Leningrad is remembered as the setting of a childhood under siege and as the measure one witness uses to distinguish wartime violence from the slower, less visible danger of Chernobyl. Its place in the account is formed not through a city portrait but through bodily memories of hunger, cold, and fear—and through the later difficulty of speaking about what happened there.

Childhood on the Front

A speaker who lived through the Siege of Leningrad as a child recalls that life there felt like being at the front: people were continually under fire, and hunger lasted for years. The siege is described not as an abstract historical episode but as an ordeal that pushed people toward animal instincts. The remembered winter is defined by immediate deprivation and the struggle to stay alive.

In the speaker’s account, the family burned the wooden furniture in their apartment, along with books and old rags, for fuel. People moved so slowly that they crawled rather than walked. Someone who fell on the ice might remain frozen where they had fallen; passersby often lacked the strength to help. These details make Leningrad a place where exposure and exhaustion governed ordinary movement, and where death could remain in public view without anyone being able to intervene.

A Measure for Chernobyl

When the reactor exploded, the speaker’s mother still lived with the family. She maintained that they had already endured the worst thing in the blockade and that nothing could be worse. Her conviction carries the authority of lived experience, but the later disaster unsettles the comparison: the speaker insists that the blockade and Chernobyl cannot simply be equated.

The distinction rests partly on how danger announces itself. In Leningrad, shooting and hunger made the threat immediate: a person could die that very day. After Chernobyl, by contrast, the landscape could appear healthy, with gardens in bloom, while contamination remained difficult to perceive. The speaker recalls that people nonetheless kept measuring the new catastrophe against war. Ten years after the accident, some treated the danger as past, some expected recovery, some feared imminent death, and others wanted to leave. The siege thus becomes both a historical comparison and a limit to comparison: it clarifies the difference between visible wartime peril and an invisible, continuing threat.

The Limits of Testimony

The speaker can talk about Chernobyl but cannot speak about the blockade at a gathering of the Children of Blockaded Leningrad. At the meeting, no words came. The silence contrasts with the public expectation that a survivor should be able to turn experience into testimony. At home, the speaker’s mother had not wanted the family to remember the blockade; later, the speaker suggests that fear alone is not enough to explain it, and that the experience resists being made into a simple account.

The difference is not that Chernobyl is easily discussed. The speaker says that people do not talk about it among themselves either; conversations happen when outsiders, journalists, or relatives from elsewhere arrive. Leningrad’s remembered silence therefore sits alongside another difficult silence, shaped by an event that the speaker says cannot yet be fully named or understood. The comparison connects the two histories while showing that each has its own conditions of remembrance.

Recovery and Inheritance

The speaker describes emerging from the blockade as a process that took years. In the same account, children visiting the speaker’s studio are encouraged to make sculptures from ordinary pieces of wood. The passage associates creative activity with waking up and with the long work of getting beyond the siege’s hold, without presenting recovery as immediate or complete.

Leningrad also persists through public and familial inheritance: a gathering organized around the identity of children who survived the blockade, a mother’s insistence that the family had already survived the worst, and a speaker who can attend such a meeting but cannot speak. The city’s significance in the book lies in this tension. It supplies a concrete memory of extreme, visible suffering, yet that memory does not make the later catastrophe easy to explain; it instead reveals how survivors carry different disasters in different forms of silence.