Shostakovich and other refugees from Railway Car No. 7 were shuttled to a school building already occupied by dancers from the Bolshoi Theater. They divided themselves up, eighteen to a classroom. This was their temporary home. Everyone slept on the floor, pressed close together. No one had a mattress. Outside the door was a mound of muddy overshoes.
Still, the situation was better than it had been on the train. Shostakovich found that the rations for his family were much better than they’d had in a while — including not only butter and sweets but also salami.
Nikolai Sokolov fondly remembered the high artistic bar set by the whistling in the boys’ bathroom. The nation’s most famous opera singers and musicians hummed arias while they bathed and shaved.
It appears that after a few days, the Shostakoviches were put in a smaller room with just one other couple, a set designer and an actress. They clipped up some cotton curtains to try to get some privacy.
There was no question of Shostakovich working on his symphony. There was too much confusion, too much fear, too much sorrow. One day, Sokolov asked him how work on the fourth and final movement was coming along.
Shostakovich said miserably, “You know, as soon as I got on that train, something snapped inside me. . . . I can’t compose just now, knowing how many people are losing their lives.”
He did not write a note for a month and a half.
He thought of his native city.
Leningrad in November 1941 had begun to sink into darkness. The days were short. The winter had set in. By the middle of the month, the temperature dropped below zero. This was not unusual, but this year, people did not have fuel. Their furnaces were empty. There were no more deliveries of coal. Even if trains had been able to get through, the coal mines of the south and west were now in German hands. There were no reserves of firewood: the city had been surrounded before the usual winter deliveries had been made. People were freezing.
Many of their windows had been blown out by nearby explosions. The cold air drifted in. People blocked up the empty window frames with anything they could find: boards, furniture, rags, plywood, a handmade Turkish carpet. Most people had no electricity, so the blocked windows meant that they sat in the dark. It was hard to get candles or lamp oil. The population passed their days in cavelike apartments, listening for the air-raid sirens.
“The temperature is really dropping now,” a Leningrad soldier noted in his diary, “and hunger is a constant presence among us. The food we are issued is very poor. Today I saw some civilians crying by the roadside — they were so desperately hungry. They told me their babies are dying from malnutrition.” The city government still passed out ration cards, but almost nothing on the cards was actually available. The bread ration shrank, it seemed, week by week.
The man hired to make announcements about rationing, Ivan Andreyenko, later spoke angrily about the fact that more people hadn’t been evacuated before the Germans arrived. In particular, he cursed the propaganda that had convinced people like Shostakovich that they should stay in their native city rather than abandon it. “From one point of view, you see, it was good, but from another it was bad, because we shouldn’t have evacuated 636,000 but many more than that, twice as many, even three times.” As it was, about two and a half million people remained in Leningrad, desperately hungry, miserably cold, some without shelter.
Among them were Shostakovich’s mother, Sofia; his sister Maria; and his nephew, Dmitri. It had become very clear that the government had no real intention of flying them out.
They were stuck in the city as it starved to death.
The Leningrad authorities were running out of flour to make the rationed bread. They started to use substitutes. In September, white flour was mixed with horse fodder. In October, a supply of grain that had been sunk on barges in Lake Ladoga during a German air attack was dredged up and used to bake loaves that stank of mold. In November, the government bakeries resorted to “edible” cellulose made from pine sawdust and floor sweepings. By November 20, the bread ration had been reduced to the point where factory workers got 250 grams a day; Sofia, Maria, young Dmitri, and most of the rest of the population would have gotten 125 grams a day. Officially, this was about a quarter of what an adult needs to retain normal body weight. Unofficially, there was so much filler in the bread that was not food that the real nutritional value of it was much, much lower.
A Leningrad mother later remembered, “In those days when you took [the bread] in your hand water oozed from it and it was like clay. Imagine bread like that for children! True, my children weren’t in the habit of asking for things, but you could see it in their eyes. You should have seen those eyes!”
Meanwhile, the Germans dropped leaflets that taunted, “Finish your bread; you’ll soon be dead!”
“There have been cases of increasingly weak workers falling unconscious in the workplace,” the German intelligence service reported with delight. “The first starvation deaths have also been recorded. It can be concluded that in the coming weeks we will see further significant deterioration in the food situation of the civilian population of Petersburg.” They were thrilled.
The people of Leningrad stood in the bread lines day after day as the temperature dropped and dropped. They did not only have to worry about the Luftwaffe bombing them from above; men also lay in wait near the ends of lines to grab bread out of people’s weakened hands and cram it into their own mouths. On the wrong day, that small theft could mean the difference between life and death.
Families found that hunger drove them to creative solutions. They stripped wallpaper off the walls and ate the paste. Some had read adventure novels in which starving explorers ate leather. They boiled belts and animal pelts. Unfortunately, treated leather, unlike rawhide, was saturated with polish and tanning chemicals. It took a long process of trial and error to learn how to cook a belt. They scraped the joiner’s glue from furniture.
The writer Aleksandr Fadeyev recalled the recipe for “Leningrad blockade jelly”: “As everybody knows, carpenter’s glue is got from bones. Here was the reverse process: you cooked the glue, removed all the bone scum — or rather, the scum of what had once been bone — and added gelatin to the rest. Then you let it cool.” Some people garnished it with bay leaves. They smeared it with mustard to hide the flavor.
People fought over cakes of cattle feed made of pressed seed husks. Men and women ate lipstick or used it as cooking grease to make pancakes of face powder. Factory workers discovered that industrial casein, used to make paint, was barely edible. It made them sick, but it was better than death.
A mother, desperate to feed her family, boiled the pages of books. Their father fed them felt.
An NKVD agent reported: “I witnessed a scene in the street where a cab driver’s horse collapsed from exhaustion. People ran up to it with hatchets and knives. They hacked off pieces of the horse and carried them home. This was horrible. They looked like executioners.”
One man rapturously remembered the day that a woman on an armament assembly line invited him over for several handfuls of tank lubricant. They were so hungry that it tasted delicious.
One diarist wrote: “Protein — meat — we hardly see at all. Recently Professor Z. told me, ‘Yesterday my daughter spent all day in the attic searching for the cat.’ I was prepared to be deeply touched by such love for animals, but Z. added: ‘We eat them.’”
People were ashamed by what they were doing, by the scrounging, by the theft, by the bickering, but they were starving. They were no longer themselves. Or as one woman wrote, perhaps they were even more themselves: “Before the war, people adorned themselves with bravery, fidelity to principles, honesty — whatever they liked. The hurricane of war has torn off those rags: now everyone has become what he was in fact, and not what he wanted to seem.”
In the months that followed, this question of what people were really made of and what the human animal really was would become a desperately important one.
Many died
of cold or hunger.
“The city is literally flooded with corpses,” wrote diarist Elena Skrjabina toward the end of November. “Relatives or friends take them to be buried, tied on by twos and threes to small sleds. Sometimes you come across larger sleighs on which the corpses are piled high like firewood and covered over by a canvas. Bare, blue legs protrude from beneath the canvas. You can be certain this is not firewood.”
And around the same time, she noted that people had begun whispering that meat had begun reappearing at the markets — and that it was made of the flesh of the dead.
In Kuibyshev, Shostakovich found some relief from his anxiety. The city was far from the front. The composer and his family had finally been moved into their own room. It had beds in it. The Commissar of the Council of the Arts had even found him a piano. It was expected he would soon get back to work.
Artist Nikolai Sokolov dropped by one day to talk to him. Shostakovich drummed his fingers on the table. He was anxiously pondering how little or how much people needed to be happy.
You know, Nikolai [he said], when I got into that dark carriage with the children in Moscow I felt that I was in paradise! But by the seventh day of the journey I felt that I was in hell. When we were settled in the classroom of the school, and what’s more given a carpet and surrounded by suitcases, I again felt myself to be in paradise; but after three days I was fed up; in these circumstances you can’t get undressed, being surrounded by a mass of strangers. I again perceived this as hell. And then we were allocated this room to ourselves, with decent conditions. . . . And what do you think? Shortly, I felt that I must have a piano. I was given a piano. Everything seemed just fine, and I thought to myself again, “This is paradise.” But now I notice how inconvenient it is to work in a single room; the children are rowdy and disturb me. Yet they have every right to be noisy, they are only children, but unfortunately I can’t work.
At the beginning of December, their living arrangements improved even more: they got an apartment with two rooms. One became Shostakovich’s study, with the piano and a desk. They slept in the other one. A young woman from upstairs, Flora Litvinova, a daughter-in-law of the Soviet ambassador to the United States, had some children’s clothes that didn’t fit her son. She gave them to Nina for the kids. Flora Litvinova also took Nina shopping, and they bought bowls, glasses, and mugs, though even the department store for the bureaucratic elite was running out of goods.
Their apartment was now outfitted.
Still, Shostakovich couldn’t finish his symphony.
Flora Litvinova, listening through the apartment floor, heard him try for a few minutes and give up. “Today (2 December) I heard the piano and some obviously Shostakovich-like sounds. I got terribly excited. I stood next to the radiator so that I could hear better.” The music, however, quickly stopped. Instead, Galina and Maxim started bawling out a song: “Three soldiers in a tank, three jolly friends!”
Knowing what he did about the plight of Leningrad and the precarious situation of the country as a whole, Shostakovich couldn’t work on his piece.
Who could have?
Who cared?
SOURCES
Early in December 1941, two things changed the direction of the war entirely.
The first was that the Red Army began to win their desperate, grappling battle against the Germans near Moscow. The German troops were exhausted. Their generals had planned for an easy victory before the winter set in. Everyone knew that invading Russia in winter was futile, disastrous. Napoleon, leading his Grande Armée, had made it to Moscow more than a century earlier, but even he, one of the most famous generals in the history of Europe, found that the Russian winter sapped his army’s strength, trapped his forces without food and ammunition, and killed hundreds of thousands of his soldiers.
Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of Russia, had been launched on the anniversary of Napoleon’s invasion. To Hitler’s generals, that detail now seemed gloomily prophetic.
The winter had closed in. The snow was deep. As the Germans prepared to snap their iron ring shut around Moscow, the temperatures ranged between zero and forty below. It was so cold that when a man spat, it hit the ground frozen. Yet the Wehrmacht troops did not have winter gear or heavy coats. Their uniforms had been issued for a July invasion. There was a rumor that Hitler did not send them to the front with adequate coats because he wanted to force them to win the war by autumn. This is not true, we know now; German supply lines were simply stretched too thin. Winter clothing had been issued, but it was stuck in depots back in Poland.
The cold caused machinery to freeze. Tanks, finally freed by the first frosts from the autumn mud-wallows, now seized up and would not start at all. Planes couldn’t fly in the harsh conditions. The supply lines were so tenuous that the Germans often couldn’t get oil or ammo.
As one Panzer officer complained, “We have blundered, mistakenly, into an alien landscape with which we can never be properly acquainted. Everything is cold, hostile, and working against us.”
Once Stalin had made a firm decision not to abandon Moscow, he stubbornly would not let anyone else flee, either. The troops that had passed the Shostakoviches on the railways were now arriving at the front. Stalin and his generals immediately sent them into the field against the Wehrmacht. Their losses were huge, but Stalin would not let them retreat. Russian frontline soldiers were overwhelmed and bewildered by the relentless casualties. As one machine-gunner put it: “The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?” These suicidal charges worked occasionally only because Stalin did not care how many of his own soldiers died.
When the Germans were within seven miles of General Zhukov’s headquarters, one of Stalin’s men in the field called the Leader to pass on a request from the men there to abandon their command center and move headquarters east of Moscow, where they would be farther from the fighting.
Stalin listened to the request over the phone. He considered. Finally, he said, “Comrade Stepanov, ask them whether they have any spades.”
“I’ll find out straight away.” Stepanov turned and talked to the members of the military staff. He returned to the phone. “What sort of spades, Comrade Stalin? Entrenching tools or some other kind?”
“It doesn’t matter what sort.”
“I’ll find out straight away.” There was a pause. “Yes, there are spades, Comrade Stalin. What should they do with them?”
“Comrade Stepanov, tell your comrades to take their spades and dig themselves some graves. The [high command is] not leaving Moscow. I’m not leaving Moscow. And they’re not going anywhere.”
Slowly, painfully, with the loss of more than a third of the troops in the area, the Red Army pushed back the Germans. The tide turned in the second week of December 1941. The Soviets repelled all three of the German armor divisions around Moscow, destroying almost five hundred tanks, and they scattered almost all of German Army Group Center.
For the first time in World War II, one of Hitler’s land armies had been stopped.
It was huge news. Still, the Sovinform Bureau did not report the victories for days. They needed to be sure, apparently. On December 13, they finally allowed the headline to break: “The Collapse of the German Plan to Surround and Capture Moscow — Defeat of German Forces.”
It was this news, supposedly, that led Shostakovich to think he could perhaps resume work and write a triumphant finale to his symphony.
There was, however, another military event at around the same time that would change the course of the war. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. Eight battleships were sunk to the bottom of the harbor or left in flames. During a devastating air raid that resembled the Germans’ on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, 188 American planes were destroyed, most of them never even leaving the ground. Two-thirds of the American military aircraft in the Pacific were wiped out in the space of a few
minutes.
The United States formally declared war against Japan. This activated a series of interlocking treaties and agreements. Now Great Britain, the USSR, and the United States found themselves officially united against the Axis powers (Japan, Germany, and Italy) — alliances that would have seemed bizarre and impossible just a few months earlier.
This gave the Russians hope, however. Perhaps now the western Allies would open up a “Second Front” in Europe, trying to take back France, and the Germans’ troops and attention would be distracted from their savage assault on the Soviet Union.
Things seemed to be looking up.
Nikolai Sokolov remembered, “As soon as the news came through that the Fascists had been smashed outside Moscow, [Shostakovich] sat down to compose in a burst of energy and excitement.”
At the same time, the composer spent a lot of time writing to various government offices in Kuibyshev, trying to get them to evacuate his mother, sister, and nephew from Leningrad. “He was very distraught,” a neighbor remembered. “At the Leningrad airfield they had promised to put his mother [Sofia] on the next plane out, but they hadn’t. Now he was obsessed with the idea of chartering a plane to go and fetch her.” This didn’t come to anything, but he kept on trying.
He intervened for friends and colleagues, too. Shostakovich didn’t have a problem using his celebrity status to help other people. He had a nervous horror, however, of asking for things for himself. Friends were surprised that he didn’t request a car in Kuibyshev. “He never asked for anything for himself,” Isaak Glikman said. “It was so much against his nature that he was actually incapable of doing so.” The composer almost fell to pieces with gratitude when he received an extra half a can of jam for his family.
Once people knew he was in town, he found himself constantly approached by strangers asking for favors. He couldn’t even cross the courtyard to get the family’s buckets of hot water in the morning without running into ballerinas and playwrights asking him to put in a good word for them.
Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 23
