The smoke rose in a black bulb and hung motionless in the sky.
What was it? people wondered.
The news spread quickly: The Leningrad city bosses had decided in their wisdom to store all of the city’s emergency food supplies in one place — a compound of thirty-eight old, wooden warehouses in the city’s southwest quadrant — the Bedayev warehouses. The Germans, having figured this out, had aimed their incendiary bombs right for them. The warehouses were close together, filled with drums of oils and lard, filled with flammable grain, filled with the city’s supply of meat. The whole sector burst into flame. Two and a half thousand tons of molten sugar swamped burning alleys.
Lavrentii Beria, the head of the NKVD, ingeniously homicidal himself, was outraged at the incompetence of storing all the food in one place. Years later, he hotly told his son, “[Leningrad Party bosses] Voroshilov and Zhdanov had been instructed to disperse Leningrad’s food reserve and build new storage sheds in different parts of the city. The army and NKVD had pressed for this to be done urgently. Through sheer incompetence, the work was delayed, and the wooden storehouses were burnt down by the Germans, dooming the city to famine.”
As the bulb of black cloud, lit by both sun and flame, hovered above the storehouses, the people of Leningrad looked on in choked awe. “It was an immense spectacle of stunning beauty,” wrote Lyubov Shaporina.
The air smelled sweet as tons of sugar burned.
Somehow, in the midst of all of this fire and fury, Shostakovich managed to begin the first draft of the lightly tripping dance movement of his symphony. Halfway through that movement, it becomes a shrieking, sneering parody of itself. The screaming outburst in the middle isn’t what he would have been writing as the bombs fell on September 8, however. He would have just been setting out the theme of the “Reminiscences.” This suggests how complicated the relationship is between a composer’s experience and the music they write. This was gentle music to be composing in the midst of hell.
The raid was not over. At around ten thirty that evening, another wave of bombers appeared. This time they were not carrying incendiaries but large high-explosive bombs ranging from five hundred to more than a thousand pounds each. Once again, the sirens wailed, the foghorns groaned, and urgent voices on the loudspeakers called for people to take cover.
“Whole new squadrons flew over us,” one Leningrader said, “bombs fell endlessly, and the antiaircraft artillery blasted at full power. Sheer hell.”
Another remembered: “We were all deafened by the roar of engines. We heard bombs exploding somewhere near by. The air, everything around, was crackling, booming. Our house was shaking, through and through. The earth, too, seemed to be seized with convulsions, as in an earthquake. My teeth were chattering from fear, my knees were shaking. I squashed myself into a corner, and pressed the children to me. They were crying with fear.” The woman’s hair started to go white in the space of a few hours.
In the air-raid shelters, the scene was equally chaotic. Diarist Elena Skrjabina wrote: “Down there were many people, especially children. They cry loudly, pressing closely to their panic-stricken mothers. With each new explosion, the women, many of whom are Communists, compulsively cross themselves and whisper prayers. In such moments, antireligious propaganda is forgotten.”
Poet Olga Berggolts described the sensation of hearing the bombs falling above while crouched in a basement: “Everyone thinks, ‘This one’s for me,’ and dies in advance. You die, and it passes, but a minute later it comes again, whistles again, and you die, are resurrected, sigh with relief, only to die again over and over. How long will this last? . . . Kill me at once, not bit by bit, several times a day!”
The next day, the people of Leningrad crept out of their cellars to find the city had changed.
“A few scenes have etched themselves into my memory,” wrote Skrjabina, “probably until I die: a house demolished almost to its foundations, but one wall remained, still papered in the favorite cornflower design. There is even a picture hanging on it, as straight as ever. Above a heap of bricks, cement, and beams, a whole corner of an upper apartment of another house was preserved. In the corner, an icon; on the floor, toys, scattered everywhere as if the children had just finished playing. Further down was a room half buried in debris, but against the wall, a bed with fluffy pillows, and a lamp.”
Another lone wall stood with its house entirely sheared away, leaving a quiltwork of pretty wallpapers; a large clock on a wall ticked away, telling time as if nothing had happened.
The streets were filled with a deadening mist. It smelled of ham and butter.
The same day that the Bedayev warehouses were destroyed, Hitler’s high command called in a nutritionist, Ernst Ziegelmeyer, to discuss the food situation in Leningrad. Ziegelmeyer made a studied assessment of the rationing that would probably go into effect in the city. He calculated that the population would starve to death quite soon. His recommendation to the Führer, therefore, was that the German army should not invade the city at all but simply wait in a choking noose around it. “It is not worth risking the lives of our troops. The Leningraders will die anyway. It is essential not to let a single person through our front line. The more of them that stay there, the sooner they will die, and then we will enter the city without trouble, without losing a single German soldier.”
The nutritionist supplied an exacting projected schedule for the mass death of the 2.5 million people still trapped in the city. Everyone was impressed with his clarity and insight. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary, “We shall not trouble ourselves with demands for Leningrad’s capitulation. It must be destroyed by a virtually scientific method.”
Hitler’s commanders on the Leningrad Front, however, foresaw a glitch in the scientific precision of this solution: when starvation reached a certain peak, there were likely to be attempts, perhaps even mass attempts, by women and children trying to make a break for German lines to submit themselves as prisoners in exchange for food. This was inconvenient; Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, in charge of the northern invasion force, worried that young German soldiers, not yet hardened to atrocities, if confronted by starving women and children, wouldn’t shoot. He wanted “to spare the troops having to fire at close range on civilians.”
After a lot of thought, he eventually hit upon the happy idea of creating a deeper ring of land mines around the city. In addition, he ordered the long-range guns to focus on anyone trying to cross over this no-man’s-land. “It is the task of the artillery to deal with such a situation, and as far away from our own lines as possible — preferably by opening fire on the civilians at an early stage [of their scramble out of the city] so that the infantry is spared the task of having to shoot the civilians themselves.” The field marshal was relieved. “Even then a large part of the civilian population will perish, but at least not in front of our eyes.”
With this delicate problem solved, the Germans sat back on their haunches and waited.
Food rationing had started in the summer; now it got much tighter. The city government instituted a strict hierarchy to the rationing very similar to the program in the prison work camps, the gulag. Soldiers and industrial workers got the most, office workers got about three-fourths as much, and “dependents”— children, the wounded, and the elderly — got about half as much.
By mid-September, after the destruction of the food warehouses, industrial workers got about 500 grams of bread per day; children and white-collar workers got about 300 grams; other dependents got 250. This was not enough for the elderly, in particular, to sustain life.
The Shostakoviches were lucky that their dependents, Galina and Maxim, were so young (five and three years old). The size of a child’s ration allotment was the same whether the child was one year old or eleven. This was fine for the very young, but meant that a lot of ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-old kids went hungry. Shostakovich was doubtless also worried about his mother, Sofia; his sister Maria (who h
ad returned from internal exile just in time for the war to break out); and Maria’s young son, Dmitri, Shostakovich’s nephew, all of whom would have been on minimum rations.
There were families much worse off than the Shostakoviches; there were also families in power, families able to call in favors, who were much better off. One of the bitter experiences of the starving citizens during the Siege of Leningrad was glimpsing the children of a few well-connected Communist Party members eating ham sandwiches or leaving juicy rinds of fat on their plates. Corruption, unfortunately, was rife.
In mid-September, many people were hungry but still struggling along. The ration levels kept dropping throughout the fall, however. Soon, many dependents were not getting enough food to allow them to retain weight. They were wasting away. Their ration cards were death sentences — people grimly called them smertniks, from the Russian word for death, smert.
Writer Lidiya Ginzburg described the astonishment with which civilized Leningraders first greeted starvation. They “didn’t believe that the inhabitants of a large city could die of hunger. . . . On hearing of the first cases of death amongst their acquaintances, people still thought, Is this the one I know [dying]? In broad daylight? In Leningrad? With a master’s degree? From starvation?”
The lines for food were even longer than usual, stretching around blocks. It was not easy to stand for hours, waiting for rations. The Nazis shelled the city every day — a routine observed with deadly German efficiency. Shelling began at eight in the morning and continued until nine, from eleven to twelve, from five to six, and from eight in the evening until ten. “This way,” a German prisoner of war explained, “the shelling would kill as many people as possible . . . and most importantly, attempt to destroy the morale of the Leningraders.”
People standing in the food lines had to decide whether to head for shelter and lose their places or stand firm and risk their lives as shells rained down on the city around them.
The shelling was regular and daily, but the Luftwaffe air raids were surprises. Every few days, they would fly over in waves, almost unopposed since the Russian air force had been all but obliterated on the first day of the invasion.
The German bombers had worked out a new routine: the first squadron dropped explosives, which blew buildings apart; the second squadron would drop the incendiaries, which would light the wreckage on fire. People on rooftops could see flames all over the city. The suburbs, too, were on fire.
Shostakovich generally did not allow the Luftwaffe to disturb him. Nina remembered, “Even during air raids, he seldom stopped working. If things began getting too hot, he calmly finished the bar he was writing, waited until the page dried, neatly arranged what he had written, and took it down with him into the bomb-shelter. Whenever he was away from home during an air-raid alarm, he always phoned me asking me not to forget to take his manuscripts down into the shelter.”
When Shostakovich got up from his desk because the sirens and Klaxons were wailing, he wrote v.t. on the manuscript of his symphony. It stands for vozdushnaya trevoga, “air-raid alarm.” We can see where he was interrupted. He returned some hours later and picked up where he left off, without a change in direction or mood.
One evening, the Shostakoviches’ apartment shook. A house across the street had been hit by an incendiary bomb.
All night the building burned and cast its shadows on their walls.
SOURCES
Stalin wanted some answers. He was irate.
How had the Germans encircled Leningrad so completely? What had happened to the food supply? How could it be that the second-most important city in his empire was starving to death?
When one of his most competent generals, Georgi Zhukov, flew out to Leningrad to investigate, it became clear that the military situation there was a mess. The Red Army was losing territory daily. The soldiers were demoralized and underequipped.
Zhukov looked through the maps and diagrams of the city and its surrounds and threw them angrily onto the floor. He pointed at a situation map on the wall and demanded, “What are our tanks doing in this area? There’s something wrong here.”
Timidly, the local commander admitted, “Those are actually tank mock-ups, Comrade . . . wooden dummies.”
Zhukov was stunned. Unlikely as it might seem, most of the Leningrad tank force was made up of motionless decoys, nailed together by Shostakovich’s colleagues in the set-design team at the Mariinsky Theater. The local commander could at least report favorably that the fake theatrical tanks had been bombed twice. It was one of the most unusual contributions of the arts to the war effort.
Zhukov, recovering, snapped, “Get another hundred of them tonight, and tomorrow morning put them in these two places near Srednyaya Rogatka — here and here.”
The local commander apologized that the set designers couldn’t build a hundred fake tanks in one night.
“If you don’t do it, you’ll be court-martialed,” rapped out General Zhukov. “I’ll check up on you tomorrow myself.”
It was clear to Zhukov that the city’s strategic approach had to change. The man in charge of Leningrad’s defense, the rather dim Marshal Voroshilov, was recalled to Moscow for a stern talk with Stalin. Tukhachevsky’s foe Voroshilov had overseen the purging of the army after the marshal’s execution. Now, in a sense, he was on trial for failing at Tukhachevsky’s job.
Stalin was already responding to the military’s failures with his favorite managerial maneuver: blaming people and having them killed. As early as July, he had ordered four of the commanding officers for the Western Front shot. Marshal Voroshilov must have been anxious that he would be next.
He met with Stalin at a dinner at Stalin’s country house. Other members of the Politburo were dining with them (including Nikita Khrushchev, who wrote down the conversation years later). For a while, they ate and talked things over politely — but finally, Stalin could not contain himself. He leaped to his feet and started accusing Voroshilov of disastrous incompetence.
Voroshilov, bravely if foolishly, pushed back his chair, rose, and began shouting right back at Stalin. “You have yourself to blame for all this! You’re the one who annihilated the Old Guard of the army; you had our best generals killed!”
It became a screaming match.
Voroshilov picked up the platter of roast suckling pig and slammed it down on the table.
Everyone was stunned. Probably Voroshilov as much as anyone else.
He was lucky he was not executed. It was still dangerous to disagree with Stalin. This fact was disastrous for the war effort. His generals were terrified of telling him bad news; it was safer to lie. For the first several months of the Great Patriotic War, therefore, he often didn’t know the real strategic situation. Even worse, military experts couldn’t question his amateur civilian judgment without fear of death.
At one point, for example, Stalin held a meeting with the Politburo to talk about the failures of the Soviet air force. He questioned the commander sharply about why so many planes and so many pilots were lost.
The air force commander at the time, Major General Pavel Rychagov, was young and hot-headed. He was furious at the low quality of Russian fighter planes and bombers. (In the course of the war, the USSR lost 80,300 planes; only about half this number were actually destroyed by the enemy.) When Stalin needled Rychagov, the young airman barked back defiantly that the death rate among pilots was so high “because you’re making us fly in coffins!”
The room fell silent. No one in the Politburo dared to speak. Stalin often held meetings while strolling around his office, puffing his pipe. Now he paced behind their backs. He murmured softly, “You shouldn’t have said that.”
He slowly walked around the table.
He repeated, “You shouldn’t have said that.”
Rychagov was deprived of his command and shot.
This fatal pressure only made commanders more deceptive, hesitant, and incompetent.
At the same time, a peremptory brutality trickl
ed down through the ranks.
Up on the Leningrad Front, General Zhukov was reorganizing the city’s defenses. One of the first things he did in mid-September 1941 was to create new “blocking units,” which would be posted behind Red Army detachments — and which would shoot any soldier who tried to run from the Germans. Their families would also be shot.
This protocol, originally issued in Leningrad, became general to the whole of the Red Army. By the end of the war, about three hundred thousand soldiers had been killed by their own army for attempted flight or desertion.
This was simply an extension of Order No. 270, issued by Stalin back in August, which mercilessly proclaimed that any soldier who allowed the Germans to take him prisoner was a “traitor to the Motherland.” The families of those who surrendered or were captured would have their ration cards taken away from them (and so would starve to death) or would be arrested and imprisoned in the work camps.
With his “blocking units” in place to stop his soldiers from retreating, General Zhukov attempted to break through the iron ring the Germans had forged around Leningrad.
He threw Red Army units against the Germans at several key points along the Neva River. This stopped the Germans from advancing any farther but did so at a huge loss of Russian lives.
As the Red Army troops formed up in their ranks for another hopeless sally, German loudspeakers mocked them: “It’s time to assemble at your extermination points again — we shall bury you on the banks of the Neva.” Then the German guns would start roaring, and so many projectiles would hit the river that the water would start to boil.
At the time, Zhukov was praised for halting the German onslaught. He had, in fact, reorganized the city’s defense well in many ways. What the Russians did not know, however, was that the Nazis were no longer interested in subduing Leningrad. They did not want to defeat it anymore — they only wanted to encircle it and starve it to death — so they no longer needed a full invasion force. Many of their tanks were recalled and trundled off to the south to join the assault on Moscow.
Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 19
