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| The Aftermath of Slow Bombing. The Siege of Leningrad in the History of One Family |
| 2025-01-28 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Kirill Novikov [REGNUM] January 27 is the anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad. The date is not a round one: Russia and the world celebrated the 80th anniversary of the final liberation of the city last year, in 2024. But for the descendants of those who survived the siege, the "beauty" of the date is of no importance. Every year on the anniversary of the beginning of the blockade, September 8, and on the day of liberation, January 27, residents of St. Petersburg and Leningrad remember those who did not survive the 872 days of the continuously ongoing catastrophe, and those who defended the city on the Pulkovo line and the Nevsky patch, worked and shared with their loved ones the crumbs of the rations they received from their work cards. IA Regnum assessed those who condemned the city of almost three million to starvation, and told in detail about the feat of the soldiers of the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts. Today the author will share the story of his family, in order to show the everyday life of blockaded Leningrad using its example. Our family keeps the story of our grandmother, Maria Nikolaevna Sapikova. She was born during the Civil War, in 1918, into a peasant family. Her parents, Nikolai Fedorovich and Pelageya Ilyinichna, had a traditionally large family - two sons and four daughters. The memory has been preserved that great-grandfather and great-grandmother "ran a single-handed household" - with a cow, a horse and pigs. In Leningrad, in the pre-war years, Maria Nikolaevna first worked in the printing house named after Evgenia Sokolova (by the way, before the revolution this printing house was named after Marx, but not Karl, but Adolf Marx, a publisher and teacher), and eight years later - at the Printing Yard, where she typeset school textbooks. Including in Finnish - for the Karelo-Finnish Republic and, who knows, perhaps for Finland that was never Sovietized. In August 1941, when the Wehrmacht on one side and the Finnish army on the other were approaching Leningrad, Maria Sapikova was sent along with thousands of Leningraders to dig trenches and fortifications near the regional center of Kingisepp. The first weeks and months of the blockade - autumn and early winter - were spent on "public works": Maria Nikolaevna told how she dismantled wooden houses for firewood, cleared snow, cleaned roads, kept watch on the roofs of houses, and put out incendiary bombs. Her older sister Elizaveta worked in the city (our family lived on the outskirts, almost in a village) at a defense plant and - fortunately, her health allowed it - donated blood at donor stations. Then, in the first days of the blockade, the first sad news arrived - the ex-wife of Maria Nikolaevna's older brother died from a shrapnel wound - she went to the market in our outlying area of Novaya Derevnya and came under fire. Brother, Alexander Nikolaevich, was at the forefront of the Leningrad Front at that time. He still had to go through the Great Patriotic War to Victory and take part in the war with Japan. Their little three-year-old daughter Irina lived with her grandmother, Pelageya Ilyinichna, throughout the blockade. But the family was facing their first winter of the siege. They hid from the bombings in makeshift shelters, something like trenches (there were no bomb shelters on the outskirts of Leningrad, in the Novaya Derevnya area), and they also had to go to the river for water - in our case, we went to the Bolshaya Nevka with buckets. The windows were covered with blankets, and the rooms were lit by small oil lamps. The meager rations in the family were divided among brothers, the best piece was given to the children. For "grammiki" - bread rations, we went to the bakery in Serebryakov Lane at six o'clock. Our family was saved by the fact that everyone was actively working, even the dependents: Elizaveta, Maria's older sister, went to babysit the neighbors' children, Elena carried water for people, the boys chopped wood in other people's yards. It was also saved by the fact that the family, living on the outskirts, was not exactly city people - they worked in the vegetable gardens, "on potatoes and vegetables", in the hayfields they prepared fodder for the cattle Winters were more difficult. At first, during the blockade, the family had to make do with what was left from their own reserves of their subsistence farming; later, they ate bran and "duranda" - pressed bars made from what was left over from flour production. Essentially, cake. This "duranda" could be steamed in a saucepan, and it turned out to be something like porridge. The cake, from which they baked flat cakes, is mentioned in many blockade memoirs - there were stories that even during the "two famines" - the hungriest winters of the blockade - some managed to save grains from the 10-gram "ration" of sugar, add them to the "duranda", and it turned out to be something like candy for children. But death from hunger, cold and disease was close by - and it was not a figure of speech. The family remembers the poems from the blockade cycle by Olga Berggolts: On children's sleds, narrow and funny, Grandmother Maria also recalled these children's sleds, on which Leningraders carried the bodies of the dead. Often people simply did not have the strength to walk to the cemetery, they could leave the sled with the deceased relative in any yard, so the family always locked the gates closer to evening. In the second year of the blockade, our "peasant" house on the outskirts was dismantled for the needs of the army, and the large family had to move to the center - to a five-story apartment building No. 90 on Bolshoy Prospekt Petrogradskaya Storona. After the move, the family's situation became more complicated: if earlier they could somehow rely on their own farm, now any additional opportunities were cut off. And the ration was, as is known, only 125 grams of bread (often with the same cake) per day for employees and dependents, and 250 grams for workers. Some of the relatives were evacuated from the city. Olga, one of my grandmother's sisters, was seriously ill and taken to Kazan, but died there in 1943. Her little daughter Tamara remained in Leningrad with her grandmother. Tamara's father, Grigory Sheloukhin, died of starvation in 1942, and is buried at the Serafimovskoye Cemetery. The head, the "patriarch" of the family - great-grandfather Nikolai Fyodorovich Sapikov - died of hunger, and great-grandmother Pelageya Ilyinichna became the head of the family, she strictly ran the household and always fairly divided the bread. Despite all the horrors of the blockade, she managed to raise both granddaughters and save their lives. And great-grandmother Pelageya also helped the front as much as she could: she sewed underwear and warm clothes for the soldiers. Just as women now, including in St. Petersburg, are helping the SVO - weaving camouflage nets, making trench candles, collecting the same warm clothes... As Grandmother Maria recalled, this responsibility for the survival of loved ones helped to preserve oneself as individuals. But on the other hand, this same responsibility itself could become the cause of death, along with hunger, disease, and death from almost daily German shelling. In the spring of 1943, when the blockade seemed endless, a disease specific to the city was registered in Leningrad, which often resulted in death. At least every third person dying in Leningrad died because of it. Doctors called this disease "the consequence of slow bombing." It is a special kind of hypertension - "high blood pressure from continuous nervous tension - the result of continuous shelling and bombing. A person may outwardly almost completely not react to shelling and bombing, he may be able to control himself perfectly, but his nerves live independently of his spirit. And what's more: the better a person "controls himself", the more intensely and calmly he works, the greater the chances of his nerves and blood vessels becoming unusable." Perhaps the family was also supported by the belief that “our people” would return alive from the front and from evacuation, and after the German ring was broken. The family’s “defense” was largely undermined by the news that Maria’s younger brother, Nikolai, who went to the front in 1942 at the age of 18 and served as a signalman, went missing the following year. But they still believed that he would be found and send a message… The fate of the great-uncle is still unknown; only a few letters from the front remain from him. But the dream of family reunification has largely come true. My grandmother's twin sister, Elena, completed nursing courses at the beginning of the war and went to the front. She went through the entire Great Patriotic War, the Soviet-Japanese War, saved the lives of hundreds of wounded soldiers, for which she received many awards. In 1946, she returned to Leningrad. She lived to see the 30th anniversary of the lifting of the siege and the 30th anniversary of the Victory. But soon she died suddenly - heart... Our family chronicle does not claim to be unique: every family in St. Petersburg can share their own story about the Leningrad blockade. The testimony that was heard at the Nuremberg Tribunal: 632,253 blockade survivors who died, 97% of whom were killed by hunger and died of disease - this testimony will never become "just statistics" for us. |
| Posted by:badanov |