Siege diary Daniil Granin. Blockade book

On January 27, the 95-year-old writer gave a speech in Germany that made the Bundestag blush and cry.

The German federal parliament may have never heard such a passionate and terrible speech, based on the facts presented. The 95-year-old St. Petersburg writer cited facts and figures about the blockade that cannot be listened to without tears. It is unlikely that this information can be found in German history textbooks. And in the building of the Rekhistag, from the lips of such a person as Granin, they sounded like a revelation. Daniil Alexandrovich did not set out to embarrass and reproach members of the government, the President of Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, by the way, listened with her eyes downcast. Granin accepted the invitation to perform in Germany on January 27, the day of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi blockade. Coincidentally, a year later, on the same day, the prisoners of Auschwitz were also released, so since 1996, the Germans have been celebrating this date. The Petersburger’s almost hour-long speech was listened to in deathly silence, and at the end they applauded while standing.

“I had some strange and latent desire to tell this to all my dead fellow soldiers who did not know that we had won,” Granin explained. “They died with a feeling of complete defeat, confident that we had surrendered Leningrad, that the city would not survive. I wanted to tell them that we won after all, and you didn’t die in vain.

“They put crackers on the graves”

Today in St. Petersburg people go to the Piskarevskoye cemetery. This is one of the symbolic cemeteries of the city. They go to remember and pay tribute to all those who died during the siege. They put crackers, sweets, cookies on the grave mounds...

This story was tragic and cruel for me too. I started the war from the first days. Enlisted in the people's militia as a volunteer. For what? Today I don’t even know why. But this was probably a purely boyish thirst for romance. How will there be a war without me? But the coming days of the war sobered me up, like many of my comrades. They were brutally sobered up. We were bombed when our train had just arrived at the front line. And since then we have experienced one defeat after another. They ran, retreated, ran again. And finally, somewhere in mid-September, my regiment surrendered the city of Pushkin. We retreated to the city limits. The front collapsed.

The front collapsed. All connections of the huge metropolis were cut off from the mainland. And the blockade began, which lasted 900 days.

The blockade was sudden and unexpected, just like this whole war. There were no reserves of fuel or food. And soon, somewhere in October, the card system began. Bread was given out on ration cards.

And then, one after another, catastrophic events began, the electricity supply stopped, the water supply, sewerage, and heating ran out.

“Hitler ordered not to enter the city”

What is a card system? She looked like this. From the first of October they were already giving 400 grams of bread for workers, 200 grams for employees. And already in November they began to catastrophically reduce the issuance rate. Bread was given to workers 250 grams, and to employees and children 125 grams. This is a slice of low-quality bread, halved with cellulose, duranda and other impurities. There was no supply of food to the city.

Winter was approaching. And as luck would have it, it’s a bitter winter, 30-35 degrees. The huge city lost all life support. It was bombed mercilessly every day.

Our unit was located not far from the city, we could walk there. And we, sitting in the trenches, heard the explosions of aerial bombs, and even the shaking of the earth reached us. They were bombed every day. Fires started. Houses were burning because there was nothing to fill them with, and the water supply was not working.

Houses burned for days. And from there, from the front, turning back, we saw columns of black smoke and wondered where and what was burning.

By December, the streets and squares of the city were covered with snow. Only in some places there were passages for military vehicles. Monuments were covered with sandbags, shop windows were boarded up. The city has changed.

There was no lighting at night. Patrols and rare passers-by walked with fireflies. People began to lose strength from their heads. But they continued to work. Go to enterprises, especially military ones, where tanks were repaired, shells and mines were made.

Hitler ordered not to enter the city in order to avoid losses in street battles, where tanks could not participate. The army repulsed all our attempts to break through the blockade ring. The German troops, in fact, quite comfortably, without much difficulty, expected that the coming hunger and frost would force the city to capitulate.

... In general, I am speaking now not as a writer, not as a witness, I am speaking rather as a soldier, a participant in those events. I have trench experience as a junior officer on the Leningrad Front.

“I wish I could live to see the grass”

Already in October, mortality began to rise. With this catastrophically low nutritional norm, people quickly grew thin, became dystrophic and died. In 25 days of December, 40 thousand people died. In February, 3.5 thousand people were already dying of hunger every day. In December, people wrote in their diaries: “Lord, I wish I could live to see grass.” In total, approximately 1 million people died in the city. Zhukov writes in his memoirs that 12 million 200 thousand died. Death participated silently and quietly in the war.

... I want to tell you some details of life that are almost not in books and in descriptions of what happened in apartments during the blockade. You know, the devil of the blockade lies largely in these details. Where to get water? Those who lived close to canals, the Neva, embankments, went there, made ice holes and took out water in buckets. Can you imagine going up to the fourth or fifth floor with these buckets? Those who lived further away collected and melted snow. How to drown it? On potbelly stoves, these are small iron stoves. How to heat it, where to get firewood? They broke furniture, parquet floors, and dismantled wooden buildings in the city.

“I fed my daughter my dead brother”

Already 35 years after the war, the Belarusian writer Adamovich and I began interviewing the survivors of the siege about how they survived. There were amazing, merciless revelations. A mother's child dies. He is three years old. The mother places the corpse between the windows, it is winter. And every day he cuts off a piece to feed his daughter and at least save her. The daughter did not know the details. She was 12 years old. But my mother did not allow herself to die and go crazy. This daughter has grown up. And I talked to her. She found out years later. Can you imagine? There are many such examples that can be given of what life has become for survivors of the siege.

... One day they brought the diary of a siege survivor. Yura was 14 years old, he lived with his mother and sister. The diary amazed us. This was the story of a boy's conscience. In bakeries, the portion of bread provided was precisely weighed, down to the gram. Yura’s duty in the family was to wait in line for bread and bring it home. In his diary, he admits what torment it took him not to pinch off a piece of bread along the way. He was especially tormented by the appendage; he uncontrollably wanted to eat this small piece. Neither mother nor sister seemed to know about this. Sometimes he couldn't stand it and ate it. He describes how ashamed he was, admits his greed, and then his shamelessness - a thief who stole his daily bread from his own people, from his mother and sister. Nobody knew about it, but he suffered. The neighbors in the apartment were a husband and wife, the husband was some kind of big boss in the construction of defense structures, he was entitled to additional rations. In the common kitchen, the wife prepared dinner, cooked porridge, and lunch. How many times did Yura feel the urge, when she went out, to grab and scoop up some hot porridge with her hand? He punishes himself for his shameful weakness. What is striking in his diary is the constant battle between hunger and conscience, his attempts to maintain his integrity. We don't know if he managed to survive. The diary shows how his strength was declining. But even when he was already completely degenerate, he did not allow himself to beg for food from his neighbors.

“I hated the fascists”

...One woman told how she went as a child to the Finlyandsky Station for evacuation. Her son was walking behind her, he was 14. And she was carrying her little daughter on a sled. The son fell behind on the way. He was very emaciated and dystrophic. She didn't know what happened to him. And when she told us, she remembered her guilt.

… I was on the front line starting in '41 and part of '42. I honestly admit that I hated the Germans not only as opponents, Wehrmacht soldiers, but also as those who, contrary to all the laws of military honor, soldier’s dignity, officer traditions and the like, destroyed people, townspeople in the most painful, inhumane way. They no longer fought with weapons, but with the help of hunger, long-range artillery, and bombing. Destroyed whom? - Civilians, defenseless, unable to participate in the fight. This was Nazism in its most disgusting form, because they allowed themselves to do this, considering Russians to be subhuman, considering us almost savages and primates, with whom we can do as we please.

… Black markets appeared. There you could buy a piece of bread, a bag of cereal, fish, or a can of canned food. All this was not exchanged for money - for a fur coat, felt boots. They brought everything from home that was valuable - paintings, silver spoons.

There were corpses wrapped in sheets lying on the streets and in the entrances. Sometimes I was sent from the front to headquarters. I visited the city and saw how the human essence of the siege survivors changed. The main character turned out to be someone nameless - a passerby who tried to lift the weakened man who had fallen to the ground and lead him. There were such points with boiling water. They only gave a mug of boiling water, and this often saved people. It was compassion awakened in people.

Speech about the blockade of Leningrad in the Bundestag, memories of the war, reflections on mercy and a conversation about Russian politicians - "Paper" selected quotes from five interviews, public appearances, and essays by the writer.

“There were corpses lying on the streets, there was no strength to bury them”

Speech in the Bundestag

On January 27, 2014, Daniil Granin spoke in the Bundestag during the “hour of remembrance,” which takes place annually in the German parliament in memory of the liberation of Auschwitz prisoners by Soviet troops. The writer talked about how he survived all 872 days in besieged Leningrad, how the city’s residents starved, fled under endless shelling and did not have time to bury their loved ones, and how Leningraders died on the Road of Life.

Daniil Granin:

Several times I was sent to headquarters and I saw these scenes and realized that one of the heroes of the blockade was “someone”, an “unnamed passer-by”, he was saving a fallen, freezing man. People's compassion did not disappear, but rather appeared. The only thing that could be opposed to the hunger and inhumanity of fascism was the spiritual resistance of the people of the only city of World War II that managed to survive.

The text of Granin’s speech in the Bundestag can be read on the Rossiyskaya Gazeta website.

“Stalingrad was military valor, and Leningrad was spiritual”

Speech at “Dialogues”

Daniil Granin was a guest of the “Dialogues” of the Open Library in October 2016. In the lecture hall of the General Staff of the Hermitage, he, together with the Lithuanian playwright Marius Ivaskevicius, spoke on the topic “The Experience of Memory. Leningrad. Fly." The writer talked about the famine during the war, how modern politicians relate to the memory of the blockade, and what was the essence of the “Leningrad syndrome” that allowed the city to survive the siege.

Daniil Granin:

Firstly, the politicians of modern Russia did not invite me to speak. They believe that the blockade is known to them; it is already a past stage in our history. Yes, wonderful, valiant and so on. But why tell? For what? So what are you doing? Well, leave alone, you know, all the sorrows and troubles of your past life. Let people live in peace today. Leave our people alone. You know, they think they are right. But I want to tell you: can a normal person live without sadness, without despondency, without melancholy, without tears, without attacks of despair, and so on? Can not! This is a normal human need.

“We have lost the best part of the people. She was the one who went on the attack. She worked in the rear, as a partisan."

Interview with Novaya Gazeta

In 2017, on the eve of May 9, Granin tells how people went to war, captured the Germans, how the mood changed among the soldiers, and how he was struck by Stalin’s reaction to the victory.

Daniil Granin:

What is 42 million? This is not a number. For those who survived, it is loneliness. I have no one to celebrate the victory anniversary with. I have no one left from my school and student friends, from my fellow soldiers. Not only due to natural decline, but also because they died in the war.

“What is it - 42 million dead? This is not a number. This is loneliness"

"New Newspaper"

Interview with front-line soldier, writer and honorary citizen of St. Petersburg Daniil Granin on the eve of May 9

“To take away mercy means to deprive a person of one of the most important manifestations of morality”

From Daniil Granin’s essay “On Mercy”

In his famous essay, the writer discusses why the concept of “mercy” disappeared and what this feeling means for society.

Daniil Granin:

It was not by chance that mercy was destroyed. During the time of dispossession, during the difficult years of mass repression, no one was allowed to provide assistance to the families of the victims; it was impossible to shelter the children of those arrested and exiled. People were forced to express their approval of death sentences. Even sympathy for those innocently arrested was prohibited. Feelings like mercy were regarded as suspicious, and even criminal. From year to year this feeling was condemned, eradicated: it is apolitical, not class, in an era of struggle it interferes, disarms... It was made forbidden for art too. Mercy could really prevent lawlessness and cruelty; it prevented people from being imprisoned, slandered, violating the law, beating, destroying. 30s, 40s - this concept disappeared from our vocabulary. It also disappeared from everyday life, going underground, as it were.

Daniil Granin. Mercy

“Life in Russia is always a miracle. A bad miracle or a good one, but it must be a miracle.”

“The Rules of Life of Daniil Granin”, Esquire

The writer talks about the Russian table, meeting Konstantin Paustovsky and a novel about Russian managers.

Daniil Granin:

I'm no longer sick of space. Why do I need Mars when I go to take out the trash and see people rummaging through containers? My delight immediately disappears. Why should I be excited that there is life on Mars when we have no life for humans?

I would like to thank Mr. President, the Chairman and the entire leadership of the Bundestag, the deputies for the kind invitation to speak here today, on such a significant day, at least for me. Today in St. Petersburg people go to the Piskarevskoye cemetery, this is one of the symbolic cemeteries of the city. They go to remember and pay tribute to all those who died during the years. They place crackers, sweets, and cookies on the grave mounds to express love and memory for those people for whom this was a tragic and cruel story.

It was tragic and cruel for me too. I started the war from the first days. He joined the people's militia as a volunteer. For what? Today I don’t even know why, but it was probably a purely boyish thirst for romance: how will there be a war without me, I must definitely participate. But the next few days of the war sobered me up. Like many of my comrades, they were brutally sobered up. We were bombed when our train arrived at the front line. And since then we have experienced one defeat after another. They ran, retreated, ran again. And finally, somewhere in mid-September, my regiment surrendered the city of Pushkin and we retreated beyond the city limits. The front collapsed. And the blockade began.

All connections of the city, a huge metropolis, were cut off from the mainland, and a blockade began that lasted 900 days. The blockade was so sudden and unexpected, just like this whole war was unexpected for the country. There were no reserves of fuel or food, and soon, already in October, the rationing system began. Bread was given out on ration cards. And then, one after another, catastrophic phenomena for the city began - the electricity supply stopped, the water supply and sewerage stopped working, there was no heating. And the disasters of the blockade began.

What is a card system? It looked like this: from October 1, they were already giving 400 grams of bread to workers, 200 grams to employees, and already in November they began to catastrophically reduce the distribution rate. Workers began to be given 250 grams, and employees and children were given 125 grams. This is a slice of low-quality bread, halved with cellulose, duranda (cake, the remains of oilseeds after squeezing the oil) and other impurities.

There was no supply of food. Winter was approaching, and as luck would have it, it was fierce: thirty to thirty-five degrees. The huge city lost all life support. It was mercilessly bombed and shelled from the air every day. Our unit was located not far from the city, we could walk there, and while sitting in the trenches, we heard the explosions of aerial bombs and even felt the shaking of the earth. They were bombed every day. Fires started and houses burned. Since there was nothing to fill them with - there was no water, the water supply did not work - they burned for days. And we from the front, turning back, saw these columns of black smoke and wondered where everything was burning.

By December, the streets and squares of the city were covered with snow, only in some places there were passages for military vehicles, monuments were covered with sandbags, shop windows were boarded up - the city was transformed. There was no lighting at night. Patrols and rare passersby walked around with “fireflies” (luminous badges. - Ed.). People began to lose strength from hunger. But they continued to work, going to factories where tanks were repaired, shells and mines were made. And then the following began to happen, something that I learned about in detail only after the war.

Hitler ordered not to enter the city in order to avoid losses in street battles, where tanks could not participate. Von Leeb's Eighteenth Army repulsed all our attempts to break through the blockade ring. The German troops, in fact, were very comfortable, without much difficulty, waiting for the oncoming hunger and frost to force the city to capitulate. In fact, the war became not a war, the war on the part of the enemy became an expectation, a rather comfortable expectation, of surrender.

I am talking now about these details, which are related to my personal experience as a soldier. And in general I speak not as a writer, not as a witness, I speak rather as a soldier, a participant in those events about which little is known. I have purely trench experience as a junior officer, but experience that has its own details, its own impressions, quite important, because they made up that life, that flesh of events for every resident of the city, and even for the soldier of the Leningrad Front.

Already in October, the mortality rate began to increase. Because with this catastrophically low nutritional norm, people quickly became dystrophic and died. In twenty-five days of December, 40 thousand people died. In February, three and a half thousand people died of hunger every day. In the diaries of that time, people wrote: “Lord, I wish I could live to see the grass” - when green grass appears. In total, more than one million people died from hunger. Marshal Zhukov writes in his memoirs that 1 million 200 thousand people died. Death began to participate silently and silently in the war, forcing this city to surrender.

And it is believed that hunger had the greatest significance. This is not entirely true. The frosts affected people's condition, their psyche, their health and well-being - there was no heating, - lack of water... And I want to tell you some details that are almost not in books and in descriptions of what happened in the apartments during the blockade, how people lived. The devil of the blockade is in many ways precisely in such details. Where to get water? People, those who lived close to the canals, from the Neva, from the embankments, made ice holes and from there they took water and carried these buckets home. We went up to the fourth, fifth, sixth floors, carrying these buckets, can you imagine? Those who lived away from the water had to collect snow and melt it. They burned on "potbelly stoves" - these are small iron stoves. What to heat with? Where to get firewood? They broke furniture, broke into parquet floors, dismantled wooden buildings...

Already 35 years after the war, the Belarusian writer Adamovich and I began interviewing survivors of the siege. They asked how they survived, what happened to them during the blockade. There were amazing, merciless revelations. A mother's child dies. He was three years old. The mother puts the corpse between the windows, it’s winter... And every day she cuts off a piece to feed her daughter. At least save my daughter. The daughter did not know the details; she was twelve years old. But the mother knew everything, did not allow herself to die and did not allow herself to go crazy. This daughter grew up, and I talked to her. Then she didn’t know what they were feeding her. And years later I found out. Can you imagine? There are many such examples that can be given - what the life of a siege survivor has become.

They lived in the apartments in the dark. They covered the windows with anything to keep warm, and lit the rooms with smokehouses - this is a jar into which transformer or machine oil was poured. And this tiny tongue of flame burned day after day, for weeks, for months. This was the only lighting in the houses. So-called black markets appeared. There you could buy a piece of bread, a bag of cereal, some kind of fish, a can of canned food. All this was exchanged for things - fur coats, felt boots, paintings, silver spoons... And on the streets and in the entrances there were corpses wrapped in sheets.

When the ice began to get stronger, they paved the Road of Life along Lake Ladoga. Cars moved along it, firstly, to take out children, women, the wounded and to bring food into the city. The road was mercilessly shelled. The shells broke the ice, the cars went under water, but there was no other way out.

Several times I was sent from the front to headquarters, and I visited the city. Then I saw how the human essence of the blockade survivor changed. The main character in the city turned out to be “someone”, a “nameless passer-by”, who tried to lift the weakened dystrophic man who had fallen to the ground, to take him away - there were such points, they gave him boiling water, there was nothing else - they gave him a mug of boiling water. And this often saved people. It was compassion awakened in people. This “someone” is one of the most important, and perhaps the most important, hero of besieged life.

One day, in May 1942, when it was already warmer, everything had melted and there was a danger of infections from a large number of corpses, we, a group of soldiers and officers, were sent to the city to help take the corpses to the cemetery. The corpses lay in piles near the cemeteries - relatives and friends tried to bring them, but, of course, they did not have enough strength to dig a grave in the frozen ground. And we loaded these corpses into cars. We threw them like sticks - they were so dry and light. I have never experienced this creepy feeling again in my life.

There were special problems in the evacuation. One woman told how she went with her children to the Finland Station. Her son was walking behind her, he was about fourteen years old, and she was carrying her little daughter on a sled. She drove her to the station, but her son fell behind on the way; he was very exhausted. She didn't know what happened to him. But I remembered this, you know, merciless loss. And then, when she told us about it, she remembered it as her guilt.

Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Soviet Union Alexei Kosygin was a delegate from the State Defense Committee and was sent to Leningrad. He told me what problem he faced every day. Send along the Road of Life to the mainland children, women, the wounded or materials, machine tools, non-ferrous metals, some instruments - for military factories in the Urals. This problem of choosing between people and instruments needed for the military industry, he described what a painful and hopeless problem it was.

There were characteristic notices in the city, with leaflets stuck everywhere: “I’m performing funerals,” “I’m digging graves,” “I’m taking the dead to the cemetery.” All this for a piece of bread, for a can of canned food...

In the spring, strings of corpses of Red Army soldiers floated down the Neva. But they continued to take water from the Neva, pushing away these corpses - but what to do? I had to drink this kind of water too.

Since July 1942, we have been trying to break through the blockade at the front. But unsuccessfully, attack after attack was repulsed. The army lost 130 thousand people, trying for several months to break through the fortifications on the other bank of the Neva.

One day they brought me the diary of a boy who lived in the siege. The siege diaries were the most reliable material about that time, especially together with the memories of people who survived the siege. In general, I was amazed at how many people kept diaries, recording what was happening in the city, everything they saw, what they read in newspapers, what was important to them... Yura was 14 years old, he lived with his mother and sister. It was a story of a boy's conscience that shocked me. In bakeries, the portion of bread provided was precisely weighed, down to the gram. To do this, I had to cut off more weights so that exactly 250–300 grams would come out. Yura’s duty in the family was to wait in line for bread and bring it home. He was so tormented by hunger that it took him great effort to refrain from nipping off a piece of bread along the way; he was especially tormented by the appendage; he uncontrollably wanted to eat this small piece; neither his mother nor his sister, it would seem, knew about it.

Sometimes he couldn’t stand it and ate it; he wrote about it in his secret diary. He describes how ashamed he was, admits his greed, and then his shamelessness - a thief, he stole from his own people, from his mother, from his sister. Nobody knew about it, but he suffered. The neighbors in the apartment were a husband and wife, the husband was some kind of big boss in the construction of defense structures, he was entitled to additional rations. In the common kitchen, the wife was preparing dinner, cooking porridge, how many times did Yura feel the urge, when she went out, to grab something, scoop up some hot porridge with her hand. He punishes himself for his shameful weakness. What is striking in his diary is the constant duel of hunger and conscience, the struggle between them, fierce fights, and daily ones, attempts to maintain his decency. We don’t know whether he managed to survive; the diary shows how his strength was declining, but even though he was already completely degenerated, he did not allow himself to beg for food from his neighbors.

35 years after the war, we interviewed 200 blockade survivors for the book. Every time I asked: “Why did you remain alive if you spent the entire blockade here?” It often turned out that those who saved were those who saved others - stood in lines, got firewood, looked after them, sacrificed a crust of bread, a piece of sugar... Not always, but often. Compassion and are typical feelings of life under siege. Of course, the rescuers also died, but what amazed me was how their souls helped them not to become dehumanized. How people who stayed in the city and did not take part in hostilities were able to remain human.

When we wrote the “Siege Book,” we wondered how this could be, because the Germans knew about what was happening in the city from defectors, from intelligence. They knew about this nightmare, about the horrors not only of hunger, but of everything that was happening. But they continued to wait. We waited 900 days. After all, fighting with soldiers is, yes, war is a soldier’s business. But here hunger fought instead of soldiers.

Being at the forefront, I could not forgive the Germans for this for a long time. I hated the Germans not only as opponents, Wehrmacht soldiers, but also as those who, contrary to all the laws of military honor, soldier’s dignity, and officer traditions, destroyed people. I understood that war is always dirt, blood, anything... Our army suffered huge losses - up to a third of its personnel. For a long time I did not dare to write about my war. But still, I wrote a book about it not so long ago. He told me about how I fought. Why did I do this? Probably, it was a latent desire to tell all my dead fellow soldiers who died, not knowing how this war would end, not knowing whether Leningrad would be liberated. I wanted to tell them that we won. That they didn't die in vain.

You know, there is such a sacred space. When a person returns to compassion and spirituality. In the end, it is not force that always triumphs, but justice and truth. And this is a miracle of victory, love for life, for man...

Thank you for your attention.

Members of the Bundestag gave a standing ovation

On January 27, against the backdrop of the next date for lifting the siege of Leningrad, a strong wave of fierce controversy arose in social networks and the blogosphere, initiated by a survey by the Dozhd TV channel. The controversy continues to this day. But now the “hotbed of discussion” has moved from the TV channel to front-line writer Daniil Granin, who gave a speech in the German Bundestag. And for an entire hour, 94-year-old Granin told high-ranking Germans about the life of the besieged city. Bloggers reacted to this speech very ambiguously.

Verbal battles unfold under the video of Granin’s speech. The writer’s speech does not leave anyone indifferent. But it evokes very different emotions: from gratitude to indignation.

irinakiu comments:

Thanks to Daniil Aleksandrovich Granin for not letting society forget about this tragedy, even though it happened decades ago. And he does it like a human being, without aggression or false pathos. At the age of 95, go to another country, stand for an hour in front of a huge audience, talking not about great victories, but about ordinary people, about the torment that they had to endure. A huge number of people listen to this recording on different resources, this is important to people.

Inga Khlopina notes:

This huge trauma of our people hurts so much and for so long that it’s hard to hear about it even now. But we need to listen, mourn, remember these silently and innocently departed people. If we don’t talk about it (and cry), then our soul will remain sick and half-dead. What good fellows the Germans are that they can accept their guilt, repent, and pass on the memory of this terrible crime and repentance to their children and grandchildren. Thank you for posting this speech, I listened to it carefully and with tears, and passed it on to my friends and children.

Mentioning the scandalous Dozhd survey, bloggers also recall Granin’s “Siege Book.” How many discrepancies does it have with the “official” version?

cordiamin writes:

In Soviet times, one of the most controversial pages of our history - the siege of Leningrad - was also considered untouchable. And this was understandable: Leningrad is the cradle of the October Socialist Revolution, the cradle of ideology. on which the USSR was built. This meaning no longer matters to us. Where does this need for sacred cows come from?
The silence around this topic was broken by Granin, who wrote the “Siege Book.” Have any of those who today foam at the mouth demonize “Rain” read this book?
For example, I read.
But you can throw Granin on the pitchfork: he told a truth that was also hidden. He was the first to make a hole in this cover of holiness.
I don’t put “Rain” on a par with Daniil Granin. They're on the wrong plane. And at the same time, ignoring holiness, I do not see blasphemy in their question. Provocation - yes. But provocation is one of the elements of the “Amateur” project. Because we are all amateurs. And the holier, the more. And the further we go, the less we know. Here's an example from March last year - Matvienko was amazed by the results of a survey of schoolchildren about the Great Patriotic War. The students don't know the war heroes! In November 2012, VTsIOM conducted a survey on a similar topic: “Some of the respondents named Poland as opponents of the Soviet Union, others named Ukraine and even Austria-Hungary, which collapsed back in 1918!” As part of the project “Demythologizing the History of Russia,” it turned out that for 25 percent of young people, the Great Patriotic War is in the distant past, along with the First World War and the War of 1812. And at the same time, all survey participants unanimously confirmed that they are proud of the history of our country.
That is, under this holiness, if you look at it, there is nothing.

lagezza writes:

I caught myself thinking when I was listening to Daniil Granin that, not knowing about the situation with Dozhd, and not knowing about the widely circulated counterargument: Hitler’s decision not to accept surrender, he accidentally refuted it in his speech: he clearly and several times said that The Germans were waiting for the city to capitulate. Maybe that’s why they didn’t show his speech on the federal channel? Because the argument in this case would look very unconvincing - and Daniil Granin would also be included in the list of those who do not know history.

“The first Stalinist blogger” (as he calls himself) klimoff_den writes :

Let's start with a story about how some Western media presented their viewers with Daniil Granin's recent speech in the Bundestag.
Not a word about besieged Leningrad, liberated exactly 70 years ago.
Here, for example, is a news story from one English-language TV channel. The credits clearly and clearly state who this Granin really is. As it turns out, he is a “prisoner who survived the Holocaust,” and not at all a lieutenant of the people’s militia who fought on the Leningrad Front...
Simply put, Western society was shown only a picture from the Reichstag.
At the same time, the content of the speech of the author of the “Siege Book” was completely distorted.
Allegedly, in Berlin, Granin spoke exclusively about the horrors experienced by the long-suffering Jewish people.
In general, history always confirms the rightness of those who write it. Therefore, they are increasingly trying to equate the great feat of the Red Empire with the crimes of Hitler’s Germany...
And if the Chairman of the German Parliament himself admitted on Tuesday that the German people still do not know the truth about the Leningrad blockade, then what can we say about other countries and other people?

They answer him in the comments:

Stas Bitsuev writes:

He meant that the German people do not know from the words of the prisoners of the siege....but the Germans know the history of World War II very well, and are still paying for it, both financially and morally, unlike most of our modern compatriots.. .

Blogger maxim_akimov and even calls Granin’s speech “actions bordering on criminal madness”:

maxim_akimov writes:

The “writer” Daniil Granin was invited to the Bundestag, who is famous for pouring tons of dirt on the Soviet state, designed to reduce the Soviet system to the rank of a worthless, or even criminal organization, and also to lead the reader to the idea that the Soviet people were slaves of this inhumane systems, and cruel but dumb animals. (...)
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Germans dragged this subject into their parliament yesterday, and, sitting down opposite him, began to listen to exactly what they wanted to hear, that is, stories about the baseness of the Russian people, stories about how Russian “subhumans” degenerated, caught in extreme conditions.
In addition to other “heartbreaking” stories, Daniil Granin colorfully described the story of how, in besieged Leningrad, her own mother froze the body of a dead child and fed him the meat of her other child, her daughter.
These are exactly the kinds of stories that German politicians and “thinkers” need, they desperately need them! Today's Germans are reluctant to listen to stories about how low their own grandfathers had sunk, how hopelessly and bestially they had lost their human appearance, destroying millions of Leningraders, dooming people to nightmarish, unbearable torment, no, this is not what is required, we need completely different information, the kind that will confirm that even if the Germans are to blame for something, then the Russians, in any case, are subhumans, eaters of children, monsters, not worthy to stand among human nations.

polo79 in a post about Maxim Kantor’s response to the hype around the Dozhd poll, also does not ignore Granin’s speeches:

polo79 writes:

Daniil Granin describes one story from besieged Leningrad: a mother with two children, one three years old, the second, if I’m not mistaken, 9 years old. Naturally, they are starving. The body of the youngest child cannot stand it and he dies. The mother places his body on the windowsill between the window frames and cuts off a small piece every day to feed the older child. This is how they survive. Whenever I try to imagine this situation, to try it on myself, to get used to it even just a little emotionally, I feel bad and everything gets colder inside. Now, let’s just imagine that this woman is quite specifically asked the question of what she will choose: to live in occupied Leningrad (as was the case in Kyiv and Minsk, for example) or to feed one surviving child with the corpse of another (and, most likely, to eat )? Do we have the right to make this choice for her and say unequivocally that she would choose the latter? We certainly don't have that right. The only problem is that she didn’t have this choice (modeled by us). They were left there to die, but against all odds, miraculously, they survived. And no one now has the right to either condemn them or make their actions a banner on a pike in order to stab opponents in a dispute with this pike.

yzhukovski notes:

So was it possible to reduce the number of victims of the siege of Leningrad, in any way? Hey military historians, where's the answer? It remains to be assumed that Comrade Stalin not only liquidated the archives, but also all the witnesses to the liquidation of the archives. Isn’t this a crime against historical truth? (...)
Daniil Granin says a fantastic thing that outweighs all the noise around “Rain” and the moment of glory of Andrei Norkin or Natalia Sindeeva. He says the mother fed one child to another to keep her sanity. After the total Gulag, the people's sanity was preserved, no matter what seeders, winnowers and combines of the free market they assemble, but they only turn out to be of vertical take-off, named after Joseph the shoemaker's seed. Only the popular mind, preserved by devouring historical memory and truth, can joyfully vote for dictatorship-light, politically dressed in liberal clothes and modernized in color. My people do not want freedom, because it is in their genes to eat a child for the sake of preserving historical sanity.

The topic of cannibalism in the besieged city is fiercely discussed. Some believe that the importance of cannibalism should not be exaggerated. Others cite as an example Granin’s new book “A Man Not From Here,” which describes how the “top” of the Soviet regime lived and what they ate during the blockade.

On July 4, 2017, the front-line writer passed away. We remember his poignant speech, which in 2014 made the Bundestag blush and cry

The writer told the merciless truth about the siege of Leningrad. The writer told the merciless truth about the siege of Leningrad. Photo: Timur KHANOV

The German federal parliament may have never heard such a passionate and terrible speech, based on the facts presented. The St. Petersburg writer, who was 95 years old in 2014, cited facts and figures about the blockade that cannot be heard without tears. It is unlikely that this information can be found in German history textbooks. And in the Reichstag building, from the lips of a man like Granin, they sounded like a revelation. Daniil Alexandrovich did not set out to embarrass and reproach members of the government, the President of Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, by the way, listened with her eyes downcast. Granin accepted the invitation to perform in Germany on January 27, the day of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the fascist blockade. Coincidentally, a year later, on the same day, the prisoners of Auschwitz were also released, so since 1996, the Germans have been celebrating this date. The Petersburger’s almost hour-long speech was listened to in deathly silence, and at the end they applauded while standing.

Angela Merkel listened to the speech with her eyes downcast

“They put crackers on the graves”

– Today in St. Petersburg people go to the Piskarevskoye cemetery. This is one of the symbolic cemeteries of the city. They go to remember and pay tribute to all those who died during the siege. They put crackers, sweets, cookies on the grave mounds...

Hundreds of thousands of Leningraders died of hunger.

All connections of the huge metropolis were cut off from the mainland. And the blockade began, which lasted 900 days.

The blockade was sudden and unexpected, just like this whole war. There were no reserves of fuel or food. And soon, somewhere in October, the card system began. Bread was given out on ration cards.

And then, one after another, catastrophic events began, the electricity supply stopped, the water supply, sewerage, and heating ran out.

“Hitler ordered not to enter the city”

– What is a card system? She looked like this. From the first of October they were already giving 400 grams of bread for workers, 200 grams for employees. And already in November they began to catastrophically reduce the issuance rate. Workers were given 250 grams of bread, and employees and children 125 grams. This is a slice of low-quality bread, halved with cellulose, duranda and other impurities. There was no supply of food to the city.

Winter was approaching. And, as luck would have it, it’s a bitter winter, 30-35 degrees. The huge city lost all life support. It was bombed mercilessly every day.

Houses burned for days. And from there, from the front, turning back, we saw columns of black smoke and wondered where and what was burning.

Granin made the Germans blush and cry.

“I wish I could live to see the grass”

Already in October, mortality began to rise. With this catastrophically low nutritional norm, people quickly grew thin, became dystrophic and died. In 25 days of December, 40 thousand people died. In February, 3.5 thousand people were already dying of hunger every day. In December, people wrote in their diaries: “Lord, I wish I could live to see grass.” In total, approximately 1 million people died in the city. Zhukov writes in his memoirs that 1 million 200 thousand died. Death participated silently and quietly in the war.

A child’s ration is three hundred grams of bread per day

“I fed my daughter my dead brother”

Already 35 years after the war, the Belarusian writer Adamovich and I began interviewing survivors of the siege about how they survived. There were amazing, merciless revelations. A mother's child dies. He is three years old. The mother places the corpse between the windows, it is winter. And every day he cuts off a piece to feed his daughter and at least save her. The daughter did not know the details. She was 12 years old. But my mother did not allow herself to die and go crazy. This daughter has grown up. And I talked to her. She found out years later. Can you imagine? There are many such examples that can be given of what life has become for survivors of the siege.

... One day they brought the diary of a siege survivor. Yura was 14 years old, he lived with his mother and sister. The diary amazed us. This was the story of a boy's conscience. In bakeries, the portion of bread provided was precisely weighed, down to the gram. Yura’s duty in the family was to wait in line for bread and bring it home. In his diary, he admits what torment it took him not to pinch off a piece of bread along the way. He was especially tormented by the appendage; he uncontrollably wanted to eat this small piece. Neither mother nor sister seemed to know about this. Sometimes he couldn't stand it and ate it. He describes how ashamed he was, admits his greed, and then his shamelessness - a thief who stole his daily bread from his own people, from his mother and sister. Nobody knew about it, but he suffered. The neighbors in the apartment were a husband and wife, the husband was some kind of big boss in the construction of defense structures, he was entitled to additional rations. In the common kitchen, the wife prepared dinner and cooked porridge. How many times did Yura feel the urge, when she went out, to grab and scoop up some hot porridge with her hand? He punishes himself for his shameful weakness. What is striking in his diary is the constant battle between hunger and conscience, his attempts to maintain his integrity. We don't know if he managed to survive. The diary shows how his strength was declining. But even when he was already completely degenerate, he did not allow himself to beg for food from his neighbors.

Granin's speech in the Bundestag was a success.

“I hated the fascists”

… I was on the front line starting in '41 and part of '42. I honestly admit that I hated the Germans not only as opponents, Wehrmacht soldiers, but also as those who, contrary to all the laws of military honor, soldier’s dignity, officer traditions and the like, destroyed people, townspeople in the most painful, inhumane way. They no longer fought with weapons, but with the help of hunger, long-range artillery, and bombing. Destroyed whom? Civilians, defenseless, unable to participate in the fight. This was Nazism in its most disgusting form, because they allowed themselves to do this, considering Russians to be subhuman, considering us almost savages and primates, with whom we can do as we please.

There were corpses wrapped in sheets lying on the streets and in the entrances. Sometimes I was sent from the front to headquarters. I visited the city and saw how the human essence of the siege survivors changed. The main character turned out to be someone nameless - a passer-by who tried to lift the weakened man who had fallen to the ground and lead him. There were such points with boiling water. They only gave a mug of boiling water, and this often saved people. It was compassion awakened in people.

Speech by Daniil Granin in the Bundestag. The hour of remembrance for the victims of Nazism in the German parliament this year was marked by the 70th anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad.