Since no reference to either incident has yet emerged from the (incompletely open) Party or security service archives, it is possible that they did not happen. The Germans’ informant may have been aiming to please; Yershov may have been exaggerating so as to boost his chances of getting US citizenship, or reporting hearsay. Leaflets urging Leningraders to revolt, however, did undoubtedly circulate. One such, stuffed into the blue-painted metal mailboxes in the entrance of an apartment building on Vasilyevsky Island, summoned residents to a ‘hunger demonstration’ on Palace Square at 10 a.m. on 22 January, whence they were to ‘proceed towards our fighters and ask them to give up this mindless resistance’. The troops would not fire since they were ‘our fathers, brothers, sons’, nor should the ‘worthless NKVD’ be feared since it had not the ‘strength to restrain the hungry masses’. Readers were to write out another ten copies of the pamphlet each, and post them in the letterboxes of neighbouring buildings.21 An engineer at a machine-tool factory was arrested for distributing a similar appeal:

Working Leningraders! Death hangs over Leningrad. Two or three thousand people die daily. Who is to blame? Soviet power and the Bolsheviks. They assure us that the blockade will be lifted and food norms raised, but it turns out to be lies, as everything Soviet power promised proved to be lies. Seize the city leadership! Save yourselves and the Motherland, or death awaits!22

Another pamphleteer, who signed himself Buntovshchik — ‘Rebel’ — regularly left bundles of Xeroxed leaflets in Moscow Station, as well as sending them direct to Popkov and Zhdanov. Despite extraordinary efforts to track him down, which included identifying all the sales outlets for a certain sort of envelope and handwriting checks on 13,000 people, he evaded the authorities’ clutches for almost two years. When finally run to earth he turned out to be an ordinary fifty-year-old ethnic Russian worker in the Bolshevik Plant’s steel foundry, his sole suspicious feature ‘relatives in Poland’. ‘What was Luzhkov’s official position in the workshop?’ Zhdanov’s deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov wrote angrily on the case report. ‘And what did the Party organisation know about him? Please check and inform me by word of mouth.’23

17. The Big House

Leaflets and two unverifiable demonstrations aside, public anger never turned into organised revolt. This was in part a case of better the devil you know: Leningraders might have feared and distrusted their own leaders, but they also learned, as shells rained around them and news came through of the utter devastation of newly liberated towns round Moscow, thoroughly to hate the Nazis. It was also an achievement of the Soviet regime, which was well informed, commanded genuine loyalty from many (especially the young), remained firmly in control of the army and police, and had long since destroyed all potential institutional sources of opposition. If, as the Cold War Sovietologist Merle Fainsod put it, catastrophe and crisis are the severest tests of a political system, the fact that Leningrad held out suggested that the Soviet apparatus was tough, durable, and capable of sustaining great shocks. The siege, he concluded, should teach the West not to underestimate Russian totalitarianism.1

Walk northwards up the Liteiniy, the broad Belle Epoque boulevard linking the Nevsky to Finland Station, and at the end of the street, just before the river, you reach a building known as the Big House — today the headquarters of the Federal Security Service and formerly those of its predecessors, the KGB and NKVD. Built in the 1920s, it is uncompromisingly modernist, its stark tiers of ox-blood marble a striking contrast to the florid grandeur of the preceding turn-of-the-century mansion blocks. When the air raids began, a siege survivor remembers, ‘all Leningraders very much hoped that bombs would fall on the NKVD building on the Liteiniy, and destroy all its records. But the building, with its grand marble entrance, remained standing — enormous and terrible.’2