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

What we decided to do was to cover it with a long canvas case painted grey. Only who would climb up that spire? We found plenty of volunteers – here in Leningrad you can find a volunteer for anything – but we realised that the fellows were much too weak and would just kill themselves. So we picked on a few who looked less exhausted than the others, and we fed them well for three or four days – and, by heaven, they did the job.’
    Somewhere in the distance the shelling had begun. We were standing in the middle of the Senate Square. To the right, where there had once been lawns, more vegetables were growing, and among these cabbage-beds were the elevated openings of dug-outs, and from among them rose a large sandbagged structure. Inside it was the greatest equestrian statue of modern times, Falconet’s Peter the Great, the Bronze Horseman. It still stood there, surrounded by sandbags, on its gigantic granite rock which had been hauled with infinite labour from Lakhta, from across the Gulf of Finland, at the behest of Catherine the Great. And when, after nine years of delays, failures and quarrels, the great statue was at last completed, she ordered that the rock be simply inscribed: ‘P ETRO P RIMO C ATHERINA S ECUNDA .’ Now, around the sandbagged structure, cabbages were untidily growing.
    The Alexandrinka Square.
    Baltic Fleet sentries outside the Admiralty.
    No statue had ever become so much the symbol of a great city as this, or had given men so much food for thought. To Pushkin, Peter was right to have built this strange city, which symbolised, like Peter himself, the new era of Russian history, the ‘Window into Europe.’ He was right, though it was built on the bones of thousands of serfs who had died in the inhuman effort of turning the swamp into an island of granite. Pushkin knew that Peter’s work was ruthless, but he knew that it had to be, and that it was good and right. He loved the city’s severe, graceful harmony.
    During the nineteenth century the city grew – grew into a city of close on two million people. It was no longer entirely a city of ‘severe, graceful harmony,’ it had become a centre of trade and industry with hundreds of thousands of newcomers – of traders, and a proletariat, a city of fearful variety, full of human contrast and human conflicts and insoluble contradictions. The white mists of the Neva were blackened by the fog of factory chimneys. Instead of the crisp sunny, winter days of Pushkin came the eerie rainy autumn nights of Dostoievsky and the shadowy unreality of Blok’s St. Petersburg poems. And before his death in 1909, Innokenti Annensky wrote his tragic prophecy – his poem ‘St. Petersburg’ – in which he spoke of Peter’s ‘cursèd error.’ It was no longer the misty lilac St. Petersburg of Blok but a city of cadaverous yellow water, ‘yellow’ snow. ‘And even in May, when the shadows of the white northern night are spread over the waves of the Neva, I feel no more the magic of spring, but only the poison of fruitless desires.’ A ‘cursèd error!’ So the poet felt. Perhaps in terms of geography and economics it was even more so. From 1918 to 1921 Petrograd nearly died of hunger. Thousands died of hunger and two-thirds or more of its population scattered. The first Soviet Government moved ‘temporarily’ to Moscow. Petrograd was not only threatened with starvation, but with invasion. It was much more hungry than Moscow. Not until several years later did it become again a great city of three million people. But ten or twelve years passed, and again came invasion, and again came hunger, this time far more terrible than the hunger of the first years of the Revolution. The ‘cursèd error’ again?
    But if so, thousands fought for this error, and died for it. And those who survived meant to persist in it. And yet, will Leningrad, sad and half-deserted and beautiful, be Russia’s capital again? I asked many people that question. They all