Beyond the Siege of Leningrad: One Woman’s Life During and After the Occupation: The Recollections of Evdokiia Vasil’evna Baskakova-Bogacheva

This memoir about the experiences of German occupation during the siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) was written by Moscow-born Evdokiia Vasil’evna Baskakova-Bogacheva (1888-1976), an émigré in Australia, at the age of eighty-one. The text had been forgotten in the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco since 1970 until the editors of this volume discovered it.

In the memoirs, after accounting on her youth spent against the background of the First World War and of the two Russian revolutions of 1917, Evdokiia describes the inferno of the Nazi occupation as experienced in a suburb of Leningrad in 1941-43. She survived for nearly two years almost on the front line, within a few kilometers of the blockade ring. As a medical practitioner, she became useful for the occupational authorities and the ever-shrinking town population, until her family was evacuated to the west in October 1943. Besides hunger, discord, disease, the hunt for food and firewood, along with violence and death, Evdokiia’s account deals with various forms of cooperation between Soviet citizens and the new authorities.

All the events she recalls can be confirmed through other sources. The introduction and the detailed notes to the text help the reader to locate Evdokiia’s recollections in time and place, and situate them in their historical context.

Oleg Beyda is the Hansen Lecturer in Russian History at the University of Melbourne. Pavel Gavrilov is an independent researcher of history of the Soviet partisan movement and the siege of Leningrad, based in Israel.