During the Siege of Leningrad: Reminiscences by Anastasia Veller-Bolotova
On January 27, the city on the Neva marks the 77th anniversary since the day of complete liberation from the enemy blockade. How did our university, at that time called the Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineering (LISI), live during those difficult years? Records of LISI teachers and employees have been preserved in the archives. Today you can see the years of the siege of Leningrad through the eyes of Anastasia Veller-Bolotova, who worked at the Department of Geodesy since 1925, organized the extramural studies, and in 1943 was the Institute’s Deputy Director.
Teachers and students restoring the Institute’s buildings
Anastasia Veller-Bolotova
In September 1941, the enemy encirclement around Leningrad closed. Bombing and shelling began. “On October 5, 1941, a high-explosive bomb fell in the courtyard of the Institute. It destroyed all five floors of the building, a fire broke out. The classrooms of architecture, physics, geodesy, the military department, part of the library and the Marxism-Leninism department were destroyed along with the room where the best samples of graduates' final papers over many decades had been kept. The entire staff of the Institute began rescuing the classrooms, laboratories, equipment... ” – these are the first memories of the participant of those wartime events.
By joint efforts, part of the Institute's services was transferred to another building, and a bomb shelter was equipped in the basement. In December 1941, a huge artillery shell pierced the wall from the side of 3rd Krasnoarmeiskaya Street and destroyed the physics classroom. Since March 1942, the Institute was completely closed. By this time, there were no longer any students (many of them went to the front, others were evacuated). Professors, teachers and administrative staff went to work at factories and the railway. In August 1942, the Institute was evacuated.
At the end of September 1943, by order of the government, three Leningrad institutes were reopened, including LISI. The teachers, students and employees who remained in the city started to restore the Institute and managed to get one of the buildings ready for recommencing the studies. On October 19, 1943, the educational process was resumed, and after the lifting of the blockade, in August 1944, a significant part of the staff returned from evacuation and the first defense of diploma projects took place again.
In 1945, the Order of the Red Banner of Labour was awarded to the LISI staff, while several professors and teachers received the Order of Lenin, a high government award, for their active participation in the restoration of the city’s industrial facilities. Anastasia Veller-Bolotova was awarded the medal "For the Defense of Leningrad".
In the post-war period, she was a member of the regional committee of the trade union of higher education and scientific institutions’ staff, which was involved, among other things, in helping orphanages. According to the recollections of her contemporaries, it was not accidental: Anastasia Veller-Bolotova lost her parents early and knew all the hardships of orphans’ life from her own experience.
Text: Alexandra Podolnikova
Photo: SPbGASU archive
Fragments of the article "The Institute During the Siege", published by Anastasia Veller-Bolotova in the LISI newspaper after the end of the Great Patriotic War, were used in the text.
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