‘Yesterday evening was really frightening. The air-raid siren went off at eight o’clock, just as we were giving the patients their supper. The anti-aircraft guns immediately began firing very close by. Then suddenly there was a huge burst of thunder and the sound of breaking glass. I was in the women’s ward at the time, and the patients immediately began shouting and groaning, many of them becoming hysterical.’ This is from a diary kept by Lena Mukhina - born 100 years ago today - during the early months of the Siege of Leningrad. She was only 16 at the time, but the diary is said ‘to paint a picture of a city reeling from the impact of war and the struggle of its innocent, defenceless inhabitants for survival’.
In 1950, Mukhina became a labourer at the Southern Kuzbass thermal power station, rising quickly to become a designer - for the organisation’s slogans, displays etc. However, by 1952, she was working at the Kuntsevo Mechanical Works, where she remained for 15 years, mostly in the branding department. Before retiring due to ill health, she worked as a painter of designs on fabrics at the Kuntsevo Factory of Artistic Haberdashery, and as a homeworker for the Soviet Army factory. She died in 1991.
Mukhina is only remembered today because of a diary she kept for a year, partly during the Siege of Leningrad. This was donated anonymously to a state archive in 1962, only to be rediscovered half a century later by Sergei Yarov. It was edited and printed in Russian (2012) before being translated into English by Amanda Love Darragh - published by Macmillan in 2015 as The Diary of Lena Mukhina. Some pages of the English edition can be previewed at Googlebooks, while the full work can be read freely at Internet Archive (with log-in).
The following paragraph comes from the editors and authors of a foreward (Valentin Kovalchuk, Aleksandr Rupasov and Alexsandr Chistikov): ‘This diary, written by sixteen-year-old Leningrad schoolgirl Elena (Léna) Mukhina and miraculously preserved from that dreadful era, gives us a human insight into the last days of peace and the first days of war. With astonishing candour and a mix of childish naivety and adult wisdom, it paints a picture of a city reeling from the impact of war and the struggle of its innocent, defenceless inhabitants for survival. The obvious talent of the writer captures our attention from the very first pages, swiftly drawing us in and holding us in a constant state of suspense as we experience the tragedy and heroism of ordinary, everyday people, on whom nations are built and by whom history is both made and recorded.’
4 October 1941
‘I haven’t written for such a long time. But today I feel an urge to write. Dear God, what are they doing to us, to my fellow Leningraders and me?
I’m working in the hospital wing of the Clara Zetkin Institute of Maternity and Infancy Protection. We hospital orderlies work twenty-four-hour shifts: I work from nine in the morning to nine the next morning, then I have a day off until nine the following morning. So I am able to sleep only every other night. It’s very hard, but not unbearable. However when I don’t manage to get any sleep at all, just a few moments dozing in the bomb shelter, then it’s horrendous. For example, now it’s quarter to seven. Between half past seven yesterday evening and six o’clock this morning there were six air raids. Of these, two lasted about three hours, two lasted two hours, and the final two were an hour and a half and an hour. I’m working in a hospital and it’s very hard work, but I’m getting used to it. On the positive side, on days when I’m working I don’t go hungry and I’m entitled to a first category ration card with 400g of bread per day.
I haven’t seen Tamara since we composed that note to Vova and promised to see each other the following day. Yesterday I wrote her a note and asked Rozaliya Pavlovna to give it to Osya, so that he could pass it on to Tamara. So 1 still don’t know anything about the fate of my message to Vova. But I have no regrets about writing to him so abruptly.
During one of the air raids I somehow got talking to Ida Isaevna about friendships between men and women. You can love only one man, but at the same time it is possible to be friends with many men. Ida Isaevna told me that when she was seventeen she was friends with some of the boys she knew, and their friendship is still as strong as ever. Five of them from her class were friends - two girls and three boys.
We’re also two girls - Tamara and I, and three boys - Vova, Misha and Yanya. I don’t know why we aren’t friends. Do the boys treat us badly? No. Are they somehow unsuitable as friends? Again no, on the contrary. They’re exactly the kind of boys it’s good to have as friends. So what’s wrong? I don’t know. But in my opinion, we don’t know how to talk to one another.
It’s a pity, such a pity. In these bleak wartime days we are the only five from our class left in Leningrad. We could be developing lifelong friendships. There’s nobody stopping us. Dima, Emma, Roza, none of the other girls are here. But still!
Tamara and I both have fairly calm temperaments. The boys are also quite reserved. Relations between us feel somehow strained, because we’re so formal with one another. Besides, Yanya is not really like the rest of us. He’s so studious, it’s hard to be friends with someone like that. We would become friends more easily if relations between us were simpler, more straightforward. Like normal relationships between boys and girls. If we were attracted to one another. If they made advances towards us. . . and we resisted.’
18 October 1941
‘Yesterday evening was really frightening. The air-raid siren went off at eight o’clock, just as we were giving the patients their supper. The anti-aircraft guns immediately began firing very close by. Then suddenly there was a huge burst of thunder and the sound of breaking glass. I was in the women’s ward at the time, and the patients immediately began shouting and groaning, many of them becoming hysterical. Anisimov ran in with the duty doctor. Somehow they managed to restore calm. When it had quietened down a little I carried the plates to the canteen with another orderly. They told me I could scrape the leftover kasha out of the pot. I had just started eating when I became aware of a strange noise coming from outside the window - people shouting, and police whistles. I asked one of the nurses what was happening. She reacted with astonishment: “Didn’t you know? There’s a fire out there, across the street. The Karl Marx factory is on fire. Go and have a look.” She took me to the bathroom and drew the curtain to one side, and I saw how bright it was outside, brighter than daylight. Great tongues of flame were shooting up into the sky, and red smoke was swirling all around. Yes, it was an enormous fire at the Karl Marx factory, across the street from our building. I understood straight away what the noise was. It was the sound of firemen working and shouting to one another, fire engines arriving and the droning of the water pumps. They didn’t manage to put the fire out until four o’clock in the morning.
Vladimirova died in the night. They brought a new patient with a head injury and a seventeen-year-old boy with a neck injury, who had been one of the firemen on the roof.’
See also Only Tanya is left.
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