Siege. Picture story by N.I. Khandogin, 8 August 1943
Much has been written about the Leningrad 900-day siege, but there is no exhausting the subject of the hitherto unheard of trials that befell the city and of the ordeal that millions of its inhabitants had to undergo, the severest siege that nobody had ever had to endure either before or after these tragic days. Should a Leningrader be asked about the siege, he will surely have a mental vision of photographs taken during those years, photographs that are imprinted in the memory of every person and that had long come to symbolize the sufferings and everyday unobtrusive heroism of many hundred thousands of city dwellers. For the very survival under the circumstances was, in effect, a great feat.
Thus, it is only the hard work of Leningrad's press photographers who recorded these events that the memory of the siege has been preserved. Many of them I knew personally - Rafail Abramovich Mazelev blessed me for the press photography, I frequently talked with David Mikhailovich Trachtenberg, Mikhail Amosovich Kashe, Iosif Ivanovich Fetisov, made profiles of Georgy Fedorovich Konovalov and Leonid Ivanovich Korovin on Leningrad TV, for many years worked with a friend of mine Vsevolod Sergeevich Tarasevich in the Novosti News Agency; together with Alexander Ivanovich Brodsky I was in charge of Leningrad section of photography at the Union of Journalists; I was acquainted with Losin, Khandogin, and Fedoseev. During my time as Chairman of the section of photography, Boris Vasileivich Utkin was rather a nuisance, as he kept complaining to various authorities, but God is my witness that I bear no grudge against him.
I never met B. Vasytinsky, L. Bernstein, A. Mikhailov, V Kapustin, S. Kropivnitsky, B. Kudoyarov, S. Nordstein, M. Trakhman, G. Chertov as well as many others. Alas, they have not been with us for quite a long while now.
All of them, this way or another, had contributed to the blockade photographic chronicling.
Yet not everyone has been nationally acclaimed as a chronicler of the besieged city. The most favoured one must have been D.M. Trachtenberg. Dodik the Indefatigable, as his colleagues fondly called him, deserved it all right. As a press photographer in the Leningradskaya Pravda, he spent all the 900 days in the city taking pictures of everyday life of the besieged city, and after the war he published albums depicting those days. Although much in them looks a bit affected, it is his pictures that had formed the image of the blockade for millions of people.
Today I want to speak about the report that had escaped the Leningraders and which I managed to publish just recently in the album entitled "The Unknown Blockade. Leningrad 1941-44" (Limbus Press, St Petersburg, 2002).
It should be noted that its many photographs get published for the first time. Some of them were not considered by the previous researchers and compilers, others were rejected as insignificant. Yet others, the ones to be referred to, were censored during the war and afterwards.
This report was made by Nikolai Ivanovich Khandogin on 8 August 1943. On that clear Sunday day, the tram stop on the 'main thoroughfare' of the city was quite busy. On the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Sadovaya Street (there used to be tram lines along Nevsky) at the tram stop near the Elyseev Store, just opposite the Public Library, some people were waiting for a tram to come while others were just passing by. And then the shelling began. Remember the notice on one of the even-number buildings saying: "This side of the street is more dangerous!". Shelling is much more hazardous than bombing for a simple reason that it starts all at once. While sirens are sounded to warn about the coming bombers and one still has some time to go to a shelter, shells burst unexpectedly. Let us call upon the eye-witness to speak. M. Mashkova, an employee of the Public Library, lived nearby. At the end of the day she wrote in her diary: "Sunday. Evening. In the morning the children went fishing, Vadik always manages to catch some fish for a Sunday soup. Soon a horrible shelling of the area started, but the children failed to return. I lost my usual courage and was desperate, I had been on the tenterhooks for over an hour. At 1 p.m. a shell burst near the tram stop on Nevsky Prospect, shell splinters hit lots of people, 49 persons were killed on the spot, the wounded were escorted and carried to our station. Two doctors from the reading halls were summoned to the station to dress the wounds, the third doctor, also a Library reader happened to be around and he also took part in administering relief…"
Chances that we can find out how the press reporter happened to be at the site soon after the shelling are low. Maybe because the newspaper office ("Na Strazhe Rodiny" ("Keeping Guard"), 2 Nevsky) was a couple of tram-stops away, and rumours in the besieged city took minutes to spread around. Maybe, because on that weekend day he was just wandering around the city with his camera. Anyway, this is not so important, what is more important is that he recorded the tragedy, and I have never come across such a powerful recording in the whole lot of pictures of the times, though I have ransacked several thousand of negatives. This startling reportage had been stored in the family archives for many long years.
Why should it then have never been published in 1943 and in the aftermath of the war?
The thing is that it was prohibited to write, let alone to publish pictures, about the real state of affairs in the city. Censors kept a strict watch over it. Solid citizens had been taught to see spies everywhere, and a man with a camera was a walking personification of a spy.
Even after the war, until the mid-seventies, archives never exposed any photographs which had "more than three dead bodies on them at a time". Imagine such things said about the city which had lost over a million civilians!
V.A. Nikitin
V.A. Nikitin
Source: "Petersburg's Photos", No. 1 (81) 2004
