Reflections on the Russian Soul

"When Likhachov died his obituarists called him ‘the last of the Petersburg intelligentsia’. A scholar of medieval literature at Leningrad University, his life [from 1906 to 1999] spanned the birth and death of Russian Communism. In his twenties, he was one of the first generation of Gulag prisoners – on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, where the Gulag was trialled. And in his eighties, during glasnost , he became a leading pro-democracy activist. His memoir brilliantly takes in the whole period. Likhachov had medical exemption from the army, so he saw the siege from inside the city. A lot of siege survivors rewrote their memories so as to make them bearable, to make the ghastly experiences they went through possible to live with. He didn’t do that at all; he’s angry and almost painfully clear-eyed. A mass evacuation of civilians was finally organised in late January 1942, across frozen Lake Ladoga, to Leningrad’s east. Not everybody was allowed to leave, though – you had to get a permit. Often the mother of a family would get a permit to leave with her children, but without her elderly parents. So she faced an awful choice: Do I stay here with my parents and doom my children and myself? Or do I save my children and abandon my mother or father? Very often people chose the latter. Likhachov tells the story of a friend of his, an elderly professor, whose wife and daughter are trying to sort out what to do with him as the days tick by to their departure date. They want to put him in a clinic, but it hasn’t properly opened yet. The father is very ill, lying on a sled, and though the doctor tries to turn them away they just leave him there, in a cloakroom. He dies a few weeks later. That kind of thing happened a lot, and to children as well. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . People behaved in all sorts of varied and very human ways during the siege. The same person might behave heroically in one instance, but selfishly in another. It gives insight into what happens to human beings – every person of every nationality – under extreme stress, when you are fighting for your barest survival and social norms disintegrate."