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Terror, though particularly severe in the first twelve months of the war, continued throughout.3 The large-scale deportations of July and August 1941 were followed by mini-purges in September, November and March, the last of which swept up around a hundred scholars at a variety of academic institutions.4 By autumn 1942 more than 9,500 people had been arrested for political crimes, about a third of them intelligentsia or ‘former kulaks, tradesmen, landowners, nobles and officials’, the rest peasants and ordinary white- and blue-collar workers.5 For those put in front of the military tribunals that supplemented the regular People’s Courts, the chances of acquittal were extremely slim: only in 6 per cent of cases were not-guilty verdicts returned or the case dismissed. The civilian courts’ comparative laxity (20 per cent dismissals or not-guilty verdicts) earned reprimands from the military prosecutor.6

Likhachev witnessed siege-time terror’s workings at Pushkin House, where Grigori Gukovsky (the same professor whom Olga Grechina had criticised for avoiding the draft, and who had joked that if the Germans came he would pass himself off as Armenian) was arrested and forced to denounce three colleagues, one of whom subsequently died in prison. Likhachev — himself a veteran of five years on the Solovetsky Islands — was unjudgemental. ‘At the time’, he wrote later, a conversation between two people about what they would do, where they would hide, if the Germans took the city, was considered little short of treason. I therefore didn’t think of blaming Gukovsky in the least, nor the numerous others who under duress put their signatures to whatever the interrogator-torturer wanted. . It was the first time Gukovsky had been arrested and he obviously didn’t know that one should either refuse to answer the interrogator’s questions or say as little as possible.7

Marksena Karpitskaya, another veteran of NKVD interrogation rooms as the daughter of ‘enemies of the people’, was called into the Big House and asked to join in the denunciation of a colleague at the Public Library, an elderly ex-officer in the tsarist army who helped out with small tasks in exchange for company and warmth. When she refused, the policeman sneered that this was only to be expected, given her parentage. Karpitskaya, to her own amazement exploded with rage. I said that nobody had yet proved that my parents were enemies of the people, and that what he was saying was itself a crime. . Only the foolishness of youth could have possessed me to be so brave! He jumped up and lunged towards me, as if to hit me. . I stood up and grabbed a stool. . He came to his senses, sat down at his desk and asked for my papers.

Though ordered to leave Leningrad, Karpitskaya managed to evade deportation with the help of her boss at the Publichka, who put her up in her own office, hiding her whereabouts from the authorities for the rest of the war.8

The geography teacher Aleksei Vinokurov came to the attention of the security services when he posted up handwritten notices offering to buy landscape photographs of the Urals and Siberia. A scribbled response invited him to a flat on the Nevsky, where he was promptly handed over to a police lieutenant and escorted to the Big House. ‘It was tedious at the NKVD’, he confided to his diary. ‘The staff at that establishment amaze with their dullness. The stupid interrogation procedure went on for about three hours. With difficulty the lieutenant wrote out the protocol, which I virtually had to dictate to him.’ These were among the words underlined by Vinokurov’s investigator a year later, when his flat was searched and his diary confiscated. Also underlined were mentions of seeing corpses fall out of the back of a truck, and emaciated soldiers, marching along the Nevsky, step out of line to trade tobacco for bread. So too were criticisms of Sovinformburo for its ‘meaningless’ reporting, and references to the Germans as Europeans. Combined with a hint that he wished to join relatives in the Nazi-occupied town of Staraya Russa this was more than enough to condemn him, and on 19 March 1943 he was shot, having been convicted of ‘conducting counter-revolutionary agitation’ at his school.9 Cannier was Aleksandr Boldyrev, whose diary references to a ‘stupid’ English novel — title Two Trips to the Big House — were code for interrogation sessions.10

Execution may have been a merciful end, since memoir evidence suggests that the large majority of those imprisoned in Leningrad during the first siege winter died of starvation. An inmate of the Kresty (‘Crosses’) prison, a vast, red-brick neo-Byzantine edifice next to Finland Station, had the job of removing corpses from the cells. He counted 1,853 between 16 October and 2 February: