Reclaiming the siege of Leningrad from the Russian state: Living Pictures reviewed

Take the Red Line north, heading out of St Petersburg, and you’ll eventually reach Courage Square on the city’s outskirts (if you pass Polytechnic you’ve gone too far). From there, it’s a brisk 20-minute walk along the birch-lined Avenue of the Unvanquished to Piskaryovskoye cemetery, home to some 186 mass graves and almost half a million civilians and soldiers who died during the 900-day siege of the ‘hero city’ during the second world war – or, as it’s known to Russians, the Great Patriotic War. Just behind the obligatory statue of Mother Russia watching over the sepulchral hush you’ll find, etched in granite, the words of the poet Olga Bergholz: ‘Know this, you who regard these stones: No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.’

The words can have an unnerving ring. Equal parts commemoration and threat, it’s obvious why the Soviet state adopted them as the official motto of blockade veneration, inscribing them in every last one of its dozens of monuments, museums and other memorial sites dotted about the city. This is memory on a totalitarian scale: eternal and absolute. But as Polina Barskova suggests in Living Pictures, a collection of writings on the life and afterlife of the blockade, the official line is at best a half-truth, at worst an outright lie.

In the opening piece, the author recalls visiting Piskaryovskoye cemetery herself, after which, having been struck by the vast emptiness of it all, she reflects: ‘Today the blockade seems to generate – instead of compassion, attention, pity and collective mourning – an absence of real, viable emotion.’ True enough: in Russia now, official memory tends not towards loss but ‘sacrifice’, not to pathos but to ‘glory’, not to tragedy but to ‘heroism’.