The 900 Days (44 page)

At least three literary works touching on the Izhorsk defense and the workers’ battle to save Kolpino were written after the war. Yevgeny Ryss started to publish a novel in 1945 which he called
At the City Gates
. It dealt with the Izhorsk factory which he called “Starozavod.” Only two parts of the novel ever came out. He ran into endless “critical” difficulties and finally abandoned the idea. Nikolai Chukovsky touched on the subject in his novel
Baltic Skies
, and Leonid Rakhmanov, who had been a war correspondent with the Izhorsk workers, wrote a play about them. Neither work ever saw the light of day in its original form. Only in 1959 did Rakhmanov finish his play.

Vera Ketlinskaya is blunt in placing responsibility for these difficulties. It was, she said, the “Leningrad Affair” which caused them. That is a euphemism for the savage political war between Zhdanov, on the one hand, and Georgi Malenkov and Lavrenti Beria, on the other, which, in the end, took countless lives in Leningrad.

The shadow of Mga was quick to lengthen, but on September 1 there were still signs of peacetime normalcy in Leningrad. The university had sent 2,500 students, 8 professors, 60 docents, 47 senior lecturers and 109 assistants into the armed forces. Yet 2,000 students registered for classes on September 1. One girl complained that a lecture had lasted five hours—her class was trapped with its professor in a bomb shelter and he never stopped talking. Forty higher educational institutions opened their doors September 1 and in the two weeks following. It was not business as usual. Schoolchildren collected a million bottles for Molotov cocktails in a fortnight.

September 1 was the day Dmitri Shostakovich spoke on the Leningrad radio.

“Just an hour ago,” he said, “I completed the score of the second part of my new large symphonic work.”

If he completed the third and fourth parts, he said, he would entitle it his Seventh Symphony. He had been working on the composition since July.

“Notwithstanding war conditions, notwithstanding the dangers threatening Leningrad,” he said, “I have been able to work quickly and to finish the first two parts of my symphony.

“Why do I tell you about this? I tell you this so that those Leningraders who are now listening to me shall know that the life of our city is going on normally. All of us now carry our military burdens.”

Leningrad, he said, was his native city. Here was his home and here his heart.

“Soviet musicians, my many and dear colleagues, my friends,” he said. “Remember that our art is threatened with great danger. We will defend our music. We will work with honesty and self-sacrifice that no one may destroy it.”

Then Shostakovich returned to his apartment on Skorokhod Ulitsa on the Petrograd side, there to continue his work and to serve his duty with the fire service, protecting the apartment house against bombs. The day was an exceptionally clear one and the air had a special quality. Those who heard Shostakovich talk said each word rang like the note of a great piano.

He had, he told his friends, never composed with greater ease. He spent hours at his desk in his flat on the top floor of the five-story building where he lived, sometimes working around the clock. And he still went to the conservatory, where he had a few students left. Most had gone to the front, including the most talented of all, a young man named Fleishman who joined the People’s Volunteers and was killed at the front in July.

Repeatedly Shostakovich was asked to leave Leningrad. He refused. Not until early October, after finishing the third movement of his symphony, did he reluctantly obey a command by the government. He and his family were evacuated to Moscow and within a few days to Kuibyshev. There he finished his symphony. There in March it was performed for the first time and on March 29 was given its formal premiere in the Hall of Columns in Moscow—Shostakovich’s Seventh, the Leningrad Symphony, with its broad sweep of anger, agony and military panoply.

The sheets on which Shostakovich wrote his September 1 radio address have been preserved. On the reverse side are the hasty notes of the studio director:

Plans for next broadcasts to the city

1. Organize detachments.

2. Communications in the streets.

3. Construction of barricades.

4. Fighting with Molotov cocktails.

5. Defense of houses.

6. Especially emphasize on all instructional transmissions that the battle is nearing the closest approaches to the city, that over us hangs deadly danger.

Olga Berggolts preserved that souvenir of Shostakovich’s broadcast. She preserved another souvenir—a sheet of lined paper torn from a bookkeeper’s ledger on which she wrote down at the dictation of Anna Akhmatova the speech which the poetess gave over Leningrad radio, the dictation carefully corrected by Anna Akhmatova in her own hand. It was dictated not at Anna Akhmatova’s own house but in the so-called writers’ “skyscraper,” in the apartment of Mikhail Zoshchenko, the satirist. They had gone there because a heavy bombardment was in progress and the skyscraper was supposed to be a safer place.

Anna Akhmatova was Leningrad’s “muse of tears,” intensely feminine, personal and emotional. But it was with another voice that she spoke that evening over the radio to “my dear fellow citizens, mothers, wives and sisters of Leningrad.”

For months, she said, the Germans had sought to take prisoner “the city of Peter, the city of Lenin, the city of Pushkin, of Dostoyevsky and Blok, the city of great culture and great achievement.”

“All my life is connected with Leningrad,” she said. “In Leningrad I became a poet. Leningrad gave my poetry its spirit. I, like all of you now, live with one unconquerable belief—that Leningrad never will be Fascist.”

After the broadcast they went back to the building on the Fontanka, the former Sheremetyev Palace where Akhmatova lived. Olga Berggolts long remembered her beside the wrought-iron gates, her face stony with anger, a gas mask over her shoulder, standing duty as a member of the ARP team. Anna Akhmatova sewed bags for sand, which protected the shelter trenches in the gardens of the palace under the great maple of which she wrote in “Poem Without a Hero.” All through September Anna Akhmatova stood by her post, guarding the roofs, placing the sandbags, writing her verses, fighting for her country. Only with October would she, too, reluctantly accept evacuation to Tashkent in distant Central Asia.

It was in these days that Olga Berggolts wrote of her beloved city:

Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky had lived with his wife in Pushkin for nearly ten years. Then, in late August, he collected his writings, his most essential reference books, a few other personal possessions and came to Leningrad. It was no longer possible to work in Pushkin. The beautiful city on Leningrad’s outskirts with its great parks, its palaces, its villas, its deep associations with Russian history and Russian culture overflowed with refugees from the Baltic, from Pskov, from Velikiye Luki, from Gatchina. At the Conservatory, where Bogdanov-Berezovsky taught a course in the history of Soviet music, they tried to persuade him to join the group of composers and musicologists which was being evacuated to Tashkent. He declined to go. His mother was ill and could not be moved from Leningrad, and he had been asked to head the organization directing the work of those remaining in Leningrad. The Conservatory group was evacuated without him on the night of August 22. The train was held up at Mga because the Germans had bombed out the bridge at Volkhovstroi, en route to Vologda. Finally, the train was diverted to the Pestovo line, the only one remaining open. Shortly after the train pulled out of Mga, German bombers savagely attacked Mga railroad station.

On August 30 Bogdanov-Berezovsky went to Smolny to talk with Party officials about setting up a small mobile orchestra and singing group which would present operatic scenes to troops at the front and in the hospitals. After the conference he and other composers assembled for rifle drill under the direction of a “very nice but very demanding young lieutenant.” The musicians loaded their guns, fired at targets, cleaned them. They were preparing for the block-by-block defense of Leningrad. On September 1 Bogdanov-Berezovsky rose at 6:30
A.M.
He worked at his desk until nearly 10. Then he went to the Union of Composers. He and his colleagues held an audition of military songs for a military song book which they were putting out for the Leningrad troops. This was his new life—a life which differed only in minor detail from that of most of his fellow citizens.

September 4 was a foggy, cloudy day. All night there had been the sound of cannon. The shelling seemed nearer. By noon reports began to come to Smolny: German long-range artillery was firing into the city. A shell plunged into the Vitebsk freight station. Another hit the Dalolin factory. Then the Krasny Neftyanik plant was hit, followed by the Bolshevik factory and Hydroelectric Station No. 5. There were heavy casualties. The shells, it was quickly determined, were being fired by long-range 240-mm siege artillery from the region of Tosno.

Word of the shelling spread from one end of Leningrad to another, and with it word of the fall of Mga which had cut the last railroad to Moscow. It was the fall of Mga which had enabled the Germans to begin shelling the city. Vissarion Sayanov walked through the Leningrad streets that day. The posters were up for the premiere of
Maritza
at the Musical Comedy Theater September 6. He found a long line at the railroad station. He asked the people why they went there. The window was shut. No tickets were being sold. Didn’t they know Mga had fallen? A woman with three little children beside her answered, “Maybe they will take Mga back and then the road will be open and then the people in line here will get the first tickets. That’s why.”

A white-aproned girl was selling soda pop in the station, and people walked past eating Eskimo pies. A little girl had chalked squares on the sidewalk and was solemnly playing hopscotch. That was the day Sayanov met a girl walking on Nevsky Prospekt with two gas masks over her shoulder and a cat in her arms.

“You’re well prepared for a gas attack,” he observed.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m practicing.”

“But why two masks?”

“What about my cat?” she said. “Do you think I’d let her die in a gas attack?”

Sayanov was often to think of the girl and her cat in the weeks to come as Leningrad belts drew tighter.

People talked of Mga and little else. Sayanov heard a man say on the street, “The German soldiers say they hold Mga so strongly that if we take it they’ll have to fall all the way back to Berlin. They say it’s impossible to take Mga.”

It was strange, Sayanov thought, that people’s attention fastened so on Mga—not only that of civilians but of the military as well.

¹
More fortunate than most, General Nikishev was not shot. He survived to participate in the Stalingrad battle. (
N.Z
., p. 444.)

VERA INBER HAD NEVER SEEN SUCH AN AUTUMN: NO RAIN; the air warm and dry; the leaves purple, amber and lemon-yellow, still rustling on the trees. Her husband, Dr. I. D. Strashun, was busy all day at the great hospital on Aptekarsky Island. Occasionally there was an air-raid alert, and Vera Inber would stand on the balcony of their apartment on Pesochnaya Ulitsa and look out beyond the pleasant trees and walks of the Botanical Gardens to the vista of the great city.

On September 8 she went with some friends to the Musical Comedy Theater to see
The Bat
. When the sirens sounded between the first and second acts, the theater director asked the audience to take seats close to the walls because there was no air-raid shelter. The performance went on to the counterpoint of AA guns.

When Vera Inber and her friends came out of the theater, they noticed a strange reddish light reflected across the square in the dusk. Suddenly their chauffeur appeared and said, “I thought I’d come for you. It’s better to get home quickly.”

As their car turned out of the square, they saw mountains of smoke pouring up toward the sky, the smoke shot through with long tongues of reddish flame, the flames and the smoke reaching thousands of feet over the city.

“The Germans have set fire to the food warehouses,” the chauffeur said.

They drove rapidly through St. Isaac’s Square, past the Admiralty and its slender spire, across Palace Square and over the Neva by the Kirov Bridge. As they looked back, they could see the waves of smoke, oily-black and ember-red, curling ever higher and higher.

Alarm followed alarm. For the first time Vera Inber went down to the shelter. The sound of German planes was still overhead and the AA guns had not been silent.

Pavel Luknitsky had a front-row seat for the raid—the window of a friend’s sixth-floor apartment at the corner of Borovaya Ulitsa and Rasstannaya. It overlooked the Vitebsk locomotive depot, the great Badayev warehouses, the freight station and beyond toward Avtovo and the Kirov metallurgical works.

The Badayev warehouses had been built by an old St. Petersburg merchant named Rasterayev just before World War I. They were wooden buildings, put up one next to the other with gaps of not more than 25 or 30 feet between them. The compound covered several acres in the southwest quarter of the city. Luknitsky and his friend, Lyudmila Fedorovna, walked to her apartment on Borovaya in early evening. They stopped with many other Leningraders to peer at a building at the corner of Glazovskaya and Voronezh streets which had been hit by a German shell. The German shelling had started only September 4, and the building, No. 13 Glazovskaya, was one of the first to be hit. There had been many casualties, mostly women and children. The evening was pleasant and clear. There were a few white clouds in the blue sky. Suddenly a factory whistle sounded an air alert. Almost immediately they saw hundreds of incendiary bombs showering into the Vitebsk freight yards. Dozens of fires of blinding brilliance burst out.

Clouds of black and red smoke began to rise. Bombs continued to fall and the AA guns to bark. Some women gathered in the courtyard of the building, chattering in curiosity about what was going on. Luknitsky climbed to the roof. From there he could see that the whole city was gradually being covered with smoke from huge fires burning in the vicinity of Ligovo and the freight station. At first he thought it must be an oil depot. Later he learned it was the Badayev warehouses.

About 8
P.M.
the all-clear sounded and Luknitsky started back to the Petrograd side. But he found the trams were halted by crowds moving toward the fires. He had to go on foot to Five Corners where the streetcars were running. Along a wall on Chernyshevsky Street he saw a group of youngsters with guitars and mandolins playing for their girl friends. The blood-red smoke spread farther and farther across the sky, and after 10
P.M.
when he got back home a new air alert sounded.

To Olga Berggolts the greasy clouds brought a premonition of alarm. They reminded her of an eclipse of the sun—a red eclipse. She thought of the leaflets which the Germans had dropped: “Wait for the full moon!” And below in smaller letters: “Bayonets in the earth.” Superstitious people might take panic. But as yet she had no idea that the red clouds were casting the fateful shadow of famine over her beloved Leningrad.

Vsevolod Kochetov had returned from the front to the
Leningradskaya Pravda
on September 8 and was talking with his colleagues when the alert sounded. They saw planes, high in the sky, heard the AA guns and the sound of fire trucks and ambulances. Then they went up to the roof and someone said, “It’s the Badayev warehouses.”

The tower of flame and smoke rising more than three miles provided an easy marker for the German planes when they returned to bomb the city again about 11
P.M.
Yet it seemed to Kochetov that the Germans were being aided by rockets fired inside Leningrad, by signals sent up to guide the Nazi bombers. Who were these traitors? Former imperial bureaucrats? Elderly members of the old Russian intelligentsia? Kulaks? Old White Guard officers? Traders? Businessmen ready to greet Hitler with the traditional Russian offering of bread and salt? Kochetov, ever ready to suspect the worst, felt there was treachery all about him.

Kochetov was not the only one to see Nazi agents and traitors signaling from windows and rooftops. That night and for weeks to come rumors of Nazi activity flooded the city. The Nazis did send agents into the city. There was hardly a Leningrader who did not believe that Nazi “rocketmen” were active. The reports found their way into official accounts, police documents, military reports, personal reminiscences and official histories.

In reality, the “rocketmen” did not exist. They were a product of the hysteria and suspicion of the times.
¹

Colonel B. V. Bychevsky was returning on the evening of September 8 from one of his endless trips to the front, this time to the Neva region, where he was working on a pontoon bridge. He was deep in thought when his chauffeur, Pavel Yakovlev, suddenly stopped the car, saying, “Comrade Chief, look at what’s happening in the city!”

Bychevsky looked. The whole horizon over Leningrad was colored deep blood-red. The sky was crisscrossed by searchlights, and the flames of the fires, reflected back from the smoke clouds, filled the streets and squares with a strange light. People were running toward the conflagration with loads of sand and carts of water. AA guns rattled and bombs kept falling.

It was midnight when Bychevsky got back to Smolny Institute. The news was all bad. The German air attack had been going on for hours. At the front the offensive was gathering strength. Secretary Kuznetsov had been at the great Peterhof Palace, the pride of Russia, the rival of Versailles. He ordered Its treasures evacuated but forbade the sappers to mine the noble buildings. By now the Germans probably were there. Bychevsky was still talking with M. V. Basov
²
of the Leningrad Party organization when N. M. Shekhovtsev, deputy of the City Soviet, came in from the fire, his wide face lined with deep creases and smeared with soot. He sank into a chair, letting his heavy hands fall to his lap. It was now 6
A.M.
, and the fight with the fire was still going on.

“Has it all burned?” asked Basov, referring to the tons of flour, sugar, meat and other provisions in the warehouse.

“It’s burned/’ Shekhovtsev sighed. “We kept all these riches in wooden buildings, practically cheek by jowl. Now we will pay for our heedlessness. It’s a sea of flames. The sugar has flowed into the cellars—two and a half thousand tons.”

Shekhovtsev launched into a bitter denunciation of himself, of the city authorities for their carelessness, for not dispersing the supplies, for not putting them in secure buildings, for the shortage of fire-fighting apparatus.

“Well,” snapped Basov, “the leaders are to blame—ourselves among them. The people have good grounds for hurling some nasty words at us. What are the people saying?”

“They’re saying nothing,” Shekhovtsev replied. “They are fighting the fire, trying to save what they can. . . .”

The German air attack on Leningrad had begun September 6, but the first intensive raid was that of September 8. The Germans came that night in two main waves. The first, at
6:55
P.M.
, was carried out by 27 Junkers, dropping 6,327
³
incendiary bombs, of which 5,000 fell on the Moscow region, 1,311 in the Smolny region and 16 in the Red Guard region. These incendiary bombs set 178 fires.
⁴
At 10:35
P.M.
a second wave of bombers dropped 48 high-explosive bombs of 500 to 1,000 pounds, mostly near Smolny Institute and the Finland Station. A pumping plant at the city waterworks was hit, and 24 people were killed and 122 wounded.

Almost all the city’s fire-fighting apparatus, 168 units, was brought out to fight the Badayev fire, which blazed over an area of more than four acres. It took all night to bring it under control.

Not a person in Leningrad on the morning after the Badayev fire had reason any longer to doubt that the city faced the grimmest trial of its history. The smell of burning meat, the acrid stench of carbonized sugar, the heavy scent of burning oil and flour filled the air. Everyone knew Badayev was the city’s greatest warehouse. Everyone knew that here the grain, the sugar, the meat, the lard and the butter for the city were stored. Now it was lost. “Badayev has burned,” the babushkas said. “It’s the end—famine!”

The iron ring of Hitler had closed. Indeed, Nazi troops were pounding into Shlisselburg and sealing the circle during the very hours in which Badayev went up in a pillar of flame. And even before Badayev went the city’s position had been desperate.

For weeks Leningrad had glided along. To be sure, food was rationed, but no more strictly than in any other big city in Russia.

Even now Kochetov could buy at the lunch counter at
Leningradskaya Pravda
luxury products without ration coupons—first-quality crabmeat, gray full-grained caviar. At a special “closed store” for generals the salesgirl pressed Kochetov to buy champagne. “It’s very nourishing,” she said, “full of vitamins.” At first he was going to take a bottle, but she insisted that he take more. He wound up coming away with a case. Thousands of Leningraders hoarded as much food as they could buy. Luknitsky visited a photographer with whom he had once traveled in Asia. The photographer showed him a special shelter which he had built in his apartment, filled with shelf after shelf of canned goods, food of every conceivable kind. He was certain there would soon be famine in the city. Luknitsky left the apartment with a feeling of revulsion. He recalled another friend, Major Boris Likharev, chairman of the Leningrad Writers Union. Likharev’s wife had found a ten-pound can of caviar in the store and bought it “just in case.” Likharev made her give it to a children’s home because he thought it was showing a bad example.
⁵
Olga Iordan could still buy fresh caviar, real coffee, blackberry juice and sea cabbage. But shopping was getting more difficult.

Yelena Skryabina had to spend long hours in queues. She was able to buy butter in the commercial stores (of which there were seventy-one in Leningrad) and sometimes sugar. But she had to scurry from one end of town to another, sometimes to Vasilevsky Island, sometimes to the Petrograd side. She had about a month’s supply of food oh hand September i.

No one in Leningrad—up to September 8—had actually suffered for food. White bread was sold as late as September 10. The rationing imposed July i was close to the average normal food consumption. The bread ration was nearly two pounds (800 grams) a day for workers and about a pound for dependents and children. The 1940 average consumption had been 531 grams of bread a day. The cereal ration of 2,000 grams a month compared with 1940 consumption of 1,740; meat was 2,200 grams compared with 3,330 average; butter and fats 800 compared with 1,020 average, and sugar
and
sweets 1,500 compared with 3,630 average.

No alarm about Leningrad’s food situation had been expressed until the special mission of the State Defense Committee discovered that on August 27, the date when for all practical purposes rail communications with Leningrad were severed, the city had on hand the following supplies: flour, exclusive of grain, 17 days’ supply; cereals, 29 days’; fish, 16 days’; meat, 25 days’; dried fish, 22 days’; butter, 28 days’.

An urgent telegram was sent to the State Defense Committee in Moscow August 29 asking that emergency food shipments be sent to Leningrad. The committee decided to provide Leningrad with a 45-day reserve of food. It proposed to ship in 135,000 tons of flour, 7,800 tons of cereals, 24,000 tons of meat and fish, 3,500 tons of dried fish, 3,000 tons of butter.

It recommended that Leningrad reduce its free commercial sale of food (at high government prices) and put tea, eggs and matches on a ration basis. The government approved these recommendations and ordered the Transport Ministry to begin on August 31 sending eight food trains daily to Volkhovstroi and Lodeinoye Pole with food for the city. From those points the food was to be sent by barge, tugboat and tanker via Lake Ladoga and the Neva River to Leningrad.

In line with these decisions, on September 2 the Leningrad rations were reduced. The bread ration was cut to 600 grams—a little more than a pound —a day for workers, 400 grams for office workers and 300 grams—about half a pound—for dependents and children under twelve. The meat ration was cut to three pounds a month, cereals to the same level, fats to a pound and a half, and sugar and candy to five pounds. This meant belt-tightening. But it was not insupportable—especially since it was still possible to eat in restaurants or dining rooms attachéd to factories, institutions and offices without giving up ration coupons.