Anna Reid's Reading List

"Alexander Werth was the BBC’s Moscow correspondent through the war. He had been brought up in St Petersburg and emigrated with his family to Britain soon after the revolution [of 1917]. So not only was he an excellent writer, but unlike most of the foreign press corps had the enormous advantage of being bilingual. Part history and part memoir, his book is shrewd, vivid and even funny. Published in 1964, it’s still one of the best general histories of the war in Russia. He’s excellent on the overall picture – especially on scratchy wartime relations between the Allies – but what makes him stand out is his reportage. One example – he’s talking about the wave of patriotism that swept the country on the announcement of war in June 1941. He’s at the cinema in Moscow. Stalin appears on the newsreel and everyone bursts into wild applause. Of course, at public gatherings this was mandatory, but Werth points out that inside the cinema it was dark, so nobody could see if you were clapping or not. He took that to mean that it was genuine applause. There’s another lovely moment when he describes papier maché hams and vegetables being put on display in the shop windows on May Day 1942, and the cruelty of this when everybody was very short of food. He makes telling little observations like that all the way through."

"These are the notes Grossman took while a war correspondent for the army newspaper, the Red Star . They are true first drafts of history – quick descriptions of what was going on around him as he sat in some truck or dugout, waiting for something to happen. He has a wonderful, cinematic eye, describing the look of burned-out villages, roads full of refugees, and so on. And he gets the voices of the soldiers and officers absolutely right. He famously never took notes as he interviewed people, but had such a good memory that in the evening he could go off into a corner and write it all down verbatim. I prefer this book even to [his novel] Life and Fate , which was recently dramatised on Radio 4. It’s just so immediate; it takes you right there. The editors, Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, managed to persuade Grossman’s family to give them access to these notebooks, and it’s the first time they’ve been published. They’re so human and open, and Grossman is such an involved, interesting man. It’s rare to find someone in Soviet literature whose writing hasn’t been poisoned by that ghastly Soviet-realist style. So if Life and Fate looks a bit daunting on your bookshelf, all two and a half inches of it, this is just as good and a lot shorter."

"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."

"Brodsky lived through the first part of the siege as a baby, in a one-room flat on the Liteiny, right in the centre of town. He brilliantly describes the atmosphere of the postwar city: the bombed-out buildings – ‘haggard and hollow-eyed’ – and the feeling of emptiness, of crowding ghosts. He’s good, as well, on how pinched and harsh life continued to be well after the war. One of his earliest memories is of being given a white bread roll – not a common black one – for the first time. It was such an event that he ate it standing on a table, surrounded by admiring adults. Yes, he was expelled in 1972, and went to the States. Earlier he had been arrested and exiled to a collective farm near Archangel. It wasn’t especially harsh and he was only there for eighteen months. His mentor Anna Akhmatova joked that he’d arranged it on purpose, so as to boost his CV."

"Djilas was Tito’s number two, and negotiated with the Kremlin on various diplomatic missions. He’s a terrific source on the grotesque late-Stalin court – the ghastly, drunken, late-night banquets at Stalin’s dacha, the bullying, fear and paranoia; the way the whole Kremlin circle was completely cut off from reality. Stalin had always been suspicious of Leningrad, disliking its Europhile bent and fearing it as an alternative centre of power. After the war he purged the city’s party leadership and cracked down on its intelligentsia, most famously on the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose son, having been released from the Gulag to fight for his country, was sent straight back to the camps. Stalin did not, however, engineer the siege –which is one theory that has been around. I include this book for the benefit of those who regard Stalin and Hitler as political and military geniuses, albeit perverted ones. Together with Hitler’s Table Talk , (if I can sneak in a sixth title), it’s a reminder that both of were not only psychopaths, but the most god-awful bores. Djilas describes Stalin’s senility and gluttony, crude jokes and inane drinking games. Hitler’s Table Talk is a collection of rants to cronies, taken down by secretaries during mealtimes at his various wartime headquarters. Monster is too big a word. I like to think of them as poisonous. Hitler was a poisonous little corporal, really – a town-hall Robespierre. He bangs on about Esperanto, about how many lanes his new autobahns should have, about whether polenta is better for you than rice. He’s a bar-room crank, a petty autodidact with an army at his disposal. People can have a sneaking fascination for the great dictators; these books bring them down to earth. I do think there’s the capacity for sudden change. The Orange revolution in Ukraine , for example, came out of nowhere. Did you spot Putin getting booed the other day at the wrestling competition? Things can change suddenly. I think it’s an anachronism that Russia is stuck with this third-world political system, and I don’t think it will last forever. When I put it to my Russian friends that things are bound to change, they all say – No, the new middle class only cares about the latest model iPad and winterbreaks in Sharm-el-Sheikh. But I’m not sure that will be true forever. Specific issues can still get people out on the streets and very angry. Russia’s quite good at revolutions. I’m always expecting the unexpected in Russia."