Brian Moynahan - Leningrad: Siege and Symphony

LENINGRAD

SIEGE AND SYMPHONY

LENINGRAD

SIEGE

AND

SYMPH ONY

Brian Moynahan

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright 2013 by Brian Moynahan

Maps by William Donohoe

Jacket design by Christopher Moisan

Jacket photographs: top, Corbis; photo shows Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (19061975), Russian composer; undated; date photgraphed ca. 1930s. Bottom, Corbis; Leningrad Blockade 1941, fire after the first National Socialist air raids in Leningrad, photographed in September 1941; Berliner Verlag/Archiv/dpa/Corbis. Author photograph Katie Bridgeman

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First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Quercus Editions Ltd

P ICTURE CREDITS

S ECTION 1: p1 Top: Getty Images/UIG, Bottom RIA Novosti/Lebrecht Music & Arts;
p2 Top: DeAgostini/Getty Images; p3 Endeavour London Ltd;
p4 Top: Bettmann/CORBIS, Bottom: Getty Images/AFP;
p5 Top: Bettmann/CORBIS, Bottom: Endeavour London Ltd.;

p7 Top: Rodchenko & Stepanova Archive, DACS, RAO, 2013,
Bottom: Getty Images/UIG/Sovfoto; p8 Top left: Getty Images/UIG,
Bottom : Photas/Tass/Press Association Images S ECTION 2: p1 Top: Getty
Images/UIG/Sovfoto; p2 Top: Courtesy of author; p3 Top: Berliner
Verlag/Archiv/dpa/Corbis; Bottom: Berliner Verlag/Archiv/dpa/Corbis;
p4 Top : akg-images, Bottom Endeavour London Ltd.; p5 Top: SCR PHOTO LIBRARY,
Bottom: akg-images; p7 Top: Lebrecht Music & Arts, Bottom: Photas/Tass/Press
Association Images; p8 Top : Photas/Tass/Press Association Images.

Printed in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8021-2316-9

eISBN 978-0-8021-9190-8

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

F OR

T ILLY

WITH LOVE

Contents

Dramatis Personae

Akhmatova, Anna (18891966) Poet of genius, whose Requiem is a masterpiece of the agonies of the Terror. Her first husband was shot by the secret police. Her son and her partner Nikolay Punin were sent to the camps. A friend of Shostakovich, to whom she dedicated verses.

Berggolts, Olga (19101975) Poet of rare power. Arrested in the Terror in 1936, beaten during interrogation and lost the child she was carrying stillborn. During the Siege, her broadcasts on Radio Leningrad stiffened morale in the darkest months.

Beria, Lavrenti (18991953) Head of the NKVD 19381953. A sadist and rapist. Suffered the same eventual fate, of torture and execution, as his predecessor.

Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Valerian (190371) Composer and music-ologist, studied at the Conservatoire. Close friend of Shostakovich, particularly in the 1920s. Siege diarist.

Eliasberg, Karl Ilyich (19071978) Conductor of the Leningrad Radio Committee Orchestra. Well never play this, he said, when the score of the Seventh was flown into the besieged city. He had lost more than half his players over the winter, to hunger and shell fire, and only special rations kept him alive. The premiere was a triumph. After the war, Eliasberg was cruelly ignored as the Leningrad Philharmonia, and its conductor, Yevgeny Mravinsky, returned from their evacuation in Siberia.

Glazunov, Alexander (18651936) Composer and head of the Conservatoire from 190628 (during the name changes from St Petersburg to wartime Petrograd to post-1924 Leningrad). Taught and much admired young Shostakovich, arranging special rations for him during the civil war hunger. Emigrated to Paris in 1928.

Glikman, Isaak (19112003) Close and trusted friend of Shosta-kovich, acting almost as a private secretary at times, with vigorous correspondence between them. Critic and professor at the Leningrad Conservatoire.

Glinka, Vladislav Mikhailovich (19031983) Elegant scholar, curator and archivist at the Hermitage museum in Leningrad, and survivor of a distinguished Imperial family.

Inber, Vera (18901972) Daughter of a publisher, partly educated in Paris. Writer of prose and poetry, and Siege diarist who broadcast her poems on Radio Leningrad.

Izvekov, Boris (18911942) Professor, head of Geophysics at Leningrad Technical University, and a leading climatologist. Arrested by the NKVD on 3 February 1942, interrogated on the conveyor, sentenced to death for counter-revolution and treason.

Kharms, Daniil (19051942) Surrealist, absurdist and short story writer of wit and fantasy. Arrested in 1931, and released, but in hunger and poverty thereafter, able to write only for childrens magazines. Arrested again, for treason, in 1941 and died of starvation in prison.

Khachaturian, Aram (19031978) With Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, one of the trio of great Soviet composers to be condemned for formalism.

Krukov, Andrei (1929) Professor and musicologist. Kept a diary as a schoolboy in Leningrad during the Siege. The leading authority on the premiere of the Seventh.

Kruzkhov, N.F. (Unknown) Interrogator at the Bolshoi Dom with Leningrad NKVD.

Mayakovsky, Vladimir (18991930) Futurist poet, playwright, actor. In 1929, working with the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Shostakovich wrote the music for his play, The Bedbug . Mayakovsky shot himself the following year.

Meretskov, Kiril (18971968) General, army commander, and survivor. Arrested at the outbreak of war, tortured, confessed implicating others whom Beria had shot. Released from prison to command the Fourth Army outside Leningrad. Retook Tikhvin in December 1941, but failed to prevent the slaughter of Second Shock Army on the Volkhov in the spring and summer 1942.

Meyerhold, Vsevelod (18741940) Actor and theatre director of immense variety and power. Plucked young Shostakovich from Leningrad in 1928, whilst they worked on his opera The Nose , he and his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, putting him up in their Moscow flat. Defended the composer from the attacks on Lady Macbeth . Arrested, tortured and shot. Zinaida Raikh was murdered.

Mravinsky, Yevgeny (190388) Conductor, inexperienced and little known before making his name after conducting the Leningrad Philharmonia in Shostakovichs tumultuously applauded Fifth Symphony. Evacuated with the Philharmonia to Siberia during the war.

Oborin, Len (190774) Close friend of Shostakovich in their student years. Pianist and composer.

Shostakovich, Mariya Dmitrievna (19031973) Composers elder sister. Our whole world crumbled around us in one night, she said when the NKVD came for her husband, Vsevolod Frederiks, in 1936. An outstanding physicist, he was sent to the camps where, his health ruined, he died. Mariya herself was exiled from Leningrad. Sofiya Mikhailova Vazar, the composers mother-in-law, was also arrested.

Shostakovich, Sofiya Vasilyevna (18781955) Composers mother. Siberian born, she had danced for the tsarevich as a young girl. A pianist of quality, she started teaching her son to play on his ninth birthday.