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SIX The Ruins of the Blockade of Leningrad and the Aesthetic Struggle for Survival t In early September 1941, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, ever a keen observer of the urban landscape, strolled down to Senate Square in Leningrad to examine the preparations then being undertaken to protect Falconet’s Bronze Horseman against anticipated shelling by the Nazis. A whole army of people, including many volunteers, was hastily burying the monument under piles of sand brought in by ship. The artist, born in 1871, had by then already reached her seventies. She had become a national treasure and was highly regarded, even by Soviet authorities. And yet, watching the selfless efforts of her fellow Leningraders, she felt slightly ashamed to stand by passively. Under normal conditions, inspired by her life-long interest in chronicling changes in the visual appearance of the city, she would have reached for her sketching pad, but, as she noted herself, “I was afraid of drawing—the city is under martial law.” Only at home did she dare to sketch from memory the view of the boxed-up monument. Two days later, when she returned to Senate Square to check the faithfulness of her drawing, it was already out of date.1 That such an established artist would fear being caught in the act of drawing a concealed monument speaks volumes about the control the state had assumed over matters of representation. Suspicions of spying were widespread, and even non-military objects, indeed the entire urban environment, were considered to be strategically sensitive. Photographers, when they had permission to shoot within the city, were by and large lim- The Ruins of the Blockade of Leningrad 153 ited to a narrow range of prescribed subjects: the damage inflicted upon civilian structures by the enemy, the vigilant work of firefighters and airdefense units, rescue and clean-up activities, continuing industrial production , etc. In their memoirs of the blockade, Dmitrii Likhachev and his wife noted that “spymania reached incredible dimensions.”2 The painter A. Pakhomov recalled that “in my work on the blockade series, I made very few on-site sketches. At the beginning I didn’t have the authorization for such drawings, and even when I received it, things weren’t so simple. The population was so suspicious about an artist [sketching in plein air—A.S.] whom it deemed a spy or saboteur, that the mere act of drawing necessitated endless explanations.”3 In addition to such explicit control, artists and reporters often adopted a tacit rule to restrict representation to scenes conducive to supporting both military operations and the popular morale. Views of drastic misery and devastation were considered too demoralizing, possibly even unpatriotic. Thus Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, the authors of the groundbreaking Book of the Blockade, were initially both surprised and shocked that the photographic archives of TASS failed to depict the true horror of the blockade, until reporters of the time explained to them that “they had in 1942–43 considered it their duty to the war effort to show that despite the blockade, the hunger, the cold and the shelling, people continued to work, to serve their country.”4 Consequently, much of the TASS archive contains shots of reasonably well-fed and cheerful workers toiling away to support their country. Even idle gazing was grounds for suspicion. A.I. Vinokurov, a middle school geography teacher, reported in his diary that a Red Army soldier had once brusquely ordered him to move on, as he stood on the Troitskii Bridge and admired the scenery. “It was a pity,” he noted, “but I had to obey.”5 This teacher had had brushes with the authorities before. In February 1942, he had incautiously resolved to expand his collections of views of various regions of the USSR in preparation for his teaching and posted a notice that he was looking to purchase negatives shot in remote areas of the country. Released after a three-hour interrogation at the NKVD, he proceeded to burn his entire collection of photographs, negatives, and maps.6 This is not to say that Leningrad authorities had no interest in documenting the condition of the city—quite the contrary. As early as September 1941, the Executive Committee of the City Soviet sought information from district authorities about damage inflicted during air raids. By mid-October 1941, city authorities had initiated the compiling of information about architectural monuments threatened by destruction .7 On January 4, 1942, the Executive Committee of the City Soviet [3...

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