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“OUT OF PLACE” IN THE POSTWAR CITY: PRACTICES, EXPERIENCES AND REPRESENTATIONS OF DISPLACEMENT DURING THE RESETTLEMENT OF LENINGRAD AT THE END OF THE BLOCKADE By Siobhan Peeling, BA, MPhil Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2010 Abstract This thesis explores the repopulation of Leningrad following the blockade of the city during the Second World War. In the years after the lifting of the siege blockade survivors remaining in Leningrad were joined annually by hundreds of thousands of incomers. However, while the siege has recently been the subject of a number of scholarly and literary treatments, much less attention has been paid to what happened next in terms of the mass resettlement of the city. Accounts of the consequences of the blockade that touch upon the postwar population have deployed the term ‘Leningraders’ as shorthand for a cohesive community of blockade survivors, embedded in the culture and landscape of the city. Even pieces of work that have portrayed post-siege Leningrad as a ‘city of migrants’ have concentrated on the impact of the loss of the prewar population rather than on the multifarious experiences of its itinerant populations. The thesis addresses the role of widespread experiences of displacement and resettlement in structuring relationships among individuals and between citizens and the authorities in the post-siege civic environment. It examines the repopulation in the context of evolving Soviet practices of population management after the war and in terms of the intersection of population movements with the re-affirmation of a civic community in a city which had lost a vast proportion of its population, just as it gained the basis for a powerful new narrative of belonging. It demonstrates how competing visions of the desired postwar order on a national and local scale were constructed and contested in relation to displaced people who were often targeted as a potentially transgressive presence in the postwar landscape. ii Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting the research project that provided me with my doctoral studentship. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Nick Baron for his patient reading of draft chapters and his detailed and thought provoking comments on my work. My gratitude also goes to Professor Peter Gatrell for his helpful remarks and his capacity for pointing out all kinds of interesting further reading. I was also very fortunate to have the opportunity to share ideas and discuss work in progress with other participants and collaborators on the project and I am grateful to them all for their insights. My thanks in particular to Dr. David Norris, Dr. Rosaria Franco, Dr. Tomas Balkelis and Dr. Ewa Ochman for enjoyable and fruitful conversations. I would like to thank the scholars with no connection to the project who have generously shared their findings with me and provided me with advice and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Dr. Anna Reid for her interesting correspondence and to Dr. Elizabeth White for her guidance in the early stages of the research, her company in Moscow and her hospitality in London. My gratitude also goes to Dr. Sarah Badcock for reading an early draft of the introduction, for her support of my academic development and her excellent advice, both professional and personal. I am indebted to the scholars working in the Oral History Centre at the European University, St Petersburg for welcoming me into their office, opening up their archive of interviews to me and encouraging me to present some of my work in a talk at the university. Thanks in particular must go to Tat’iana Voronina who provided assistance with my research and gave me the benefit of her keen observations and in whose company I spent many agreeable hours. I am also grateful for the companionship of fellow researchers Robert Hornsby and Bob Henderson and others that enriched my stays in Moscow. I would like to express my particular appreciation to the staff at the Central State Archive of St Petersburg (TsGASPb) and the Central State Archive of Literature and Art of St iii Petersburg (TsGALI SPb), and also to the staff at the reading rooms of the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. I am grateful also to staff at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) for their assistance. I would like to note in particular the efforts of Galina Mikhailovna at the Komsomol reading room of RGASPI. The assistance of staff at the University of Nottingham, especially Amanda Samuels, Jessica Chan and Katrina Johnson, as well as that of Christopher Straw, has also been invaluable in helping me reach the submission stage. On a personal note I must thank my partner, Peter Jemmett, for putting up with my itinerant lifestyle while researching the thesis, for spending his leave from Afghanistan looking after me and our daughter while I tried to finish writing it and for much more besides. I am incredibly thankful for the constant support of my parents, Fred and Elaine, without whom this work would never have come close to being completed. Finally, I would like to mention my sister, Grace, the brightest person I ever knew, and my daughter, Phoebe, with love. iv Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 “Quickly-quickly they settled all our empty space.” 1 1.2 A motley crowd: questions of identity in postwar Leningrad 7 1.3 “What is lacking is a nomadology”: integrating an historical 17 study with theories of space, place and displacement 1.4 Notes on methodology 38 1.5 A complex story of travelling and dwelling in the 42 post-siege city: an outline of the thesis 1.6 Postwar Enigmas 49 Chapter 2. “Who are you?” Reconstructing the 55 population of the post-siege city (part one) 2.1 The spring fair crowd 55 2.2 The blokadniki 61 Chapter 3. A “City of Migrants?” Reconstructing the 98 population of the post-siege city (part two) 3.1 The village rushed in 98 3.2 The varied population 104 3.3 The lost population 112 3.4 The unruly population 122 v Chapter 4. The constitution of a ‘Family of 129 Leningraders’ 4.1 ‘Pure’ and ‘Impure’ Leningraders 129 4.2 Everyone is needed in their place 132 4.3 “Everyone thought up their own way of how to get to 151 Leningrad” 4.4 Endless resettlement 161 4.5 Powerful Roots 181 Chapter 5. Matter out of place: the repopulation of 185 Leningrad and the ‘danger’ of social contamination 5.1 Protecting the city from ‘dissolute elements’ 185 5.2 “Where are you crawling to, louse?” Sanitary processing 188 and the passport regime 5.3 Cleansing the cityscape 199 5.4 Repopulating a purified space 228 Chapter 6. Conclusion 245 6.1 The postwar Soviet family 245 6.2 A new lens 246 Select Bibliography 250 vi Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1 “Quickly-quickly they settled all our empty space.” This thesis is a study of the repopulation of Leningrad in the wake of the devastating blockade of the city in the Second World War. On 27th January 1944, Soviet troops on the Leningrad front had the German army in retreat, and the freedom of the city from its almost nine hundred day encirclement was announced. The American journalist and war correspondent Harrison Salisbury described the moment thus: On January 27 at 8 p.m., over the sword point of the Admiralty, over the great dome of St. Isaac’s, over the broad expanse of Palace Square, over the broken buildings of Pulkovo, the dilapidated machine shops of the Kirov works, the battered battleships still standing in the Neva, roared a shower of golden arrows, a flaming stream of red, white and blue rockets. It was a salute from 324 cannon marking the liberation of Leningrad, the end of the blockade, the victory of the armies of Generals Govorov and Meretskov. After 880 days the siege of Leningrad, the longest ever endured by a modern city, had come to an end. 1 The shower of golden arrows and red, white and blue rockets roared over a city, as this passage suggests, much of which was still standing, but which was scarred by the preceding years of bombardment and blockade, of military mobilisation and mass starvation. The poet Vera Inber, who only came from Moscow to stay in the city in the wake of the German invasion but lived there through the whole of the siege, recalled jumping on a crowded tram to travel to watch the dazzling light show from the Kirov 1 H. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (London: Pan Books, 2000), p.566; Salisbury points out in a footnote that the exact length of the siege is variously calculated at 880, 882 or 872 days depending on the start date used. The fall of Shlisselburg on 8 th September 1941 is commonly accepted today as marking the start of the blockade, which then continued for 872 days, although the encirclement was breached in January 1943. 1 Bridge, which was completely filled with people. 2 According to some estimates, however, less than a fifth of the pre-war population of Leningrad remained in the battered city at the end of the siege to witness the victory salute. 3 The other four fifths had mobilised to the army at the front, evacuated to the east or starved to death in an urban famine of unprecedented scale. 4 In the most severe period of the blockade, the winter of 1941-2, rations fell to as low as 125g of bread a day and inhabitants remaining in the city endured bitter cold and hunger without fuel, running water, or means of transport.

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