The 900 Days (46 page)

On the night the Gostiny Dvor was hit Dmitri Shostakovich invited some of his friends—Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, the musicologist, and the composers, Gavriil Popov and Yuri Kochurov—to his fifth-floor flat. They found him surrounded by orchestration sheets on which he was scoring his Seventh Symphony. He sat at the piano and began to play with enormous enthusiasm. He was in such a state of emotional tension that it seemed to his listeners he was striving to extract from the piano every last atom of sound.

Suddenly the air-raid siren sounded, and overhead the musicians could hear Leningrad’s fighter planes. Shostakovich played on. When he finished the First Movement of the symphony, he asked his wife and children to go to the bomb shelter but proposed to his friends that he continue to play. He went through the Second Movement to the crashing accompaniment of antiaircraft guns. The Third Movement was incomplete.

Shostakovich’s friends made their way back home after the all-clear had sounded. They saw from their streetcar clouds of smoke rising over the city. It was the Gostiny Dvor. It burned for days.

Shostakovich’s music, the roar of the guns, the fires springing up, the bombs, the sirens, the planes—all seemed to Bogdanov-Berezovsky to blend into a cacophony in which reality and art were inextricably intermingled.

On the day of the Gostiny Dvor disaster Ivan Bondarenko, a Tass man, noted in his diary: “Explosions, explosions, more explosions. Yellow dust and black smoke over Socialist Street.”

And that same day a Moscow woman living on Stremyannaya Ulitsa rushed into the Leningrad radio studios. Her house had just been smashed by a bomb, and under the wreckage lay her two children, dead.

“Let me talk on the radio,” she begged. “I want to speak.”

She was permitted to go to the microphone, and there, her voice breaking with emotion, her words heavy with sorrow, she told of the death of her son and daughter.

“I can remember not only her words but even the sound of her breathing,” Olga Berggolts wrote twenty years later.

The air of the city grew thicker and thicker with the smashing of buildings, the fall of bricks and plaster, until Vera Ketlinskaya found it difficult even to take a breath.

Army General (later Marshal) Nikolai N. Voronov, the country’s top artillery specialist, returned to Leningrad in these days. Leningrad was his native city. Here he had been born, here he had spent his childhood before the Revolution, here he had grown to young manhood. Now he had been called back to aid the city in its hour of peril. Voronov was no stranger to war and siege. He had served in Spain during the Civil War. He had seen Guadalajara, Teruel and Barcelona. He had fought through the siege of University City and had lived in Madrid during the bombardment.

One day he climbed to the cupola of St. Isaac’s. From a height of 260 feet he could look out on the city, could see the ARP posts and the AA guns mounted on the roofs of the tall buildings, the great gray warships of the Baltic Fleet brought into the wide Neva and moored as floating long-range batteries to fire back on the German siege guns. He could see the Red Army’s ragged lines to the south and southwest and could make out the flash of the German guns as they trained in on Leningrad targets.

“Again and again,” he recalled, “my thoughts returned to Madrid and what that city had survived. There also the enemy had closed in on all sides. But here it was all repeated on an even grander scale—the city was greater, the intensity of the battle, the size of the forces. Here everything was infinitely more complicated.”

Complicated, it was, indeed. And it grew more complicated. One day Yelena Skryabina took a battered old
sumka
_y
or shopping bag. She put in it two or three bottles of very strong vodka which she had managed to buy after standing in line for hours at a small wooden street stall.

She also had a dozen packs of cigarettes, a pair of men’s shoes and some women’s socks. She went out into the country a few miles to see what kind of food she might get from the peasants. It was a terrifying experience. The peasants stood looking at her stolidly. She could not help remembering the days of 1918 or 1920 when the city residents had to go to the villages with their furs, their rings, their bracelets, their rugs, and haggle with the peasants for crusts of bread and sacks of potatoes. The same thing was happening all over again. She returned that evening, exhausted, with forty pounds of potatoes and two quarts of milk. “I don’t know how long I can keep up this kind of trading,” she wrote in her diary.

¹
Reports of rocketmen can be found, for example, in the official account of Pavlov, head of the Leningrad City Military Department, to Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov, October 23, 1943, telling of the success of the Young Communists in combating them
(900 Geroicheskikh Dnei
, p. 122). There are similar reports by Lieutenant General G. Stepanov, former chief of the Leningrad garrison (S. Bubenshchikov,
V Ognennom Koltse
, Moscow, 1963, p. 51); I. Ya. Lorkish, writing of the struggle against Abwehr agents in Leningrad
(Nevidimye Boi
, Leningrad, 1967, p. 11); the history of the Leningrad militia (A. Skilyagin, V. Lesov, U. Pimenov, I. Savchenko,
Dela i Lyudi
, Leningrad, 1967, p. 261); the October 31 report of the Petrograd regional council to the Leningrad City Council
(poo
, p. 75); the official history of the Leningrad blockade
(Leningrad v VOV
, p. 98); and in many, many other works. To all these reports the men in chargé of Leningrad’s defenses offer a negative response. The authorities who investigated the rumors became convinced that in the vast majority of cases what Leningraders took for “rocket” signals were, in fact, tracer bullets of antiaircraft guns firing from rooftop positions at German planes or in some instances flares dropped by Nazi aircraft. As Ye. S. Lagutkin, chief of Leningrad’s wartime A A defense, put it: “If some authors of books and articles write that in Leningrad there were many rocketmen, then these statements do not conform to reality.” (2V.Z., p. 168.) D. V. Pavlov, the Leningrad food chief, supports Lagutkin’s view. (Pavlov, personal communication, April 30, 1968.)

²
Basov was executed in 1950, one of the many victims of the so-called “Leningrad Affair.” (G. Odintsev,
Voyenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal
, No. 12, December, 1964, p. 61.)

³
Pavlov,
op cit.
_y
2nd edition, p. 32. The figure is given as 12,000 by the official history.
(Leningrad v VOV
, p. 172.)

⁴
Pavlov,
op. cit
., p. 32. The figure is given as 183 in the official ARP report, (
900
, p. 139.)

⁵
Two years later Likharev admitted to Alexander Werth that he and his wife had many times regretted their action. “We were haunted by the memory of that tin of caviar. It was like paradise lost.” (Alexander Werth,
Leningrad
, New York, 1944, p. 77.)

⁶
In July, 2,562,000 ration cards were issued in Leningrad; in August, 2,669,000; in September, 2,480,400; in October, 2,443,400. About 636,283 persons were evacuated through Leningrad from June 29 through August 27, of whom Pavlov estimates 400,000 were Leningraders, the remainder refugees from the Baltic states. (Pavlov,
op. cit
., 1st edition, pp. 59, 60.) Karasev estimates the September 6 population at “over 2.5 million.” Leningrad’s population by the census of 1939 was 3,191,300. (Karasev 120, p. 17.) An unpublished document has been found in the Leningrad archives which reports “in all 227,335 persons” were evacuated up to December 4, 1941. This casts doubt on the authenticity of the 636,283 figure (which supposedly included 488,703 Leningraders) (
Voprosy Istoriiy
No. 11, November, 1968, p. 167). Thus,.the number trapped in Leningrad may have been 260,000 more than earlier estimated.

⁷
2V.Z. claims 900 tons of sugar and 1,000 tons of flour were reclaimed. (N.Z., p. 195.)

⁸
Dmitri V. Pavlov insists his report is exact and that all other versions are “fantasies.” (Personal communication, April 30, 1968.)

⁹
N.Z
., p. 166. The date of this disaster is mistakenly given as September 24 in
Leningrad v VOV
, p. 176.

VSEVOLOD VISHNEVSKY HAD NOT BEEN IN LENINGRAD since returning from the inferno of Tallinn. Day and night he worked at Kronstadt composing pamphlets, writing dispatches for
Pravda
and
Red Star
, making speeches to the political workers and officers. Now on a fine, sunny day, September u, he took a cutter across the choppy sound to Oranienbaum and a crowded train to Leningrad. An air alarm sounded and he could see fires and shells exploding in the direction of Ligovo (Uritsk), just south of the city, where the Germans were trying to smash through to the railroad line. Vishnevsky was pleased that the people on the train seemed relatively calm and that, despite bombs, shells and fires, the streetcars still ran and bootblacks manned their stands.

But not everything was going well. He found some open panic. Wild rumors circulated, stimulated by the absence of accurate communiqués. The communiqués of the Soviet Information Bureau were bland. Those with some grasp of the course of events sometimes could divine what was happening by identifying “Strongpoint N” (which had been lost) or the troops of the “Nth Army” (one of the Leningrad armies) or by a reference to a particular commander. It was a time when the OMS (One Major Says) News Agency flourished, not to mention the OBS (One Baba Says). “What’s happened to the army around Volkhov?” people asked. “What about the railroad to Moscow?” They knew the railroad was cut. But the government had not officially said so. Not a word appeared in the press. Leningrad radio was silent. There was a rising feeling of uncertainty, of bewilderment over what was happening. It would not be the last time that Leningrad would feel shrouded by official secrecy from the swift progress of events which might decide her fate. Everyone knew the war was going badly—but how badly? How much worse than the communiqués admitted?
¹

Vsevolod Kochetov, a chronic alarmist, was convinced that if the Germans broke into Leningrad they would find it filled with informers and traitors ready to assist them. He remembered that in 1919 the White Guard General Yudenich had dreamed of hanging a Bolshevik to every lamp post in Petro-grad. Now, Kochetov speculated in terror, there would not be enough lamp posts to meet the purposes of the Nazi execution squads. The Germans would have to put hundreds, possibly thousands, of gallows up in the Champs de Mars, Palace Square and along the embankments of the Neva. A chilling thought!

Kochetov knew what the Nazis were doing on the approaches to Leningrad, the areas which were already occupied. He had met a commissar named Semenov who had made his escape through the lines from a village near the front.

“There you see the true face of German Fascism,” the commissar told him. “Orders, orders, orders. Threats, threats, threats.”

Semenov showed him a proclamation he had torn from a village fence. It said:

So it went, point by point, each ending: “will be immediately shot.”

It would be the same, Kochetov felt certain, if the Nazis broke into Leningrad.

As for the spirit of the Leningraders, Kochetov saw among them and among his own journalist colleagues many whom he called cowards and panicmongers, people of little spirit who wanted by any means to escape the iron circle of blockade. He knew of one newspaperman who had wangled passage out by air and was hauled off the plane at the last minute by Maxim Gordon, an elderly
Izvestiya
correspondent. Nor was Kochetov impressed by the correspondents whom he encountered at Alexei Tolstoy’s villa in Pushkin—the villa which now belonged to the Writers Union, the same in which Luknitsky had been living and working on the eve of the war.

Pushkin was crowded with writers and war correspondents. The division newspaper of the 1st People’s Volunteers was being published on the presses of the local paper, having lost its portable press in a desperate escape attempt across the marshes after the collapse of the Luga line. The editorial offices were in House No. 4 on Proletarian Street—the Tolstoy villa. Every room of the villa was filled with newspapermen. In the 6th Military Encampment at the edge of town five thousand survivors of the ist People’s Volunteers were jammed into an old barracks. As a military unit it hardly had any existence, having lost the arms and equipment it had started with, together with two-thirds of its strength.

Vyacheslav Shishkov, author of the picaresque Siberian classic,
Grim River
, still lived and worked in Pushkin, although he was more and more worried about moving into Leningrad. Aleksandr Belyayev, one of Russia’s leading writers of science fiction, had not left his house. He was critically ill.

Kochetov and his friend Mikhalev spent a night at the Tolstoy villa. Kochetov found it difficult to reconcile himself to the fact that a man like Tolstoy, of noble origin and Western, fastidious taste, should live and write in the Soviet Union. The luxury of the house and its furnishings offended him. Kochetov knew none of the writers and correspondents who were spending the night there, but he was invited to join them at a long table where champagne flowed freely—the gift of the local Party committee. He was not comfortable, and he did not like the way from time to time one of the writers would go to the door and listen to the sound of the firing which was coming closer to Pushkin. Somehow, he did not trust these people. In the morning Kochetov strolled around the lovely grounds. He went to the Catherine Palace and saw the hundreds of boxes in which its treasures had been packed for safekeeping. He visited the Alexandrovsky Palace where the last of the czars, Nicholas II, had lived. Here was the office where Nicholas worked. Kochetov thought it looked more like the office of a businessman than an emperor. Here was the imperial bedroom with its wall of icons. And the telephone, the direct wire to staff headquarters by which the Empress Alexandra communicated with her husband during the war, giving him the latest counsel which she had received from Rasputin. Kochetov walked out of the palace and into the park, where were buried heroes of the Revolutionary Civil War, past the Chinese Theater, the Hunters’ Castle, the marble mausoleum. Never again was he to see many of these beautiful epitaphs to empire. The Nazis and destruction lay only hours away. Finally, with his fellow writers, Kochetov packed and left Pushkin by the Egyptian gate. He paused a moment to look at the granite and bronze monument to Pushkin. As far as the village of Bolshoye Kuzmino Pushkin’s sad and gloomy visage followed them.

Now the Germans began to try some tricks. They dropped screaming, whistling bombs. They dropped booby traps, sometimes in the form of children’s toys, fountain pens and cigarette lighters. And once some students named Mikhail Rubtsov, Konstantin Kruglov and Nadezhda Zabelina saw a big ball burst over the Narva Gates. It looked like a shower of leaflets, but when the youngsters reached the area, they found ruble notes scattered all over the ground together with ration cards. Did the trick work? It is hard to say. The authorities contended that all the counterfeit money and cards were collected and turned in.

But Dmitri Pavlov, who controlled the city’s food supplies and had to deal with problems like those of forged ration cards, was deeply concerned.

“Egoists and crooks,” Pavlov recalled, “tried by every means possible to obtain two, three or even more ration cards. For the sake of their stomachs they tried to obtain cards even if it cost the lives of their nearest and dearest.”

The sharpers forged cards and worked rackets to get cards illegally or legally. They bribed house janitors to certify they were living in empty apartments. They applied for cards for dead relatives or imaginary persons. They stole cards. If the Germans dropped counterfeit cards in any numbers, chaos would ensue. The whole delicate rationing system would collapse. Steps would have to be taken quickly to thwart such tactics before the Nazis realized how vulnerable the system was.

The police reported to the Leningrad Command that the Germans were making more and more efforts to infiltrate agents into the city. There was a steady increase in circulation of dangerous and frightening rumors, many of which could directly be traced to Nazi sources. A man named Koltsov was picked up for circulating Finnish anti-Soviet leaflets in a beer hall. He was summarily shot. There were scores of cases of pilfering and juggling of books in the food-distribution system, and the black market in food, kerosene and soap rapidly expanded.

It was not easy to train citizens to stand fast and fight the frightening fires touched off by the Nazi incendiaries. People panicked at the sight of phosphorus bombs spreading rivers of fire over apartment roofs or inside factories. On September 11 four explosive bombs and hundreds of incendiaries fell on the great Northern Cable factory. In one shop a single fireman was trying to cope with raging fires while the workers huddled in terror against the wall. Finally, Party Secretary A. V. Kassirov came to the aid of the fireman and shamed the others into helping. The next day a group of workers applied for release from work. The factory had been badly damaged, windows blown out, shops riddled. One person had been killed and four injured. The factory director noted on the petition: “This is in the category of cowardice.”

In these critical times there could be no sign of weakness. The poet Boris Likharev put it bluntly in the paper
On Guard of the Fatherland:
“We will be victorious at any price, whether we live or die—not one step backward. As for cowards and traitors—shoot them on the spot.”

Special problems arose with the work battalions on fortifications. Many found themselves without food and shelter. Others were blasted out of their positions by Nazi bombing. Bewildered and frightened, many people left the construction sites and fled back into the city. Bands of Party agitators were sent to rally those who were branded deserters, panicmongers and whiners.

Every evening now Editor P. V. Zolotukhin of
Leningradskaya Pravda
made his way from his editorial offices at No. 57 Fontanka to Smolny, there to consult with Party Secretary Zhdanov and the other chiefs about the leading editorial, the play to be given stories and the wording of announcements. Often it was 2 or 3
A.M.
before he telephoned back to the editorial offices, telling the weary staff that the paper could go as made up or ordering complete changes.

As times grew more tense, Zhdanov began to take on the task of writing or rewriting the principal editorials. He it was who wrote the editorial published September 16: “The enemy is at the gates . . . Each must firmly look the danger in the eye and declare that if today he does not fight bravely and selflessly in defense of the city then tomorrow he will lose his honor and freedom, his native home, and become a German slave.” And as the times grew even more dangerous, it was Zhdanov who penned a savage call: “Mercilessly exterminate the Fascist beasts!”
²

Entering Leningrad after several days in Kronstadt, playwright Shtein found a change in the streets. His papers were examined not just at the city limits. They were checked and rechecked every few blocks. There was a sentry post at every bridge, at important intersections, at the entrance of buildings. He saw workers’ patrols on the streets,, armed with rifles. They were rounding up those who could not prove their identity or occupation. Since the circle had begun to close around the city, the streets had been filled with wandering men in rumpled uniforms, some with insignia, some without. They were deserters, or malingerers, or just men who had lost their units. Some had been in the People’s Volunteers. Some had been encircled and had slipped through the German lines and into the city. They were demoralized. Their eyes wandered. Shtein had seen them huddled at the entrances to apartment houses, going back to their homes. He had seen them in the beer halls, shouldering up to the head of the queues, demanding to be waited on first, as “military men.”

Now this human debris was being gathered up. Some were sent to the firing squads, some to construction battalions. Others were put back into units and took their stand on the lines of the city’s defenses. Military tribunals passed out the edicts—this man to be shot, this one to the front line, this to the barricades.

It was not easy to hold those lines. B. Rozenman had been wounded and in mid-September was going back to the front to rejoin the 168th Rifles, the Bondarev division, one of the finest defending Leningrad. Division headquarters, he understood, were somewhere near Moskovskaya Slavyanka. Leningrad was being heavily bombed as he and several officers made their way forward toward Pushkin. They met fewer and fewer persons as they got closer to the front. Alongside the road were signs of fresh bombardment. German planes periodically appeared overhead. Suddenly they saw a crowd of soldiers, obviously in panic. At the same moment a solidly built officer in a sun-faded jacket took his place in the center of the road and, pointing an automatic at the mob, shouted, “Halt!”

Air-raid barrage balloons over the Admiralty spire.