One night, faint with hunger, Berggolts set out from Radio House to see a friend, who told her she’d found a bottle of cod-liver oil they could feast on. It was only a walk of two blocks, but Berggolts felt overwhelmed by the mounds of snow, the ruts of ice. She doddered like an old woman — tripped over something, and fell. As she lay there, she realized she had stumbled on a dead body, frozen into the slush in front of Philharmonic Hall. She did not think she could get up. The night, the darkness, the snow, the cold, the silence covered her, and it seemed as if she should just lie still and give up.
At that point, all around her, disembodied, she heard her own voice, speaking softly to her of hope. She could no longer understand what was happening. She wondered whether the corpse she’d tripped over was her own, whether she already was dead.
Then the voice in the air stopped reciting her poetry, and an announcer for Radio Leningrad came on. She had been hearing her own program, broadcast from a loudspeaker on the corner of the Hotel Europa.
Shaken, she slowly climbed to her feet and continued the walk to her friend’s apartment. Her poetry had saved many others in moments of despair; now, strangely, it had saved her own life, too. Many people compare the role of her poetry to that of Shostakovich’s music.
His music was being discussed in the city. There was a push to get music played on the radio again. The only orchestra left in the city, in fact, was the Radio Orchestra. They had stopped playing a few months before. Leningrad’s Communist Party boss, Andrei Zhdanov, was irritated by the radio’s political speeches and the ticking of the metronome: “Why spread such doom and despondency? Could we have at any rate some music?”
Late in the winter of 1942, Radio House decided to try to reassemble its orchestra and play favorite classics, such as Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. At a meeting of the Radio House staff with a propagandist visiting from Moscow, a pale young journalist urged, “Is it possible to get the score of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony?” Party Secretary Zhdanov agreed that a performance of the piece in Shostakovich’s own city was vital for morale. An order from him survives in the Radio House vault: “By any means, get a score of the Seventh from Moscow. Transport it to Leningrad as soon as possible.”
They presented the idea of performing the Seventh to Karl Eliasberg, the conductor of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra. He was excited by the idea but said it was not yet possible. Shostakovich’s symphony called for a huge orchestra. Eliasberg estimated that half his musicians were dead. As someone told Olga Berggolts, “The first violin is dying, the drummer died on the way to work, the French horn is near death.”
A performance of Shostakovich’s new symphony in Leningrad would have to wait for many months.
Artistic flourishes like this may have seemed like a waste of energy, but they were central to the survival of the city and the pride of its inhabitants. As one woman boasted, “Just think! The Germans are outside the city, and here we sit and talk about everything, about our whole life, the whole of our history, and we sing songs and have been ready to spit at the Germans. They’ll all rot in the earth, as hundreds of thousands and millions of them have already rotted in the earth, and our city will stand and we shall still live in it and work and write poetry and sing our Russian songs.”
Strangely enough, doctors and nurses noted that activity actually prolonged life, when it should have shortened it. Those who lay down and tried to conserve energy often were the ones who trailed off and died first.
One medical student got angry at his mother, who kept telling him to get up, move around, and go to classes. “But Mother, when you’re lying down you use less energy so you need less food.”
She snapped back, “It’s paradoxical, but it’s true — those who move about will work and live. So move about!”
Astounded, people in hospitals, factories, and communal apartments saw that this was true. The survivors were the people who committed themselves to washing, to eating off plates, to going to work through snow and sleet. “Not counting the old people, the sick or those constitutionally in poor health, the first to die among those in normally good condition were people of weak character, those who gave in morally, who lost the will to work and thought too much about their stomachs. I noticed that when someone gave up washing his neck and ears, stopped going to work and ate his ration of bread right away and then lay down and covered himself with a blanket — he wasn’t long for this world.”
A district nurse concluded: “I found in my work that it was not only nutrition that was conducive to survival, but morale.” A doctor studying “life at the limit” found that he could not explain by simple scientific means how some of his patients were still alive. He concluded, “Something else is coming into play, something that we don’t understand.” Attitude became the difference between life and death. It made a profound physiological difference.
“What saved us all (well, I don’t know about all) was hope and love,” one woman wrote. “Well, I loved my husband, my husband loved his family, his daughter. He was serving in the army nearby. When we sat down to eat something, his photograph was there before us, and we were expecting him to come back. And it was only because of that love, because of that hope that we were able to keep going. It was really difficult. Now I can’t imagine how we survived.”
Characteristically, Nazi SS commander Heinrich Himmler did not emphasize “love” when discussing the miraculous survival of the city. “The hatred felt by the population was an important motivating mechanism for defense.”
He was not wrong, either. The Nazi propaganda of fear had only strengthened opposition to the Germans. As a boss at the Kirov Tank Works said, “If anyone were to ask me what sort of feeling was most vividly at work among the Kirov workers I should without hesitation reply: the desire for vengeance. . . . Their feeling towards [the Germans] is one of hatred, of insistent, personal, mortal hatred. Sometimes it seems to take an almost exaggerated form, as if they seek vengeance in the labor of their hands.”
On the artillery shells produced in Leningrad, workers stenciled messages to the Germans: “For the blood of our workers,” “For our children’s anguish,” and “For our murdered friends.”
These curses were fired from the mouths of guns, and their words killed thousands.
Love and hate made a tactical and strategic difference.
One day, many years after the siege was lifted and the war was over, two nutritionists met by chance. They introduced themselves. One, Alexei Bezzubov, had worked at Leningrad’s Vitamin Institute, seeking out new sources of protein for the hungry. The other, as it turned out, was Ernst Ziegelmeyer, deputy quartermaster of Hitler’s army, the man who’d been assigned to calculate how quickly Leningrad would fall without food deliveries. Now these two men met in peace: the one who had tried to starve a city, and the other who had tried to feed it.
Ziegelmeyer pressed Bezzubov incredulously: “However did you hold out? How could you? It’s quite impossible! I wrote a deposition that it was physically impossible to live on such a ration.” Bezzubov could not provide a scientific, purely nutritive answer. There was none. Instead, he “talked of faith in victory, of the spiritual reserves of Leningraders, which had not been accounted for in the German professor’s ‘research.’”
And so the city of the dead carried on its life at the limits, dark for all but a few hours of the day, silent, frigid — and yet filled with small cells of light. Some chose to respond to the crisis by giving in to their hungriest, most brutal selves; others fought to work together, to recall the trappings of a civilization that lay in heaps around them.
Every night, unmarked and unmourned, thousands of them died.
Shostakovich, in distant Kuibyshev, no longer starved and no longer had to fear falling bombs and fire from the sky. He could not have known everything that was going on in Leningrad, his native home. (The radio and newspapers would not allow any talk of it.) But he knew that even the silence from the city meant the situation was dire.
In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “Our life here carries on without too many problems, in peace and quiet.” But then, without transition, he continued, “Sometimes at nights I don’t sleep, and I weep. The tears flow thick and fast, and bitter. Nina and the children sleep in the other room, so there is nothing to prevent me from giving way to my tears.”
SOURCES
1 The name burzhuika most probably comes from the word bourgeois, or middle class, and may reflect the fact that the stoves were potbellied, like little fat capitalists.
It took the orchestra in Kuibyshev forty rehearsals, supposedly, to master Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. It required a huge orchestra — more than a hundred musicians. A legend circulated (and still persists) that Shostakovich wrote for such a large orchestra because he knew that all “the musicians performing the piece got a quadruple norm of food, and he knew that while they were rehearsing they would be fed better.” He was ensuring their employment by writing parts for them.
Once, Shostakovich brought his kids to a rehearsal. Nina recalled: “There they sat in the director’s box, and when Professor Samosud, the conductor, asked them: ‘What have you come to listen to?’ they replied: ‘Our symphony.’ But in the middle of the first movement Maxim suddenly started ‘conducting’ with such desperate energy that he had to be taken home.”
Maxim Shostakovich would later become a conductor himself.
The Soviet government had started to realize that Shostakovich’s new symphony had an important role to play on the world stage. Conductors from the Allied countries were beginning to clamor for the rights of first performance. The Soviet ambassador to the United States, Maxim Litvinov — whose relatives were camped out in the apartment above Shostakovich’s — was fielding requests from American conductors all the way from New York to California. The USSR’s cultural propaganda wing, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), quickly realized that this was a chance to solidify relations with an important ally, now that the Americans had entered the war.
Why was it so important to send a symphony to the United States?
For years, the Russians and the Americans had eyed each other with suspicion. The average citizens of neither country knew much about the other. Though few Americans understood the full tragic price of the Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror, most knew enough to feel a deep distrust of Stalin and his Communist Party. The Russians, on their side, were disdainful of America’s capitalist excesses. Humorists Ilf and Petrov explained, “The word ‘America’ has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares.” After having rambled through the country in the midst of the Great Depression, Ilf and Petrov wrote that for them, the United States represented “the most advanced technology in the world and a horrifyingly oppressive, stupefying social order.”
Relations with the Americans were not helped by the fact that, until only a few months before, Russia had openly allied itself with Nazi Germany. Now, suddenly, Stalin and his ministers were demanding aid against Hitler.
They were asking the Allies for two things: First was a “Second Front,” an assault on Germany from the west via France, which would force the Wehrmacht to turn its ferocious attentions away from Russia. The second thing the Soviet ambassador requested was free aid in the form of planes, tanks, weapons, radios, jeeps, food, and medical supplies.
The United States could not immediately grant the first request. They were already fighting and losing a war in the Pacific against the Japanese. They did not have the strength to launch a frontal attack on Nazi-held France at the same time.
But American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt immediately agreed to send the Soviets aid shipments. He even agreed, over the angry protests of many, not to ask for anything in return for the military matériel and foodstuffs he supposedly “lent” them or “leased” them. From his point of view, the important thing was to strengthen the Soviets so they could hold off the Germans and would not capitulate. The Allies had to stand together or they would soon fall together.
Many disagreed with his generosity. Several American generals believed that the USSR was about to collapse. It seemed to them that any weaponry shipped to the Russians would soon be in German hands, helping the German cause. Congressmen were angry that the secretive Russians refused to provide any details of how they used the goods they were sent. Many were outraged that the Russians should be given so much for free. The American ambassador to Russia scolded President Roosevelt: “Stop acting like a Santa Claus, Chief! And let’s get something from Stalin in return.”
To make things worse, an intense cultural difference soured negotiations over the aid packages: the Americans expected profuse thanks and shows of gratitude from the Russians; the Russians were much more hardheaded and practical, knowing that they were taking the brunt of the Germans’ military might. This led to anger on both sides.
The American secretary of agriculture, for example, complained about the way the Soviet bureaucrats made their demands. “They simply walked in, all of them sober-faced, never cracked a smile. . . . They said, ‘Here is what we want.’ And they’d just sit there. There wasn’t much negotiation to it.” British prime minister Winston Churchill later wrote, “Surly, snarly and grasping, the Soviet Government had the impression that they were conferring a great favour on us by fighting in their own country for their own lives.”
This Soviet impression was not necessarily mistaken. They eventually suffered 95 percent of the military casualties inflicted on the three major Allied powers (the U.S., the U.K., and the USSR) — and 90 percent of Germans killed in combat died fighting them. This was a considerable battlefield contribution made through a very considerable sacrifice. A Soviet writer argued, “God knows we paid [the West] back in full — in Russian lives.” As a Soviet official commented sarcastically, “We’ve lost millions of people, and they want us to crawl on our knees because they send us Spam.”
It was a serious diplomatic problem. President Roosevelt knew the strategic importance of substantial aid to the Soviets, but he also knew the kind of opposition he faced given the poor relations between the two powers.
What the Russians needed was some way to convince the Americans that they were not the rude, cold Communists of capitalist nightmare. Somehow, the Russians had to stir up American sympathies, to remind them of the shared battle, to persuade Americans, in the gung ho words of Life magazine, that Russians are “one hell of a people” who “look like Americans, dress like Americans, and think like Americans.” Or at least that their sorrows and triumphs for the next few years would also be American sorrows and triumphs.
So the Soviet government turned its attention to Shostakovich’s symphony. Here was a piece apparently about the war, depicting the life of Soviet citizens, the horrors of German invasion, and the triumphant victory to come. It was by one of Russia’s only international celebrities. It would remind the West that Russians were not Bolshevik barbarians. They were writing symphonies even in the midst of siege.
As a flow of American tanks, planes, and canned meats headed toward Russia over waters thick with U-boats and through skies patrolled by the Luftwaffe, Russian diplomats began to make arrangements for the symphony to be shipped to the West.
The world premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony took place in Kuibyshev on March 5, 1942, with Samuil Samosud conducting the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra.
Shostakovich was a nervous wreck that day. “He was in and out of our apartment all day,” wrote the sculptor Ilya Slonim, “never staying longer than ten minutes, looking even paler than usual and, almost stammering, imploring us not to go to the concert, hoping all his friends would stay away, and the next moment calling up the theater and begging for
‘just one more ticket,’ for a girl in the post-office who had asked him to get her in.”
As he rushed past Flora Litvinova, clenching his fists, Nina explained to her, “He’s always like this on the day of a first performance. . . . He is frightened it’ll be a flop.”
He was even more anxious at the theater, right before the concert. “He seemed to suffer agonies,” recalled Ilya Slonim. “The audience insisted on seeing him before it began, and he stood up on the platform, rigid and unsmiling.”
He spoke both to the audience in front of him and the radio audience listening to the broadcast. What he said was presumably similar to the statement he released later: “My music is my weapon,” he declared. “We are struggling for the highest human ideals in history. We are battling for our culture, for science, for art, for everything we have created and built. . . . I dedicate my Seventh Symphony to our struggle with fascism, to our coming victory over the enemy, and to my native city, Leningrad.”
Then Samuil Samosud raised his baton — and for the first time, the world heard Shostakovich’s symphony.
The opening strides forth confidently. If it is a portrait of a city, it is a city animated with purpose and pride. Then a second melody follows — this one gentle and tender, quiet. But it is at this point that the symphony itself is “invaded.”
Very softly, with the rattle of drums, Shostakovich’s irritating little march starts — plucky, even twee. It does not seem menacing yet. But it is repeated again and again. It is as infuriatingly memorable as a propaganda slogan drilled into the ears over months. It grows in volume until its empty repetitions have forced everything else out of memory. The symphony’s previous themes are gone. There is only this one untiring, repeated statement.
Once again, people in the audience thought of this theme as the approach of the Germans, of “War and Hitlerism”: “One, two, left, right — machines as intelligent as men and men as soulless as machines approached our frontiers,” wrote journalist Yevgeni Petrov. People thought of the news bulletins announcing city after city falling prey to armored tank divisions. The stupid melody grew; it blared. “It shakes the hall,” Petrov wrote. “Some iron machine runs over human bones and you hear them crack. You clench your fists. You want to shoot at this monster with a zinc snout that is marching down upon you.”
Symphony for the City of the Dead Page 26
