The Siege through the eyes of Leningrad residents. Diaries and memoirs digitized by the Presidential Library

79 years ago, on September 8, 1941, Leningrad was surrounded by enemy troops. The fascist Siege, which lasted 872 days, began. The Presidential Library, together with the "Radio Rossii" (the primary public radio station in Russia) and the "Peterburgskiy Dnevnik" newspaper, held a large-scale campaign devoted to preserving the historical memory of the Siege of Leningrad of 1941–1944. In total, more than 200 people took part in the project and donated more than 4,000 documents to the Presidential Library. All the materials enter the digital collection of the Presidential Library "Memory of the Great Victory".

The Presidential Library's specialists have to talk with everyone to obtain detailed biographical information about the person who possesses the materials, about the people captured in the photographs. Often Saint-Petersburg residents did not just share this information, but talked about the difficult life during those years, cried, remembering their dead relatives. Of course, such material is worth to be studied and regarded with respect, because they are rich in everyday details and impressions of people.

Letters of Siege time: "Only strong natures will survive"

The collection of wartime letters that entered the Presidential Library, is the issue of great interest. They are written from Leningrad to the front, to the "Big Land", as well as to the besieged city by front-line soldiers and evacuated relatives. More than 800 letters were scanned. Many of them contain traces of military censorship and survived by a miracle. This collection includes 125 letters by a resident of the besieged Leningrad Vanda Iosifovna Garpf (Itzhakina) (born in 1925). Most of them were written by her mother, Adele Mikhailovna Garpf. The rest was written by her father, Joseph Lukich Garpf, and brother Stanislav.

 All letters are addressed to one person - the second brother of Wanda, Mikhail Garpf. Shortly before the war, he left Leningrad making a tour together with a jazz orchestra. The family that remained in the city, mainly his mother, wrote to him almost every day. Many letters bear traces of military censorship: paragraphs or entire pages are painted over or cut out. The head of the family, Joseph Lukich, was in a very difficult situation: "Our daddy is getting weaker every day. Right now ... he looks very ill" (July 20, 1941); "Dad is sick. Weakness, malaise, pain in the stomach" (July 31, 1941). Leningrad residents were not aware of further sorrows: "Now we live still quietly ... we have no worries. But our future is hidden in the darkness" (August 30, 1941). The situation worsened during the autumn: "You are very worried for us. And I must admit that there is something to worry about. Yesterday, missiles of long-range guns exploded in the streets" (September 14, 1941); "Milk is hard to find, it can be exchanged for bread, which everyone lacks" (October 25, 1941); "You know how difficult it is now with the products. It is necessary to survive, but only strong natures will survive, physically - the emaciation of the whole body is affected, and the frosts will be soon here" (November 8, 1941). Hunger greatly worsened the health of Joseph Lukich. On December 30, 1941, a short telegram was sent to Novosibirsk, where Mikhail was in those days: "Today, on the night of December 30, our daddy died. Mooring mother, Stas, Wanda". Having survived difficult sorrows, having lost a father, the family was evacuated from Leningrad in the summer of 1942.

Diaries: "I am swollen out like a log, I have no strength to move"

Diary is a source that is not subjected to censorship. It features details about the everyday life of the besieged Leningrad residents, which cannot be found in letters. Siege diaries are of greatest value. One of these is the diary of Yuri Davydovich Khazanov (1915–1942). His daughter Anna Chernyak gave to the Presidential Library's specialists an amazing letter, according to which we can conclude that the famous writer, author of "Two Captains" Veniamin Kaverin also looked through this diary and, perhaps, used it while writing his books.

The Siege diary of Yuri Davydovich Khazanov (1915–1942) is one big unbearable pain: hunger, war, life ... Being healthily disabled, even before World War II, he was not mobilized into the army and continued to get sick, already in the besieged city.

"The New Year brought no relief", wrote Yuri Khazanov in early 1942. - “We wished each other happiness, cried, and at 8 o'clock went to bed to prevent hunger. And now, from the 1st day, real starvation came. People walk down the street almost dead. I am swollen out like a log, I have no strength to move".

The last records are related to early February 1942. Yuri Khazanov was evacuated from the city, but, depleted and exhausted, died on the way to Nizhny Novgorod. The diary was kept by his friend Yakov Pyatov. After the war, he met the writer Veniamin Kaverin, who complained that he did not find any worthy materials about the Siege of Leningrad. "I told that I have the diary of my best friend", said Yakov Pyatov. - He asked me much to give him a diary for a short time - three days. He assured me that the diary would be completely safe and he would not show it to anyone. And I agreed. <...> When I came to Kaverin three days later to take back a diary, he apologized for the unfulfilled promise - he could not resist and showed Yura's diary to his family, his wife. He said that he had never seen anything like this in the sincerity and purity of the human soul. <...> How he used what he read in the diary, I don’t know".

There are no children during the war

The Presidential Library's collection includes memoirs of people who survived the Siege of Leningrad being children. They are edited memoirs as well as stories, which were kept in the families or were written after the Siege. They include the memoirs of Alexander Vladimirovich Tsimmermanov (born 1931). When the war began, he lived with his parents on Rubinstein Street. "In the third decade of November, bread rations were cut to 125 grams. <...> Other products were not received. Mass hunger and death launched", wrote Alexander Vladimirovich. During the winter of 1941-1942, his parents died of starvation, but they managed to move his son to his aunt (father's sister) on Sinopskaya embankment. "My parents felt that they would not survive, on the morning of December 31, we went with sledging to my father’s sister, my godmother ... and only in the evening, they reached her house... to leave me. But they couldn’t go back. January 3, 1942 mother died. <...> Father died on January 18, 1942, we could bury him only on January 26. <...> They had to give their bread ration stamps to burial in the grave".

The memoirs of Galina Mikhailovna Solovyova (Sirota) (born 1931), "They Lived, Survived" are no less emotional. In August 1941, 9-year-old Galya, the primary school student, was evacuated from Leningrad, along with her grandmother, to the village of Zubrilovo in Penza Region. Her mother Evdokia Alexandrovna Braginskaya (1911–1993) remained in Leningrad. They kept in touch through letters, but in the spring of 1942 mail from the city was less than usual. The bad news was expected. Suddenly, one April day in 1942, they heard the knock on the window of a village house and saw the mother. "She sat on the bench and was silent", reminds Galina Mikhailovna. - "We were silent too. I did not run to her, did not hug her. I was silent. This woman was not my mother! Before us sat an old woman. Her sallow face was thin and scary, and her hands hung like whips. She closed her eyes". Difficult days began - they tried to bring the exhausted woman back to life. Little by little, she began to recover and "look more like that pre-war mother".

School works of children of the besieged Leningrad were often brought along with school diaries. Saint-Petersburg resident Lyudmila Zemskova brought the works that her grandmother’s sister Valentina Lyubova saved while working as the director of the Leningrad school № 105. The children wrote on different topics: "Autumn in Leningrad 1941", "Winter in 1941-1942 in Leningrad", "Why I hate Nazism", "My life". On stained notebook sheets, schoolchildren shared their dreams of post-war life, their love for their native city, described their feelings and mourned for their dead relatives. Fragment of the work of a school student D. Nakhabin: "The most memorable day in my life is January 29. This day my grandmother died. This day I will never forget and will curse Hitler forever ... " The work of the student Tamara Solovyova "My life": "My father fell ill because of lack of food and died on the night of December 20-21. Our brother is missing. He probably fell on the road, as he was very exhausted. On February 10, my mother fell ill. On March 2 she died. No dad, no mom, no brother - I'm alone. <...> On April 8, I went for bread and got under a car and broke my leg. And this, perhaps, saved me from death, as I was fed well in the hospital ... " Zinaida Arkadyevna Itkina, a student of school № 218, wrote about the most memorable day for Leningrad residents - the end of the Siege of Leningrad: "I ran to my grandmother, sat her at the table, took a piece of paper, painted Leningrad like a dot, then painted a circle as a ring of Germans <...> Then I took the pencil and crossed out the ring and left the "city" along and said: "That's all, there is no more Siege!". Grandmother cried with joy ... ".

The pre-war, post-war and rare military photographs of Leningrad residents feature the history of families during the times of tragic events and make them even more personal. A unique picture was presented by the child of the besieged Leningrad resident Sultangali Tuktargali Abdulvalayev. On the photo card, which he entitled "Tea Party" the boy is sitting at a table with his mother in the flat on Nevsky Prospekt. They hold cups in their hands, and in front of them is an empty vase, full of candies and cookies in the pre-war times.

Siege drawings

Besides the photographs, the Presidential Library received lots of drawings of the Siege time. Among them is the album of the Leningrad artist Yuri Bazhanov (1927–1949), who died tragically at the age of 21; the works by the famous graphic artist Ivan Korolyov (1888–1942), who painted the terrible everyday life of the Siege; sketches of the inhabitants of the plant's hospital by Ivan Doroshev, who was an amateur artist, inventor, deputy head of the laboratory of the Leningrad plant "Proletarian", and many others. Drawings of Leningrad children are of particular interest. When the war began, Evgeny Vladislavovich Aganin was 2.5 years old. On a stripped notebook paper by crayons he depicted a battle: green tanks with a red star on board move across the river over the bridge and shoot at the enemy, in the sky above them is a Soviet plane that shot down a German enemy, and the inscription in block blue letters "This is war" is written on top.

The Presidential Library received various documents related to work, study, military service, evacuation, and simple everyday life of a city during the Siege. Among them are private documents of Komsomol and party members, driver’s licenses, school diaries, mobilization instructions, etc.

The materials featuring the history of the Siege of Leningrad are only a small part of what the Presidential Library received during a large project. These and many other historical documents will be included in the thematic digital collection of the Presidential Library "The Defence and Siege of Leningrad" as well as in the personal family sections of the "Memory of the Great Victory" collection.