The 900 Days (39 page)

Protection for the rescue convoys would be provided by armored cutters and gunboats. The fleet batteries on Krasnaya Gorka and the Bjerkoe Peninsula could lay down protective fire.

Panteleyev set off in a wooden patrol boat—the best defense he could think of against the magnetic mines which were plaguing Soviet ships in the Gulf of Finland. The weather was fine—a lazy southwest wind and gentle waves. The patrol boat skirted the Finnish coast. Panteleyev saw an occasional summer villa, no people, no horses, no cows. He had known the Koivisto cove since he was a youngster and had sailed there. It was a picturesque coast and this was where the yachts began their cruise to the Gulf of Bothnia.

In the Koivisto Harbor Panteleyev found two Soviet gunboats, an ironclad and a landing barge. The Soviet forces had set up a defensive ring, and it seemed probable that they would be able to hold out against attack until the evacuation was completed. Word came from Kronstadt that two transports were on the way.

Some army men appeared on the pier, gloomy, with drawn faces and hoarse voices. They were commanders of various broken units. There were many wounded. Finally a division commander came up with the remnants of his staff. He was as tired as the others but still carried himself with vigor.

“I’ve neither guns nor tanks left,” he said.

“Never mind,” Panteleyev assured him. “We have 130-mm guns on the ship. They will support us.”

In the darkness the first transport appeared. It was decided to load the two thousand wounded first. Next unwounded soldiers would be boarded, but only those who still had their guns. This was a purposeful order. The officers had noticed many men throwing away their weapons. Now the troops started to scurry about. Miraculously unit after unit appeared, each man with a gun or submachine gun.

“Our tickets for the steamboat,” one man said.

Three ships had been assembled for the operation—the
Barta
, under Captain A. Farmakovsky, the
Otto Schmidt
, captained by N. Fafurin, and the
Meero
, commanded by Captain V. A. Tsybulkin.

The
Barta
arrived first. It loaded 2,350 men and took off.

Thousands still waited on the shore when word came that one of the transports—it was the
Meero—
had been sunk near the Bjerkesund, by either a mine or a torpedo.

Then the
Otto Schmidt
ran aground, but managed to get off and picked up its load. All night long the evacuation went on. The last transport vanished to sea, and still men and women kept appearing from the forest. A gunboat was sent off, loaded to the water line with evacuees.

Panteleyev stood by with several cutters in case more people appeared. Finally, he gave the order to cast off. His boat had gone only a short distance when the sailors spotted a dog, panting with exhaustion, running down the pier.

“It’s our dog from the gunboat!” a sailor shouted. The boat drew back to the pier and the dog jumped aboard, wild with happiness.

Panteleyev’s boat moved out to sea. As they approached the Stirsudden lighthouse, they hailed it. No answer. “Maybe they’re asleep,” someone said. Then the answer came: a shot from a field gun. Then another. Clear enough! The enemy had occupied the lighthouse.

Before noon the convoy had reached Kronstadt—14,000 men had been evacuated safely, 12,000 “fit for combat” and 2,000 wounded.

Pavel Luknitsky, the correspondent, had spent much time on the Karelian front. He had seen the tenseness, the near-panic in Petrozavodsk when women and children were evacuated with the heightening of the Finnish August offensive. Now he met the survivors of the Twenty-third Army when they arrived in Leningrad. He thought them far from fit for battle. Many were emaciated, exhausted. Many were wounded. Many had fought to the last of their strength. Others had become demoralized when they found themselves trapped in encirclement. It would take time to form these bedraggled troops into new first-class fighting units. But time was one asset Leningrad did not possess. The men were assigned to new units and sent up to the front almost as rapidly as they landed in the cutters from Kronstadt.

In Karelia the Soviet troops dug in on the old lines, there to sit it out until 1944. To the east, on the Seventh Army front, there was another month of action. The Seventh Army positions east of Lake Ladoga had been unhinged by the disintegration of the Twenty-third Army. The Finns massed nine infantry divisions and three brigades against the Seventh Army—a manpower superiority of almost three to one. Beginning September 4 they went on the offensive. In harsh fighting the Finns captured Olonets the next day and drove to the Svir River by September 10, cutting the Kirov railroad which connected the Karelian front with the rest of the country. After a bitter battle the Finns finally occupied Petrozavodsk October 2.

By this time—as of September 24—General Meretskov, one of the best of the Soviet generals, had taken command of the Seventh Army. He stabilized the front along the whole Finnish littoral, and for practical purposes there was no more movement until the opening of the Soviet counterdrives in 1944.

On the line of the river Svir and on the old Finnish-Soviet frontier positional warfare became the rule of the day. The objective which Hitler had advanced before launching his attack on Russia—that the Germans and the Finns join hands across the Karelian peninsula in preparation for the final great sweeping drive south on Moscow—was not now achieved—nor would it be. But critical days lay ahead before this was to become clear.

THE TRAIN ON WHICH VERA INBER WAS RIDING SLOWED to a halt just after daybreak. No station was in sight, no plane in the sky, no sound of gunfire. All was stillness. Even the men in the compartment where an endless game of preference was in progress played with stealthy quietness. The Lieutenant General, whistling under his breath, named his suit. A military engineer next to him tapped his pipe so gently on the edge of the table it sounded like a distant woodpecker. A single wisp of tobacco smoke floated out the door and into the corridor, where it was caught in the rays of the rising sun.

So still was it that to Vera Inber the train seemed to be moving on velvet rails.

She had seen few signs of war. At Volkhov two fighter planes flew over the train for a while, and a small detachment of marines, the golden anchors on their uniforms glittering in the sun’s first rays, marched down the platform.

To the right and the left of the track the holes, filled with water, seemed to be more frequent. Along the telegraph line there were also holes, but smaller ones. The Germans, she thought, are very economical, very German in their bombing. They wasted nothing: big bombs for the railroad tracks, small bombs for the telegraph poles. Now the forest was scorched by explosions and there were uprooted trees. She saw a birch, its bark crisscrossed with names and messages. The history of a lifetime had been scratched out on the white surface. Now it sagged, half-burnt, blackened, torn.

When the train pulled through the next station, Vera Inber read the name, neatly outlined on white-painted stones that stood among a bed of red and white petunias. The name was Mga. Vera Inber had never heard it before. These stations, she thought, all had drowsy, ancient Russian names . . . names that smelled of the pitch and the honey of the pine and birch forests: Mga . . . Budogoshch . . . Khvoinaya . . .

In those days the novelist Vera Ketlinskaya spent most of her time in an
old
stone mansion at No. 18 Ulitsa Voinova, just off Liteiny Prospekt, a stone’s throw from the Neva. Here was the headquarters of the Leningrad Writers Union, and here she sought to organize her colleagues in Leningrad’s war effort. An aeon had passed since that Sunday in the country at Sviritsa, where she had been teaching her ten-month-old son, Serezhka, to take his first halting steps and someone interrupted with the news: War!

In the last days of August her task was not easy. She was besieged with requests for permission to leave the city. People wanted a pass to get out before the Germans came.

There was panic and nervousness. Not that Vera Ketlinskaya was inclined to blame anyone. The situation was frightening. The city was preparing for battle in the streets. The examples of Madrid and of London were vivid in the minds of all. Block-by-block defense units were being set up. Because there were so few guns, Finnish knives—long-bladed hunting weapons—were being passed out.

She tried to persuade some of the writers who obviously could make little contribution to Leningrad’s defense to leave, But many refused to go. One was Yevgeny Shvarts, the playwright whose
The Naked King
reminded more than one Leningrader of life under Stalin (which may be the reason it remained in Shvarts’s literary archives after his death and was only performed ten years after Stalin’s death and eight years after Shvarts’s).

The Leningrad Theater of Comedy was being evacuated. But Shvarts would not join his associates. He said he would stay on in his granite building at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal, where he was a member of the fire brigade and his wife belonged to the first-aid team.

Shvarts was no Communist, but he was a patriot.
¹
A few months before the war started he wrote a play in which a foreign spy plane landed somewhere on the steppes of southwest Russia. The censors banned the play. “Really,” they told Nikolai Akimov, director of the Theater of Comedy, “do you think our air frontiers are not secure? The basic theme of this play is unjustified and impossible.”

Shvarts volunteered to help Vera Ketlinskaya. He was with her when a Party secretary telephoned from Smolny about a uniformed war correspondent. The secretary wanted the man released so he could be sent to the rear. “This is a military question,” said the Party man, “not a literary one.”

“Indeed,” Shvarts commented wryly, “it is a military matter—a matter of getting out of the military.”

Two days after the correspondent escaped to the safety of Moscow an article he had written earlier was published by
Leningradskay a Pravda
, proclaiming: “We will defend Leningrad with our naked breasts!”

One day—it was August 27—the office door opened, and Vera Ketlinskaya saw a small, graceful woman wearing a light coat and a coquettish hat under which struggled a mop of curly grayish hair.

“How do you do!” the woman said. “I’m Vera Inber.”

She walked across the room, her high heels ringing on the parquet.

To Vera Ketlinskaya it was like an appearance from Mars. Vera Inber was fifty-three years old and a well-known Moscow poet. Her husband was the distinguished physician, Professor Ilya Davidovich Strashun. What was she doing in Leningrad?

“My husband and I have come to live in Leningrad,” she said simply. “I don’t know for how long, but at least until spring.”

Was it possible that this chic, self-possessed woman did not know what she had walked into, did not know that at any moment the Germans might break into the streets of Leningrad, that the city might soon be encircled, indeed might already be within a German ring?

Vera Ketlinskaya hurriedly cleared the room and began to speak confidentially with Vera Inber.

“I know all that,” Vera Inber replied. “You see, my husband had a choice —to be chief of a hospital in Archangel or in Leningrad. We decided that since my daughter and granddaughter have been evacuated and since, as a poet, I should in time of war be in the center of events, naturally Leningrad would be much more interesting.”

“But—” Vera Ketlinskaya interrupted.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Vera Inber continued. “But, first of all, I believe that Leningrad will not give up. And second, well, we are not young. And for the middle-aged to sit in the rear is somehow very shameful.”

That night Leningrad was put under curfew. Movement in the streets between 10 in the evening and 5
A.M.
was forbidden without special pass. And that evening Vera Inber spoke for the first time on the Leningrad radio. She recalled that Alexander Herzen, the nineteenth-century Russian critic, democrat and patriot, once said that “tales of the burning of Moscow, of the Battle of Borodino, of the Berezina Battle, of the fall of Paris, were the fairy stories of my childhood—my
Iliad
and my
Odyssey.”
So in these present days, she told her listeners, Russia was creating for future generations new Odysseys, new Iliads.

In the fortnight during which August imperceptibly blended into September the city never had seemed more beautiful. It stood brooding and grim, Peter’s military city, on guard, under heavy attack, firm, belligerent. Never had there been such an August—hot, dry, summery, a clear sky of distant blue curved like a saucer high over the city, the trees and shrubs flowering magnificently. The great lindens glowed with gold and purple and russet along the wide avenues, under the trees carpets of mushrooms. An ill omen, the babushkas said. Many mushrooms, many deaths. The green lawns and flowerbeds of the parks were crisscrossed with trenches and packed with gun sites.

Leningrad was preparing to meet the enemy. Catherine’s equestrian Peter no longer reared his mighty chargér on the banks of the Neva. Around the heroic figure were piled layer after layer of sandbags, covered with gray wooden planking. Gone were the Klodt stallions from the Anichkov Bridge, buried in the Summer Gardens and protected by mounds of earth. Only the stone sphinxes with their great paws still guarded the Neva embankment, and the bowed caryatids still shouldered their terrible burdens at the portals of the Hermitage. And the ugly monument to Catherine II stood in all its ugliness in Ostrovsky Square.

The weather continued hot. Kirov Prospekt, always so clean and sparkling, always washed down each morning just after dawn, always swept each night, now was dusty and dirty. Rubbish was collecting in the gutters. The Prospekt was the grand boulevard that cut across Kamenny Ostrov—stone island. Once it had been Kamenny Ostrov Prospekt, but like so many of Leningrad’s boulevards its name had changed. Thus, Sadovaya (Garden) Boulevard had become Third of July Street. Morsky (Sea), Teatralny (Theater), Ofitsersky (Officer), Millionnaya (Million)—all had been changed. You could almost write a history of Leningrad by chronicling the names of the streets. There was the time early in the 1920’s when Nevsky Prospekt was known as NEPsky—after the NEP men or private traders whom Lenin had brought back under NEP or the New Economic Policy. In those days NEPsky was graced by the fine fish monger, Zolotsev, and the sausage king, Marshan. There was a gambling club on Graf sky (Count) Street, across from the trotters on Troitsky (Trinity). Later Grafsky was changed to Proletarian Street. But always, whatever the changes, the streets seemed to come back to their original names. No one ever got used to calling the Nevsky Twenty-fifth of October Street, and soon it would be officially the Nevsky once again.
²

Day by day long military columns moved through the city, slowly pushing down the boulevards, many made up of broken units, men who had survived one battle and were en route to another which they might not survive. Beside the Karpovka embankment stood a number of dusty carts and horses. Red Army men clambered down to the river with buckets and pans. A crowd of forty or fifty silently watched them.

The sight of the Red Army men drinking water from the river when there was a tap in every apartment in the city somehow seemed unbelievably grievous.

Finally someone shouted, “Fellows! What are you drinking that dirty water for? Come around to the courtyard.”

Aleksandr Shtein had a room at the Astoria Hotel. That was the hostelry where the Germans planned to hold a joint victory dinner with the Finns. Residence in the hotel was controlled by the Leningrad City commandant. Shtein gave the hotel director Shanikhin his order and got the key to a corner room on the mezzanine floor, looking out on the square across from the handsome monument to Nicholas I.

The Astoria had become headquarters for Soviet war correspondents, for the pilots of the Soviet-produced Douglas DC— 3’s who flew back and forth, low over the fighting lines, usually without fighter cover. Here were the chiefs and technical assistants of big Leningrad factories, awaiting evacuation, representatives of the central ministries, important and not-so-important refugees from the Baltic states. Here were a few ordinary Leningraders and singers like Lydiya Sukharevskaya and Boris Tenin. Here the newspaper
Red Star
parked its Emka, the battered light car used by the poet, Mikhail Svetlov, and the prose writer, Lev Slavin.

Shtein looked out on the cast-iron figure of Nicholas I, astride his cast-iron horse, and beyond that to the dark-red granite of the old German consulate. It had flown up to June 21st an enormous Nazi banner which flapped from the roof. It had been broken by angry demonstrators on the second day of the war and not repaired.

At dusk a maid made the rounds of every room to be certain that the heavy blackout curtains were drawn. If any light showed, Shanikhin was on the spot instantly with his chief assistant, Nina.

Down the corridor from Shtein came the sound of a husky, bold, coarse voice singing:

Shtein had heard the voice and the song before—in the Golden Lion in Tallinn. It was a record by the White Russian cafe singer Leshchenko singing his favorite Paris song, “Marusichka.” Who was playing it? Shtein found the room occupied by a big, bluff submarine commissar, a man who had fought through the Finnish war, the wearer of an Order of Lenin, a man who reminded him of the correspondent Vsevolod Vishnevsky. The commissar was suffering from a light case of tuberculosis and had been sent back from Kronstadt for treatment. He had gotten as far as the Astoria. Where he would go next no one could say. He sat in his room playing “Marusichka.” Then he played “Tatyana”; then “Vanya”; finally, “Masha.” He was indefatigable. So was Leshchenko.

The commissar had a stock of Leshchenko records and a case of beer. As long as the beer lasted, as long as the records lasted, the commissar sat in his room. Finally, the beer ran out, the phonograph broke. He packed up his things and went back to Kronstadt.

In the restaurant the band still played. No one had thought of evacuating the musicians. No one had thought of mobilizing them to military duties. They were incorporated in the ARP squad “without release from production duties.” They played on.

The restaurant was directed by a lady with a grand manner whom the correspondents called “Lady Astor.” One night when all the rumors were bad S. Abramovich-Black, director of one of the fleet newspapers and the descendant of a long line of Russian and non-Russian naval officers, approached her with all his gallantry and announced: “My cutter is at your service at the pier on Lake Ladoga. I give you my word of honor as an officer, madam, that without you we will not leave. You may go on working in peace.”

The fact that Abramovich-Black had no cutter and that there was no cutter waiting on Lake Ladoga made no difference.

The band struck up the “Barcarole.” Everyone felt better.