Russian writer who chronicled the siege of Leningrad and worked for democracy and reconciliation
DANIIL GRANIN, who has died aged 98, was a Soviet veteran of the Second World War who survived the siege of Leningrad and later published, together with Ales Adamovich, A Book of the Blockade, a collection of people’s reminiscences from the time; his writings, which included novels, made him a moral authority for many in Russia and in later life he was prominent as an advocate of perestroika, democracy and reconciliation with Russia’s former enemies.
Granin was 22 when he volunteered to join the Red Army, “probably out of pure boyish lust for romance”, and became a tank officer. But he quickly came up against the brutal realities of war: “We were bombed out just when our train arrived on the front line, and after that we experienced one defeat after another, so we fled, retreated, then fled again. Finally my regiment was forced to surrender the town of Pushkin [15 miles south of Leningrad], the front collapsed and the blockade began.”
Hitler planned to take Leningrad by starving its people into submission. The siege lasted 871 days, from September 8 1941, until January 27 1944, and as Granin recorded, when supplies of dogs, cats and rats ran out, daily food rations fell to just 125 grams of bread per person, so people ate anything else they could lay their hands on, “everything from the birdseed to the canary itself ”.
They ate petroleum jelly and lipstick, spices and medicines, fur coats, leather caps and earth. Some made face-powder pancakes; others munched grimy crystallised sugar, dug out from under the warehouses levelled by German firebombs.
The city had around 2.5 million inhabitants at the beginning of the blockade, including about 400,000 children. By the end of the siege about 1.1 million had died from starvation and cold. Granin came to the conclusion that the survivors were mostly people who had helped others rather than caring only for themselves, preserving their dignity under terrible circumstances.
After the war Stalin played down the siege, preferring to celebrate the less problematic victories at Moscow and Stalingrad, and meted out repression to the former defenders of a city he had always mistrusted. Brezhnev co-opted it into his heroic cult of the Great Patriotic War, designed to distract attention from communism’s failures, down-playing stories of human suffering and depravity.
A Book of the Blockade, first published in the Soviet Union in 1979 (reprinted in an expanded edition in 1982), was based on hundreds of interviews and diaries of people who had been trapped in the besieged city, and came as a revelation with its accounts of some of the darker sides of the blockade. Yet as Granin revealed later, the book was heavily butchered by the official censor who had objected to materials relating to postwar Stalinist repression and accounts of cannibalism.
It was only after the collapse of communism that police records were released showing that 2,000 people had been arrested for cannibalism during the siege, of whom 586 were executed for murdering their victims. Most of those arrested were women.
In a keynote speech to the German Bundestag in 2014 to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Granin described the almost unthinkable: “A child died – he was just three years old. His mother laid the body inside the double-glazed window and sliced off a piece of him every day to feed her second child, a daughter. This is how she got her through.”
But, earlier in 1992, after the Soviet Union had fallen apart, Granin and Adamovich considered filling in gaps in their account. They had no hesitation about revealing the crimes of Stalin, but baulked when it came to publishing stories of cannibalism, feeling that “there are things that shouldn’t be told. They cripple the soul.” The official censor, Granin said, had “simplified our problems and moral torment”, but left to their own devices the writers found he had “made a nest” in their souls.
“Ordinary human life,” he observed, “can be cruel in its demand for absolute truth”.
The son of a forester, Daniil Alexandrovich Granin was born on New Year’s Day 1919 in a village in south-west Russia and began writing stories in the 1930s, while he was training as an engineer at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute.
After graduation, Granin began working at the Kirov energy laboratory. He joined the Red Army when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and served until the end of the Second World War. In 1945 he began working in the Leningrad Regional Administration of Power System Management and Scientific Research Institute.
His first novel, Dispute Across the Ocean, was published in 1949, and he went on to produce several more works of fiction, most of which concerned the heroic battles of principled scientists and inventors against obstructive careerists and bureaucrats. Some were made into films, earning him popularity.
Granin’s novels explored themes such as mercy, remorse, tolerance and conscience – and although he served as secretary of the board of the Soviet Writers’ Union and won the 1978 State Prize for Literature, hardliners accused him of a “bourgeois lack of character”. It did not go down well in the Brezhnev era when he told an interviewer that during the war he had “learnt to hate and kill, to be brutal and vindictive – everything a person doesn’t need”.
In 1987, after Mikhail Gorbachev launched his campaign of glasnost, Granin won acclaim with a biography of the geneticist Nikolai Timofeevresovsky, who endured repression under Stalin for disagreeing with officially sanctioned Lysenkoism, a pseudo-science which rejected the concept of the “gene” and natural selection. The same year an article in which he criticised “the mass repressions of Stalin’s time” led to the establishment of a charity in Leningrad which set up the first soup kitchen in the Soviet Union.
In 1989 Granin wrote an open letter, published in Moscow News, in which he apologised to the Czechoslovak people for the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968, condemning it as “collective murder” which had allowed Stalinists to block communist reform for two decades.
But some reforms proved a step too far. When Leningraders voted to change the name of their city back to the Tsarist St Petersburg, he objected, on the grounds that “when a person is lying down on the operating table for major surgery, you shouldn’t be arguing about what colour to dye his hair”.
Granin regularly published new titles in the 1990s, but they went largely unnoticed. He served as a member of Boris Yeltsin’s Presidential Council, a body that met infrequently.
He continued to campaign for human rights and liberal values. In 2000 he wrote an article condemning the official cover-up which followed the sinking of the Kursk submarine.
“The Kursk affair has confirmed in the eyes of the whole world our reputation of a country steeped in lies,” he wrote. “Events in the Barents Sea have shown that today we have no democracy … One should be wary of the notion of ‘patriotism’ which is being foisted on us from high rostrums. We are not the best of peoples. We are not the most tolerant of peoples. We are not the most industrious of peoples and we are not the most moral of peoples. We need more humility. Less arrogance. And we shouldn’t strive all the time to play the role of a great power. The greatness of a country lies in the price it puts on human life, on its subjects and citizens.”
Daniil Granin was predeceased by his wife Rimma Maiorova.