by ANNA REID
Lena Mukhina, c 1932: survivor
The Diary of Lena Mukhina: A Girl’s Life in the Siege of Leningrad. Edited by Valentin Kovalchuk, Aleksandr Rupasov & Aleksandr Chistikov. Translated by Amanda Love Darragh (Macmillan 390pp £16.99)
Germany’s siege of Leningrad was one of the Second World War’s worst atrocities. Lasting two and a half years, it killed 700,000 to 800,000 people, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the city’s entire civilian population. Atrocities on such a scale are best understood through individual accounts, and this diary, newly emerged from the archives, is one such. It was written by Lena Mukhina, a plain, prim sixteen-year-old living in the city centre with her adoptive mother and an older woman nicknamed Aka – possibly, according to the editors, a retired English governess.
When the diary opens in the spring of 1941, Lena’s preoccupations couldn’t be more ordinary: she is irritated by her mother, anxious about her end-of-term exams and has an unreciprocated crush on a boy in her class. But from 22 June, when the German invasion is announced on the radio, her world turns upside down as Leningrad stiffens its defences, suffers its first air raids, then spirals into mass starvation. Around 100,000 Leningraders died in each of the first three months of 1942, the death rate only beginning to fall off when there were fewer mouths left to feed and supplies started coming in across Lake Ladoga, to the city’s east. Lena’s passage to adulthood was swift and brutal.
Initially, the war brings her nothing worse than hard physical work. She helps clear flammable lumber from her apartment building’s attic, unloads bricks from barges and in mid-July is sent out to the countryside to join in the building of new defence lines. For six weeks she lives in an evacuated village school, trench-digging, gossiping under haystacks during breaks (another girl has been ‘kissed three times: on her forehead, the back of her neck and her cheek’) and watching dogfights between German and Soviet fighters in the summer skies overhead. One evening, three planes crash in a nearby field.
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