Some of the thousands who died en route; Kobona, April 1942

Summer 1942: though outwardly the city returned to life, mortality remained high.

Victory salute; Troitsky Bridge, 27 January 1944

Reconstruction: Nevsky Prospekt, opposite the Beloselskikh-Belozerskihk Palace, 1944

Coming home: demobilised soldiers, July 1945

Notes

Introduction

1 Olga Berggolts, ‘Tragediya moego pokoleniya’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 18 July 1990, p. 5.

2 Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945, p. 238. The death rate among Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Nazis is reckoned to be even higher, at 55 per cent.

3 Professor Ulrich Herbert, interview with the author, Freiburg, April 2008.

4 The Times, 19 January 1943.

5 Commander Geoffrey Palmer; interview with the author, Sherborne, July 2007. Commander Palmer, who sadly passed away before this book was completed, was probably the last Englishman to have met Stalin. He described him as resembling ‘a benevolent grocer; someone who would make a good godfather to one’s children. He looked you straight in the eye, but then you realised that he was looking right through you and out the other side. It was rather uncanny.’

6 The diarist Vera Inber describes visiting the museum on D-Day: see her Leningrad Diary, p. 204. For an interview with the curator at the reopened museum see Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds, Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs and Documentary Prose, p. 170. See also Lisa Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments, p. 144. The book is a fascinating analysis of siege memorialisation up to the present — the ‘story of the story of the siege’, as Kirschenbaum calls it.

7 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, p. 14.

8 See Sergei Yarov, ‘Rasskazy o blokade: struktura, ritorika i stil’, Nestor, 6, 2003, p. 422.

Part 1. Invasion: June — September 1941

Chapter 1: 22 June 1941

1 Dmitry Likhachev, Reflections on the Russian Soul: A Memoir, p. 215.

2 Yelena Skrjabina, Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader, p. 3.

3 Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, A Book of the Blockade, p. 236.

4 Edward Crankshaw, ed., Khrushchev Remembers, London, 1971, p. 135.

5 Harold Shukman, ed., Stalin’s Generals, pp. 2, 319–20.

6 Solomon Volkov, St Petersburg: A Cultural History, p. 425.

7 G. Kulagin, Dnevnik i pamyat: o perezhitom v gody blokady, Leningrad, 1978, p. 17. Notes to Pages 14–28

8 Elliott Mossman, ed., The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910–1954, p. 203.

9 Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941–1945, p. 8.

10 John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany,vol. 1, p. 105.

11 Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, pp. 401–2; Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 37.

12 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944, p. 24.

13 Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, eds, The Halder War Diary, 1939–1942, p. 313.

14 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 11; Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, pp. 14–15; Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, pp. 142, 147.

15 Field Marshal von Kleist, in Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side of the Hill: Germany’s Generals, Their Rise and Fall, p. 182.

Chapter 2: Barbarossa

1 Yelena Skrjabina, Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader, p. 4.

2 Andrei Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade: sbornik dokumentov, doc. 197, p. 466.

3 Richard Bidlack, ‘The Political Mood in Leningrad during the First Year of the Soviet-German War’, The Russian Review, 59, January 2000, p. 99.

4 Dzeniskevich, ed., Leningrad v osade, doc. 197, p. 466.

5 Interview with Dr Lyuba Vinogradova, Moscow 2007.