Marking the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory. Without intermission: the theater during the siege

When weapons speak, muses are silent... This ancient saying, which was not originated on our land, was completely refuted during the Great Patriotic War. In these harsh days, the muses were not silent - they led into battle, supported the spirit of those who fought with the enemy at the front lines and in the rear, and became terrible weapons.

The Presidential Library’s portal in its collections The Defence and Siege of Leningrad and The Year of Theater in Russia presents unique materials on the history of Russian theater during the Leningrad siege; along with the decisions of local authorities, fiction and documentary literature, video lectures, abstracts of dissertations, memoirs and correspondence of theater workers, these are also manuscript diaries from the personal archives of the inhabitants of the besieged city, which were collected by the Presidential Library in conjunction with the St. Petersburg Diary as part of a large-scale campaign marking the 75th anniversary of the complete lifting of the siege of Leningrad.

...Summer of 1941. It seems that the stronghold is closing and that inhuman trials await ahead. Residents of the city are buying up everything that remains in grocery stores. Anxiety rises. The Germans are getting closer to the city ...

In August 1941, the evacuation of theatrical groups of Leningrad began. Actors who were not evacuated were included in the troupes of the Baltic Fleet Theater, the People's Militia Theater (later the theater propaganda platoon of the Red Army House), the operetta ensemble under the direction of Bronislava Bronskaya, concert and chef brigades and others.

Your way out, propaganda platoon!

A special place among the publications presented in the above-mentioned collections belongs to the book Without intermission. Actors of the city of Lenin during the siege of 1970, which is available in the electronic reading room of the Presidential Library. The collection is built up of memories of the artists of the besieged Leningrad. Heroes, according to the preface, “did not attack, did not shoot with rifles, and, nevertheless, all that they did can rightfully be equated with a feat”.

In February 1942, the Leninist Komsomol Theatre was evacuated, but not all actors agreed to leave for the rear. Some went to the front with weapons in their hands. Others were enrolled in agitation platoons and gave several concerts a day in the front line.

Yefim Kopelyan, a young actor of the BDT, volunteered at the front at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War and soon became an actor of the Militia Theater, and then a theater propaganda platoon.

“The word “theater” did not exist, - recalls People's Artist of the USSR Yefim Zakharovich Kopelyan in his book “Without Intermission”. - Our unit - and this was precisely the unit - was called a military propaganda platoon. On the top floor of the Red Army House is our barracks. It is cold. For several weeks there is no light, the water supply does not work. We sleep, hiding our heads in greatcoats. Long before the onset of the late winter dawn, the daylight awakens. A meager breakfast takes a little time. ... There is no transport in a besieged, freezing city. When it’s necessary, like seasoned foot soldiers, we move forward in dashes, and when necessary we crawl”.

There was no talk about the stage or at least somehow adapted to the performance. They worked on any punctured patch of land, and it happened that in the trenches before the battle.

I will never forget my friends at that hour. A minute before the arrival of the envoys of the island battery, they seemed to be exhausted to the limit. I don’t know where people came from, I don’t know how we played in the dugout, which was under the firing positions of anti-aircraft gunners, but, returning back in an open truck, people were sleeping, not paying attention to the frost and wind, which felt like a complete master in the vast open spaces of the night Ladoga".  

Natalya Sakhnovskaya, a student of Agrippina Vaganova, ballerina at the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater, said: “We are performing with transport aviation pilots. They made six to seven missions, leaving all norms far behind. They had to engage in battle in almost every transport flight - the enemy did everything in his power to prevent food from entering the besieged city. The pilots tried to load the plane to the full with food: if the pilot had a tiny space under his elbow, he would squeeze in an extra loaf of bread there...”  

I would like to recall by name all - future "folk" and ordinary artists of the stage. The artist, entertainer Konstantin Guzynin, who led one of the teams created at the House of the Red Army, recalls that it consisted of a reader Donat Luzanov, violinist Lazar Shifman, acrobats Jamilia Valiulina and Evgeny Sklyadnev, narrator, entertainer Vasily Zotov and bayan player Viktor Krugov. Such a landing could shake, cheer up tired soldiers, make them smile!..

The artists were not always able to return from the frontline in one day. As a rule, after playing the program in one part, they headed to the next one, as a result of the trip it took two or three days, or even more. And what a dangerous trip these were! Leningraders-Petersburgers do not need to explain what the Oranienbaum patch is held by our troops, where every inch of the earth was riddled with fascist shells. Agitation platoon fearlessly got there too.

Although, the artists still had the strength to defuse the atmosphere with a good joke and raise the morale of the propaganda team. Konstantin Alekseevich Guzynin recalls: “At the outpost, the patrol stopped the car to check the documents. Having learned that the artists were going, a young guy looked into the back of the truck and asked: “Will you give a concert? You are so strong though!”. And then one of ours answered: the last strength!.. Everyone was immediately amused”.

“Silva” and “Maritza” were given during the whistle of shells

During the siege days at the Musical Comedy Theater there were given Maritza, Wedding in Malinovka, and Seller of Birds. In addition to classical operettas, musical performances of military themes were staged: “The Love of a Sailor”, “Forest Story”, “The Sea Spreads Wide”. At the end of 1941, a bomb fell into a neighboring house, and the theater was damaged, the troupe moved to the building of the Alexandrinsky Theater. A rare performance was dispensed with without a break by an air-raid alarm. Then everyone went down to the bomb shelter, and then the performance resumed. Information about the performances and cinema sessions was published on the pages of Leningrad Truth.

People sitting in the hall and performing on the stage often barely stood on their feet from hunger. But the performance was on, the artists joked, the orchestra played... For some time the theater allowed us to forget about the advanced, about the difficulties of the besieged life, strengthened people's faith in victory.

The importance of the theater in the life of Leningraders is evidenced by the diaries of the townspeople digitized by the Presidential Library. Here is an almost impeccable handwriting of Igor Malakhov’s graduation class student’s notes during the siege; In the summer of 1942, a teenager got a job as an apprentice fitter at the ATUL repair plant. On August 29, 1942, together with his mother, he was evacuated from Leningrad.

Musical symbol of the siege

In addition to theatrical performances, film demonstrations, music continued to perform in the city.

This is incredible, but on August 9, 1942, in the besieged Leningrad, the famous Seventh (Leningrad) symphony by Dmitry Shostakovich was first performed. One of the most important works of art of Russian culture of the 20th century has become a musical symbol of the siege of Leningrad, the stamina and courage of the city’s defenders. The Presidential Library’s electronic collections contain a digitized handwritten score of the symphony, the original of which is stored in the music library of the St. Petersburg Radio House.

The document was handed over for digitization to library’s specialists at a gala event dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the breaking of the siege and the 74th anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi siege, in January 2018.

Each of the four parts of the symphony is presented in a separate notebook. The pages of the score illustrate remarks by conductors S. A. Samosud and K. I. Eliasberg, made with ink and colored pencils. On the back of the title page of the first notebook is the composition of the orchestra (instruments) and other information about the first performance.

The initiator of the Seventh Symphony in besieged Leningrad was the chief conductor of the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra of the Leningrad Radio Committee, K. I. Eliasberg. Rehearsals began after the score of the Seventh Symphony was delivered to the city on the Neva in July 1942 by a special plane from Kuybyshev (now Samara) - the place of Shostakovich's evacuation. The composer managed to create three parts of it in his native besieged city, between the participation in the construction of anti-tank fortifications and the extinguishing of incendiary bombs, the fourth part was written in evacuation. The symphony required an enhanced orchestra, so a lot of work was done to find the surviving musicians in Leningrad itself and the nearest front line. The conductor of the symphony orchestra, Karl Eliasberg, did the impossible: he was able to reassemble the band, and music again sounded in the bell-filled hall of the Philharmonic. It was great!

During the premiere in the crowded hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, the sounds of the enemy’s guns were not heard - the Soviet artillerymen, as part of Operation Flurry, received an order from the commander of the Leningrad Front, L. A. Govorov, to suppress the fire of German guns at all costs, and the task was completed. The symphony was broadcasted on radio and through loudspeakers on the streets of the city. The German soldiers who were standing near Leningrad also heard it... The guns were silent. Muses spoke... Wehrmacht soldiers later recalled that on that day they understood: the war with the Russians would be lost.

The August 7, 1942 issue of the Leningradskaya Pravda newspaper, which can be leafed through on the Presidential Library’s portal, tells about preparations for the performance of the Seventh Symphony in the besieged city.

Another unique document is the program of the Seventh Symphony from a performance in besieged Leningrad on August 9, 1942. It entered the Presidential Library’s collections thanks to the cooperation of the institution with the Shostakovich Petersburg Academic Philharmonic Society and the Museum of Theater and Music.

As an epigraph in the program, an excerpt from an article by writer Alexei Tolstoy is given: “The Seventh Symphony arose from the conscience of the Russian people, who accepted without hesitation a mortal battle with black forces. Created in Leningrad, it has grown to the size of great world art, understandable at all latitudes and meridians, because it tells the truth about a person in an unprecedented year of his disasters and trials".

By the way, the document digitized by the Presidential Library brought a number of interesting discoveries. For example, in the group of trombones the program includes Igor Karpets. He was not a professional musician, but before the war he graduated from a music school at the trombone rate and, when needed, was called from the forefront and remarkably fit into a group of professional musicians. By that time, less than a dozen remained in the orchestra of the House of Radio of the latter: someone died from exhaustion, others were evacuated...

The further fate of this man, which is no longer associated with music, is also interesting. Igor Karpets became a well-known legal scholar, criminologist, doctor of legal sciences, headed the All-Union Research Institute for the Promotion of Law and Order under the USSR Prosecutor's Office and the Main Criminal Investigation Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The review of the cultural life of the besieged city will be completed with the words of Yuri Tolubeev: “I have lived a long life in the theater. I was lucky to see great artists on the stage, I had the opportunity to observe such ups of talent, when the audience seemed to be numb with delight. But now, after the war, referring to the past, every time I remember, first of all, not the performances and roles that glorified Soviet art, although we still give them their due, but those to whom the spectators of the leading edge applauded, my fellow countrymen of Leningrad who endured all the hardships of the siege".