Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege by Alexander Werth Page A

it’s raining a bit,’ said Baranov. ‘They haven’t started shelling us yet. They prefer clear days. But it’s clearing up, so we may have some yet.’ We went downstairs. Already some people, in the far end of the hall, were playing billiards. As we went out into the square in front of the Astoria, here on the right was St. Isaac’s Cathedral, with its lofty granite pillars, and its St. Paul-like dome. It was the only thing that looked different – the gilt dome which one could see forty miles away from any height in Finland or from well beyond Oranienbaum, on the southern side of the Gulf, had been dimmed with dark-grey camouflage paint. And in the garden, in front of the cathedral, cabbages were now growing, and among them was an anti-aircraft gun. Opposite us was the absurd former building of the German Embassy, minus the bronze horses and the naked Huns on its roof. To the left was Klodt’s equestrian statue of the wicked Tsar, Nicholas the First, he and part of his horse protruding from the tall structure of sandbags and scaffolding. The architect explained that the top part of this scaffolding was just now being renewed. And beyond, at the far end of the square, was the large Mariimsky Palace, where the ‘pre-Parliament’ used to meet during the last stormy weeks of the Kerensky regime. And to the side of it, straight as an arrow, the narrow Vosnesensky Prospect ran south, a street full of Gogol and Dostoievsky associations. In this street was the barber’s shop in which Gogol’s Major Kovalev lost his surrealist nose – that nose which he then observed on the following day, driving down the street in a coach and wearing the uniform and the cocked hat of a state councillor. How many other weird visions had risen out of the mist of St. Petersburg, out of the grey cold vapours of the Neva?
    We walked round St. Isaac’s Cathedral. A few of the granite pillars had been chipped by shell splinters, and the glass was broken in all the windows which were now more or less boarded up. Inside it was no longer a church but a ‘museum of religion.’ Would it ever be opened as a church again, I wondered, or would the museum – no longer quite conforming with the ‘general line’ – be put to other uses? St. Isaac’s is not ‘typically’ Leningrad. If anything, it is in contrast with the ‘native’ architecture, the classical stucco buildings. Here, beyond St. Isaac’s, was the real thing: to the left, the magnificent yellow stucco building of the former Imperial Senate, to the right, also in bright-yellow stucco, the massive building of the Admiralty with its wonderful single tower and its needle spire, that tall needle spire which Pushkin watched from his window on those brief summer nights, those ‘white’ northern nights of St. Petersburg. Even during the brief hour of darkness the point of the spire, still lit up by the last traces of the sunset and the first traces of dawn, continued to shine. In front of us was the wide breezy expanse of the grey Neva, with the Vasili Island opposite, with the University and Academy of Sciences on its Embankment, and the beautiful classical pillared building of the former Bourse, now the naval museum, on its eastern tip. And further to the right rose high into the sky the other needle spire of St. Petersburg, the spire of the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul which Peter the Great had built. The spire was no longer glittering, and seemed a little thicker than it should have been, ‘There’s quite a story attached to that,’ said Baranov, the architect. ‘We had to camouflage the gilt when the Germans started shelling us in a big way. And it was infernally difficult. We were passing through the worst period of the famine. When a man is hungry he turns giddy much more easily than usual, and to ask anyone to climb up the needle spire of the Fortress was to ask him to take on the giddiest job in the world. To paint the spire would have been too complicated.