The 900 Days (3 page)

All day Saturday there had been comings and goings at Smolny, the rambling complex of classic Russian buildings along the Neva River, once a school for noble gentlewomen, but since 1917 a symbol of revolution. It was here that Lenin and his Bolsheviks set up their command post for the November, 1917,
coup d’état
, and here, since that time, the Leningrad Communist Party apparatus had had its headquarters.

On this Saturday the Leningrad City Party was holding what was called an enlarged plenary session—a general meeting at which secretaries of the city organization, factory directors, economic specialists, labor union representatives and city officials were discussing several important questions—the carrying out of directives which had been approved at the Eighteenth All-Union Party Conference and new plans for industrial construction.

The meeting in the Smolny Assembly Hall, the room in which Lenin proclaimed the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, did not end until evening. Some delegates headed home. Others joined the casual strollers on the city’s broad boulevards, sauntering idly in the filtered midnight light. They paused to stare in curiosity at posters plastered on lamp posts advertising
Romeo and Juliet
, the Prokofyev ballet in which Galina Ulanova was dancing at the Mariinsky Theater the next day. Other posters read: “Anton Ivanovich is Angry . . . Anton Ivanovich is Angry.” Not all the delegates recognized this as a teaser for a new movie which was to open soon at the leading houses. They shook their heads in puzzlement and wandered on to peer into the bright shop windows of Nevsky Prospekt.

The top personnel at the meeting did no strolling. They went straight to their offices and waited beside telephones in case of a call. Just before they left Smolny the word had quietly been passed: “Don’t get too far away. There may be something coming up tonight.”

They had been offered no clue as to what might be happening. Disciplined to carry out Party orders meticulously and without question, they now sat by their telephones, smoking cigarettes, poring over the mountains of paper that perpetually overwhelmed them and wondering what was in the air. Not all went to their offices. Mikhail Kozin, Party organizer for the great Kirov steel works, drove to his summer cottage at Mill Stream, a few miles outside Leningrad, to spend the night with his family. He had no telephone in the country, but his chauffeur went back to the factory, ready to alert him if anything happened.

In the suburb of Pushkin, the old imperial village of Tsarskoye Selo, the soft air and pale light attracted scores of young couples to the linden alleys and stately parks surrounding Rastrelli’s exquisite Catherine Palace. Here where the poets Alexander Pushkin and Aleksandr Blok once lived, a new generation of Russian youngsters, many of them fresh from graduation exercises, strolled through the long night. As they passed the squat buildings known as the Half-Moon near the gates of the palace they paused. From the open windows of the Half-Moon came the haunting sounds of a Skrya-bin sonata. It was the composer Gavriil Popov and his wife, playing two grand pianos in adjoining rooms, separated only by curtains. Popov’s opera,
Alexander Nevsky
, was at that moment on the rehearsal schedule of the Mariinsky Theater, being prepared for an autumn premiere.

The Catherine Park was a nest of creative artists. Nearby the composer, Boris Asafyev, was at work, instrumentalizing his opera
The Slav Beauty
, commissioned by the Baku Opera Theater for the forthcoming Nizami festival. In an adjacent apartment the novelist Vyacheslav Shishkov, back a day or two from a vacation in the Crimea, sat at his desk, correcting proofs of a long historical novel.

All winter the young writer Pavel Luknitsky had worked in the same house with Shishkov—it was Alexei Tolstoy’s old villa, now a writers’ rest home. On June 16 Luknitsky, thin, dark, handsome, intense and as yet unmarried, finished his novel and sent it off to the publisher. Now he was in Leningrad, wondering what to do with his summer. Possibly he would go to the new writers’ resort in Karelia. There were lovely grounds there and a beach. In any event he thought he would accept an invitation he had received in the mail the day before. The writers’ organization was sponsoring a tour of the old Mannerheim fortified line across Karelia which had lain in Soviet hands since the winter war. Special buses would leave promptly at 7:30
A.M.
, June 24.

In a big house at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal, not far from the Nevsky Prospekt, the poet Vissarion Sayanov talked through Saturday night with an old friend, a factory worker whom he had met during the winter war with Finland. Sayanov had been a war correspondent, his friend a political officer with a reconnaissance unit. Over a bottle of vodka they recalled the bitter cold in the Finnish forests, comrades who had survived and some who hadn’t. It was a leisurely, reminiscent evening, and they did not separate until long past midnight.

Sayanov, a middle-aged poet with a round face and gold-rimmed spectacles, walked a bit with his friend before turning back to go to bed. The city was quiet in the hours before morning—quiet but lighted by a refracted luminosity which flattened the colors, melted out the shadows and washed the great stone buildings with eggshell tints. From a distance came the sound of young voices. They were singing a popular Soviet song: “
Daleko
. . .
daleko
. . . Far away ... far away,” a plaintive song of a lover far from his sweetheart and home. The chant rose clear and fresh, and down the street appeared a band of students, the girls’ dresses white against the darkness of the pavement, the boys in light shirts and navy-blue trousers. Their arms were linked and they slowly walked, singing with a beauty that was rare and unearthly.

For the most part Leningrad now slept, except for wandering youngsters. Over on the Petrograd side the writer Vera Ketlinskaya, walking home along the Kirov Prospekt, watched a slim young boy pause and lift a girl to his shoulders so she could pick a spray of jasmine from an overhanging limb. The boy and girl came up to the Kamenny Ostrov Bridge over the Malaya Neva River. The draw was raised and they waited at the embankment, the girl shivering in the coolness of the night. When the boy tried to put his arm around her, she pulled away willfully and said: “One thing I would never be so stupid as to do is to marry you!”

“Why not?” the boy asked in despair. “Why not?”

“That’s what I’m trying to understand myself,” the girl said.

Finally, the drawbridge was let down. The boy and girl silently crossed over, the girl still holding the sprig of jasmine. They parted at the corner; then the girl called back: “Fedya!”

“What?” the boy replied.

“Nothing. Come by day after tomorrow. I’ll give you back your books.”

“All right,” the boy said. “Leave them with your mother if you’re not home. I’ll drop in during the afternoon.”

The young couple vanished. Now the avenue stretched empty and quiet. Leningrad was sleeping through the night that was no night . . . the longest of the white nights.

NOT EVERYONE SLEPT THAT NIGHT.

Not Army General Kirill A. Meretskov, Deputy Commissar of Defense, who boarded the Red Arrow express in Moscow at midnight, June 21, on an urgent mission to Leningrad. Hour after hour he stood looking out the window of his polished-mahogany compartment with its heavy brass fittings, its Brussels carpet, its French plumbing. He was riding in an old International car of the French Wagon-Lits Company, a heritage of the imperial past. North of Moscow the searchlight of the Red Arrow’s locomotive cut through the dusk and, then, as the train hurtled down the straight course laid out by the engineers of Czar Nicholas I, the horizon slowly lightened. Meretskov knew this country well. During the years 1939–40 he had headed the Leningrad Military District. It was he who commanded the Soviet troops in the winter war on Finland. He had known Leningrad since the days of the Revolution. Almost every mile of broken birch and fir forest between Moscow and Leningrad was familiar to him.

As the landscape spread out in the cool light, he stared from the window, watching the sun rise in a pale-blue sky. The train plunged through the deep green of the forest and then out across watery marshes. Suddenly he heard the wheels echo hollowly on a bridge, and before him appeared the quiet waters of the Volkhov River. Then again swamps, more fir forests, more swamps.

General Meretskov felt a sense of mounting excitement as he saw the Leningrad land again, excitement and a sense of concern, a sense of pride and a sense of history. Pushkin’s line ran through his mind:

He watched silently at the window, his face tense and thoughtful as the train sped on toward Peter’s capital. There was much to be done as soon as he arrived.

In the barnlike Leningrad offices of the Baltic Merchant Fleet beside the Neva passenger-freight port a conviction grew on Saturday, June 21, that something strange was afoot. Exactly what no one was certain. Most disturbing was the silence in Moscow, the silence of the People’s Commissariat.

It had begun on Friday. When Nikolai Pavlenko, deputy chief of the Political Department, came to his office Friday morning, he found a cryptic radiogram on his desk signed “Yuri.” The message—sent in the clear—had been received just before dawn. It said: “Being held. Can’t leave port. Don’t send other ships. . . . Yuri . . . Yuri . . . German ports holding Soviet ships. . . . Protest. . . . Yuri . . . Yuri . . .”

The message almost certainly had been transmitted from a Soviet freighter, the
Magnitogorsk
, which was unloading cargo in the German port of Danzig. The radio operator of the
Magnitogorsk
was Yuri Stasov, and the message center recognized his characteristic sending style.

What did it mean? What should be done? The
Magnitogorsk
did not respond to wireless messages. There were five other Soviet ships in German ports. No word from them either. The “Yuri” message was relayed to Moscow. No reaction.

Pavlenko didn’t leave the matter there. He telephoned Aleksei A. Kuz-netsov, secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee, and asked for guidance. Kuznetsov suggested that precautions be taken but warned that “the question evidently is being dealt with in Moscow.” For the moment nothing could be done about ships already in German waters, but the fleet authorities decided not to send any more to the west until they knew what was going on. The motor ship
Vtoraya Pyatiletka
and the steamer
Lunachar-sky
, bound for German ports, were told to stand by in the Gulf of Finland and be prepared to put into Riga or Tallinn.

All day Saturday the Merchant Fleet waited for instructions from Moscow. None came. Pavlenko consulted Secretary Kuznetsov again. He agreed that the
Vtoraya Pyatiletka
be diverted to Riga and the
Lunacharsky
returned to Leningrad. It was an unusual demonstration of initiative for Soviet bureaucrats—to act without orders from Moscow. Meanwhile, ships in Baltic waters were told to keep in constant communication with Leningrad.

Toward evening the chiefs of the Merchant Fleet met. Sunday was a free day, but .they decided that top personnel should come to work. The others would stay in town, ready for a quick call in an emergency. The chief administrative and political officers and their deputies, including Pavlenko, remained at their desks most of the evening, then went home.

The Leningrad Military Command embraced a vast area. In event of war it would become the command center for the region extending from the Baltic Sea to the Arctic reaches of the Kola Peninsula. Subordinate to it, so far as land operations were concerned, was Admiral Arseny G. Golovko, commanding the Northern Fleet at Polyarny on the Murmansk shore. Admiral Golovko had been reporting more and more alarming intelligence. For the past week flights of German reconnaissance planes had been observed over Soviet installations. What should he do? The response was: “Avoid provocation. Don’t fire at great altitudes.”

Golovko grew increasingly restive. On the previous Wednesday, June 18, Lieutenant General Markian M. Popov, commander of the Leningrad Military District and Golovko’s immediate superior under the interlocking Soviet command system, had arrived in Murmansk. Golovko hoped for enlightenment, but none was forthcoming. Popov confined himself to questions of construction of fortifications, new airdromes, supply depots and barracks. If he had any intelligence on the current situation, he did not divulge it.

“Apparently he knows no more than we,” Golovko noted in his diary on
June 1
8.

It got no clearer on Thursday, June 19. There were more German overflights. Nothing on Friday. On Saturday Moscow’s Stanislavsky Musical Theater, starting its summer tour of the provinces, was presenting Offenbach’s
La Perichole
in Murmansk. Golovko decided to attend. He took his Military Council member, A. A. Nikolayev, and his Chief of Staff, Vice Admiral S. G. Kucherov, with him. The theater was filled. There were standees.

Golovko relaxed and let the music push his worries out of his mind. So, he thought, judging by their expressions, did his aides.

The audience seemed at ease, possibly because Golovko and his staff were present. “The situation can’t be so bad—the chiefs are here.” This is what he read in the faces of the spectators as they promenaded in the lobby between the acts.

All the way back to headquarters he, Nikolayev and Kucherov talked about the operetta. Arriving at headquarters a little before midnight, he ordered tea and sat down for the late-evening situation report.

At the Leningrad defense command installations at Kingisepp, on the Moonzund Archipelago of the Estonian Baltic coast, Major Mikhail Pavlov-sky spent Saturday, June 21, at Coastal Defense Headquarters. He had been receiving reports of unusual German activity for days, but nothing new
came
in on Saturday. As he was leaving the office, a friend in the
10th Border
Regiment, Major Sergei Skorodumov, telephoned.

“How about getting your better half and coming to the theater? The
NKVD
song-and-dance ensemble is giving a concert and I’ve got tickets.”

Pavlovsky said he would have to check with his wife.

“Any incidents today?” he asked.

“Absolutely quiet,” Skorodumov replied.

The two couples went to the concert. Afterward they walked home. The city was still. Most people had already retired for the night although it was still full daylight on the Baltic.

Pavlovsky and his wife were undressing and talking about an excursion to the country on Sunday when the telephone rang. It was headquarters calling Pavlovsky back to his post.

“What is it?” Pavlovsky’s wife asked.

“I don’t know, Klavdiya,” he replied. “I don’t know anything at all. Maybe it’s a training maneuver.”

He kissed his wife and, opening the door carefully so as not to disturb the sleeping children, walked out of the house. The hour was just before midnight.

What was happening in the Leningrad area was duplicated in other frontier regions.

June 21 found Army General Ivan I. Fedyuninsky in command of the 15th Rifle Corps, based on Kovel and defending the Bug River sector of the Central Front. His concern had mounted since Wednesday the eighteenth, when a German soldier deserted to his lines and reported that the Nazis were preparing to attack Russia at 4
A.M.
, June 22.
¹
When Fedyuninsky reported this information to his chief, Fifth Army General M. I. Potapov, he was curtly told: “Don’t believe in provocations.” But on Friday, returning from regional maneuvers, Fedyuninsky encountered General Konstantin Rokos-sovsky. Rokossovsky, commander of a mechanized corps attachéd to the Fifth Army, did not shrug off the signs of imminent Nazi attack. Indeed, he shared Fedyuninsky’s concern.
²

It was late Saturday night before Fedyuninsky retired, but he could not sleep. He got up and smoked a cigarette at an open window. He looked at his watch. The time was 1:30
A.M.
Would the Germans attack tonight? All seemed quiet. The city slept. The stars sparkled in a deep azure sky. “Can this be the last night of peace?” Fedyuninsky asked himself. “Will the morning bring something else?”

He was still pondering this question when the telephone rang. It was his chief, General Potapov. “Where are you?” Potapov demanded. “In my quarters,” Fedyuninsky replied.

Potapov told him to go immediately to staff headquarters to stand by for a call over the special high-security line—the so-called VC telephone.

Fedyuninsky did not wait for a car. He threw a coat over his shoulders and ran to staff headquarters. He found the VC line out of order. He got through on the ordinary phone, and Potapov ordered him to put his division on alert. “But don’t respond to provocations,” Potapov insisted. As Fedyuninsky put down the receiver he heard a fusillade of pistol shots—the car which had been sent to bring him to staff headquarters was being fired on by Nazi diversionists who had slipped across the frontier.
³

Vice Admiral Vladimir Tributs, commander in chief of the Baltic Fleet, chargéd with the defense of Leningrad’s sea approaches, had watched events through the dismal spring of 1941 with unconcealed apprehension. More, perhaps, than any other single Soviet officer, Tributs was apprised of the activity of German planes, German submarines, German transports, German agents and German sympathizers. Somewhat against his inclinations (because of security problems and the difficulty of constructing a new fleet base), Tributs had advanced Baltic Fleet headquarters from its historic seat at the Kronstadt fortress in Leningrad to the port of Tallinn, two hundred miles to the west. The shift had taken place when the Soviets took over the Baltic states in the summer of 1940. It gave Admiral Tributs an observation post within the newly acquired, only partially assimilated Baltic areas. He began to report the arrival of German troops at Memel, just across the new Soviet Baltic border, as early as March, 1941. In the same month German overflights became a daily phenomenon at most Baltic bases. By June, Admiral Tributs estimated at least four hundred German tanks had been concentrated just a few miles from the Soviet Baltic border.

Even more suggestive was the conduct of German engineers engaged in work for the Soviet Navy. The Russians had purchased from Germany late in 1939 an unfinished cruiser, the
Liitzoiv
. The Russians towed it to Leningrad in the spring of 1940 for completion in the great Baltic shipyards. Several hundred German specialists were working on the
Liitzoiv
. In April parts and supplies failed to arrive on schedule from Germany, although the Germans previously had been remarkably punctual. Tributs mentioned the delay to Admiral N. G. Kuznetsov, the Naval Commissar, who talked to Stalin about it. But Stalin merely suggested keeping an eye on the situation.

A little later the German engineers began to return home on one pretext or another. By the end of May only twenty remained in Leningrad, and by June 15 the last had vanished.

Simultaneously, German ships disappeared from Soviet waters. By June 16 not one remained.

Tributs was so worried that on Thursday, June 19, he convened his Military Council and decided to order a No. 2 Combat Alert for the Baltic Fleet. Chief of Staff, Vice Admiral Yuri A. Panteleyev, started to scribble out the orders while Tributs telephoned Admiral Kuznetsov in Moscow.

“Comrade Commissar,” Tributs told Admiral Kuznetsov, “we have arrived at the view that an attack by Germany is possible at any moment. We must begin laying down our mine barrages or it will be too late. And I think it essential to raise the operational readiness of the fleet.”

Tributs listened to Kuznetsov a moment, then hung up.

“He agrees to the alert,” Tributs told Panteleyev, “but orders us to be careful and avoid provocation. And we will have to wait on the mine laying. Now, let’s get to work. . . .”
⁴

On the evening of June 21 Leningrad’s sea frontiers—the Baltic Fleet, the shore bases, the coastal artillery as far west as Libau (Lipaja), the island sentries in the Baltic, the new leased-area fortress of Hangö, the submarines, the patrol craft and other sea-borne units—all were on a No. 2 Alert, just a step below all-out readiness for action. Live ammunition had been distributed. Leaves had been canceled. Full crews stood at their posts.