The death of Tanya Savicheva

On 1 July 1944, in the district hospital in the settlement of Shatki in Gorky Oblast, some 150 kilometres from Gorky (today Nizhny Novgorod), fourteen-year-old Tanya Savicheva died. Two years earlier, in besieged Leningrad, she had written down in someone else’s notebook the dates on which the members of her family died, one after another. Those few pages, filled in pencil in a child’s hand, became after the war one of the best-known testimonies of the siege of the city, and made Tanya herself its symbol.

Many chronicles of the war contain the statement that the girl “died of hunger”. This is a simplification. Tanya survived the siege: in the summer of 1942 she was evacuated from Leningrad with a transport of children from an orphanage, and she died almost two years later, far behind the front line. According to Russian studies of her life, the immediate cause of death was intestinal tuberculosis, which developed as a result of prolonged starvation (in the medical terminology of the time, alimentary dystrophy), scurvy and nervous shock. Hunger did not kill her in Leningrad, then, but it was hunger that destroyed her body.

The Savichev family

Tatyana Nikolayevna Savicheva was born on 23 January 1930 in the village of Dvorishche near Gdov, but grew up in Leningrad, on Vasilyevsky Island. She was the youngest of the five children of Nikolai and Maria Savichev. Her father, a baker, ran a bakery with a confectioner’s shop and a cinema during the years of the New Economic Policy. After the NEP was wound up, the family, as “Nepmen”, lost their civil rights, and in 1935, according to her biographers, the NKVD expelled them to beyond the “101st kilometre” from the city. Nikolai Savichev died in exile in 1936. The family later returned to Leningrad, but their “class origin” barred the children from the Komsomol and from higher education.

In June 1941 Tanya finished the third year of primary school. In the flat on the 2nd Line of Vasilyevsky Island she lived with her mother, her grandmother Yevdokia, her sister Nina and her brother Leonid, known as Lyoka. The eldest sister, Zhenya (Yevgenia), lived separately, on Mokhovaya Street. Her brother Mikhail had left the city the day before the German attack on the USSR, and in September, when the ring of the siege closed around Leningrad, he found himself on the other side of the front. Their mother’s brothers, Uncles Vasily and Alexei, were also in the city.

Nine pages

The first death came at the end of December 1941, when transport in the city had ground to a halt and hunger was killing tens of thousands of people. Zhenya, who regularly gave blood for soldiers and walked some seven kilometres to her factory every day, died on 28 December 1941 in the arms of her sister Nina. Tanya then took Nina’s notebook, which had an alphabetical index at the back, and on the page for the letter Zh wrote: “Zhenya died 28 December at 12.00 in the morning 1941”.

The later entries were made in the same way, on the pages bearing the first letter of each name. Grandmother Yevdokia, whom doctors diagnosed with third-degree dystrophy, refused to go to an overcrowded hospital; she died on 25 January 1942. The family did not report her death until 1 February, so that they could use her ration card until the end of the month. Lyoka, who worked at a shipyard and hardly ever left it, died of exhaustion on 17 March in the works hospital, aged 24. Uncle Vasya died on 13 April, Uncle Lyosha on 10 May, and her mother, Maria Savicheva, on the morning of 13 May 1942.

After her mother’s death Tanya filled three more pages, under the Russian letters S, U and O (the initials of the words for “Savichevs”, “died” and “left”): “The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.” She did not know that two of her siblings were alive. Nina had not come home on 28 February 1942, a day of heavy shelling, and the family assumed she had been killed; in fact she had been suddenly evacuated with her factory across Lake Ladoga, along the Road of Life, and had been unable to let her family know. That is why the diary says nothing about Nina. Mikhail, cut off from the city, was fighting in a partisan unit.

The whole “diary” amounts to nine written pages, six of which record dates of death. It contains no description of hunger, frost or shelling – only names, days and hours. It was precisely this dryness, with the missing words and mistakes of a child who had stopped going to school, that later made the notes affect readers more powerfully than many lengthy accounts.

Evacuation and death

With the help of neighbours – the parents of her friend Vera Nikolayenko – Tanya took her mother’s body on a cart to a hangar by the bridge over the Smolenka, where the dead from the whole of Vasilyevsky Island were brought. The next day she went to a distant relative, her aunt Yevdokia Arsenyeva, taking with her a few keepsakes, the death certificates and the notebook. Her aunt took her in, but worked a shift and a half at a time, and the girl’s condition was very poor. When it turned out at the beginning of June that Nina was alive, Tanya was fit only for evacuation. Her aunt placed her in an orphanage that was being prepared for departure.

In the summer of 1942 (on 17 July according to Russian biographers, in August according to other sources) a transport of 125 children arrived in the settlement of Shatki, from where they were sent to Children’s Home No. 48 in the village of Krasny Bor. All of them were utterly emaciated, but only Tanya was diagnosed with tuberculosis, so she was kept isolated from the other children. For a time her condition improved: she walked on crutches, then by holding on to the wall. In the spring of 1944, however, the illness advanced. Mikhail, wounded at the front and treated in Leningrad, learned from neighbours that only Tanya was left of the family and wrote to the children’s home. In a reply dated 10 May a carer warned him that there was no hope of recovery. Thanks to this letter Tanya at least learned that her brother was alive.

In May 1944 she was moved to the infectious diseases ward of the hospital in Shatki. She was looked after by an orderly, Anna Zhurkina, who carried her in her arms and fed her with a pipette. In June the girl suffered from headaches, and at the end of the month she lost her sight. She died on 1 July 1944, aged fourteen and a half. According to her biographers, she was the only child of the 125 in the transport who could not be saved. She was buried the same day in the local cemetery.

The fate of the notebook

When she left, Tanya had left the notebook with her aunt. After the siege was broken Nina returned to Leningrad and took the notebook, convinced that it contained only her own notes from the design office, and only later noticed her sister’s entries. She handed them to Major Lev Rakov, before the war the academic secretary of the Hermitage, who on the orders of the Political Directorate of the Leningrad Front had been helping since late 1943 to create the exhibition “The Heroic Defence of Leningrad”. The exhibition grew into the Museum of the Defence of Leningrad, officially opened on 27 January 1946. When the museum was closed down in 1953 in the wake of the “Leningrad affair”, the notebook went to the Museum of the History of Leningrad, today the State Museum of the History of St Petersburg in the Peter and Paul Fortress. A copy is displayed at the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery.

It is often repeated, in Polish and Western publications among others, that Tanya’s diary was used as evidence for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. The claim, however, has no basis in the documents. Lilia Markova, a researcher of Tanya’s life, has pointed out that had the notebook been evidence at the trial, it would have remained in the tribunal’s files, whereas it has been an exhibit in the Leningrad museum since 1946. In all likelihood, then, it is a legend.

For a long time the fact that Tanya’s brother and sister had survived was also passed over in silence. When in 1959 the director Yefim Uchitel recalled her story in the documentary film Podvig Leningrada (The Feat of Leningrad), he asked Nina for permission to present the girl as the last of her line; according to Russian biographers, the surviving Nina and Mikhail were not mentioned until the early 1980s. The pre-war repression of the “Nepman” family was also left out. In December 1943 the Savichevs’ flat was allocated to another family, and in the 1970s, according to members of that family, the authorities refused to turn it into a museum precisely because of the Savichevs’ “unsuitable” origins.

Remembrance

The grave in Shatki, for a long time a plain mound, was found thanks to an appeal on a Pioneer radio programme. In 1972 an obelisk and a stele with a relief of the girl and pages of the diary were erected in the cemetery (some accounts give the year as 1975), and on 31 May 1981 a marble headstone was placed on the grave itself. Beside Lake Ladoga, on the former Road of Life, the “Flower of Life” memorial to the children of the siege has stood since 1968; stone tablets bearing Tanya’s notes were later added to it. Commemorative plaques hang on the house on Vasilyevsky Island, in 1971 the asteroid 2127 Tanya was named after her, and Edita Piekha sang a ballad about Tanya Savicheva. When, years later, the transfer of her remains to the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery was considered, Nina opposed it. She died in 2013 at the age of 94. Mikhail died in 1988.

Place in the war

Tanya’s story is one of hundreds of thousands. Leningrad, cut off by land in September 1941, was supplied only across Lake Ladoga and by air until the siege was broken in January 1943. Its complete lifting came only with the Leningrad–Novgorod offensive in January 1944. The city celebrated the end of the siege with a salute on 27 January, after 872 days of siege. At the Nuremberg trials the Soviet side gave, on the authority of the Extraordinary State Commission, a figure of 632,253 inhabitants dead, of whom only about 3 per cent were killed by bombs and shells. Historians estimate the civilian toll of the siege at between about 800,000 and more than a million people. Researchers point out that many evacuees, like Tanya, died outside the city – on trains, in hospitals and in children’s homes – and were not always included in these figures.

Tanya’s death came when the front was already far from Leningrad: in July 1944 the Red Army was advancing westwards through Belorussia, and the troops of the Leningrad Front were fighting at Narva and on the Karelian Isthmus. For Soviet, and later Russian, memory her notebook became an image of what the siege meant for ordinary families, and outside Russia it is sometimes compared with the diary of Anne Frank. Its power lies not in heroism, of which there is none in it, but in simple arithmetic: six dates in five months, and one sentence about who was left.