3 "Glory to the mother-heroine!"29 The 1944 poster “Glory to the mother-heroine!” fits into the former category: it was intended to represent the experience of motherhood during the siege. The poster depicts a strong, robust woman staring straight at the viewer, surrounded by ten healthy, smiling children. Of course, this scene would have been nearly impossible in the context of besieged Leningrad. The woman’s strong frame would have been eroded by starvation.
Her children would have been emaciated and frail. But it is in this obvious misrepresentation of reality that the poster’s significance lies, because it indicates the extent to which the regime extended the narrative of female heroism to the realm of motherhood: it obscured the fact that the mother and children would have been fighting starvation and death, and emphasized instead their almost superhuman ability to persevere within the worst of circumstances.
29 “Glory to a mother – a heroine! 1944” Windows on War, FromUniversity of Nottingham, 2013, accessed January 8, 2018, http://windowsonwar.nottingham.ac.uk/poster/Glory-to-Mother-Heroines
59 Significantly, this poster also perpetuated the oppressive idealization of motherhood against which many women in Leningrad chafed in their siege narratives.
According to the poster’s title, the mother it portrayed was a “heroine;” she was meant to epitomize the self-sacrificing, “ideal” Soviet mother who—along with her children—bore no signs of the desperate conditions of the siege. By presenting only the most idealized portrayal of motherhood in siege propaganda, the regime obscured the very real plight of mothers themselves. The unambiguous “heroine-mothers” that the regime represented
“shoulder[ed] virtually every responsibility for their family’s survivals” with cheerful smiles and determined expressions.30 Unlike Lydia Ginzburg (and other Leningrad mothers) who shared their bread with their children while “writing in pity or cursing,” the
Party’s “heroine-mother” smilingly endured “inexorable demands for sacrifice.”31 The behavior of the mother’s children in the “Glory to the mother-heroine” poster furthers its idealization of the Leningrad mother. Her two eldest sons wear military uniforms, while one of her younger sons plays with a toy airplane. Thus, this heroic mother was raising healthy children who were themselves going to grow up to defend the Soviet Union.
Siege propaganda posters also presented the theme of motherhood in a more metaphorical sense, associating the defense of Leningrad with the defense of the Russian
“motherland.” The 1943 poster titled “For the Motherland! For Mother-Russia!” established an overt connection between the defense of the city and the safeguarding of both Leningrad’s mothers and the Soviet “motherland.”
30 Kochina, Elena, Blockade Diary: Under Siege in Leningrad, 1941-42, (New York: The Overlook Press, 2014), 18. 31 Ginzburg, Lydia, Blockade Diary, Alan Myers, trans, (London: Harvill Press, 1996), 7.
60
Figure 2.4 “For the Motherland! For Mother-Russia!” 32 The poster depicts a mother and son both draped in a red flag, keeping watch over the group of Soviet soldiers marching beneath them. As in “Glory to the mother- heroine!”, the mother in the poster is healthy and strong; she holds her child in one arm and a spear in the other. Any signs of the physical realities of life in besieged Leningrad are obscured by the woman’s triumphant stance and determinedly outstretched arm. The added dimension in this poster is the extent to which the mother seems to be the manifestation of the symbolic notion of the Motherland. She serves not only as a mother to her son, but also as a spiritual guide for the nation and its soldiers. As women’s narratives elucidate, however, women did not consider themselves to be fighting for the defense of the motherland: they preferred more local, familial explanations for their willingness to persevere.33 Thus we see how women’s actual motivations to endure were
32 “For Motherland – for mother! 1943,” Poster Collection, from Hoover Institution, 2013, accessed January 8, 2018, https://www.hoover.org/research/you-are-strong -you-are-weak-mother-russia 33 Inber, Vera, Leningrad Diary, (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), 94.
61 obscured by the regime’s visual representations of their heroism—in this case, the heroism that would be conferred by the mother’s symbolic association with the defense of the motherland.
“Heroic” Women’s Roles in the Defense
Siege propaganda also provided visual representations of what the Party understood women’s day-to-day roles to be within the besieged city. Notably, propaganda almost universally represented those roles as being on the home front, with women performing duties that were traditionally considered to be “women’s work.”
Thus, although the Party represented Leningrad’s women as the exemplars of dedication to the war effort, propaganda made clear that there was a limit to women’s mobilization—specifically, that it was limited to the domain of the home front. Consider, for example, the 1941 poster “We will defend Lenin’s City,” in which the lone woman in the poster is relegated to the background.34
34 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 82.
62
Figure 2.5 “We will defend Lenin’s City”35 At the forefront of the poster are three men: a soldier, a naval officer, and a civilian, all of whom are holding weapons. The only woman in the poster has the same dogged look of determination these three men at the forefront, but nevertheless is placed far behind them.
In a symbolic sense, we might interpret this as the woman being relegated to the “home” front, behind the line of combat. In actuality, there were many female members of the
Soviet military. As writer Svetlana Alexievich’s recent book The Unwomanly Face of
War clearly illustrates, Soviet women had central roles at the battlefront during World
War II.36 As “We will defend Lenin’s city” visually represents, though, the Party conceived of female Leningraders heroism as being limited to the sphere of the home front.
A related relegation of women to duties on the home front is conveyed in
Leningrad in Struggle. The film features numerous images of Leningrad’s ongoing
35 “We will defend Lenin’s City,” Soviet Music, accessed April 15, 2018, http://www.sovmusic.ru/p_view.php?id=512 36 Alexievich, Svetlana, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, (New York: Random House, 2017). Alexievich’s work discusses the centrality of women on the Soviet battlefront, enlisted in the army as nurses, foot soldiers, and even snipers.
63 industries, seemingly in an effort to prove to tired and hopeless Leningraders—as well as the Soviet population as a whole—that the city still possessed remarkable industrial might. The film’s interlacing footage of workers in munitions plants and of guns shooting on the front, for example, established a connection between the city’s industries and its capacity for defense.37 But notably, the film lacks any footage of women in armament or munitions plants, as there are only men in the factories that it portrays. The only depiction of women in industry is one short scene in which a woman in a textile factory sews mittens for soldiers.38 The film’s message was thus overt: women were mobilized for the war effort, but they would continue to work in light industries where female labor had traditionally predominated. In other words, the Party understood—and represented— women’s supposedly heroic mobilization as being limited to roles they had held in the prewar period.
In some ways, this relegation of women to the home front did correspond with women’s own conceptions of their roles: as demonstrated in Chapter I, many women considered themselves to be crucial keepers of the home while their husbands were fighting at the front.39 However, there were also pronounced differences between the
Party’s representations of women’s roles in industry and those of women themselves.
Both the poster and the film removed the dynamism and fluidity of women’s duties during the siege, which, according to women’s narratives, ranged from serving as air raid lookouts on roofs and working in heavy industry to caring for their families.40 The
Party’s whitewashed propaganda did much to craft a narrative in which women happily
37 Leningrad in Struggle, 21:11 38 Leningrad in Struggle, 13:45 39 Inber, Leningrad Diary, 94 40 See Chapter I, 17
64 sewed mittens for their loved ones fighting at the battlefront while also standing as stalwarts at home. There was no room in that narrative either for the starvation and physical suffering that women endured, or for the “manly” industrial labor that they conceived of themselves as performing.
Stalin’s Wartime and Postwar Commentary on the Siege
Until this point, we have examined how state-sponsored propaganda employed images of Leningrad’s women instrumentally in order to craft and cultivate the persona of the “Leningrad heroine.” Our focus will now shift to how Stalin himself expressed his conceptions of the siege, in both the wartime and immediate postwar periods. If siege propaganda clearly showed how the regime wanted its citizens to perceive the siege and the roles of Leningrad’s women within it, Stalin was largely silent on the subject of
Leningrad during its ordeal (aside from his 1941 directive that the city be defended at any cost). In general, Stalin left management and oversight of the city, to Andrei Zhdanov, one of his closest advisors and a well-established local Leningrad leader.41 However, the consummate strategist, Stalin did have a strategic vision for the city: its heroic defense, he presumed, would prove the validity of Communism, and would thus encourage the postwar proliferation of Communism among recently leveled regimes and across blurred national borders.42 With Western European capitalist regimes in tatters, Communism would finally spread into the world at large, led by a recently-victorious Soviet Union.43
41 Gellately, Robert, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War, (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 47. 42 Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 121. 43 Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 7.
65 Consequently, Stalin conceived of Leningrad, and its defense, in instrumental terms: defending the city would bestow legitimacy on the entire Soviet Communist project.
Because Stalin cast the defense of Leningrad in ideological—even epic—terms, the daily sufferings of its citizens were largely irrelevant to him. Consequently, the complex ways in which women conceived of their experience were immaterial to Stalin, whose thinking was on a scale far above that of the mere individual. Stalin’s lack of concern for individuals in Leningrad is perhaps most evident in the fact that he made only two public addresses that mentioned the siege during the eight-month period following the Allied victory and the lifting of the siege.44 He made no personal gestures toward the
“heroes” of the city, and certainly none toward the “heroines.” As historian Robert
Gellately describes, Stalin conceived of the relationship between Party and populace as one in which the people “worked together with the Kremlin, rolled up their sleeves, and sacrificed so that their county could achieve atomic parity.”45 Leningraders’ survival was crucial but not worthy of special treatment: their perseverance was simply an essential component of their natural duty to their ruler, and to the nation he represented.
Stalin’s attitude toward siege survivors remained largely unchanged between the wartime and postwar years. However, his relationship with Leningrad’s leaders became much more fraught in the postwar period. Almost immediately after the siege was lifted,
Stalin became concerned that growing Russian (as opposed to Soviet) nationalism in the recently liberated city might undermine the Soviet state and, more specifically, his personal autonomy.46 As Gellately describes, “the cataclysmic events of wartime…opened more space for people to think for themselves,” and thus moved the
44 Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 118. 45 Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 221. 46 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 143.
66 city further from the center of Stalin’s power.47 In an effort to dampen the city’s postwar cultural independence, Stalin oversaw the Zhdanovshchina, a movement executed by
Leningrad Party boss Andrei Zhdanov to tighten the boundaries and controls on cultural expression in the city. The Zhdanovshchina focused on denunciations of newspapers that had risen to prominence during the siege—in particular, the Leningrad literary journal. In typical Soviet fashion, the Zhdanovshchina also involved public denunciations of intellectuals who had leant their voices to the siege, including prominent authors Anna
Akhmatova and Mikhael Zoschenko.48
Zhdanov’s death in 1948 set off a related chain of political denunciations and suppression that would come to be known as the “Leningrad Affair”: the widespread purging of prominent Leningrad city officials in the aftermath of the siege. Zhdanov’s death necessitated the reshuffling of power in the city; Stalin’s characteristic paranoia and mistrust of those around him meant that this reshuffling took the form of political purging. Documents suggest that between 1949 and 1952, over 2,000 Leningrad officials were removed from office. Several of the most prominent officials among that group were even executed by the Ministry of State Security in October 1950.49 Like the
Zhdanovshchina, the Leningrad Affair reflected Stalin’s attempts to tighten his control over the city in the postwar era.
While not directly related to the Party’s narrative about women during the siege, the Zhdanovshchina and Leningrad Affair affected the dissemination of women’s narratives in the postwar period. As demonstrated throughout the chapter, Leningrad’s
47 Gellately, Stalin’s Curse, 210. 48 Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 67. 49 Zubkova, Elena, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, Disappointments, 1945-1957, (Abindgon: Routledge, 1998), 133.
67 women had served as a rallying point for mobilization during the siege, as propaganda emphasized their heroism and commitment to defending the nation. However, in the postwar period and its climate of denunciation, Stalin came to perceive that narrative of female heroism as presenting a risk: it could serve as a rallying point for Russian nationalism, rather than the Soviet nationalism that featured him at its center.
Consequently, what should have been a period of celebration and triumph following the siege became one of denunciation and fear: in this climate, women were largely silenced.
As one siege survivor recalled, in the period after the war “the government made everything top secret,” and there was an “unspoken ban on mentioning the Leningrad blockade” for fear of retribution by the NKVD.50 Women were not encouraged to disseminate or celebrate their experiences, but rather to suppress or forget them. We might consider this an extension of the way in which the Party’s relationship to
Leningrad’s women was defined by political expediency. During the War, the Party had employed the narrative of women’s heroism as a political tool with which to inspire mobilization. After the War, it became politically favorable for Stalin to deemphasize women’s centrality to the defense, so that he might place himself at the center of war narratives.
Perhaps nowhere was the silencing of female survivors in the postwar period more apparent than in Stalin’s closure of the Leningrad Defense Museum. The museum had originated in 1942, when Leningraders put together a small exhibition dedicated to the labors of those living through the ordeal.51 It officially opened in 1946, immediately
50 Gorter, 900 Days, 46:50; 49:36. 51 Pörzgen, Yvonne, “Siege Memory-Besieged Memory? Heroism and Suffering in St Petersburg Museums dedicated to the Siege of Leningrad,” from Museum & Society, 14 (3), Leicester: University of Leicester,
68 after the siege was lifted, as a tribute to the city’s defenders. By its inclusion of personal testimonies and artifacts from the siege, the museum sought to represent the lived experience of Leningrad’s ordeal. However, it would become one of the first victims of the postwar purges. Because the Museum portrayed the “reality” of existence in the besieged city, it became one of Stalin’s top targets as he and prominent Party members sought to “conceal the city’s wartime fate.”52 In 1949, the museum was reworked to
“better reflect Stalin’s greatness,” and to emphasize his personal centrality to the defense of the city.53 By 1950, however, Stalin concluded that even the re-tooled Museum was a threat; he thus liquidated it, and sent its directors to exile in Siberia. There was to be no further discussion of women’s hardships and toils—not even of the heroism that the wartime propaganda had so conscientiously cultivated. And so it was that a mere six years after the lifting of the siege, the narratives of those who survived the ordeal were silenced.
Conclusions
As women wrote into, and thereby discovered, the new narrative space afforded by the siege, the Party employed propaganda to define and limit that space. Most prominently, it crafted a narrative around female heroism that used women’s perseverance instrumentally, to inspire total mobilization within the populace. One of the primary effects of the Party’s creation of the “Leningrad heroine” was that it obscured women’s own understandings of themselves during the siege. Significantly, numerous
Department of Museum Studies, 2016. (Accessed January 21, 2018), https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volumes/porzgen. p. 417 52 Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 76. 53 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 145.
69 characteristics of the “Leningrad heroine” would extend years into the postwar period, and would thus remain places of disjuncture between the narratives of the Party and civilian women themselves.
Indeed, the centrality of the theme of the “Leningrad heroine” in the postwar era warrants a brief review of her qualities. She was a self-sacrificing, attentive mother who contributed to what was considered “women’s work” in the factories. Her motivations to survive lay in her distinct desire to save the Soviet Motherland, which she herself often symbolically represented. This “Leningrad heroine” did not bear any external signs of starvation or suffering; her body was neither ageless nor sexless, but rather womanly and robust. In this regard, she differed fundamentally from the image of the representative
“Leningrad woman” described in women’s own accounts of the siege, who was akin to a
“skeleton wrapped in skin.”54
At the end of the war, the female heroism narrative was no longer needed as a tool with which to inspire citizens to defend their country. As it became clear to Stalin and other prominent Party officials that Leningrad had become largely independent from
Moscow (the seat of Soviet power) over the course of the siege, the narrative of female heroism began to present a threat to Stalin’s centralized governing apparatus. Stalin sent a clear message with the closure of the Leningrad Defense Museum: individual narratives from the siege would be silenced, and a narrative that centered on Stalin’s personal leadership (and, to a lesser degree, the role of the Party) would predominate. The voices of Leningrad’s women would not be lost forever, but they were effectively silenced through the end of Stalin’s regime.
54 Kochina, Blockade Diary, 104.
70 The Party’s idealized depictions of Leningrad’s women in wartime propaganda are significant for two main reasons: they reflected the Party’s ongoing tendency to manipulate the image of Soviet women for political ends, and they laid the foundation for further instrumental use of women’s perseverance in postwar propaganda. The Party’s establishment of the image of the “Leningrad heroine” was not a distinctly new phenomenon, but rather marked the most recent iteration of the regime’s propensity for deploying the image of Soviet women in its political propaganda. During the era of collectivization, for example, Soviet posters had depicted peasant women as newly empowered to contribute to agriculture. The Party’s use of the imagery of Leningrad’s women for political ends thus points to an enduring, defining component of the Party’s relationship with its female citizenry, at least during the Stalinist period. The other significant implication of wartime propaganda’s depictions of Leningrad’s women was that it set a model for similar representations in the regime’s postwar narrative. As will be discussed in the following chapter, the female heroism narrative would predominate in the postwar era, too, and would continue to obscure women’s own articulations of their lives under siege.
71 Memorials and Memories: the Party’s Postwar Narrative
“No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten”1 -Olga Berggolts, 1948
In the spring of 2010, eight women who had survived the siege shared tea in a St.
Petersburg restaurant. Their meeting was recorded by filmmaker Jessica Gorter as part of the footage for 900 Days, her documentary about the siege of Leningrad. After a few minutes of discussion, the conversation among the survivors became heated. One of the women began to explain the “unspoken ban on mentioning the Leningrad blockade” that she had experienced in her youth; this prompted several other women around the table to shake their heads in disagreement.2 What ensued was a debate among the women as to whether or not the “ban” really existed, and what role Stalin had played in the siege and in its postwar memorialization.3 Ultimately, the women agreed to disagree, having deduced that their disputes were “controversies” that could never be resolved. Their quibble, though, illustrates the extent to which questions related to the siege, its postwar memorialization, and the Party’s role in crafting a narrative about it remain pertinent in the twenty-first century.
This chapter examines the evolution of the Party’s narrative of women’s roles in the siege in the postwar era, particularly under three Soviet leaders: Nikita Khrushchev,
Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev. When one considers the Party’s narrative of the siege across the regimes of these three leaders, a general arc becomes clear. The
Khrushchev era saw a partial re-definition of the narrative, as denunciations of Stalin
1 Kirschenbaum, Lisa. The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments, (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), 190. 2 Gorter, Jessica, 900 Days, (Brooklyn: Icarus Films, 2012), 49:36. 3 Gorter, 900 Days, 1:05:07.
72 prompted the Party’s reversal of many of Stalin’s restrictions on dialogue about the events in Leningrad. In important ways that will be touched upon in this chapter, though, even that re-defined narrative was largely continuous with the one that the Party had crafted and cultivated during the war. Under Brezhnev, the narrative of the siege was meaningfully altered by the publication of A Book of the Blockade, which printed for the first time testimonies of female siege survivors themselves. Consequently, the voices of
Leningrad’s women came to be heard more under Brezhnev than under Khrushchev. This proved to be a preview to the Gorbachev regime, during which the democratization of politics enabled an explosion in publication of female siege survivors’ memoirs and diaries. As this general arc makes clear, over the course of the late twentieth century, the
Party’s narrative of the siege gradually came to assimilate more and more aspects of the narratives crafted by women themselves.
Despite the progressive inclusion of women’s voices, though, several core features of the Party’s narrative remained relatively constant under each leader. The most prominent continuity was the fact that in all cases the regime’s political objectives motivated its renovation of the siege narrative. Although these objectives differed across regimes, each one refurbished its narrative of the siege to best suit its particular political purposes. This tendency of the Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev regimes to use their iteration of the siege narrative instrumentally, as a tool for accomplishing political goals, recalled the wartime regime’s similar deployment of the siege narrative as a means for inspiring citizens’ dedication to the war effort.
Another continuity within the narrative cultivated by all three postwar regimes was the theme of female heroism. As demonstrated in Chapter II, the Party established a
73 quality of mythic strength around Leningrad’s women in wartime propaganda, mainly in order to inspire Soviet men to commit themselves fully to combat at the front. As this chapter will show, the regimes of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev similarly used this myth of female heroism as a tool for inspiring unity and loyalty within the populace.
A related theme of similarly enduring relevance was the image of the self-sacrificing, supremely committed siege mother. As with the myth of female heroism, Soviet leadership mobilized this image in the postwar era as a means of encouraging citizens to emulate the sacrifices made by mothers during the siege in the Soviet Union’s postwar endeavors.
By examining the particularities of the siege narratives crafted and cultivated by three prominent postwar Soviet leaders, this chapter elucidates the evolution—and, at times, the stagnancy—of the Party’s assimilation of women’s siege narratives into its own, dominant narrative of women’s roles and responsibilities during the siege.
Khrushchev (1958-1964)
The months following Stalin’s death saw the upper echelons of the Party and state in turmoil: who was to succeed the dictator? Stalin himself had left no clear indication of who should become supreme leader. It was only after a power struggle among his closest lieutenants that Nikita Khrushchev, commissar-turned-Stalinist-advisor, emerged victorious. If Stalin had envisioned that his successor would carry on his legacy, that was not to be. Within three years of his ascendency, Khrushchev denounced Stalin in his famous “Secret Speech” at the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress. As expressed in the speech, Khrushchev aimed to reinvigorate both the Party and the Soviet system by
74 dismantling Stalin’s “Cult of Personality.” He thus attempted to explain away the
“excesses” committed during Stalin’s years as supreme leader as the result of his personal
“intolerance, his brutality and his abuse of power.”4 The Secret Speech marked the beginning of the “thaw”: the period during which Khrushchev took apart many of Stalin’s repressive policies, and hoped to reverse some of the “extreme measures” that the Party had taken under his leadership.5
Khrushchev’s main objective was to re-legitimize the Party as a ruling apparatus that would transfer communist ideals into reality; one of the primary ways in which he attempted to achieve this end was by establishing a Cult of the Great Patriotic War. This
Cult was predicated on the notion that “[n]ot Stalin, but the Party as a whole, the Soviet government…its talented leaders and brave soldiers, the whole Soviet nation—[were] the ones who assured victory in the Great Patriotic War.”6 Khrushchev’s objective was to instill in citizens a conviction that Soviet Communism had enabled their victory in the war and, consequently, it was the most viable political system for the country’s continued successes. To promulgate this message, he lifted the ban on the publication of stories from the war that focused on anything other than Stalin’s military genius.7
One of Khrushchev’s main methods for constructing the Cult was to add a more personal dimension to the war—in particular, to the siege of Leningrad. Consequently, the regime allowed some female siege survivors to speak at anniversary celebrations of the lifting of the siege.8 But this greater public acknowledgement of the siege did not
4 Khrushchev, Nikita, “The Cult of the Individual,” The Guardian, April 26, 2007, accessed April 16, 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/apr/26/greatspeeches1 5 Khrushchev, “The Cult of the Individual” 6 Tumarkin, Nina, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 109. 7 Kirschenbaum, Lisa, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 154. 8 Unfortunately, I could not locate any record of these women’s speeches.
75 necessarily confer greater truthfulness to the Party’s narrative. Indeed, the Cult of the
Great Patriotic War did not seek to uncover the actual, lived conditions of the siege as presented in women’s narratives. Rather, the Party’s aim in adding a more personal dimension to the siege narrative was to “sentimentalize” it, in the hope that doing so would make the Cult more appealing and would also heighten citizens’ ideological commitment to the Soviet Union.9 The Khrushchev era thus saw a reassertion—and even intensification—of the myth that had surrounded the siege during the War, but with the important alteration of replacing Stalin’s personal greatness with the centrality of the
Soviet people and, especially, the Party, to victory.10
Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery
As it had during the war, the image of Leningrad’s women would play a central role in the renovated official narrative. Indeed, the Cult of the Great Patriotic War drew heavily on the images of women that had been invoked in wartime propaganda—in other words, Khrushchev-era portrayals of the Soviet Union’s women in wartime were largely continuous with those of the war era. This is perhaps best illustrated with regard to the
Leningrad siege by the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery.
Opened on May 9, 1960, Piskarevskoye is the only cemetery dedicated explicitly to memorializing the victims of the siege. The day of its opening was a joyous one in
Leningrad: as one female siege survivor in attendance attested, the opening of the cemetery held meaning for “all the women of Leningrad, who ha[d] not yet forgotten the black years of the war,” and who saw the cemetery as a fitting tribute to the efforts of
9 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 154. 10 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 160.
76 those who had lost their lives defending the city.11 The cemetery at Piskarevskoye had traditionally been only for fallen soldiers, but became the primary burial site for civilians during the winter of 1941-42.12 In 1953, immediately following Stalin’s death, the Party’s
Science and Culture Department called for a renovation of the cemetery, citing the abysmal, swampy conditions of the cemetery as disrespectful of those buried there.
Although plans for the renovated cemetery were drawn up in 1953, bureaucratic inefficiencies and residual political fear over memorializing the siege meant that the project was not completed until early 1960.13 Notably, the Party did not welcome input from Leningraders regarding the cemetery’s design and layout. There was virtually no public intervention or controversy surrounding the renovation of the cemetery, which, as historian Lisa Kirschenbaum has pointed out, reflects the primacy of state—rather than public—interests in the project.14 While the cemetery was meant to commemorate those who lost their lives defending the great city of Leningrad, it was to do so on the Party’s terms.
Of the Cemetery’s various features, in this section I will focus on two: the memorial of the Eternal Flame, and the Mother-Motherland statue.
The Eternal Flame
Visitors entering the Cemetery are greeted by the eternal flame that stands near its gates. Meant as an enduring tribute to those who lost their lives during the siege, the flame was lit for the first time during the May 1960 opening ceremonies. The flame for the memorial was carried to the cemetery from the nearby Memorial to the 1917
11 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 200. 12 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 193. 13 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 195. 14 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 191.
77 Revolution, which also had an eternal flame as one of its focal points. As a contemporary newspaper article reported, the flame was transported from one memorial to the other because “the victory of the heroes of the Revolution served as an inspiring example for the thousands of Leningraders during the years of the Great Fatherland War.”15 In other words, as the newspaper article indicates, the Party used the Cemetery’s eternal flame as a means of forever linking the Leningrad siege and the 1917 Revolution.
This physical connection between the Memorial to the Revolution and the
Piskarevskoye Cemetery reflects the Party’s tendency to ascribe ideological meaning to the siege of Leningrad, and to the mentalities of those who defended the city. The primary goal of this association was to demonstrate to both powers abroad and citizens at home the power of Soviet ideology, and of citizens’ commitment to upholding it. This practice of ascribing ideological foundations to women’s motivation to survive the siege was, of course, not new. Wartime propaganda had associated women’s defense of the city with their larger defense of Soviet Communism. Recall, for example, Party member
Dimitry Pavlov’s report that attributed women’s motivations to defend their city to the knowledge that their struggle would enable them to serve as “inspiration[s] for millions of people.” 16 The association between the Memorial to the 1917 Revolution and the
Eternal Flame thus demonstrates that the Party’s narrative of women’s roles and self- concept during the siege retained certain key features both during the war and under
Khrushchev.
Here it is important to emphasize that, as demonstrated in Chapter I, women’s siege narratives indicate that Party loyalty and Communist ideology were not decisive
15 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 202. 16 Pavlov, Dimitry, Leningrad 1941: The Blockade, John Adams, trans, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 134.
78 factors in their motivations for defense. Women did not cite the Revolution as “an inspiring example” for survival, but rather generally fought for their survival out of a sense of responsibility to those around them. By symbolically associating the defense of the Revolution with the defense of the city, therefore, the Party negated the voices of
Leningrad’s female defenders, who were concerned with local notions of civic responsibility rather than large ideological ones. Recall the sentiments of siege survivor
Elena Kozhina: “every person [in Leningrad] needed somebody else.”17 It was that commonly held sentiment of civic responsibility and personal connection that inspired women to survive, not the conviction that they were upholding Revolutionary principles.
Mother-Motherland Statue
Figure 3.1. “Mother-Motherland Statue”18 Perhaps the most dominant feature of the Piskarevskoye Cemetery is the Mother-
Motherland statue, which stands to keep watch over the graves. It is the cemetery’s only
17 Kozhina, Elena, Through the Burning Steppe: a Wartime Memoir, (New York: Riverhead Hardcover, 2000), 55. 18 “Motherland (Mother-Russia) Sculpture at Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery,” “Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery,” ST-PETERSBURG.COM, http://www.saint- petersburg.com/monuments/piskarevskoye-cemetery/
79 vertical element and, as such, represents its “symbolic core.”19 The statue’s simplicity affirms the mother’s solemn task: laying a garland on the grave of a loved one. Although the mother wears a flowing skirt, her body is not overly feminized: it is her sober strength, rather than her femininity, that seems to be the emphasis. Her face has a strong, stern glance—one of grim determination. She does not look at the garland in her hand, but rather outwards: toward the graves, the Soviet Union, and perhaps the hopeful future of the socialist motherland.
One of the defining components of the statue is thus the mother’s visible strength.
However, as demonstrated in Chapter I, the bodies of survivors were not defined by their strength—in the conditions of the siege Leningraders had become akin to “skeletons wrapped in skin.”20 People were “all bloated, frightful looking, dirty, and emaciated.”21
The statue’s depiction of an idealized, strong siege body points to a continuity between representations of women’s bodies in the wartime and Khrushchev eras. Wartime propaganda, too, depicted Leningrad’s women as healthy and strong, similarly obscuring the realities of life in the city. Recall, for example, the wartime poster Glory to the mother-heroine! which depicted a smiling woman surrounded by ten healthy children.
The mother in the poster was the epitome of health, despite living under the unimaginably harsh conditions of the siege.22 Both during the war and during the
Khrushchev era, therefore, the Party’s representations of women obscured how women themselves understood the degeneration of their bodies. In both instances, these
19 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 195. 20 Gorter, 900 Days, 31:17. 21 Lincoln, Bruce, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia, (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 283. 22 See Chapter II, 60.
80 misrepresentations served political ends: they were meant to demonstrate how Soviet
Communism assured a healthy life for women.
Also as in wartime propaganda, the Mother-Motherland statue established an explicit connection between Leningrad’s mothers and the symbolic concept of the
Motherland. During the war, this association was used instrumentally by the regime to legitimize the fight for soldiers on the front—to encourage them to fight not only for their mothers and wives, but also for the Motherland that these women symbolized. During the
Khrushchev era, this association served a similar function. Specifically, it furthered the
Party leadership’s agenda of conferring greater legitimacy on the regime by encouraging citizens to establish more connections with the Great Patriotic War, and with the governing apparatus that had led to the Soviet Union’s perseverance. Indeed, the statue encouraged Leningraders to consider the sacrifices made by their mothers and grandmothers for the Motherland, and to emulate their example. But as we have seen, this association between Leningrad’s mothers and the Motherland was a misrepresentation of the reasons for which Leningrad’s women endured. Women cited local, familial motivations for their perseverance, not, as the regime portrayed, their desire to contribute to the “grand narrative of collective heroism and sacrifice.”23 Here too, then, the Khrushchev regime’s narrative of women’s roles during the siege remained largely continuous with the wartime narrative. The Party continued to employ women’s survival during the siege as an instrument for conferring legitimacy on the government and, in so doing, continued to obscure the reasons for which women understood themselves to endure.
23 Inber, Vera, Leningrad Diary ,(London: St. Martin’s Press, 1971), 94. ; Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningad, 190.
81 Olga Berggolts’s Dedication
Despite these continuities with the Party’s wartime representations of women and their motivations, the cemetery’s dedication, located on the base of the Mother-
Motherland statue, suggests that a more complex and nuanced narrative of the siege had become possible under Khrushchev. The dedication is a poem written by siege survivor
Olga Berggolts. It reads:
Here lie the people of Leningrad. Here lie its citizens, men, women, children. Near them are Red Army soldiers. They defended you, Leningrad, Cradle of the revolution. We cannot here enumerate their noble names, So many are there under the eternal protection of granite. But now as you look upon this stone No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.24
To some extent, Berggolts’s poem reinforces the narrative of female heroism that the Party had cultivated and crafted during the war. Her description of the names of the dead as “noble” echoes the language that the Party employed during the siege to describe women in the city. Party member Alexandr Fadeev, for example, lauded the “nobility of
[women’s] labours” during his wartime visit to Leningrad.25 This continuity between
Berggolts and Fadeev’s diction points to some continuity of sentiment, whereby both understood women’s perseverance as “noble” and worthy of praise. At the same time, however, Berggolts’s poem also combats the Party’s narrative of women’s unambiguous heroism during the siege. The poem’s final line, “no one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten,” offers an implicit response to the Party’s attempts to gloss over the events of the siege. It points to the Party’s persistent attempts to craft a narrative that omitted
24 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 192. 25 Fadeev, Alexandr, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, R.D. Charques, trans, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971), 62.
82 defining components of women’s experiences. Thus, although Berggolts’s poem may have helped to propagate the narrative of female heroism during the siege to some extent, it also subtly fought against the Party’s attempts to obscure siege survivors’ realities.
This enigmatic, perhaps even paradoxical, quality of Berggolts’s work epitomizes the Party’s attitude toward the siege during the Khrushchev period. The regime aimed to simultaneously “recast Stalin’s victories as the Party’s” while “reignit[ing] the spirit of the war years.”26 In other words, it sought to re-inspire the patriotism that the populace had evinced during the siege, but also to transfer to the Party the language that had focused on Stalin’s personal greatness. To some extent, Berggolts’s poem (which had to be approved by the Party before being printed on the statue’s base) reflects this two- pronged aim: it perpetuated the “noble” spirit of the war years, while also denouncing the
Stalinist practice of enforced forgetting. Ultimately, the Khrushchev regime did not stray far from the wartime regime’s narrative of women’s roles and self-concept during the siege. As the Eternal Flame and Mother-Motherland statue illustrate, women continued to be portrayed as heroines fighting for the propagation of Revolutionary ideals, with bodies that bore no marks of the suffering that they endured. Although, as Berggolts’s poem indicates, the Khrushchev regime did allow room for a somewhat more nuanced conception of the siege, its narrative was—with regard to Leningrad’s women—largely continuous with that of the war era.
26 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 163.
83 Brezhnev (1964-1982)
By 1962, unrest had begun to brew within the Party. Having lost confidence in the ageing Khrushchev, a diverse group of Party leaders began to plan his ouster. Ultimately, power transferred with relative ease, when Leonid Brezhnev succeeded Khrushchev as preeminent leader of the Party in 1964.27 Among the numerous challenges facing the nation’s new ruler, one was particularly salient: the so-called “nationalities” question, which had plagued the Soviet Union since its inception. The 1959 population census named 108 separate national groups within the Soviet Union.28 To foster a distinct Soviet nationalism among disparate groups was becoming increasingly challenging for the regime, particularly as the conditions of the Cold War necessitated a more unified Soviet front. The context of the nationalities question is important for understanding the particularities of the narrative of the siege under Brezhnev, because one of the primary means by which the regime sought to unify Soviet citizens was by re-igniting the War
Cult. This deployment of the Cult of the Great Patriotic War for political ends marked an important continuity between the regimes of Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
The early years of the 1980s saw the escalation of Cold War politics in almost every theater. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, one of the imperatives of the Brezhnev regime was to demonstrate the Soviet Union’s international stature.29 The grand monuments and memorials to the Second World War, whose construction Brezhnev oversaw, were
27 Strong, John W., ed, The Soviet Union Under Brezhnev and Kosygin: The Transition Years, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1971), 27. 28 Strong, The Soviet Union Under Brezhnev, 27. 29 Garthoff, Raymond L, “Brezhnev, Andropov: Tensions Revived, 1979-84,” in Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War, (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015), 59.
84 therefore meant not only to promote national unity among the multinational Soviet populace, but also to prove the Soviet Union’s might to powers abroad. Further, these monuments were not intended to be merely places to visit: they were also the sites of anniversary celebrations and military parades. These celebrations were meant to serve as a further means of unifying the populace under a shared national identity and common goal within the context of the Cold War. As one of the most dramatic and celebrated events of World War II, the siege of Leningrad formed an important component of the
Soviet Union’s commemoration projects.
Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad
As it had under Khrushchev, therefore, the regime under Brezhnev deployed the
Cult of the Great Patriotic War as a means of legitimizing the Soviet government in the eyes of both its own citizens and foreign powers. As part of this effort, the regime erected several notable memorials to the war, including the Soviet Union’s most sizeable tribute to the siege of Leningrad: the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, which was completed in 1975. As is apparent from the fact that its construction was funded by citizens’ donations, the project enjoyed widespread popularity among Leningraders.
Indeed, in contrast to the construction of the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery project under Khrushchev, Leningraders were involved at all stages of the planning process for the Monument. The Monument was dedicated in May 1975, on the thirtieth anniversary of Soviet victory. The finished memorial was indeed monumental in size, featuring no fewer than seven statues, an obelisk, and a solemn, inner circle that represented the ring of German troops that had surrounded the besieged city. The city’s cultural officials had ordered that it be located where the city had met the front line of combat. As Lisa
85 Kirschenbaum explains, this meant that the monument symbolically “bridge[d] the experiences of the city and the front, of civilians and soldiers, of men and women.”30
The statues are the monument’s focal points, as they portray scenes that would have been meaningful within the context of the besieged city.
Figure 3.3. “Sculptural group Partisans in front of the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad” 31 The statue above is one of only two, out of the Monument’s total of seven, that portrays a woman. Standing erect in the background of the statue, the woman’s face bears an expression of grim determination. Her body is undeniably feminine, reflecting the regime’s tendency (since the War era) to portray women living under the siege as retaining the clear marks of gender. She pays no attention to the child collapsed— presumably dead—in her arms, but rather looks outward, perhaps towards a more hopeful future. Like the mother portrayed in the Piskarevskoye Cemetery’s Mother-Motherland
30 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 213. 31 “Sculptural group Partisans in front of the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad,” “Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad,” ST-PETERSBURG.COM, http://www.saint- petersburg.com/monuments/heroic-defenders/
86 statue, this woman seems to epitomize resilience and strength. Her strong stance, determined expression, and forward-focused stare make her the idealized Leningrad heroine that had been evoked in Party propaganda during the war years.32
Figure 3.4. “Sculptures in front of the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad”33 The monument’s only other sculptural portrayal of a woman is among a group composed otherwise of men going off to fight at the battlefront. The lone woman in the ensemble is shown embracing her husband as he joins the other soldiers for battle. The woman’s face is mostly hidden by her husband’s, as her inclusion in the statue is predicated on his going off to fight, rather than on any action she herself has taken. She is thus depicted in a predominantly passive role: that of a wife losing her husband to the front. In contrast to the statue in which the woman provides a visual representation of the
32 For example, in the posters “We defended Leningrad, now we will rebuild it!” and “For the Motherland! For Mother-Russia!” Both can be found in Chapter II, 57, 62. 33 “Sculptures in front of the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad,” “Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad,” ST-PETERSBURG.COM, http://www.saint-petersburg.com/monuments/heroic- defenders/
87 forward-looking and determined Leningrad heroine, the woman in this statue is represented in a largely dependent role. She appears less as the ideal Leningrad heroine, and more as a passive victim of the conditions of the siege. This more passive quality that is conveyed by this woman reflects the possibility of a more nuanced narrative under
Brezhnev. While visual portrayals of women during both the wartime and Khrushchev eras had only emphasized women’s physical strength (and, by extension, the female heroism narrative), the Brezhnev era saw the opportunity of adding greater nuance to that narrative. In the case of the Monument, that meant the possibility of portraying a woman as vulnerable, and dependent on her husband.34
Significantly, the aspect that unifies both of these statues is that the women they portray are victims of suffering. In the first statue, the woman suffers the loss of a child; in the second, the woman suffers the loss of her husband to the front. Although the first statue emphasizes the woman’s ongoing determination in the face of adversity, it nonetheless represents a moment of intense sadness. To an extent, this representation of women as victims of the siege, and of its associated tragedies, both pushed back against the narrative of women’s unambiguous heroism and reflected the sentiments of
Leningrad’s women themselves. As shown in Chapter I, women tended to cast themselves as victims of the siege in their own narratives. Kyra Wayne, for example, saw herself as a victim of others’ ignominious thievery. 35 Elena Kochina understood her
34 It is interesting to note that the statues’ visual relegation of women to the home front reflected a turn back to traditional gender stereotypes that emphasize masculine dominance of public activity and female limitation to the domestic sphere. As Svetlana Alexievich’s recent publication The Unwomanly Face of War elucidates, however, women constituted a crucial part of military combat in World War. Further information about the substantial contributions of women to the Soviet war effort in World War II can be found in Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, (New York: Random House, 2017). 35 Wayne, Kyra Petroskaya, Shurik: A WWII Saga of the Siege of Leningrad, (Guilford: The Lyons Press, 2000), 22.
88 forays into theft as evidence that she had fallen victim to the altered moral climate of the siege.36 Consequently, the statues’ (albeit subtle) representations of women’s suffering assimilated components of women’s self-described experiences during the siege.
Whereas the prior regimes had emphasized only women’s almost superhuman strength and determination, the greater inclusion of women’s suffering (which they understood as part of their lives under siege) points to the greater nuance that was allowed in the Party’s official narrative of women’s self-concept in the siege during the Brezhnev era.
A Book of the Blockade
The possibility for more nuanced depictions of women’s experiences under siege was reflected in A Book of the Blockade, the 1982 publication of which marked the most significant turning point in the narrative of the siege under Brezhnev. The Book combined personal interviews and excerpts from siege diaries in one large volume whose objective was to record the narratives of those who had survived Leningrad’s ordeal. Ales
Adamovich and Daniil Granin, the book’s compilers, sought to bring light to “the testimony of ordinary people about how they lived, to record the living voices of participants.”37 Their objective was not to offer interpretations or analysis of the siege, but rather to ensure that survivors’ voices would be transmitted to younger generations, who could forever take pride in the heroism of their forebearers.38 In this regard,
Adamovich and Granin’s objectives aligned with those of the Brezhnev regime, which sought to renew the Cult of the Great Patriotic War, as a way to unify the Soviet populace with a shared pride in its historical legacy. Reinforcing this alignment of objectives was
36 Kochina, Elena, Blockade Diary: Under Siege in Leningrad, 1941-1942, (New York: The Overlook Press, 2014), 100. 37 Adamovich, Ales and Granin, Daniil. A Book of the Blockade. Hilda Perham, trans. Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1982, 11. 38 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 181.
89 the intense scrutiny and process of approval by the Party apparatus to which A Book of the Blockade was subjected. The fact that the Book was approved for publication by the
Party apparatus enables us to use it as a way of gaining insight into the narrative of the siege that the Brezhnev regime sought to cultivate.
One of the recurring themes in Adamovich and Granin’s work is the heroism of
Leningrad’s defenders—in particular, the heroism of Leningrad’s women. Adamovich and Granin praised the city’s women for their “desperate” and “fearless” fight against starvation.39 They applauded them for their survival, marveling that they had to be
“stronger, tougher, and more courageous than even their own selves.”40 The compilers even proclaimed that the Leningrad woman had attained the “heights of the human spirit.”41 These exalted terms reinforced the recurrent trope of the Leningrad heroine who, with her mythic strength and fortitude, managed to save herself and her city from extinction. In this regard, the Book perpetuated the heroism narrative that had been prominently featured in the Party’s representations of women in the siege since the wartime era. As always, it is important to recall that Leningrad’s women did not conceive of themselves, and of their roles in the siege, in superlative terms. While female diarists and memoirists took pride in their perseverance, they attributed it to their love for, and sense of responsibility to, those around them. 42 They did not, as Adamovich and Granin claim, consider their perseverance to be a manifestation of their having attained a spiritual “height.” That was the language of the legendary female heroism narrative that
Adamovich and Granin deployed throughout A Book of the Blockade.
39 Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 170. 40 Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 171. 41 Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 225. 42 Skrjabina, Elena, Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader, Norman Luxenburg, trans, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2009), 47.
90 Insofar as Adamovich and Granin presented Leningrad’s female defenders as heroines of an epic, A Book of the Blockade offered a narrative that largely aligned with that which was propagated during both the wartime and the Khrushchev eras.
Consequently, it would seem that the regime’s tendency to emphasize the heroic quality of women’s survival remained a constant over the course of the four decades that followed the War. This continuity is reinforced by comparing A Book of the Blockade with the wartime diary of Party member Dimitry Pavlov. Adamovich and Granin’s assertion that women had reached the “heights of human spirit” recalls Pavlov’s conclusion that women’s “will to live, their moral strength…[would] always be the example and inspiration for millions of people.”43 Both sentiments held women’s survival, and commitment to their country, as the standard to which other Soviet citizens should aspire. During the siege, this emphasis on women’s “heroic” survival was deployed as an instrument with which to inspire Soviet citizens’ mobilization for the war effort. During the Brezhnev era, emphasis on women’s strength during the war was meant to reinforce perceptions of Communism’s superiority to Capitalism within the context of the Cold War.44
Crucially, though, A Book of the Blockade did not only present the narrative of female heroism; it also displayed a newfound honesty when it came to describing the effects of hunger on women’s movement and bodies. Commenting on citizens’ ability to move around the city during the siege, Adamovich and Granin describe how “every movement was slowed down…No one ran, they walked slowly, raising their feet with
43 Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 225. ; Pavlov, Leningrad 1941,134. 44 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 133.
91 difficulty.”45 In this regard, its descriptions of corporeal existence during the siege aligned very closely with those of women themselves. Their description is almost identical to that of siege survivor Olga Berggolts, for example. In her postwar memoir
Daytime Stars, Berggolts described how women had to “stumble,” and “barely drag
[themselves] along.”46 There is also substantial overlap between how Adamovich and
Granin characterized women’s bodies and how women themselves tended to do so in their narratives. Adamovich and Granin described women’s eyes as “staring”; Berggolts described them as “empty, heavy and concentrated.”47 Adamovich and Granin commented on the “noticeable loss…of age and sex” among Leningraders; Elena
Kochina related how “one couldn’t tell” the difference between men and women.48 This concordance between the descriptions of women’s bodies in the Book and in women’s own narratives seems to mark an important turning point in the evolution of the Party’s narrative of the siege. During both the wartime and the Khrushchev eras, the emphasis had been on the unwavering strength of the female body—which, it was supposed, reflected women’s steely commitment to defending the city. By contrast, as A Book of the
Blockade indicates, the late Brezhnev era saw the emergence of a narrative in which women could possess a great degree of mental strength while also bearing outward, physical manifestations of starvation.
Overall, A Book of the Blockade offered a more nuanced narrative of women’s roles during the siege than had been expressed during the wartime, Khrushchev, and even early Brezhnev eras. Although it perpetuated the Party’s longstanding narrative of
45 Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 37. 46 Berggolts, Olga, Daytime Stars, Lisa Kirschenbaum, trans, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Unpublished manuscript, 178. 47 Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 60. ; Berggolts, Daytime Stars, 248. 48 Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 60. ; Kochina, Blockade Diary, 102.
92 women’s heroic commitment to upholding the city and Soviet Communism, it also suggested that women could be heroines while their bodies bore marks of starvation. The
Book thus represented perhaps the first moment in which the reality of corporeal existence in Leningrad was officially acknowledged. That allowance for women’s humanity in the conditions within which they suffered provided a preview to the
Gorbachev era, which would see significant opportunities for women to define for themselves the effects of survival on their bodies.
Gorbachev (1985-1991)
Mikhail Gorbachev took the reins of the Party-state apparatus after being elected leader by the Politboro in March, 1985. As had been the case for his predecessors, one of
Gorbachev’s overarching goals was to re-legitimize the Soviet system in the eyes of both
Soviet citizens and powers abroad. Imagining himself to be a faithful disciple of Lenin,
Gorbachev believed that the excesses and sins of the Stalinist period had prevented the
Soviet Union from achieving Communism.49 His proposed reforms, therefore, were meant to distance the Party from its Stalinist past, and to pave the way for a democratic, socialist future. Like his predecessors, Gorbachev thus hoped to use the Party as a tool with which to accomplish an overall revitalization of the Soviet system. But his attempted democratization of the Soviet system ultimately went beyond the Party, as he encouraged
Soviet citizens themselves to “be masters of their own destinies.”50 For women, this climate of greater democratization provided new opportunities to assert their own views
49 Sternthal, Susanne, Gorbachev’s Reforms: de-Stalinization through Demilitarization, (Westport: Praeger, 1997), 2. 50 Merridale, Catherine and Ward, Chris, eds, Perestroika: The Historical Perspective, (London: Edward Arnold, 1991), 3.
93 and demands. The formation of the All-Union Conference of Women in 1987, for example, was the first of many initiatives that gave Soviet women a louder voice in politics.51 The appearance, by mid-1990, of numerous professional associations of Soviet women similarly reflected the general atmosphere of greater female autonomy during the
Gorbachev era.52
This expanded ability of women to publicly assert themselves was reinforced by another key element of Gorbachev’s reforms: the policy of glasnost.53 In this context, glasnost meant “openness” and “transparency;” the policy involved the lifting of numerous restrictions on public expression, especially in literature. Glasnost thus enabled the recovery of numerous texts that had fallen victim to state censorship under
Gorbachev’s predecessors. Ultimately, Gorbachev’s implementation of glasnost was politically motivated: he hoped to use the policy to curry favor among the cultural elite, and to leverage the support of the Soviet intelligentsia for other reforms. He also hoped that by enabling public articulation of citizens’ complaints, the Party would become more responsive, contributing to its overall re-legitimization. 54 One of the effects of glasnost, however, was to enable the publication of numerous works related to the Second World
War. This, in turn, led to an explosion of literature published about the siege— particularly, works written by women, both during the war and in hindsight.
Gorbachev’s reform program, of which glasnost was a part, thus had numerous implications for the Cult of the Great Patriotic War. Like his predecessors, Gorbachev sought to distance Soviet victory in the War from Stalin himself. But where both
51 Merridale and Ward, eds, Perestroika, 74. 52 Merridale and Ward, eds, Perestroika, 70. 53 Sternthal, Gorbachev’s Reforms, 2. 54 Taubman, William, Gorbachev: His Life and Times, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 246.
94 Khrushchev and Brezhnev had replaced Stalin’s centrality with that of the Party,
Gorbachev went a step further, emphasizing Soviet citizens’ personal contributions to victory. For Gorbachev, the “main source of victory was the Soviet people,” who had
“united to face the enemy together.”55 In his 1990 speech entitled “The Lessons of the
War and Victory,” Gorbachev even honored those citizens who had contributed to the war effort before being “illegally stripped of their honorable names and their citizenship rights and locked up in camps,” thus both explicitly praising all Soviet citizens’ contributions to the war effort and denouncing Stalin’s use of excessive force.56
Gorbachev’s emphasis on the central role of the Soviet people in achieving victory reflected his overall goal of re-legitimizing the Party and the Soviet system through increased democratization.
The Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad
Figure 3.5. Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad57
55 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 198. 56 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 197. 57 “Entrance to the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad from Solyanoy Pereulok,” “Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad,” SAINT-PETERSBURG.COM, http://www.saint- petersburg.com/museums/museum-of-the-defense-and-siege-of-leningrad/
95 The 1989 re-opening of the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad constituted an important medium through which the Party’s narrative of the siege was recast under Gorbachev. As described in Chapter II, the Museum initially had opened in
1946, and was meant as a tribute to the city’s defenders. It had been one of the first victims of the postwar purges, however, when Stalin liquidated it in 1950. In April of
1988, a group of prominent Leningraders crafted a letter entitled “Change,” in which they advocated for the re-creation of the Museum within the general climate of liberalization.
The letter’s writers and signers argued that a restored Museum would acquaint the city’s youth with the sacrifices of their forbearers, and forever serve as a memorial to those who had lost their lives. Their appeal to the Party was successful, and the reopening was approved by the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council in April of 1989.
The Museum itself opened the following September.58
As it had in its first iteration, the redesigned Museum prominently displayed artifacts from the siege. One of the new and notable features, however, was the inclusion of excerpts from numerous siege diaries and memoirs, which had been donated to the
Museum by siege survivors and their families. The prominent display of these works allowed women’s voices to be heard as never before. Although all excerpts from diaries and memoirs were carefully selected by the City Council, the Museum nonetheless enabled visitors to directly interact with women’s articulations of their self-concept.
Siege Narratives During Glasnost
Among the multitude of women’s siege diaries and memoirs that were published under glasnost, several common features stand out. Many narratives incorporated
58 “History of the Museum,” State Memorial Museum of Defense Leningrad, accessed April 15, 2018, http://blokadamus.ru/cgi-bin/magazine.cgi?id=2#3
96 language and imagery that had been used by the Party in its descriptions of the Cult of the
Great Patriotic War. As Lisa Kirschenbaum has explained, the War Cult provided “well- worn clichés, images, and anecdotes that proved difficult to avoid, let alone subvert.”59
Most narratives thus incorporated at least in some way the myth of the siege that the
Party had developed and cultivated in the years following the war. For example, a prevalent theme in diaries and memoirs during this period was that of motherly love— specifically, its undying, stable quality.60 In other words, even under the greater openness afforded by glasnost, motherhood during the siege retained a special, symbolic quality in the minds of Soviet citizens. It was not until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991 that accounts that featured the burdens of motherhood would be published.
However, women’s narratives published during glasnost also made shocking revelations, including acknowledgement of the existence—indeed, the relative prevalence—of cannibalism during the siege.61 The subject of cannibalism directly challenged the Party’s narrative of Leningraders’ unambiguous heroism. Indeed, discussions of cannibalism complicated the notion of morality during the siege, necessitating more flexible conceptions of what constituted a transgression within the extreme conditions faced by
Leningraders during the siege.
Another way in which the narratives published during glasnost challenged the
Party’s earlier narratives of the siege was through discussion of the difficulties of movement around the besieged city. An excerpt from Daytime Stars, the memoir of
Leningrad poet Olga Berggolts (which was published under Gorbachev), offers a
59 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 232. 60 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 242. 61 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 238.
97 revealing example.62 Recalling a walk that she took during the siege, Berggolts describes how those around her on the street would “stumble” and “barely drag [themselves] along.”63 The “starving,” she continued, “grasped lampposts, trying to keep their balance, and slowly sank to the pedestals, so as not to stand up longer.”64 Berggolts conjured a highly evocative image: that of emaciated Leningraders stumbling through the streets, frequently falling victim to the weakness induced by starvation. Indeed, Berggolts’s narrative suggests that “normal” movement around the city was nearly impossible within the context of the siege. Berggolts’s description of Leningraders’ ability to move around the city built upon the narrative offered by Adamovich and Granin in A Book of the
Blockade, which had begun to elucidate the complications of movement during the siege.65 Significantly, though, in the Book it had been the compilers’ who had discussed the difficulties of movement: here, it was a woman herself.
Leningrader Elena Oskarovna Martilla evinced a similar conception of the difficulties of movement in her siege diary, which, like Berggolts’s memoir, was published during the late Gorbachev era. On a particularly cold day in February 1942,
Martilla wrote, “hardly made it home. All the way I set up points for me to rest, but it’s impossible to sit down…”66 Martilla’s attestation that she “hardly made it home” points to the effects of starvation on Leningraders’ ability to move around the city and, again, challenges the images of Leningraders bustling around the city conveyed, for example, in the wartime propaganda film Leningrad in Struggle. It is highly significant that this
62 Although Berggolts had written Daytime Stars in the years immediately following the War, the memoir was not published in the Soviet Union until 1990. Thus, it provides us with insight into what was allowed to be published under Gorbachev. 63 Berggolts, Daytime Stars, 178. 64 Berggolts, Daytime Stars, 181. 65 Chapter I, 93. 66 Simmons, Cynthia, and Perlina, Nina. Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 180.
98 excerpt from Martilla’s diary was on display in the restored Museum of the Defense and
Siege of Leningrad. This meant that the Party’s cultural department had both approved its publication and deemed it worthy of exhibition.
Martilla’s diary also detailed the static quality of public transportation in the city.
For example, in the same February entry she bemoaned the fact that “walking was the only means of travel,” because all means of public transportation had been shut down.67Again, this description of life under siege differed significantly from that in
Leningrad in Struggle, which portrayed trolleys running in the city even during the terrible winter of 1942, when Martilla wrote her diary entry.68 Again, the fact that
Martilla’s discussion of this static quality of life under siege was allowed to be displayed at the Museum reflects the extent to which the regime under Gorbachev increasingly came to assimilate women’s own conceptions of their lives under siege into the Party’s dominant narrative.
Although Berggolts’s and Martilla’s narratives illustrate the greater openness enabled by glasnost, there were still limits to what could be discussed. The memoir of siege survivor Olga Mikhailovna Freidenberg, which was published by the Paris-based
Russian Émigré Press in 1987, provides us with insight into these limits, as it suggests what could not be published in the Soviet Union. One of the most condemning components of Freidenberg’s memoir was her portrayal of the Party and its numerous failures during the siege. Freidenberg asserted, for example, that “instead of bread and food, the state began every month to distribute vodka” to Leningrad’s populace.69 Her
67 Simmons, and Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad, 179. 68 “Leningrad in Struggle 1942,” YouTube video, 1:10:10, June 3, 2012, 30:35, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zISOOn3WvsI 69 Simmons and Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad, 75.
99 implication was that the Party had not, in fact, done all that it could have to help the starving populace. One of the primary aims of the Party under Gorbachev was to re- legitimize the Soviet government; Freidenberg’s accusation of the Party’s ineffectiveness during the siege posed a threat to that goal. Going even further, Freidenberg claimed that the government “profiteered in vodka” during the siege.70 This notion that the Party benefitted from exchanging bread for vodka presented it as being inherently corrupt.
Again, this assertion posed a significant threat to Gorbachev’s goal of re-legitimizing the
Soviet system, in that it cast the Party apparatus as morally corrupt.
Freidenberg also criticized the Party for the way in which it extracted labor from the Leningrad populace during the siege. According to her memoir, the Party maintained
Leningrad’s rate of industrial production “by slave labor, the kind of labor that was used only under serfdom and slavery.”71 This was followed by another accusation of corruption, in which Freidenberg claimed that this forced labor system enabled the government to “profite[er] in people.”72 The Party’s narrative of the siege had traditionally celebrated the labor of Leningrad’s female populace, citing it as one of the primary displays of their heroism and devotion to the war effort. Freidenberg’s claims directly threatened this narrative by suggesting that Leningraders’ labor was extracted by force, and thus was less a reflection of citizens’ heroism than of the exploitative tendencies of the Soviet government. Her narrative both undermined the Party’s claims of
Leningraders’ voluntary and selfless devotion to the industrial effort and maintained that the Party profited off of Leningraders’ vulnerable position under siege. It seems likely that this de-legitimizing potential of Freidenberg’s memoir prevented it from being
70 Simmons and Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad, 76. 71 Simmons and Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad, 75. 72 Simmons and Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad, 76.
100 published in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the content of Freidenberg’s narrative points to the limits of glasnost—specifically, it indicates that overt criticisms of the Party’s handling of the siege were still forbidden under glasnost’s newfound openness.
Conclusions
By examining monuments, memorials and written works, this chapter has elucidated the continuities and discontinuities of the state-sponsored narrative of the siege of Leningrad across the eras of three Soviet leaders: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and
Gorbachev. As demonstrated throughout the chapter, several continuities existed across the eras of each of these postwar leaders. The most prominent of these was the tendency of each leader to deploy the narrative of female heroism for political ends. Particularly within the conditions of the Cold War, in the post-World War II era, all three leaders used the female heroism narrative as a means of inspiring Soviet citizens’ ideological commitment to upholding Soviet Communism. This political mobilization of the
Leningrad heroine had also occurred under Stalin’s wartime regime (as demonstrated in
Chapter II). Thus, although post-Stalinist Soviet leaders tended to openly distance themselves from the controversial dictator, the continuity of the instrumental use of the female heroism narrative indicates that there was some important continuity across the eras of these four Soviet leaders. An additional continuity between the Khrushchev,
Brezhnev, and Gorbachev regimes that has been illustrated in this chapter is the importance that all three leaders placed on memorializing the siege. Each oversaw the construction of at least one significant memorial to the siege: Khrushchev, the
Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery; Brezhnev the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of
101 Leningrad; and Gorbachev, the Leningrad Defense Museum. This is, in and of itself, indicative of the enduring importance of the siege in Soviet political and cultural life.
The other central objective of this chapter has been to illuminate the ways in which the state-sponsored narrative of women’s roles and self-concept during the
Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras incorporated, contradicted, or obscured the wartime narratives of Leningrad’s civilian women themselves. Whereas the state- sponsored narrative of the siege under Khrushchev largely obscured women’s experiences as they articulated them, the increased liberalization of the Gorbachev era saw the proliferation of women’s diaries and memoirs from the siege. In other words, the broad trend of the postwar period moved from the omission of women’s voices almost completely, to their increased incorporation into the official memorialization of the siege.
That being said, there were some components of the siege experience that remained taboo, even as women’s voices came to the forefront: as Freidenberg’s memoir demonstrates, it was not possible to publish direct criticisms of the Party and its handling of the siege.
102 Conclusion :
Past and Present
The central aim of this thesis has been to give voice to Leningrad’s women—to bring to light the complexities, nuances, and incongruities of the diverse ways in which they understood themselves, and their roles and responsibilities, during the siege of
Leningrad. That objective also prompted exploration of how women’s narratives from the siege were both silenced and appropriated by the Party-state apparatus as it crafted its own narratives of the siege during the wartime and postwar eras. Comparison between women’s and the Party’s narratives of the siege has elucidated the gradual incorporation of women’s narratives into those cultivated by the Party over the course of the postwar era. In turn, this increased integration of women’s narratives reflects the broader process of liberalization that took place in the Soviet Union, initially under Khrushchev but especially from the 1980s until the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse.
As demonstrated in Chapter I, women’s narratives from the siege displayed both breadth and complexity. While one can pull out several common themes from these accounts, there was no single way in which women understood the experiences of starvation, severe privation and destruction, and the challenges of motherhood. The extreme conditions of Leningrad’s siege forced all civilian women to rethink basic values, understandings, and self-conceptions, but each did so in a particular way. This nuanced quality of women’s conceptions of themselves and of their experiences, however, was all but lost in the Communist Party’s wartime narrative of the siege. As illustrated in Chapter II, propaganda during the war obscured the nuances of women’s experiences by crafting and cultivating an idealized image of a universal “Leningrad
103 heroine,” which the Party would use as an instrument for inspiring citizens’ mobilization and commitment to the War effort. This idealization proved effective in part because it drew upon traditional Russian and Soviet ideals of masculinity and femininity, with which Soviet citizens were well acquainted. There were also traits of the idealized
“Leningrad heroine” that reflected those in which civilian women themselves took pride
(for example, women’s roles in maintaining Leningrad’s industrial output). This, too, conferred greater legitimacy to the “Leningrad heroine” trope, and in that way increased its effectiveness as a political instrument.
In the postwar era, the regimes of Khrushchev and Brezhnev continued this deployment of the myth of the “Leningrad heroine” for political ends, a strategy that was embodied materially in the memorials that were erected to the siege under both of these leaders. While the Khrushchev and Brezhnev regimes allowed the voices of select women to be heard, it was only to the extent that those voices supported and reflected official narratives. The increased liberalization of the Gorbachev era enabled a significant expansion of the incorporation of women’s voices into the Party’s official narratives of the siege. This was particularly reflected in the publication of many women’s wartime diaries and memoirs. Even within the climate of greater openness, though, political considerations continued to define the limits of what could be said.
Despite this evolution in the integration of women’s narratives into the state- sponsored narrative of the siege, several important continuities existed throughout the postwar period. Most significantly, the Communist Party deployed the myth of the
“Leningrad heroine” instrumentally, as a tool for achieving political objectives, across the span of nearly five decades. As shown throughout the thesis, the endurance of this myth
104 did much toward silencing the voices of Leningrad’s women, and obscuring the nuanced and diverse ways in which they conceived of themselves within the context of the siege.
To be sure, the regime’s consistent deployment of the narrative of female heroism helped to preserve the enduring and symbolic power of the siege in the Soviet Union, and to keep it in public regard—but importantly, it did so in a way that idealized Soviet women.
Indeed, the enduring relevance and symbolic power of the siege have extended beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union and into the present day. Consider, for example, a January 18, 2018 article in TASS, the Russian News Agency, which details the recent commemoration in St. Petersburg of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the lifting of the siege. The article provides quotations from President Vladimir Putin’s speech on the occasion: most salient for this thesis, Putin asserted that the attitude of sacrifice that
Leningrad’s defenders displayed “is typical of the [Russian] people and is what
[Russians] must seal for long years to come for all the future generations.”1 Russia, Putin continued, “has always relied on self-sacrifice and the love for the homeland, especially during the difficult years of ordeals.”2 Putin seems in this speech to clearly deploy the
Leningrad heroism myth for political ends: he emphasizes the valiance of Leningrad’s defenders as a way to inspire present-day Russians to emulate their forbearers in their devotion to the Russian state and nation. Although Putin does not directly refer to the women of Leningrad in this speech, the substantial overlap between his rhetoric and imagery and that of past Soviet leaders illustrates both the enduring symbolic and emotional power of the siege, and the extent to which it continues to serve as an instrument to inspire political loyalty.
1 “Putin calls to spare no effort to avoid 1941-1945 war tragedy,” TASS: Russian News Agency, January 18, 2018, accessed April 16, 2018, http://tass.com/society/985704 2 “Putin calls to spare no effort to avoid 1941-1945 war tragedy”
105 Quite apart from their instrumental, political role, the monuments and memorials erected to the siege of Leningrad in the postwar period constitute one of the primary ways in which the memory of the siege is preserved in present-day Russia. Each year, for example, on the anniversary of the lifting of the siege, Russians pay their respects to its victims at the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery. This central role of memorials and monuments to the siege as places of remembrance raises important questions about commemoration, and how monuments inform our historical understanding of people and events. Consider the Mother-Motherland statue that stands in Piskarevskoye Memorial
Cemetery. The statue portrays a physically strong Leningrad woman whose face bears no signs of sorrow or suffering. Whereas Leningrad’s women’s narratives universally evince that women understood themselves as living through an unimaginable tragedy, the woman in the Mother-Motherland statue shows no outward signs of suffering. For the average visitor to Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery, who most likely does not have background knowledge of women’s narratives, this physically robust, determined-looking woman becomes the emblem of the siege. Indeed, Leningrad’s women showed remarkable resilience and determination throughout the siege. However, as demonstrated throughout this thesis, they did not conceive of themselves as the invulnerable heroines of an unfolding epic; that was the language and imagery that the Party-state apparatus employed in its descriptions of the universal, uncomplicated “Leningrad heroine.”
Thus, as the example of the Mother-Motherland statue illustrates, memorials and monuments tell a narrative from a particular perspective. In “Unraveling the Threads of
History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow,” Benjamin
Forest and Juliet Johnson examine questions of memorialization in the Soviet context.
106 As the authors explain, Soviet memorials, like memorials elsewhere, tend to “reflect how political elites choose to represent the nation publicly.”3 The monuments to the siege that stand in present-day St. Petersburg, like the Mother-Motherland statue, provide us with the state-sponsored narrative of the events that transpired in Leningrad within the particular context of the Khrushchev regime. One of Forest and Johnson’s most telling insights relates to public reception of Soviet-era memorials. Their research has led them to conclude that there is substantial uniformity in public perceptions of prominent monuments and memorials. In other words, people generally do not view memorials with a critical eye. 4 The dominance of state-sponsored narratives in monuments and memorials to the Leningrad siege thus has shaped—perhaps even determined—the way in which the public understands how Leningrad’s women experienced the siege. To the extent that this is the case, these monuments and memorials have thereby operated to obscure the historical memories recorded by women themselves.
***
Near the end of 900 Days, filmmaker Jessica Gorter asks a group of female survivors about the siege’s death toll. After furnishing Gorter with the figures that the state customarily gives as an answer, one of the women continues: “the question is if we know the truth now. We still don’t know what really happened….every new leader comes up with a story that suits him.”5 As the respondent’s sentiments make clear, the state-
3 Forest, Benjamin, and Johnson, Juliet, “Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 32, no. 3 (2004): 526, accessed April 16, 2018, http://web.csulb.edu/~dsidorov/Materials/Moscow_Monuments_Annals32(9)2002.pdf 4 Forest and Johnson, “Unraveling the Threads of History,” 538. 5 Gorter, Jessica, dir, 900 Days, (Brooklyn: Icarus Films, 2012), 47:05.
107 sponsored account of the siege of Leningrad is still unfolding. Current and future Russian leaders will continue to spin their own tales of the siege—and of its heroines—to suit their political goals. More so than even in the late Soviet period, however, the narratives of women who endured the siege are now available to be used by historians and others both to interrogate official accounts of the siege and to gain deeper insight into how women understood their roles and responsibilities within the context of the siege.
Therefore, my hope is that future scholarship will continue to unravel the complex interactions between women’s narratives and those that have been, and will continue to be, crafted by the state. The remarkable feats of Leningrad’s women deserve to remain in public regard, but they should be there in a way that incorporates women’s own telling.
108 Bibliography
Primary Sources
Adamovich, Ales, and Granin, Daniil. A Book of the Blockade. Hilda Perham, trans. Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1982.
Aleksandrov, G.F. “Report on the Film ‘She Defends the Motherland,” May 11, 1943. James von Geldern, trans. Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University. Accessed April 15, 2018. http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1943-2/women-in- war-films/women-in-war-films-texts/ideological-flaws-in-she-defends-the-motherland/
Berggolts, Olga. Daytime Stars. Lisa Kirschenbaum, trans. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Unpublished Manuscript.
Bidlack, Richard and Lomagin, Nikita, eds. The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: a New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012.
Bonner, Elena. Mothers and Daughters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Fadeev, Alexandr. Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade. R.D. Charques, trans. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971.
Ginzburg, Lydia. Blockade Diary. Alan Myers, trans. London: Harvill Press, 1996.
Gorter, Jessica, dir. 900 Days. Brooklyn: Icarus Films. 2012.
Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union. David Skvirsky and Vic Schnierson, trans. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974.
Inber, Vera. Leningrad Diary. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1971.
Khrushchev, Nikita. “The Cult of the Individual.” The Guardian. April 26, 2007. Accessed April 15, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/apr/26/greatspeeches1
Kochina, Elena. Blockade Diary: Under Siege in Leningrad, 1941-1942. New York: The Overlook Press, 2014.
Kozhina, Elena. Through the Burning Steppe: a Wartime Memoir. New York: Riverhead Hardcover, 2000.
“Leningrad in Struggle 1942.” YouTube video. 1:10:10. June 3, 2012. Accessed 15 April, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zISOOn3WvsI
109 Magayeva, Svetlana, and Pleysier, Albert. Surviving the Blockade of Leningrad. Alexey Vinogradov, trans. New York: University Press of America, 2006.
Pavlov, Dmitri. Leningrad 1941: The Blockade. John Adams, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
"PURGE OF THE ARTS SET IN LENINGRAD." New York Times, August 23, 1946. Accessed October 7, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/1946/08/23/archives/purge-of- the-arts-set-in-leningrad-communist-party-writers-act-on.html
“Putin calls to spare no effort to avoid 1941-1945 war tragedy.” Tass: Russian News Agency, January 18, 2018. http://tass.com/society/985704
Skrjabina, Elena. Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader. Norman Luxenburg, trans. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2009.
Stalin, Joseph. “Brothers and Sisters!,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University. Accessed January 20, 2018. http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1943- 2/the-cult-of-leadership/the-cult-of-leadership-texts/stalin-brothers-and-sisters/
Wayne, Kyra Petroskaya. Shurik: A WWII Saga of the Siege of Leningrad. Guilford: The Lyons Press, 2000.
Werth, Alexander. Russia at War: 1941-1945. New York: Carol & Graf Publishers, Inc, 1964.
Secondary Sources
Alexievich, Svetlana. The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II. New York: Random House, 2017
Barskova, Polina. Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 2017.
Bater, James, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change. London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1976.
Beevor, Antony. “The Unmentionable Season of Death.” The New York Review of Books, January 18, 2018. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/01/18/leningrad- unmentionable-season-death/?sub_key=5a72110bea9c2_
Bidlack, Richard, and Lomagin, Nikita. The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012.
110 Chatterjee, Choi. Review of Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (review no. 315). Institute of Historical Research, London.
Forest, Benjamin, and Johnson, Juliet. “Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 32, no. 3 (2004): 524-546 http://web.csulb.edu/~dsidorov/Materials/Moscow_Monuments_Annals32(9)2002.pdf
Garthoff, Raymond L. “Brezhnev, Andropov: Tensions Revived, 1979-84.” In Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War, 57- 73. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015.
Gellately, Robert. Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War. New York: Vintage Books, 2013.
Glantz, David. The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002.
“History of the Museum.” State Memorial Museum of Defense Leningrad. Accessed April 15, 2018, http://blokadamus.ru/cgi-bin/magazine.cgi?id=2#3
Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.
Lapidus, Gail Wershofsky. “Sexual Equality in Soviet Policy: a Developmental Perspective,” in Women in Russia, eds. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, and Gail Lapidus. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1977.
Lincoln, Bruce. Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Merridale, Catherine and Ward, Chris, eds. Perestroika: The Historical Perspective. London: Edward Arnold, 1991.
Peri, Alexis. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2017.
Pörzgen, Yvonne. “Siege Memory-Besieged Memory? Heroism and Suffering in St Petersburg Museums dedicated to the Siege of Leningrad.” From Museum & Society, 14 (3). Leicester: University of Leicester, Department of Museum Studies, 2016. (Accessed January 21, 2018) https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volume s/porzgen
111 Reid, Anna. Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941-1944. Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011.
Salisbury, Harrison. 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. Boston: Da Capo Press. 2003.
Simmons, Cynthia, and Perlina, Nina. Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.
Sternthal, Susanne. Gorbachev’s Reforms: de-Stalinization through Demilitarization. Westport: Praeger, 1997.
Strong, John W., ed. The Soviet Union Under Brezhnev and Kosygin: The Transition Years. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1971.
Taubman, William. Gorbachev: His Life and Times. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.
Tumarkin, Nina. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Yarov, Sergey. Leningrad 1941-42: Morality in a City Under Siege. Hoboken: Wiley Publishing, 2017.
Zubkova, Elena. Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945- 1957. Abindgon: Routledge, 1998.
Images
“Entrance to the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad from Solyanoy Pereulok.” From: Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad. SAINT- PETERSBURG.COM. http://www.saint-petersburg.com/museums/museum-of-the- defense-and-siege-of-leningrad/
“For Motherland ! for mother-Russia!” 1943. Still Image. Poster Collection. From: Hoover Institution, 2013 https://www.hoover.org/research/youare-strong-you-are- weak-mother-russia
“Glory to a mother – heroine!” 1944. Still Image. Windows on War. From: University of Nottingham, 2013. http://windowsonwar.nottingham.ac.uk/poster/Glory-to- Mother-Heroines
“Motherland (Mother-Russia) Sculpture at Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery.” From: “Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery,” ST-PETERSBURG.COM. http://www.saint- petersburg.com/monuments/piskarevskoye-cemetery/
112
“Sculptures in front of the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad.” From: “Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad.” ST-PETERSBURG.COM, http://www.saint-petersburg.com/monuments/heroic-defenders/
“Sculptural group Partisans in front of the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad.” From: “Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad,” ST- PETERSBURG.COM. http://www.saint-petersburg.com/monuments/heroic- defenders/
“We defended Leningrad. Now We will rebuild it!” 1944. From: Cybrisky, Roman Adrian.Kyiv, Ukraine: the City of Domes and Demons from the Collapse of Socialism to the Mass Uprising of 2013-2014. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2016. 270
“We will defend Lenin’s City,” From: Soviet Music, A Collection. http://www.sovmusic.ru/p_view.php?id=512
113