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Still important guardians of the siege story are the dwindling band of blokadniki themselves. For them the siege is not history but acute, lived experience, and their memories of it, as Olga Grechina puts it, ‘a minefield of the mind. You only have to step on them, and you explode. Everything flies to hell — quiet, comfort, present-day happiness.’5 Memory triggers lurk in wait all around — a particular outdoor tap or fire hydrant, the drone of an aeroplane or the squeak of sled runners, the smell of joiner’s glue or just the sight of untrodden snow on a city pavement. One man never puts up a New Year’s tree, because it reminds him of the one underneath which his father lay dying of hunger; others always detour round particular streets or bridges. For Grechina, one day in 1978, it was the smell of a bonfire, drifting in at her window. Having for years given the conventional version of the siege in talks to students, she sat down at her desk and wept and wrote for two days and nights, releasing a torrent of long-pent-up grief and anger. Siege-time behaviours have stuck, too — blokadniki say they cannot leave food on their plates, throw away even the stalest bread, or pass a discarded piece of wood without wanting to take it home to feed a non-existent burzhuika. Survivors’ guilt, though never given this name, is common, expressed in many cases as distress at not having secured a relative a proper burial. One woman, not knowing where her father is buried, visits the Piskarevskoye each year on his birthday, and lays flowers on every individual grave she can find whose occupant had the same Christian name or date of birth. She never, she remarks, has flowers enough.6

Many survivors have blocked out the siege entirely, never talking about it even to close friends and family. Others — as Grechina once did — have adopted the possible-to-live-with Brezhnevite version, subsuming their own acutely painful memories into a larger, safer story. But even for those who wanted to talk frankly, making themselves heard could be difficult. ‘Inside’, wrote Marina Yerukhmanova, there was always this question — Can’t I just talk about it how it was? Sometimes I wonder why we kept quiet. Probably because it was somehow not done to talk about it. . Every time conversation touched on the blockade, it seemed that everybody knew everything already — they’d read about it, heard about it, seen the films — and repetition of the details would give neither satisfaction to the teller nor understanding to the listener.

We too watched the films, read what was written about those times. But though your stomach turned upside down, somehow none of it put across the feeling of those days.

Blokadniki often complain that nobody is interested in the siege any more. ‘Each generation has its own wars — Afghanistan, Chechnya’, says one. Another describes giving a talk about the siege to young offenders, and getting no reaction except when she showed them how scurvy had left her with only six teeth.7 Grechina stresses the tension between siege veterans and post-war incomers to Leningrad, who she claims used rudely to grab blokadnik-reserved seats on public transport, justifying themselves on the grounds that in their villages ‘everyone starved too’.8

That the siege took a back seat was true in the 1990s, when the fashionable subjects were the Terror and the Gulag, but is not so now. The last decade has seen the publication of dozens of memoirs and diaries, albeit usually in tiny print runs or in academic journals. The flood continues: just in the time it has taken to research this book several important new accounts have appeared, and more will doubtless continue to emerge from dusty files and top-of-the-wardrobe suitcases.

There has also been a last-minute effort to collect oral testimonies from the remaining siege survivors. Though interviewing blokadniki often tells one more about the strategies the mind employs to make the unbearable bearable than about the siege itself, it is nonetheless a compelling exercise. Sitting at a zakuski-covered kitchen table, in a mahogany-panelled backroom of the Public Library or in a shiny new café, these women — they mostly are women — were actually there. They were the muffled black and white figures shuffling along a snowy street, they themselves queued outside the bread shops, hoisted buckets of water up ice-covered stairs, watched their own flesh fall away and discolour, their parents and siblings fade and die. The events of the siege are distant and strange, but they happened not so very long ago, to that woman sitting right in front of me, insisting that I take another slice of bread and butter and a fresh cup of tea.