Stanziliëri

This is a picture that depicts a scene during World War 2: The Siege of Leningrad. The city formerly, and now again, known as Saint Petersburg endured one of the longest and most destructive sieges of all time. It lasted 2.5 years, and cost 1.2 million people their lives. This is a multitude of the death toll caused by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and only superseded by the enormous amount of casualties at the Siege of Stalingrad, during the same war.

Reading about the Siege of Leningrad I feel astounded by the tremendous suffering of the people, but also by the spirit that somehow survived, even though all hope seemed lost forever. It is astonishing to what length the population had been driven in order to survive the German and Finnish assaults and everlasting blockade.

The Soviet secret service NKVD intercepted many letters from people trapped in Leningrad. And it is those letters that remain today, and which give us an insight in their private feelings, and life. It is merely heart-breaking....

With every day that passes, life in Leningrad gets worse. People are beginning to swell up because they are eating patties made from mustard. Flour dust, which used to be used for making wallpaper paste, cannot be bought for love nor money.

There is a terrible hunger in Leningrad. We go to the fields and the scap heaps and gather all sorts of roots and dirty leaves from animal feed... and even that's a rare find.

I was witness to a scene when a cabbie's horse collapsed on the street from malnutrition. People ran over to it with aces and knives and began cutting it up into pieces and carting them home. It's awful. These people had the look of executioners about them.

Our beloved Leningrad has turned into a heap of dirt and corpses. Trams have long since ceased to run, there is no light, no fuel, the water is frozen, the rubbish isn't cleared. And, most important, we're tormented by hunger.

We've become a herd of hungry beasts. You walk along the streets and come across people swaying like drunks, collapsing and dying. We've become used to seeing such sights and pay no attention because today they are dying but tomorrow it will be me.

Leningrad has become a morgue, the streets have become avenues of the dead. In every house, the cellar is a dump for corpses. There are cavalcades of dead bodies lining the streets.

One of the people living in this time was Dmitri Shostakovich. A great composer. Recognized in his country alongside Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky. By judiciously avoiding public criticism of Stalin he had survived the worst of his Terror, and had remained in the Soviet Union. Such was his love for the Motherland, that when the war with Germany started in 1941, he applied to join the Red Army on his own accord. He was twice turned down, because of his poor eyesight. However, he was accepted in the People's Volunteer Brigades.

Only by fighting can we save humanity from destruction. - Dmitri Shostakovich

His international reputation was so great, that he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, dressed as a Soviet firefighter, ready to defend Leningrad against the German Panzer divisions that were on course to obliterate its very existence.
However, it was not this, but his majestic music, that would contribute most to the morale of the nation.

During the siege Shostakovich wrote his 7th symphony, and he dedicated it to "my native city." Generally known as the "Leningrad Symphony" a writer for the Observer by the name of Ed Vulliamy vividly described the extraordinary occasion of the first performance of the Leningrad Symphony in the besieged city itself. On that 9th of August 1942, by a scratch orchestra of starving musicians.
As Vulliamy relates the story, Shostakovich wrote the Adagio by candlelight in what was clearly a frenzy of creative inspiration while Leningrad was under bombardment by the Luftwaffe. However, he was forced to finish the manuscript in Moscow a little after Christmas 1941, because he had reluctantly obeyed the party's instructions to evacuate his native city.
The symphony had its premiere in Moscow in March, and after a microfilm score was smuggled out to the west, it was performed in America to huge acclaim.

But a premiere in Leningrad was harder to accomplish. In 2001 one of the last surviving members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra of those days, Victor Koslov, a clarinettist, recalled what it was like to endure the winter of 1941-2 and what he saw when the snows began to melt in the spring of 1942.

Some were dead, some were half-dead, sometimes from injuries they had done to themselves. People were cutting off and eating their own buttocks. We only really saw what winter did when the snow began to melt.... Decomposing, dismembered corpses in the streets that had been hidden under the ice. Severed legs with meat chopped off them. Bits of bodies in the bins. Women's bodies with breasts cut off, which people had taken to eat.

It was at this time that a light plane from Moscow, flying over the encircling German army, dropped Shostakovich's score into the city. The symphony orchestra was re-formed and rehearsals started for what was to be the most important concert ever held in Leningrad.

Another last surviving orchestra member, Edith Katya Matus, recalled her arrival at the first rehearsal:

I nearly fell over with shock. Of the orchestra of 100 people, there were only 15 left. I didn't recognize the musicians I knew from before, they were like skeletons.... It was evident we couldn't play anything, we could hardly stand on our feet!

The now forgotten conductor Karl Ilich Eliasburg took to the rostrum and said "Dear friends, we are weak but we must force ourselves to start work", after which he raised his arms to begin, but, according to Martus, no one had the energy to move:

The musicians were trembling. Finally those who were able to play a bit helped the weaker musicians, and thus our small group began to play the opening bars. And that was the beginning of the first rehearsal.... I remember the trumpeter didn't have the breath to play his solo and there was silence when his turn came around. He was on his knees, poor man.... Everybody did his best, but we played badly, it was hopeless.

Gradually... week by week... they found the strength to persevere. Many of the musicians collapsed from hunger, and four died from starvation. As some fell out, others took their place, until, reinforced by musicians from military bands serving at the fromt, the orchestra was finally ready to perform.
Conductor Eliasburg announced the event on the radio, declaring: "This performance is witness to our spirit, courage and readiness to fight. Listen, comrades!"

On that August evening, the entire population of the city was reportedly in the Philharmonic Hall, or sitting by their radios in ruined apartments, or listening in their trenches at the front line. An artillery-man called Savkov described sitting with his comrades, listening with closed eyes: "It seemed that the cloudless sky had suddenly become a storm bursting with music as the city listened to the symphony of heroes and forgot about the war but not the meaning of war." The German invaders too were able to hear the great work, either because their guns had been silences by an unusually ferocious barrage on the previous night or because they could not resist listening to the message of musical defiance wafting across from loudspeakers directed at them from the Russian trenches.

The surviving citizens were suffering as never before, but the German grip on the city was already slackening. However it would take another dreadful winter, 18 more months and see many more deaths. But Leningrad was not throttled and would not succumb....

The image at the top of this article is a diorama of the "Leningrad Blockade" by Sergey Nemanov. It is on display in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, in Moscow. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.

This article is an adaptation of an exceprt of Jonathan Dimbleby's profoundly intriguing book "Russia - A Journey to the Heart of a Land and its People"