The War Journals of Lena Mukhina
“People are not born brave, strong and smart. These qualities must be acquired through perseverance and with determination, like the ability to read and write.” So wrote Lena Mukhina, a teenager who was forced to be both brave and strong as she endured the horrors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Commonly described as ‘the Russian Anne Frank’, her diaries are far more harrowing and traumatic than the writing of her more famous counterpart. Moreover, Lena’s diary entries are, at times, far more philosophical, getting deeper and darker as the siege wears on and takes its toll on the city’s desperate residents.
Lena Mukhina was aged just 16 when she started keeping a diary. It was 1941 and she was a schoolgirl. Like any teenager, she was just as worried about boys as she was with her grades, as her diary entries attest. Notably, she also recorded her efforts to learn German. After all, the Soviet Union had become allied with Nazi Germany, so the language might help her build a brighter future. All this changed in June 1941. On the 22nd of that month, the Nazis broke the pact and invaded. By September, they had reached the outskirts of Leningrad. Unable to take the city, the Nazis laid siege to it instead, hoping to starve its 2.5 million residents into submission. Lena was a witness to it all.
Above all, her pages give an eyewitness account of the first winter of the siege. Up until November, the city was completely cut off. As Lena testifies in her daily entries, people were starving to death by the thousand. Many would resort to desperate measures to stay alive. One December entry reveals that the family were forced to kill and eat their pet cat (“I never thought cat meat would be so tender and tasty”) and, more shockingly, she also tells of how the family housekeeper, an elderly lady called Aka struggled the most (“It would be better if she died…she is just an extra mouth to feed.”).
Despite it all, Lena lived through the worst of the siege. In May 1942, she was evacuated from Leningrad, along with many other children. It was here that her diary ended. She went to live with an aunt in Gorky and, though she never married and had children of her own, she did carry on being creative, working as an artist for several decades. Lena died in Moscow in 1991 at the age of just 66. Like many who lived through the Siege of Leningrad, it’s thought that the malnutrition she suffered as a child shortened her life.
As with Anne Frank, Lena didn’t write her diaries for publication. Indeed, after an anonymous individual handed them into the Soviet state archives in 1962, they lay unread for many years. Eventually they were unearthed by the historian Sergei Yarov. In 2011, they were finally published to global interest and acclaim. Lena’s teenage dream of being a published writer had finally come true, even if she wasn’t around to see it.