Marking the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory. “Thousands of Leningraders took the spades and went out into the gardens ...”

“About the end of April, in the Botanical Garden against the Grenadier Bridge, we were digging a hole for bunkers, and I picked up young maple leaves there. We cooked soup from them - very nice. We eat any greens that are edible - sorrel, hare legs - and that's it in the mouth. But we see little greenery. All the time at the factory, round the clock. <...> In mid-July, Bella Meerson and Tonya Ivanova were sent “on a mission” by the foreman in Toksovo for a sorrel for the workers of the workshop".

The "Diary entries and memories of the siege of Leningrad Khvalovskaya (Zhukova) Lidiya Vasilievna" (2019) are available in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library.

People who survive the siege do not like to recall it, because diaries and later recorded memories become especially valuable artifacts. The memory of Leningrad 1941-1942 is especially difficult, when everyone’s life depended on the very “125 blockade grams / With fire and death in half”. This norm was introduced by resolution of the Military Council No. 00409 of the Leningrad Front, which is provided in the electronic copy of the book “The Siege of Leningrad in the documents of declassified archives” by Nikolai Volkovsky (2004) from the Presidential Library’s collections.

Minimized soldering of bread was sorely lacking. Winter and early spring of 1942 claimed hundreds of thousands of lives of Leningraders and defenders of the city. Death spared no one: neither by age, nor by gender, nor even by position. The painter Ivan Bilibin, a world-famous artist, died of starvation in January 1942. The climber Aloiz Zemba from the four climbers who saved the spires of the Peter and Paul Cathedral from enemy bombing, lived from lack of strength in one of the chapels of the temple and died of starvation. Often exhausted citizens fell right on the snowy streets and froze there.

The front and party leadership then decided that this should not be repeated in the coming year. It adopted a program to combat hunger, part of which was gardening - so unexpected in the prevailing conditions, but proved to be effective. In a leaflet widely distributed throughout the city with the appeal “Comrades of Leningraders! In the conditions of the Patriotic War of the Soviet people against the Nazi invaders, an increase in food is required" says the immutable: "In the conditions of the Patriotic War of the Soviet people against the Nazi invaders, an increase in food is required to meet the needs of the Red Army and the population. Each worker must have his own personal garden ..." (1942).

This appeal was unexpected and unusual for the former imperial capital, which classical architecture was studied in the squares and streets. But to live in eternal hunger and fear was also impossible. Citizens, realizing the importance of implementing the food program, made the impossible possible.

On the second page of the digitized newspaper Leningradskaya Pravda, 1942, No. 66 (8172) (March 20), we read: “By the decision of the Executive Committee, the Lengorsovet workers' deputies, the executive committees of the district councils are urgently required to start organizing personal consumer gardens and their associations. It is proposed to the suburban agriculture and land construction trusts that seedlings be grown for individual gardening. From March 25, agro-consultations will be organized for the population of the city on the issues of growing vegetables and potatoes”.

Seeds were purchased in special stores open in every district of the city. The authorities not only demanded, but also trained Leningraders to work completely unusual for them, because the vast majority of citizens never engaged in agriculture.

In addition to consultations on the cultivation of vegetables and gardening instructions, brochures on the use of raw fruits, on the preparation of soups, meatballs, casseroles, jelly, stewed fruit, marshmallows and many other dishes were published in huge numbers; on harvesting for the future beets and its tops, turnips, radishes, horseradish, zephyr, beans, carrots and other plants.

The work in the city was boiling. Through the efforts of its emaciated inhabitants, weakened by hunger and cold, Leningrad became, in fact, one continuous garden: the beds were broken not only in the more or less adapted Summer Garden and other parks, but also around the Kazan Cathedral, near St. Isaac’s Cathedral, on the Field of Mars...

In the article “For a Heavy Yield”, published on the pages of the newspaper Leningradskaya Pravda, No. 123 (8229) (May 26), you can read: “In the Pargolovsky district, a 25-hectare plot of land has been allotted for the subsidiary farming of our plant. As early as May 4, the first group of workers arrived and immediately set to work. Immediately, we started stuffing hotbeds. Harvested land, on stretchers and trolleys delivered to the greenhouses manure. Cabbage, rutabaga, leeks were planted on seedlings, taking 200 ramomes. The collective farm team, having joined the socialist competition, set itself the task of collecting 600 tons of vegetables this year. This amount is enough for factory canteens for a year”.  

As you know, the Presidential Library, marking the year of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi siege, held a campaign to collect materials: documents, letters, diaries, photographs from the personal archives of the besieged city, together with Radio Rossiya and the Petersburgsky Dnevnik. Artifacts are digitized and enter the collections of the Presidential Library, become available to users all over the world, and are widely covered in the media. More than 250 people responded to the library’s appeal to share evidence of that time, providing at least 3,000 unique documents for digitization.

These diaries, often cursory sketches of time, contain the theme of the siege kitchen-garden, which was once the "brilliant St. Petersburg", according to the poet Nikolai Agnivtsev.

“The year 1942 has come, summer”, - says Yuri Pavlovich Ivanov in “Memories of War and Childhood in the Siege of Leningrad”, recorded by specialists of the Presidential Library and available in the electronic reading room, “It’s become a little easier, they added bread to us somewhere in December, but we only felt it, maybe in March. But what is easier? It was hungry. The only thing that we began in June to eat some kind of grass, saltbush. I remember that very well. They began to plant gardens wherever possible. Gardens were planted on Kirovsky Avenue, and somewhere even near St. Isaac's Cathedral it was... ".

The events of those 900 terrible days of the siege of the city on the Neva and its liberation is presented in the special digital collection of the Presidential Library Defence and Siege of Leningrad, which has become part of the larger and, in fact, the national collection Memory of the Great Victory, which from year to year the year is adding with new unique materials.

The “siege” collection includes not only electronic documents, newsreels, books, both fiction and documentary, diaries of Leningraders who survived the terrible times with the city, but also electronic copies of newspapers: Leningradskaya Pravda, Smena, Krasnaya Zvezda; there are also digitized editions of partisan editions, leaflets and posters from the time of the war.