Stalin was bewildered by the German successes. Since the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets had lost twenty thousand tanks and some three million soldiers. The Red Army had started with five million men; now only 2.3 million were left. That was a loss of about forty-four thousand per day.
Ninety million Soviets — 45 percent of Russia’s prewar population — were now living in occupied German territory. It seemed clear to the regime that within a few days, Moscow itself would be taken.
It is no wonder that in a vulnerable, stunned moment, Stalin croaked to his commanders, “Comrade Stalin is not a traitor. Comrade Stalin is an honest person. Comrade Stalin will do everything to correct the situation that has been created.”
He spoke of himself in the third person, as if acknowledging that Comrade Stalin was at this point something larger than his own human self, something more akin to the godlike, mustached heads that stared out of banners and posters all over the nation.
Dismally planning for defeat, Stalin began to make arrangements for the utter destruction of Moscow in the case of a successful Nazi invasion.
Recently, his secret plans have come to light. He arranged for twelve hundred buildings to be rigged with explosives: prominent hotels, famous churches, and the Kremlin itself. Large country houses surrounding Moscow were booby-trapped, too, with the exception of his own. (He was worried that someone would detonate his house with him in it.) The capital’s water and electrical supplies would be destroyed. A resistance network of 269 Muscovites with code names like Clamps and Whistler were prepared to take as many Germans down with them as they could.
Stalin calculated that if the Germans managed to take the city, there would be a grand gala celebration at the Bolshoi Theater, where Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District had once played. Stalin decided to turn the Germans’ victory celebration into a massacre. The orchestra pit would be lined with explosives. Ballerinas and circus acrobats were trained to dance onstage with hand grenades.
Shostakovich’s colleague composer Lev Knipper was given the job of assassinating Hitler. (Knipper was a secret agent, and his sister Olga was one of Hitler’s favorite actresses.)
The city would have welcomed its new masters by erupting into a dazzling fountain of mass destruction. It was a desperate plan — the flattening of a city that had been a symbol of Russian national pride since the Middle Ages.
The ruinous self-destruction that was planned shows how close Stalin felt he was to defeat.
On October 11, Shostakovich went into the offices of Sovetskoe iskusstvo (Soviet Art) to play his piano score of the new, uncompleted symphony. He performed it in the editorial boardroom. He and his audience were unaware that their Leader was, at the time, considering blowing up the city in which they sat.
The piece, even in its unfinished state, made a huge impression. In particular, the people who heard it that day were struck by the first movement, in which “Shostakovich takes a monotonous Prussian march, sets it in the style of the most banal music-hall tune, then relentlessly and ingeniously turns it into a grotesque parody that implicitly, and with enormous force, stigmatizes the nonentity of German Nazism.”
They heard in it the approach of the Panzers outside the city gates, the growing danger of invasion.
Two weeks after the Shostakoviches arrived in Moscow, they were finally granted the use of an apartment. They moved out of the Moskva Hotel immediately.
They slept only one night in their new home.
By the next morning, the military situation was so dire that the city was in an uproar. Even the Sovinform Bureau loudspeakers admitted, “The situation around Moscow has deteriorated.” Ack-ack guns blasted away at the sky. There were rumors the Germans had reached the gates of Moscow — rumors that they would take the capital the next day.
Shostakovich and his family were told they were being evacuated immediately. They were going to be put on a train with other cultural workers and taken east — somewhere east — no one knew exactly where.
They rushed to the station. No buses or trolleys were even running. The streets were mobbed with refugees. People had been struggling to get into the city; now everyone was trying to flee. It has since been called bolshoi drap, “the Big Skedaddle.” Confusion and flight were everywhere.
The main eastern routes of the city were jammed with trucks and cars while people fled on foot. Factory workers were outraged to discover that their bosses had requisitioned trucks to flee to safety with all their furniture — fancy beds, hall mirrors, “their rubber plants and chests of drawers”— leaving their workers behind. People blocked exits so the Party elite couldn’t leave and even yanked their bosses out of cars mired in traffic. There were riots on the Highway of the Enthusiasts.
People were smashing the windows of food stores and looting. Gangs robbed people’s empty houses or grabbed things from refugees on the streets. The police were nowhere to be found. Government officials were destroying incriminating paperwork as quickly as they could, burning all the records of their war arrangements and their homicidal pasts. The smoke and ashes of decades of Soviet bureaucracy filled the sky.
“Black snow flew,” one man remembered. “It was a scene out of the Apocalypse.”
Things at the train station were just as chaotic as out on the streets. The square in front of Kazan Station was packed with people. Shostakovich and his family made their way through the crowds.
An artist and friend of Shostakovich’s, Nikolai Sokolov, was being herded onto the same train. He remembered the departure:
Inside the station writers, painters, musicians and artists from the Bolshoi and Vakhtangov Theatres were huddled beside their belongings, trying to make themselves comfortable. The loudspeakers continuously blared announcements. At last we were informed that the train was ready to board. People put on their rucksacks, picked up their bundles and suitcases, and made for the platform, which was enveloped in terrible darkness. Underfoot the snow was wet and squelchy. Everyone pushed and shoved at each other with their belongings. We had a single ticket for a whole group of artists, which got torn in half in the crush. We had been designated carriage no. 7; a queue had formed outside it. Somebody stood guarding the door, blocking the entrance, shouting, “This carriage is only for the Bolshoi Theatre.”
Shostakovich had never been particularly good at fending for himself. In this bustling mob, he was at a loss. The nephew of a friend spotted him on the train platform. “He looked completely bereft. He was holding a sewing machine in one hand and a children’s potty in the other, while his wife Nina Vasilyevna stood beside the children and a mountain of stuff. I helped them load their things on to the train. Later, when I made my way home from the station, I was struck by the number of howling dogs roaming the snowy streets, having been abandoned by their owners.”
Despite his generous offer of aid, the young man evidently didn’t do a great job helping the Shostakovich family with their belongings; they were soon to find that most of their luggage was missing, either stolen or left on the platform.
Shostakovich was paralyzed in the midst of the crowd. Another composer came to his aid. “Allow Shostakovich and his children to pass!” he bellowed.
Dmitri, Nina, Galina, and Maxim squeezed their way onto Railway Car No. 7. Other composers jammed themselves through the door behind them. It was a car meant for forty-two passengers. It was holding more than one hundred.
The precious manuscript of the Seventh Symphony had been wrapped in a blanket and, apparently, removed from the luggage for safekeeping. As the family struggled onto the train, the unthinkable happened: the score of the Seventh, scribbled down between bombing raids, symbol of the city’s endurance, the main reason Shostakovich had delayed his family’s escape from the city — this bundle of papers had disappeared.
At the time, the composer didn’t even notice. Everyone was crammed in too tightly.
At ten at night, the train set off.
Moscow was blacked out to confuse
enemy bombers. The locomotive crawled through the darkened city. “It travelled very slowly,” the artist Sokolov remembered. “Near Ryazan it picked up speed; the town was being bombed by the Fascists. Some of us were on our feet throughout the night. As morning dawned we started to scrutinize each other in the light. Some people gave up their seats to those who had been standing. In other words, people started to soften and show kindness.”
The train headed to the east.
SOURCES
Railway Car No. 7, with its cargo of ballerinas, poets, painters, and symphonists, rumbled slowly across the frozen plains.
There was not enough room for everyone to sleep at once. At night, the women would lie down and sleep. During the day, the men slept.
The artist Sokolov remembered, “A wet snow, almost rain, was falling. By morning, it had frozen. People got out of the train and wandered by the carriages. They looked to each other for reassurance.” Everyone was dazed.
Nikolai Sokolov had worked with Shostakovich before. He was one of a group of three cartoonists who had smashed their names together (Kupriyanov, Krylov, and Sokolov) and called themselves the Kukryniksy. They signed their work in common. Together they had created the grotesque sets for the first act of Meyerhold and Mayakovsky’s Bedbug, the part of the play set in the 1920s.
Sokolov wasn’t the only person the Shostakoviches knew in Railway Car No. 7. Many of the nation’s most famous composers were also crammed into the seats and swaying in the aisles.
Two of Shostakovich’s suitcases had disappeared. One had his clothes in it, and the other had Maxim’s and Galina’s things. He looked desperately for his luggage but couldn’t find it anywhere. Even worse, he now discovered that the score to his Seventh Symphony had disappeared. Presumably, he had kept it out of his luggage precisely because he wanted to keep it safe by his side, but it was gone. Oddly, another composer, a friend of his named Vissarion Shebalin, had also lost a symphony. Shebalin pushed his way through the car, asking people if they’d seen his work. Shostakovich, however, simply sat numbly, without moving, and stared.
“I saw Shostakovich getting out at the stations to fetch boiling water,” said Sokolov. “He washed his crockery with snow at the side of the carriage. He was traveling in an old worn suit, and his legs got soaked through.”
Sokolov offered him some dry socks. Someone else, seeing that he didn’t have a change of clothes, lent him a shirt. “He took these things very shyly and thanked everybody in a state of great agitation.”
Dmitri and Nina worked out a system: When the train stopped at a station, one of them would run and buy food. The other would get hot water from the stationmaster to wash the children’s clothes.
On the platforms around them loomed huge machines shrouded under tarpaulins — armaments and assembly-line mechanisms ready for shipment east or west.
Railway Car No. 7 traveled for days. The passengers were heading for cities all over the eastern Soviet republics: Alma-Ata, where Shostakovich’s sister Maria had been exiled a few years earlier; Tashkent, where the poet Anna Akhmatova had flown; Kuibyshev, where the government was relocating in case Moscow fell. It appears that initially the Shostakoviches were considering Tashkent, perhaps because the Leningrad Philharmonic had already fled there a few months earlier. As it turned out, they would not make it that far.
The train did not move quickly. Often, it would be diverted onto railway sidings and would sit motionless for hours. While it idled, other trains rushed past in the opposite direction, carrying troops, tanks, and artillery toward Moscow’s battlefields. Hospital trains barreled off to the east, carrying the wounded away from the front. Long rail caravans headed for distant republics carried dismantled steel mills and agricultural machinery chained down to flatbed cars. Refugees from collective farms rode in the freight cars with their tractors and plows, peering out at the forests flashing past. As one eyewitness described it, “There was almost unbelievable misery among the refugees. There were hunger and disease. There was everything except a spirit of defeatism.”
In Moscow, now almost encircled by the Wehrmacht, the State Committee for Defense also struggled to avoid a spirit of defeatism. Stalin toyed with the idea of evacuating east himself and taking up residence in Kuibyshev, but he decided to risk staying in the capital.
The trains Shostakovich saw swaying past delivered fresh troops from Siberia, the south, and the east to the Moscow region. They were immediately put into the field, ready or not, and made valiant stands against the onslaught of Army Group Center and its Panzer divisions. Despite their efforts, the Germans fought their way to a town only twenty miles from Moscow.
At this point, Stalin no longer worked from the Kremlin. He and his staff had set up barracks and offices deep beneath the city, in the subway tunnels. The Moscow Metro system was famous for its splendor, the marble colonnades and gleaming arches that welcomed commuters. Now many of the war department’s staff slept in subway cars on unused tracks. Stalin assembled a temporary office in Mayakovsky Station — named after the ill-fated Futurist suicide — and from there, he directed his generals and received his communiqués.
He had not been a military man at the beginning of the war, but he was learning quickly.
Meanwhile, up above on the streets, the populace was uneasy. “People are saying things out loud that three days ago would have brought them before a military tribunal,” a journalist wrote in his diary.
The hysteria at the top has transmitted itself to the masses. People are beginning to remember and to count up all the humiliations, the oppression, the injustices, the clampdowns, the bureaucratic arrogance of the officials, the conceit and the self-confidence of the party bureaucrats, the draconian decrees, the shortages, the systematic deception of the masses, the lying and flattery of the toadies in the newspapers. . . . People are speaking from their hearts. Will it be possible to defend a city where such moods prevail?
On the fourth day of the clattering voyage east, there was finally some good news for Dmitri Shostakovich: his brilliant new symphony was found, wrapped in a blanket, on the bathroom floor.
It was sitting in a puddle, swamped with dirty water and urine. Nina could barely stand to touch the bundle, even to save a masterpiece.
When the Shostakoviches gingerly unwrapped it, they discovered that the score was almost entirely unstained.
The lesson here: a true masterpiece can marinate in filth and still come out clean.
The journey went on for a week. Maxim and Galina were bored and going stir-crazy. Shostakovich spent his time reading plays or chatting with his fellow composers.
One of the composers who had escaped on Railway Car No. 7 was a young man named Tikhon Khrennikov. He had idolized Shostakovich when he was a student. Now he became one of Shostakovich’s poker partners. In a few years, he would denounce Shostakovich in front of the whole nation.
For the moment, they all talked about music and wished they could hear some. They also bickered about where they thought Shostakovich should get off the train. Everyone had advice, and he was too timid to tell them to stop pestering him. He sat miserably while they all discussed his fate and badgered him about where he and his family should stop off: Kuibyshev or Tashkent. Kuibyshev, one claimed, was where everyone from the government was fleeing; it would be crowded and there would be no food left. “Why not continue to Tashkent?”
“No!” bellowed another. “Why drag the children on another eight days’ journey to Tashkent?”
“In Tashkent he won’t go hungry, but what awaits him in Kuibyshev?”
As the group debated what his family should do, Shostakovich murmured things like, “Yes . . . yes . . .” or “Possibly, possibly . . .”
“But Dmitri Dmitriyevich, how about . . . ?”
The argument showed no signs of flagging. Shostakovich wandered away without listening, stepping over luggage and packages to return to his wife and children.
On the morning of October 22, the train reached the great Volga
River. Relatives of his close friend Sollertinsky wrote:
The impression when the train began to cross the bridge was a little unnerving. Those who had been in Leningrad under constant fire, hearing the explosions of bombs nearby, and those who had flown by night over the enemy positions to escape, should of course have feared nothing here, but still, involuntarily, they held their breath while the train moved — for an eternity, it seemed — over the Volga; only the steel struts of the bridge moved outside the windows, and they could see leaden ripples and menacing little flecks of foam far below.
The train had reached Kuibyshev, seat of the government in exile.
It was there that the Shostakoviches decided to get off the evacuation train and seek shelter and safety.
SOURCES
Kuibyshev was overrun with refugees. The old storefronts and apartment buildings were occupied by ministries and commissariats that had fled Moscow when the Germans launched Operation Typhoon. The lampposts were plastered with desperate notes from lost, fleeing family members looking for one another.
The city of Kuibyshev must have seemed like the middle of nowhere to the Muscovites who now roamed its unpaved, dirt streets. There were few cars; most people used horse-carts or camels. Every morning, workers were loaded onto squeaking, antique trams and taken to work in a nearby industrial suburb called Nameless. Now rapid construction prepared drab Kuibyshev to become Russia’s most important city, if necessary. In the crammed factories of Nameless, workers assembled planes for the front. An underground headquarters was being built for Comrade Stalin. (As it turned out, he never used it.)
Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 22
