Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  The conversation was getting dangerous, Shostakovich could tell. He answered, “No, there was never any talk of politics in my presence.”

  “Now, I think you should try to shake your memory. It cannot be that you were at his home and that you did not talk about politics. For instance, the plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin? What did you hear about that?”

  Shostakovich was panicky. He did not answer. The investigator pressed him. Shostakovich kept repeating, “No, there was never any such talk in my presence.”

  The investigator insisted, “Think harder. Try to remember. Some of the other guests have verified it already.”

  Shostakovich denied having ever heard anything about a plot.

  The investigator sat back. He said that it was Saturday and that he would give Shostakovich the weekend to remember. “You must recall every detail of the discussion regarding the plot against Stalin of which you were a witness.”

  They made an appointment for Monday. By then, clearly, Shostakovich either had to make up a story that would betray Tukhachevsky and satisfy the NKVD or he would be arrested himself.

  “I understood this was the end,” he later told a friend. “Those two days until Monday were a nightmare. I told my wife I probably wouldn’t return. She even prepared a bag for me — the kind prepared for people who were taken away. She put in warm underwear. She knew I wouldn’t be back.”

  He destroyed any papers that might possibly be incriminating. He spent the weekend saying good-bye to Nina and his baby daughter.

  On Monday, he took his suitcase and went to the Big House. He showed his summons to the guards and went in to wait on a chair to be called by the investigator. He waited for hours. Finally, he timidly spoke to a security guard. The guard thumbed through the list of appointments and couldn’t find Shostakovich’s name. “What is your business? Whom have you come to see?”

  Shostakovich explained he was there to see an investigator called Zakovsky. He had an appointment.

  Ah! Now the guard understood what was going on. He apologetically told Shostakovich that over the weekend, Zakovsky had been condemned and arrested. His appointments had apparently been canceled. They were not going to be rescheduled.

  Shostakovich left the building. For the moment, he was free. As in some absurdist fable, his executioner was in line for execution. He wandered home across the Neva River, befogged and bewildered by his tenuous reprieve.

  Under torture, Tukhachevsky confessed to being an agent in the pay of the German military, the Reichswehr. He admitted to planning a coup to overthrow Stalin’s regime. He claimed he had cooked up his scheme with a German general while they’d been walking in a funeral procession behind the coffin of the king of England. After weeks of interrogation, he implicated other officers in the imaginary junta. All of these details were specially tailored by Stalin himself in daily meetings with the head of the NKVD.

  The trial of Tukhachevsky and his supposed coconspirators took place on June 11, 1937. It was held in secret.

  Tukhachevsky, hearing his comrades accuse him of crimes he had never committed, hearing of a whole alternative world in which he was a villain, said wonderingly, as so many had before him, “I feel I’m dreaming.”

  He was attacked not just for his treason but also for his supposed incompetence. He was scolded for wasting time and money on tanks when it could have been spent on training horsemen, who were clearly the future of warfare.

  There was no question of innocence. Tukhachevsky and all those on trial with him were declared guilty and sentenced to death.

  They were shot in the courtyard of NKVD headquarters. Parked trucks revved their motors to hide the noise of gunfire. One of the victims had time before he died to scream, “Long live the Party! Long live Stalin!”

  It is likely he was trying to ensure his wife and children were protected.

  After Tukhachevsky’s death, most of his family was hunted down and liquidated. His wife went mad.

  The cleaning up of odds and ends did not stop there. One of the judges miserably told his friends, “Tomorrow I’ll be put in the same place.” He was not wrong. Soon, five of the eight judges in the Tukhachevsky case were executed. The three NKVD agents who had gone to the West to purchase the forged letters were also killed.

  So Stalin got what he wanted: Mikhail Tukhachevsky was no longer a threat. But Stalin did not know how high the price really was: The Leader had just participated in a plot with Hitler to cripple his own army. Meanwhile, Hitler trained one of the world’s most fearsome fighting forces — the German Wehrmacht — for war.

  It was only after Tukhachevsky was actually sentenced that Pravda and the other newspapers even announced his trial to the Russian people. Most people only heard of the trial after Tukhachevsky had been executed.

  On July 12, the paper Izvestiya declared:

  The spies Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich, Kork, Eideman, Feldman, Primakov and Putna, who sold out to the sworn enemies of socialism, had the audacity to raise a blood-stained, criminal hand against the lives and happiness of the people. . . . The whole country, which had unanimously demanded that the band of eight spies be wiped off the face of the earth, welcomes the decision of the court. Execution by shooting! Such is the sentence of the court. Execution! Such is the will of the people.

  It may or may not have been the will of the people. Everyone was agog.

  “It was a terrible blow for me when Tukhachevsky was shot,” said Shostakovich many years later. “When I read about it in the papers, I blacked out. I felt they were killing me, that’s how bad I felt.”

  He was panicked. That day, he hastily wrote a letter to his government contact: “I have known Tukhachevsky for about eight years. . . . It could not be considered a close comradely acquaintance. . . . He was a great music lover, and all of our conversations touched exclusively on this subject.” Tukhachevsky was gone. There was nothing Shostakovich could do for him anymore. He had to save himself.

  Once Marshal Tukhachevsky was dead, Stalin unleashed a mass purge of the armed forces. He wanted to make sure there was no possibility of a military coup. Only nine days after Tukhachevsky’s body had fallen in that courtyard, Stalin’s forces had already rounded up 980 Red Army officers. They were accused of plotting and spying. The purges hit the tank units and the air force hardest. They had been Tukhachevsky’s special pride. Only two of the five marshals of the Red Army remained alive, and they both thought tank warfare was overrated.

  In just a few months, the purge liquidated or imprisoned about 60 or 70 percent of the officers in the Soviet military. Ninety percent of the generals had disappeared. Thirteen out of fifteen commanders of the army were gone. Then, a few months later, those who replaced them were also purged. In all, around twenty-seven thousand officers and soldiers vanished into concentration camps or mass graves.

  In the dark of the night, people in Shostakovich’s neighborhood were awakened by gunfire. Otherwise, the city was silent at that hour: no trams, only occasional cars.

  Shostakovich’s acquaintance and neighbor Lyubov Shaporina lay awake in her bed, listening to the shots, as she described next morning in her diary: “The shooting continued in bursts every ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes.” Shaporina opened her window and tried to hear where the gunfire was coming from. “After all, between 3 to 5 in the morning it couldn’t be a drill. Who were they shooting? And why?”

  The shooting was coming from the gray battlements of the Peter and Paul Fortress. There, in the gloomy shadow of the church where the tsars were entombed, hundreds of soldiers and officers accused of collusion with Tukhachevsky were being executed by firing squad, one after the other.

  At around five, the shooting ceased. The sun rose. The trams started moving on their tracks. A new day was beginning.

  Shaporina scribbled in her diary: “To spend all night long hearing living people, undoubtedly innocent people, being shot to death and not to lose your mind. And afterwards, just to fall asleep, to go on sleeping as
though nothing had happened. How terrible.”

  The fortress’s church spire, needle-thin and dangerously sharp, glimmered gold in the dawn.

  Shostakovich had to produce something. Soon, his silence itself would be read as a comment on the cultural revolution going on around him. Silence was becoming dangerous.

  He had started writing his Fifth Symphony in the spring. He didn’t talk about it with others. Almost no one had heard any of it. He had played a few of its movements on the piano for a musicologist, a mutual friend of his and Tukhachevsky’s, but during the investigations into the Tukhachevsky plot, the man had been dragged away and was never seen again.

  In the month after Tukhachevsky’s death, Shostakovich wrote the symphony’s tragic slow movement. Supposedly, it took him only three days to write.

  He was well aware that another failure, another public accusation of being “anti-people,” could easily lead to death or life imprisonment in a Siberian work camp.

  At the beginning of the fall, as he put the finishing touches on the symphony, he discovered that Nina was pregnant again. (It would turn out to be a boy: Maxim.) In these times, pregnancy was not entirely news for rejoicing.

  He always had before him the example of the poet Kornilov; the poet’s ex-wife, Olga Berggolts; and the unborn baby who had died, battered to death in her womb.

  As Shostakovich worked on the last details of the new symphony and considered what face he would put on for the waiting world, a great carnival was held in Moscow. (Life is getting better, comrades! Life is getting merrier!) There was a grand masquerade. Crowds thronged the Park of Culture and Recreation dressed as devils, Russian puppets, and giraffes with their necks tied in knots.

  “You don’t want to take the mask off,” the newspaper Izvestiya giddily declared. “You want to maintain your cheerful, festive appearance. . . . A carnival mask is essentially a cap of invisibility. Comrades, acquaintances, relatives and coworkers walk past without seeing you.” Fireworks exploded over the river embankments crammed with cardboard grins and leers.

  The newspaper concluded: “Now tradition takes over, masks are the rule, and the carnival begins.”

  On November 21, 1937, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5 in D minor, op. 47, was presented to the world by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. “The significance was apparent to everyone,” writes one biographer. “Shostakovich’s fate was at stake.”

  The hall was full, and the crowds were alert with nervous anxiety. Two of Shostakovich’s friends met in the chaos. Gavriil Popov — whose own First Symphony had been declared forbidden a few years before — gabbled to Lyubov Shaporina, “You know, I’ve turned into a coward, I’m a coward, I’m afraid of everything.” She, for her part, was no better off. “I wake up in the morning and automatically think: thank God I wasn’t arrested last night, they don’t arrest anyone during the day, but what will happen tonight, no one knows. . . . Every single person has enough against him to justify arrest and exile to parts unknown. . . .”

  The orchestra tuned up. The young conductor, Evgeny Mravinsky, walked out and the audience applauded. He had taken on the dangerous challenge of presenting the new symphony. Years later he said, “Until this day I cannot understand how I dared to accept this proposal unhesitatingly.”

  The first part of the concert was old music, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.

  Shostakovich sat in agony in the audience, waiting for his piece to start. He felt like a gladiator about to die in the imperial arena or like a fish in a fry pan. Over the throbbing strains of Tchaikovsky, a little ditty rang in his ears: “Tiny little fishie, fried little smelt, where’s your smile from yesterday, remember how you felt?”

  Then, with a bold, bleak declaration, Shostakovich’s symphony began.

  He could not go back now.

  Those in the hall who knew his music well (especially those who’d heard some version of the suppressed Fourth Symphony) recognized certain moods from his earlier work: the hints of some pensive character crushed and beaten by brutal marches — the orchestra warding off the blows . . . cruel, clumsy waltzes, like some Russian dancing bear willing to maul a partner . . . And perhaps most chilling of all, they recognized the moments after these assaults, when stillness arrives, and it does not feel like peace, but a stunned, appalled hush . . . as if someone, in the wake of a beating, first opens their eyes to a cold and crystalline new world in which they do not know how to feel.

  But what surprised people in the symphony was a new discipline, a new sobriety, a clear use of antique forms to describe new anguish.

  By the third movement, a slow lament, Shostakovich’s friend Isaak Glikman looked around the hall and saw that the faces of the men and women around him were wet with tears. This was a song for all their dead.

  Shostakovich later said,

  Even before the war, in Leningrad there probably wasn’t a single family who hadn’t lost someone, a father, a brother, or if not a relative, then a close friend. Everyone had someone to cry over, but you had to cry silently, under your blanket, so that no one would see. Everyone feared everyone else, and the sorrow oppressed and suffocated us.

  This requiem allowed them to mourn together, in public. In this threnody, there are fragile solos, weak shoots or tendrils of a theme that might easily get crushed underfoot. The full string orchestra takes up those thin melodies and tries them, too, as if, after a great shock, they all are teaching themselves to feel again. They are learning to sing of their own sorrow.

  The largo lament came finally, gently, to a last resting place, a resolution. And then, almost terrifying in their brutal joy, the drums and brass began to blast out the symphony’s grand finale. It was a huge, lumbering celebration of some kind, thrilling in its explosive energy, its hymns of praise, its screaming triumph.

  Some who listened thought that here was the hope they’d been looking for. This was a vision of future freedom without terror.

  Others were uncertain. The joy seemed forced.

  One thing that everyone agreed on, however, was the symphony’s power. As the finale thundered toward its conclusion, members of the audience, in a trance, began to rise out of their seats one by one. “The music had a sort of electrical force,” said one.

  The last chord sounded.

  “The whole audience leapt to their feet and erupted into wild applause — a demonstration of their outrage at all the hounding poor Mitya has been through,” wrote Lyubov Shaporina in her diary that night. “Everyone kept saying the same thing: ‘That was his answer, and it was a good one.’ D. D. [Shostakovich] came out white as a sheet, biting his lips. I think he was close to tears.”

  Another audience member reported: “A thunderous ovation shook the columns of the white Philharmonic Hall, and Evgeny Mravinsky lifted the score above his head, so as to show that it was not he, the conductor, or the orchestra who deserved this storm of applause, these shouts of ‘bravo’; the success belonged to the creator of this work.”

  The applause would not stop. The audience was practically hysterical.

  The cheering went on without abating for half an hour. The authorities were worried it would turn into a demonstration. For the audience, this symphonic victory was not simply about Shostakovich — it was about them. Everyone in the hall that night was a survivor. Everyone there had suffered what the composer had suffered, each in his or her own way. They had just been given a chance to grieve — to mourn together all that had been lost.

  Shostakovich was still stiffly bowing in front of the delighted mob. Two of his friends realized it might be a disaster if he were caught standing there when there was any trouble — a spontaneous protest, a riot, anything that might attract attention to him.

  They whisked him away.

  It appeared that, so long as the regime didn’t intervene and arrest him, his symphony was a tremendous success.

  The next day, a conductor and friend of the Shostakoviches, Alexander Gauk, who had been at the symphony’s premiere, retu
rned to Moscow.

  He overheard a conversation between two government officials. They were talking about the crowds at the premiere the night before. One — in charge of censoring and approving music — was saying that “it had been a put-up job” and that the audience had been stuffed with Shostakovich’s friends.

  Gauk interrupted. He said that he had also been at the concert. He pointed out that there had been twenty-five hundred people in attendance. He didn’t think a few friends of Shostakovich had made that much difference.

  Still, as the weeks went on, there was worry in high places about the crazed ovations the Fifth Symphony was getting all over the USSR. (After one performance, the whole audience demanded to send Shostakovich a congratulatory telegram en masse!) The chairman of the Composers’ Union spoke out about the mania for the Fifth: “Unhealthy instances of agitation — even of psychosis to a certain extent — are taking place around this work. In our circumstances this might do both the work and its composer a bad turn.” Eventually, the government’s Committee for Artistic Affairs sent two representatives to see what the hullabaloo was all about.

  After the performance, once again, the audience went wild. One of the officials stood silently. The other “made a constant stream of snide remarks, shouting to make himself heard over the noise in the hall: ‘Just look, all the concert-goers have been hand-picked one by one. These are not normal concert-goers. The Symphony’s success has been most scandalously fabricated.’”

  They demanded a continuing investigation. The Leningrad District Party Committee observed a special performance of the piece to judge whether it was formalistic and secretly anti-people. The director of the Leningrad Philharmonic had to fill out forms about ticket sales and the piece’s success. “And in the meantime,” he said, “the symphony continued its life, and was widely performed, invariably exciting a lively and enthusiastic response from its audiences.”

  So what were people getting so excited about? What was this symphony saying to them?