Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege Read Online Free PDF

accompany me and would pick me up in his car at the Metropole.
    At the airport we were joined by Colonel Studyonov, our frequent guide on front trips. Little Dangulov who had never been in Leningrad before was as excited as I was about this trip, and it was something of an anticlimax to the ‘great adventure’ to see him emerge a few minutes later from the airport booking office holding in his hand three Moscow–Leningrad tickets, complete with their return halves! Then after a while an airport official said ‘Passengers for plane number so-and-so, come this way.’ That was our plane. There were several officers travelling; a young woman with a white coat and red beret, possibly an actress, and a middle-aged woman with a little boy. It seemed a healthy sign that children should be taken to Leningrad. Shortly before the plane took off – it was a comfortable twenty-seater Douglas – there was a heated discussion between the child’s mother and an airport official who charged her with taking more luggage than was allowed, and accused her of ‘cheating the State.’ I don’t know how the discussion ended. The cargo, apart from the passengers’ luggage, contained numerous packing cases and the matrix of the Moscow Pravda, which, no doubt, was going to be printed a day late in Leningrad. All this felt surprisingly normal.
    And then we took off. The idea of going to Leningrad – after nearly 26 years – was hard to take in, and since I had been told nothing about the programme, I made no attempt to visualise anything lying ahead. There is a peculiar pleasure in abandoning oneself completely to the imprévu. We were flying north, leaving Moscow behind us almost at once. To the left I could see, among the autumn trees, the white sugar-cake pavilion of the Khimki bathing beach. There was a cold nip of autumn in the air, and I remembered regretfully how in this cold and rainy summer I had gone to bathe at Khimki only three or four times. Now the beach was quite deserted. Then we passed over a wooded belt of datchas, with an electric suburban train running along some railway. Moscow was now far behind us. And as we flew out of the immediate neighbourhood of Moscow into the great spaces of the northern forests – an ocean of dark-green fir trees with here and there a patch of fluffy bright yellow birches – I remembered the same scenery the day when I flew north out of Moscow in October 1941, when the fate of Moscow and of Russia was in the balance. The Germans were already at Viasma then. Then, as now, we flew under a ceiling of heavy leaden clouds, driven on by a cold north wind, and below there was the same vast expanse of dark-green fir trees with patches of fluffy yellow birches. But what a difference! Then, this country was in mortal danger, today it was in its hour of triumph.
    The girl with the white coat and the red beret was dozing, at the back of the plane the middle-aged woman was playing with her two children – another one had turned up from somewhere – and in the front seats were three men with caps, two of them with Orders of the Red Banner, who looked like engineers or factory executives. The worst of air travel is that you never get to know your fellow travellers. Dangulov, sitting beside me, was talking excitedly about the trip, and also said that ‘next time we must try to go to the Caucasus together.’ He is a stocky little dark-skinned Circassian, with a passion for his native Caucasus, full of Caucasian stories, and altogether very good company. One day he told me the story of his family. It belonged to one of the few hundred Moslem families who, during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, embraced the Orthodox religion, came down from the mountains, and founded the town of Armavir in the Kuban Steppes, as a result of which they acquired Cossack privileges. Armavir was burned down by the retreating Germans early in 1943. Dangulov had been a war correspondent of the Red Star until earlier