In the streets, however, feverish preparation was taking place. At the foot of Kazan Cathedral, teens were employed digging bomb shelters. On break, they made a mud Hitler and hit him with shovels. Street signs were covered up, painted over, or taken down, to disorient Germans in case of invasion. Trolley-car drivers no longer announced the names of stops, and anyone foreign asking for directions was watched carefully.
The city’s famed statues were heaped with sandbags to protect them in the case of bombing. In apartments all over the city, people crossed each individual pane of their windows with an X of tape to reduce shattering in the case of nearby blasts.
The military set up checkpoints throughout the streets and on the city’s perimeter to control all entrance and egress. They laid out huge tangled asterisks of metal in the squares to stop the onrush of invading tanks and hid antiaircraft guns in remote quarters of the city’s slums.
At the Hermitage Museum, once part of the palace of the tsars, hundreds worked to remove all the artwork so it could be shipped farther east, into the Ural Mountains, for safekeeping. Old Master paintings depicting half-remembered wars and nude nymphs bathing at the dawn of the world were taken out of their frames and rolled up in crates. Trains full of priceless paintings and Scythian gold headed off into the hills. In remote Sverdlovsk, the tsar’s treasures were stowed in the same basement where he and his family had been murdered. What remained back at the Hermitage was a strange, haunting scene: marble corridors and galleries where empty frames hung on the walls, an exhibition of blankness, vacancy.
Out in the palace gardens, groundskeepers buried statues in the dirt. As Justice and Peace were entombed together, a workman wrote on one flank, “We’ll come back for you.” The grave was covered with leaves to conceal it.
Shostakovich wrote,
It is with a feeling of admiration and pride that I watch the heroic deeds of Leningrad’s people. Despite frequent air-raid alarms, everyone goes about his work with precision and efficiency. People are calm and life continues normally. Factories and offices successfully cope with the rush orders. Theaters are as active as ever and give the people that spiritual encouragement which helps them in their work at the front or rear. Everyone shares the common cause and strives for a common aim. . . . Even children are doing their bit to help strengthen Leningrad’s defenses.
As the days went by, and Shostakovich stood watch on the roof, change in the city became more obvious from above. The golden spires now were painted a camouflage-gray. (The dazzling peak of the Admiralty had been climbed and then blotted out by a music teacher and Alpine mountaineering hobbyist named Olga Fersova.) Leningrad Communist Party Headquarters was swathed in camouflage netting and encircled with machine-gun nests and antiaircraft guns. Tarpaulins were draped over domes.
Then, like grazing beasts, barrage balloons (great lozenges and blimps) drifted up and took their places in the summer sky. Their hides glowed with sunset after the city below had fallen into twilight. As the breeze blew, they all turned slowly as if the herd regarded the approach of strangers.
Their cables were designed to catch the wings of bombers and hack them off or hurl the planes out of the air.
Shostakovich watched Leningrad prepare for an assault. No one knew, however, where the Germans were or when they would attack. There was no reliable word from Moscow.
For two days after Stalin retreated to his country house, the government stalled. No one would sign anything for fear of being blamed and executed when the Friend of the People returned from his hibernation.
At four in the afternoon on the second day of Stalin’s absence, five of the most powerful men in the administration were gathered in the office of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. They were panicked.
In low tones, they discussed how they were going to convince Stalin to return to the Kremlin. They were not sure that he would be ready. One of the men turned to Molotov and, probably without thinking, said, “Then you lead us, Vyacheslav! We will follow.”
Five anxious minds turned over exactly what this meant. There were two ways it could be heard.
Was he just urging them all to get in their cars and go out to the suburbs to speak to the Chief?
Or was he suggesting that Molotov should rule? That Stalin should be toppled? Had he blurted out treason?
They waited to see who would speak next and what that person would say.
History might have taken a very different direction if someone had taken up the second meaning.
The head of the NKVD, however, the monstrous Lavrentii Beria, was one of the five in the room. He knew that if Stalin were discarded, he himself would last only a few days before he was hunted down and killed, either legally or illegally. He chose to hear the comment as an invitation to go talk things over with the Leader.
He conducted them to their cars; they drove out to Stalin’s house.
They found Stalin in his dining room, slumped in an armchair. He looked thin and weak. Molotov stepped forward. The others followed. Stalin asked the five, “Why have you come?” He looked fearful.
He seems to have expected an announcement of his arrest.
Molotov explained that they wanted to create a State Committee for Defense and put Stalin at the head of it.
Stalin seemed surprised. “Can I lead the country to final victory?”
Marshal Voroshilov said gallantly, “There is none more worthy.”
Stalin agreed.
He returned to the Kremlin. He took up the reins of dictatorship again. A few days later, he accepted the title of supreme commander. Now he ruled with a sense that he had been called back from the brink.
That strange suburban afternoon was perhaps the closest Stalin ever came to being overthrown.
Now that he had returned, Stalin finally addressed the whole of his people on the radio. Previously, he had remained silent because he did not want to connect himself with defeat. Now he wanted to inspire victory. At six thirty in the morning, he spoke through loudspeakers throughout the nation:
Comrades! Citizens!
Brothers and sisters!
Fighters in our army and navy!
It is to you I appeal, my friends.
He had never before called his people his family. Now he listed all the nationalities that made up the USSR, calling on every one of them — from the deserts to the tundra — to take part. He warned that “whiners, cowards, deserters, and panic-mongers” would receive stiff punishment. Despite the fact that his Georgian accent made him somewhat difficult to understand on the radio — and despite the fact that he kept slugging back water in the middle of the speech and the gurgling also echoed nationwide — people were genuinely moved. He warned his citizens that this was not an ordinary war — but an eternal fight between Soviet freedom and German slavery.
“All the strength of the people must be used to smash the enemy! Onward to victory!”
The same day, Hitler announced that he would be holding a triumphal parade through the squares of Moscow by August.
It could not have been long into July when Shostakovich realized that his wife and children were in danger. Nina, Galina, and Maxim were up in their cottage near the new border of Finland. The Finnish army was on the move, trying to take back land they had recently lost during Stalin’s “Winter War.”
Wary of the risk, Shostakovich fetched his family. As Dmitri and Nina loaded suitcases into the car, Maxim and Galina watched them solemnly. Little Galina clutched a giant doll she’d just been given, certain that somehow it would be taken from her or left behind. She did not know what was happening, but she knew something was wrong.
They all drove back to the apartment in Leningrad. The summer was hot, however, and the city was sticky, which made the children miserable. The Shostakoviches may also have worried that Leningrad would soon be attacked by air, as the Luftwaffe had attacked so many other cities. It didn’t seem safe. After a few days, the composer and his wife took the kids south to the town of Vyritsa. Shostakovi
ch settled the family there for a few weeks and returned to the barracks in the Conservatory.
In hindsight, this doesn’t seem like a wise decision. A German Panzer division had just taken the old medieval city of Pskov and was set to roll straight up the highway toward Leningrad. It would pass right by Vyritsa, which, as a town with a railway connection into Leningrad, would be an obvious target. Shostakovich had placed his children directly in the path of the invasion force.
The Shostakoviches, however, almost certainly did not know the strategic lay of the land. All news of the fighting had to pass through the new Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinform), which often provided misinformation to Soviet citizens. Newspapers and radio announcements frequently didn’t mention the names of towns or cities that were under attack. They didn’t admit that the country was losing the war. When they did mention specific battles, there was often a delay of several days, so the information was stale. This made it almost impossible to tell where the front lines actually were.
For example, the Germans took Pskov on July 8. The Red Army blew up the town’s bridge and retreated. On July 12, four days after it had fallen, Sovinform finally announced to the nation that Pskov was under attack. Twelve days later, on July 24, the news still referred to it as a “battleground,” as if the Red Army hadn’t abandoned the town sixteen days earlier.
Then, ominously, they stopped mentioning Pskov altogether.
As the grim joke ran, the headlines were always the same: “We’re winning, but the Germans are gaining ground.”
Back in Leningrad, the city government was starting to demand that children be evacuated, as the very young had been evacuated from London when the city was attacked by the Luftwaffe the year before. Thousands of children were put on trains; many were sent to precisely the area where Nina, Galina, and Maxim were staying.
On July 18, city officials passed out ration cards, and citizens were required to present them in order to buy staples such as bread and butter. The stores, however, still had displays of rich foods. No one was worried, yet, about starvation. Official newspapers reassured Leningraders that there would be no food shortages and that the Germans would never reach the city itself.
It appears these lies fooled even the city government. When the Soviet trade minister sent a massive convoy of food staples to Leningrad for use in case of siege, Marshal Voroshilov and Leningrad Party boss Andrei Zhdanov decided it would look bad if the city government accepted the food. They didn’t want to appear desperate. They waved the shipment away, saying there was “insufficient warehouse space.” This was just one of the ways that Marshal Voroshilov doomed Leningrad to a year of desperate starvation.
With his family safely (or so he believed) settled in the countryside, Shostakovich began to think again about a large-scale work. He may have had scraps of ideas for a new symphonic piece floating around in his head for a while. He often mulled over music for a period of months, perfecting it, before writing it down. In particular, he seems to have thought of a cheerful march tune many months before — an irritating little tune. Cute. So chipper it was detestable. Some would later say that it sounded like “the patter of iron rats dancing to the tune of a rat catcher.” Shostakovich started to plan out repetitions and variations of this tune. When he played it to friends over the next few months, it sounded to them like the distant approach of a triumphant but wicked army.
As he heard this march getting louder and louder, more and more fearsome, he realized that it was part of something bigger. In the barracks, he began to write. On July 19, as the Germans struggled toward the city, Shostakovich set down the beginning of his Seventh Symphony — which would eventually be called the Leningrad Symphony.
Vyritsa, the town where Nina and the children were staying, was about halfway between Leningrad and a growing line of defensive antitank ditches hastily designed to protect the city from the German approach. The Leningrad city government was daily shipping trainloads of teenagers and older women out into the countryside to dig a system of gorges and trenches stretching from the town of Luga up to Narva, near the Gulf of Finland (see map, page 205). Many of the teenagers had volunteered, thrilled to be of service. Others had been conscripted, pulled off the streets of Leningrad and sent summarily down to the Luga Line. They hadn’t been allowed to go home and change, so they still wore sundresses or bathing suits. They dug under difficult conditions. They were underfed and slept on the ground. Stuka dive-bombers blasted at them as they worked.
Incredibly, this huge team of amateur conscripts and volunteers managed to dig three rings of defense around Leningrad — 340 miles of antitank trenches — in a few weeks. They laid out four hundred miles of barbed-wire fencing before the Germans arrived. It was a stunning achievement.
And it was there, at the Luga Line, that, for the first time, the Russians managed to stall the German advance toward Leningrad. Accompanied by Red Army divisions, the newly formed People’s Volunteers were thrown against the German Eighth Panzer Division on July 13. The volunteers were terribly armed (supposedly just three rifles for every four volunteers) and hastily trained. They stumbled out of cattle cars into scenes of frenzied attack: villages burning, horses screaming, cows lowing, peasants fleeing, and clouds of choking black smoke clotting the air. They were urged forward into combat by commanding officers who, in the grand tradition of Russian armies, saw the lives of their infantry as expendable, and therefore favored blunt, frontal assaults. The casualties were overwhelming. Incredibly, however, this volunteer militia, manning earthworks dug by amateurs, slowed German Army Group North for almost a month. In just the first few days of fighting, the Eighth Panzer Division lost almost half its tanks. The delay from early July until roughly August 8 gave Leningrad vital time to prepare and probably saved the city from absolute destruction.
Military resistance along the Luga Line wasn’t the only thing slowing the German advance now. Heavy summer rains made the terrain hopelessly muddy. Even when the treads of tanks could churn through the muck, the trucks that supplied the tanks couldn’t move. The whole German armored column, stretched out for miles, sat motionless in the downpours. They had to wait until the sun came out for a day and dried the mud before they could proceed on their grinding race toward Leningrad.
As the Germans crawled closer — not only from the south but from the west as well, closer to the shore — rumors of their advance reached Leningrad. The real news of the front arrived not through the loudspeakers or the pages of Pravda, but across kitchen tables and in alleys behind factories. People had to be careful as they whispered their updates; there was a new law announcing that “defeatists” who spread “false rumors provoking unrest among the population” could be arrested and tried by a military tribunal. But it was clear to the people of Leningrad that things did not look good.
German reconnaissance flights over the city became more frequent. Everyone by this point had heard that the Luftwaffe was bombing Moscow. The Russian air force responded but could not stop the attacks on the capital. It seemed like Leningrad would be next.
The city government was obviously planning for a siege. Not only were children being evacuated — so were whole factories. Assembly-line machinery was dismantled and packed into crates. Factories traveled by train or long convoys of trucks, all covered with birch branches to camouflage them from above. An observer wrote, “One can judge the time these trains spend on their way by the freshness of the branches. The trucks carry fly wheels, cog wheels, lathes, small machine parts, all kept separate, carefully greased and wrapped in parchment. Behind come the vans that carry the workers’ families; these vans are heated by stoves, and in one carriage there are children on hard plank beds. . . . The children, huddled together, look out of the window. There isn’t a smile amongst them.”
The workers had little reason to smile. Often, when they reached their new factory sites far to the east, they had to live in holes dug in the ground while they built their factories from scratch. This is how Stalin managed
to keep industrial production out of German hands. It was an incredible effort: in just a few months, ninety-two defense-related factories were relocated. But the gargantuan effort had a real cost for hundreds of thousands of people transplanted into the wilderness.
Even more ominous than the evacuations was the return of evacuees. Hundreds of children had been sent to summer camps in the Luga region, just south of where Nina and the children were hidden away. Those children now reappeared in the city. Their camps were no longer safe. The Luga Line was under attack. People muttered that it wouldn’t be long until the Germans swarmed across it.
It was time for Nina, Galina, and Maxim to return from the countryside. They rejoined Shostakovich at the apartment. The composer and his wife debated: Should the family leave the city entirely? Nina, apparently, thought they should take the children and flee.
But it was a point of pride for Shostakovich to stay in his native city for as long as possible. He seems to have insisted that he wanted to work on his symphony there, rather than risk being disrupted by a move. Nina later remembered, “For a long time my husband could not reconcile himself in thought to the necessity of leaving Leningrad.” Shostakovich was not alone: there were many who refused to abandon their homes. A Communist Party official later remembered, with some anger, that local governments “viewed citizens’ refusal to evacuate as a patriotic act and were proud of it, thus involuntarily encouraging people to remain.” This meant that millions of people were needlessly trapped when the Nazis arrived.
Every day, new evacuations were announced. Several times, Shostakovich was invited to join groups that were packing up and leaving for Central Asia: the Composers’ Union, the Conservatory, the Leningrad Philharmonic. He refused.
Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 17
