History often forgets about the siege of Leningrad, focusing instead on its southern counterpart, Stalingrad. In that the Nazis’ retreat from Stalingrad has widely been seen as a turning point, the focus is understandable, but as a consequence it is easy to overlook the siege that Leningrad, a fine city of wide promenades and ancient jingling trams, endured for eight hundred and seventy-one days of unrelenting war. Once the home of tsars, then the heartland of the revolution, it seemed remarkable to me that any semblance of the royal city had survived the beating it had taken, and indeed, in the suburbs all the way through to the heart of the city, an architecture of pragmatism and speed had taken over, of squares and rectangles and grey tarmac before brown walls. History was of little interest to the Soviets, unless it was the history of their success, and, as if embarrassed by the fine stone houses that still survived around the canals of the inner city, the high walls of the old town were plastered over with posters proclaiming STRIVE FOR VICTORY! and CELEBRATE COMMUNISM AND UNITE IN LABOUR! and other such azures of wisdom. The Winter Palace stood rather awkwardly in the midst of all these ugly good intentions, a monument to a bygone era and testimony to the regime which had been overthrown. To celebrate the Winter Palace would have, in some quaint way, glorified its previous occupiers, but to destroy it would have been an insult to those men and women of 1917 who fought against it and all it stood for, and so it and much of Leningrad remained standing strong, walls too thick to be more than scratched by bullets or cracked by ice.
The Leningrad Cronus Club resided, to my surprise, not in one of the great buildings of the old city, but in a far smaller, more modest tenement tucked in behind a Jewish cemetery, whose stones were long-since overgrown and whose trees dangled heavy over its high grey walls. The Club’s gatekeeper and, as it turned out, one of the few remaining members, introduced herself simply as,
“Olga. You must be Harry. You won’t do at all–those boots are quite wrong. Don’t stand there–come in!”
Olga, fifty-nine years old, grey hair plaited down to her waist, shoulders bent slightly forward to give her chin a jutting, protruding quality that her face itself did not merit, may once have been a beautiful young woman at whose lightest step upon tiny feet the heart of many an aristocrat raced; but now, as she grumbled and grunted at the creaking pipes that ran up the staircase of the tenement block, she was almost a child’s caricature of that creature called a crone. Green tiles on the floor and faded cobalt-blue paint on the walls were the tenement’s only real concession to vitality, and the doors that looked out on to the winding staircase upwards were kept firmly shut, “To keep the heat in!”
It was March in the city, and though the air was still biting cold, the snow was beginning to melt, whiteness giving way to a perpetual shimmer of grey-black as five months of embedded dirt, soot and grime was revealed from beneath the crystal piles shoved up against the roadside. The worst of the ice had gone from the roofs, but these masses of shovelled snow remained, insulating themselves, monuments to the fading winter that had gone before.
“I’ve got whisky,” she said, waving me to a padded chair by the orange-banded electric fire. “But you should have vodka and be grateful.”
“I’ll have vodka and be grateful,” I said, slipping into the soft padded furniture with relief.
“You speak Russian with an eastern accent–where did you learn?”
“Komosomolsk,” I admitted, “a few lives ago.”
“You need to speak with a western accent, because you look soft,” she chided. “Otherwise people will ask. And your boots–far too new. Here.” Something metal flashed across the room and landed in my lap. It was a cheese grater. “Have you never been to Russia before?” she demanded. “You’re doing this all wrong!”
“Not on a Russian passport,” I admitted. “American, British, Swiss, German—”
“No no no no! All wrong! No good, start again!”
“Forgive me,” I blurted as Olga sat down in front of me with an unmarked vodka bottle and two intimidatingly large glasses, and I set to work with the cheese grater on my boots. “But I expected there to be more people at the Club. Where’s everyone else?”
“There’s a few sleeping upstairs,” she grumbled, “and Masha’s got a toy boy in again, which I don’t approve of. They drop in sometimes when passing through, but that’s all they ever do these days–pass through. Not like the old days.”
There was a misty gleam in Olga’s eyes at the mention of the old days, but it was quickly supplanted by a focus on the vital business of drinking and chastising. “Your hair is disgusting,” she exclaimed. “What colour do you call that? Carrot? You’ll have to dye it at once.”