“As soon as you are in St. Petersburg, you are inspired by it,” Ashot Dzhazoyan speaks proudly of the city—the muse behind his film, ‘Petersburg! City of Life…’.
The film—set over the course of a day in Petersburg—begins in the morning and ends at night. It revolves around the city dwellers—drivers, artists, churchmen, engineers, ballet dancers, cannoneers, and workers from the “raising team” of Palace Bridge.
The documentary screening took place at the Russian Centre of Science and Culture to commemorate the Siege of Leningrad. The siege, also called the Blockade of Leningrad, was a military seizure of Leningrad—presently St. Petersburg—by German and Finnish troops during the Great Patriotic War (what Russians and some other former Soviet republics call the war fought from June 22, 1941, to May 9 1945 along the many fronts of the Eastern Front of World War II, primarily between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany). Necessary supplies were cut from the town and thousands of people succumbed to starvation. The siege lasted from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944.
“The account is a tragic story about the victory of the people who lived there,” says Elena Remizova, director of the Russian Centre of Science and Culture, before adding that 125 grams of bread was the minimal daily ration for Leningraders during the harsh times. After December 1941, ration was increased to 350 grams for workers and upto 250 grams for common citizenry.
“The event is to celebrate; St. Petersburg has come a long way to become one of the most beautiful cities in the world,” she points to black and white pictures of the blockaded city in ruins. The photos—by Soviet photojournalist Boris Kudoyarov—depict bombed-out spaces, displaced individuals, and students assembling aerial bombs.
One picture, titled ‘The Company’s Favourite. A Boy Saved by Sailors (1942)’, shows three armed men grinning at a two or three year old boy in the middle—the rosiness in his plump cheeks noticeable despite the monochrome.
Nishant Kumar Meena, a student of Ambedkar University in Delhi, “has had a passion for art since childhood”. “I got deeply interested in Soviet history in the last 8 to 9 years and over time it started reflecting in my art as well,” he elaborated on his work’s inclination towards Soviet.
Some of Meena’s art pieces at the Russian Centre—composed out of watercolours and Russian ink—were paintings of the Monument To Heroic Defenders Of Leningrad, a mother-daughter pair sitting on shelled-out rubble and a family carrying a deceased loved one to the cemetery.
According to him, some days during the siege, “the street cleaners had to remove around 4,000 dead bodies everyday, while the figure reached 7,000 on other days”.
Speaking about the portrait of Tanya Savicheva and a painting of her diary, Meena remarks that the diary, in which the eleven-year-old recorded every new loss in her family, was recovered from her elder sister who survived the war. Though later evacuated from Leningrad, Tanya died of starvation in 1943.