“A siren would wail when a performance began” - unknown pages of the Siege of Leningrad in the Presidential Library’s collections

As part of a joint project launched in cooperation with Peterburgsky Dnevnik newspaper and Radio Rossii - St. Petersburg we continue our story about the everyday life in besieged Leningrad. More than 250 people have already responded to the call to share memories of the life in the besieged city and provided roughly 3,000 unique documents for digitization.

Among these people are siege survivors, who now live in Israel. The book entitled Memories of the Siege (Blokadnoy Pamyati Stranitsy), which they have donated to the Presidential Library, consists of several dozen stories narrated by residents of the besieged city. They are about hunger - the worst disaster of that time, desperate efforts of Leningraders to get precious water, and their survival despite everything …

Today our story will spotlight the activities of cultural institutions during the siege. It would seem that such a topic could not have existed at all – there were much more important matters... However, even in the besieged city theatres continued to work, voices of announcers could be heard on the radio - and this meant: the city was alive, the city didn’t give up.

In the chapter Our Dear Theatre (Memories of the Siege book) Mikhail Fonaryov recalls: “The Theatre of Musical Comedy helped us and thousands of Leningrad residents to survive the siege, hunger and stay alive. It was located in a luxurious palace building at 13, Rakova Street (today Italyanskaya Street). The performances were staged regularly, sometimes twice a day, until about mid-January 1942, and then for several more months at the Alexandrinsky Theatre on Ostrovsky Square”.

He adds that as the siege began it was the theatre that became an important part of the life of Leningrad schoolchildren, not the street. “Of course, we did not have enough money to go to the theatre every day, but it was the deadly punctuality of the Germans that helped. Exactly fifteen minutes after the start of the performance, a siren wail would warn of the beginning of an air raid. All the spectators had to go downstairs into bomb shelters. Many people hid in a bomb shelter located in the basement of our house ... The alarm ended and we – teenagers – would join the crowd of spectators, who returned to the hall, and thus entered the theatre hall. We could hardly find any vacant seats, so we sat somewhere in the upper balcony or on the steps ... ”, he recalls.

In the chapter He was the Soul of the Radio During the Siege of the above-mentioned book Yevgeny Binevich describes an amazing announcer of that time: “Everyone called him Yasha, or just Yashka. I talked to many radio employees during the siege. All of them were different people, with different fates, character traits, likes, but there was one thing that united them. When these people talked about Yakov Babushkin (1913–1944), their Yasha, a kind smile lit up their faces”.

The radio program “Leningrad is Speaking”, which was broadcast during the war, proved: the city lives on, it keeps on fighting and doesn’t give up. The program featured reports from troops units, factories, interviews with teenagers, who joined the workforce, and residents on the streets. Composer D. Shostakovich, literary critic B. Eichenbaum, poet N. Tikhonov, academician I. Orbeli, professor K. Ogorodnikov and many others went on the air.

When the first winter of the siege came and brought hunger and cold, the staff of the radio committee moved to a basement, which they called a dormitory. Yakov Babushkin was appointed head of the music broadcasting department, who performed the duties of the artistic director of the radio committee. “We need a series of thematic programs. Read the classics every day, at fixed times ... Let's start with War and Peace. And something more amusing - Gogol, for example”, Yakov Babushkin said.

In the chapter under the title After the Bombing I Would Scream -“Music!” Lyudmila Girshina recalls: “The sounds of sirens and radio announcements of air attacks and shelling were heard almost every day. We had bags that mother took when we ran to the bomb shelter. There in the dark we huddled together and had to sit on the benches for hours waiting for the “end of the air raid” signal, accompanied by the sound of music ... I was so happy to hear it. I would jump up and scream: “Music! Music by Petukhovich! “I still can’t explain the origin of this last name, which somehow resembled the last name of composer Shostakovich ...”

Earlier, as part of the campaign launched in an effort to preserve the historical memory of the Siege of Leningrad, we spotlighted ship raising operations and deepening of fairways during the war, a story of a submariner and lines from his last letter, a message to the past addressed to the dead brother, essays written by Leningrad schoolchildren during the severest winter of 1941-1942, a diary, which attracted interest of Veniamin Kaverin, author of Two Captains, etc.

On the Presidential Library’s portal you can also go on a virtual tour around the exhibition halls of the temporarily closed State Museum of Defence and Siege of Leningrad, study the electronic collection “The Defence and Siege of Leningrad”, which consists of official documents, periodicals, first-hand accounts of Leningrad residents, ration cards, photo- and newsreels.