Stalin feared Hitler, but unfortunately, he also admired him. He did not believe Hitler was going to break his word — or at least not yet. Historians have struggled to understand how Stalin could have been so easily duped. It is likely that he thought that Hitler, who was already engaged in the Battle of Britain to the west, would not open up another battle front to the east — a move that would bleed German strength in two directions. Furthermore, Stalin was entertaining the idea of his own attack on Germany, perhaps to be launched in 1943. He knew that the Red Army was not yet ready to engage the might of the German war machine, the Wehrmacht. After all, Stalin had just purged the military in the wake of the Tukhachevsky trial. As a result, 70 percent of the higher-ranking officers in the armed forces had been in command for less than two years. Stalin knew that they needed to learn and to prepare. In a sense, he needed to believe that he had bought Russia time.
But also, it appears that there was some peculiar rivalry, some obscure schoolboy bully mentality, that led Stalin to at once envy Hitler, and wish to impress him, and wish to defeat him, and yet believe in some brotherhood of dictatorship.
As the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed, “Not to trust anybody was very typical of Josef Stalin. All the years of his life did he trust one man only, and that was Adolf Hitler”— the twentieth century’s most notorious genocidal liar.
In May 1941, Shostakovich and his family went on vacation to a cottage on the Gulf of Finland. It got them out of the heat of Leningrad. It was a particularly sweltering summer. During the week, Shostakovich went back to their city apartment to wrap up the term at the Leningrad Conservatory. On the weekends, he took the train up to see Nina and the children.
Though he did not know it, German reconnaissance planes were flying daily over the borders into Soviet airspace and taking pictures of all the routes to Leningrad and the other major Russian cities. In May and early June, ninety-one Nazi planes buzzed over Russian territory.
When questioned, the Germans simply purred that these flights were designed to look for forgotten war graves from World War I. Russian military command didn’t believe a word of this. The Soviet defense minister, Semyon Timoshenko, and General Georgi Zhukov of the Red Army confronted Stalin. Timoshenko said, “Zhukov and I think we should start shooting the German planes down.”
Stalin tried to calm them. Nothing was wrong, he said. “The German ambassador has explained that their air force has too many youngsters who are not well trained yet. Young pilots can easily lose their way. The ambassador has asked us to ignore the wandering planes.”
Zhukov and Timoshenko pointed out that these bewildered young pilots were flying slowly over military bases.
Stalin replied that Hitler should be told immediately. “I am not sure he knows about that.”
One of the Nazi planes had to perform an emergency landing while on a recon mission. The pilots were temporarily taken into custody. Red Army soldiers searched the aircraft and discovered high-power cameras. The film negatives showed images of bridges and railroads. The soldiers scrambled to get word to Soviet high command.
Moscow ordered the soldiers to let the Nazi pilots go free.
Reports were coming in from several locations that tanks and transports were gathering at the borders. Soldiers on guard duty heard the constant grinding of machinery in the woods.
Hitler reassured the Russian ambassador, “Please do not worry when you hear about the concentration of our troops in Poland. They are going there for massive training before major strikes in the West” against England.
On June 11, the NKVD discovered a hidden telephone cable snaking underneath a river at the border. Apparently, the Nazis had been listening in on Red Army phone conversations.
On June 13, Ramzai — the Soviet spy in Tokyo — tried again to warn Stalin of the coming attack. “I repeat: Nine armies with the strength of 150 divisions will begin an offensive at dawn on June 22.”
At the same time, German ships began to disappear from Soviet ports. Some turned around without even picking up their cargos. By June 16, there were no German ships left in Soviet waters.
On June 21, the secret police reported thirty-nine German reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory. The commander of the Soviet Third Army reported that the Germans were pulling out the barbed-wire fences on their side of the border. The officer he spoke to calmed his fears: “Believe me, Moscow knows the military and political situation and the state of our relations with Germany better than we do.”
A vast army of Germans, Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, and Spaniards was assembling all along the thousand-mile western border of the USSR from the Gulf of Finland in the north to the Black Sea in the south. It included 146 army divisions, about four million Axis troops. Some 3,600 tanks and 2,700 airplanes prepared for assault.
That evening, a Nazi soldier defected and swam across a river at the border. He staggered into a Red Army border encampment and warned the troops there of the coming catastrophe.
Moscow ordered him put to death for his pains. He was killed as a “deserter-informant.”
Stalin, pacing in the Kremlin, worried that Hitler was trying to provoke him somehow. Stalin refused to be drawn in. Lavrentii Beria, the fawning head of the secret police, reminded him of “your wise prophecy: Hitler will not attack us in 1941.”
Stalin, hedging his bets, demanded that a confusing order be sent out: troops should be on the alert, but they should not allow the Germans to “provoke an incident.”
What did that mean? Should troops return fire or not? No one knew. Commanders were perfectly aware of one thing, however: if they prepared for an attack when Stalin said there would be no attack, they could be tried for treason and shot; on the other hand, if there was a surprise attack and they weren’t prepared, they could be tried for incompetence and shot.
Regardless, many did not even receive Stalin’s bewildering command. At midnight, German commandos had slipped across the border and snipped the telephone and telegraph wires hanging on gaunt poles throughout the western marches. Many troops, therefore, had no way to communicate with headquarters.
Meanwhile, Hitler sealed a letter to fellow Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy, informing “il Duce” of his motives in invading the USSR. Hitler wrote, “Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union . . . was . . . often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts, and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.”
Stalin’s mental agonies were just beginning. In the early hours of June 22, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, he nervously decided that no invasion was going to happen. He retired to his quarters.
General Zhukov and Defense Minister Timoshenko were not so certain. They decided to stay the night in Timoshenko’s office at the People’s Commissariat of Defense. They sat down and waited.
At three thirty in the morning, Stalin went to bed.
At about the same time, German border guards near Kolden called out to the Red Army soldiers on the other side of the Bug River and asked them to walk over so they could “discuss important matters.”
As the Russian soldiers crossed the bridge, they were gunned down in cold blood.
Stalin may have slept fitfully; he may have lain awake, staring at the ceiling.
In either case, half an hour after he went to bed, out in the hot night, orders were shouted and Nazi soldiers waved tank armies across bridges and over fields. Swarms of planes sped eastward in formation.
In the dark of the morning of June 22, 1941, the largest invasion force ever assembled in European history poured across the border into the Soviet Union, and the unthinkable cataclysm began.
SOURCES
1 Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax was, incidentally, the younger brother of the early fantasy writer Lord Dunsany. Admiral Plunkett himself was an author as well. He had wr
itten a pamphlet called Handbook on Solar Heating.
2 Hitler frequently played on this pun in his dinner conversation: “The Slavs are a mass of born slaves,” he’d say with a snort. In fact, the pun is no accident: the words are related, based on an ancient enslavement of southern Slavic peoples.
In late June, the sun barely sets in Leningrad. This city of palaces, courtyards, and canals is so far to the north that midsummer is almost a continual day, while in midwinter, there is long, gloomy darkness, lit only by a few scant hours of light.
In the “White Nights”— these sunny summer evenings so bright that the skin burns even at eight — the city celebrates. There are concerts and shows. The bars are full and loud. People walk the boulevards and chase one another across the bridges. Couples stroll through the parks. They sit on the stone embankments and watch the unset sun linger over the Neva River.
In the midst of this festival atmosphere, Dmitri Shostakovich had clear plans for the day of June 22. He was scheduled to administer a few final exams at the Conservatory, and then he and his friend Isaak Glikman were going to a tasty soccer doubleheader (Dynamo and Zenith) followed by dinner.
Just after the quick slip of night, however, as the sky turned pink again, eighteen Ju 88 bombers with German crosses on their wings and swastikas on their tails buzzed into view above the Gulf of Finland. They were headed for the nearby naval base at the port town of Kronstadt.
Soviet antiaircraft gunners watched them approach. The planes were still over the water, however, when they began dropping their payloads: magnetic mines that would attach to ships’ hulls and blow them apart. The mines splashed into the sea.
The Russian gunners did not know what to do. They were not officially at war. They held their fire. The German bombers wheeled and flew on.
Out in the bay, on a Russian pleasure ship, a band played and young men and women danced to greet the solstice sunrise.
At the same time, up and down the whole Soviet border, the German air force (the Luftwaffe) began to bomb cities and airfields. Kiev, Sevastopol, Rovno, Lvov, Zhitomir — all of them woke to blasts and detonations. The world was on fire.
The Kremlin was swamped with reports of sudden attacks. Outraged and unbelieving, Georgi Malenkov, one of the most senior Communist Party leaders, called Sevastopol’s military headquarters and demanded to know what was going on. An admiral confirmed reports: “Yes, yes. We are being bombed.” As he spoke, Malenkov heard a huge blast over the phone. The admiral blurted, “Just now a bomb exploded quite close to staff headquarters!” Planes streaked by above him.
The Luftwaffe was unopposed in the air. The Soviet air force didn’t have time to scramble. Their planes were still lined up neatly on their airfields, uncamouflaged, parked wingtip to wingtip. Within a few short minutes of Operation Barbarossa’s official launch, 738 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed without ever leaving the ground. Within a few hours, the Luftwaffe had blasted apart twelve hundred Soviet aircraft. By noon on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans had destroyed more planes than they did in a whole year of their air assault on Britain. The Russian air force had been neutralized almost without firing a shot. The Western Front’s air force commander, staggered at the overwhelming futility of the loss, took out his gun and killed himself.
All over the country, Red Army units desperately tried to get in touch with General Headquarters. Many found their lines were cut. Others found HQ skeptical. “We are being fired on!” one unit announced.
The only reply they got was “You must be insane. And why isn’t your signal in code?”
At the Kremlin, General Zhukov and Comrade Timoshenko were frantic with worry as reports of bombings flooded in from the south and west. They did not want to be held responsible for the wrong decision and executed. They forced their subordinates to put their reports in writing and sign them — so that if anyone was accused of treason later, there would be a clear trail of evidence. This paralyzing fear of action was one of the fruits of Stalin’s Terror.
Nonetheless, someone had to inform the Man of Steel that his country was under attack. General Zhukov called Stalin’s country house.
NKVD general Nikolai Vlasik answered the phone, his voice gruff with sleep. “Who’s calling?”
“Zhukov. Chief of Staff. Please connect me to Comrade Stalin. It’s urgent.”
“What? Right now? Comrade Stalin’s sleeping.”
“Wake him immediately. The Germans are bombing our cities.”
Vlasik put down the phone and stumped off to wake the Leader.
Zhukov hung on impatiently. Minutes passed.
There was a rattle. Stalin was on the line. Zhukov reported that Soviet cities all along the western border were under attack. He asked permission to return fire.
Silence on the line. Stalin did not speak. Zhukov could only hear heavy breathing.
“Did you understand what I said?” he insisted. “Comrade Stalin?”
There was no sound but shocked breath.
Zhukov waited.
At last, Stalin spoke: “Where is the People’s Commissar of Defense?”
“Talking to the Kiev Military District. I am asking for your permission to open fire to respond.”
Stalin snapped, “Permission not granted. This is a German provocation. Do not open fire or the situation will escalate. Come to the Kremlin and summon the Politburo.”
At 5:45 a.m., they met at the Kremlin. Stalin still believed it might be possible to avert war. He was pale and seemed uncertain of the world into which he had woken up. Though he held his trademark pipe in his hand, it was empty of tobacco.
Stalin insisted that the bombing raids might well be some turncoat German attempting to start a war with Russia without Hitler knowing. He was very clear on this point: Hitler must not have been informed about the attacks.
Timoshenko replied, “The Germans are bombing our cities in Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltics. This doesn’t look like a provocation.”
Stalin ordered, “Call the German Embassy immediately.”
When Foreign Minister Molotov called the embassy, he discovered that the German ambassador was expecting his call and had an important announcement to deliver in person.
They met at Molotov’s office. The German ambassador recently had provided assurances that nothing was wrong.
Now the ambassador announced that Germany and the USSR were officially in a state of war.
Comrade Molotov, representative of one of the most brutal regimes in history, could do nothing but stare at him, shocked, and then whine, “But what have we done to deserve this?”
In Leningrad, the day was blue and bright. Shostakovich was on the way to his Dynamo-Zenith doubleheader. It promised to be a fine afternoon.
Then the city’s loudspeakers crackled to life. There was going to be an announcement by Comrade Molotov, commissar of foreign affairs.
“Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union!” The commissar spoke anxiously, with a barely controlled stutter, as if he were out of breath. “At four a.m., and without declaration of war and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops have attacked our country, attacked our frontier in many places and bombed from the air Zhitomir, Kiev, Sevastopol, Kaunas and other cities.” People around Leningrad listened, aghast, knowing that this same announcement was being heard throughout the nation. “The government calls upon you, men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally even more closely around the glorious Bolshevik Party, around the Soviet Government and our great leader, Comrade Stalin.” He finished, “Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.”
The announcement was over.
Chaos broke out in the streets. People charged out of their offices and homes. They called out news to one another. Soon the stores were mobbed with citizens buying emergency food. The avenues were full of hubbub.
Leningraders were so intent on responding to the Nazi threat that on that first day of the assault, a hundre
d thousand of them volunteered to take up arms. The city government was bewildered, at first, by what to do with this wave of spontaneous response.
Shostakovich immediately decided that he, too, would sign up for military service. He wanted to be useful somehow, in a real and concrete way. “Until now I have known only peaceful work,” he wrote. “Now I am ready to take up arms. Only by fighting can we save humanity from destruction.” He and one of his students, Venjamin Fleishman, set off to enlist together.
Why would Shostakovich sign up voluntarily to serve Stalin’s regime? Why did so many Leningraders sign up? Why did the Soviet people in general fight so long and so hard to protect a government that many of them hated?
Stalin himself had clearly thought about this question and gave his frank answer to a Western diplomat: “The population would not fight for us communists, but it will fight for Mother Russia.”
A writer who volunteered at the time remembered, “Very few families had not suffered under Stalin. And we students never believed in those fabricated trials [of the Great Terror]. But you have to understand. . . . We thought that it was just Stalin overdoing things in eliminating his opponents, that all these reshuffles at the top would soon be over. And everyone understood that Stalin was one thing and the country was another.”
As people all over Leningrad — all over the Soviet republics — responded to the call for help, they were doing so to protect their cities, their towns, their families. They knew their very existence was under threat. For many, it was also an opportunity to be part of something larger. This did not mean that there weren’t those who, even on this first day of war, expressed the secret hope that the Nazis would overthrow the Communist regime. One Leningrad diarist, for example, wrote that the day after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, her landlady was in the courtyard, “sitting on a tall trunk and smiling sarcastically. She made no attempt to hide her hatred for the Soviet government and saw in this war and the eventual victory of the Germans the only possible salvation. In many respects, I share her views; but that smile irritates me.”
Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 15
