The need for money pressed hard on the Bolsheviks. In February 1920, GOKHRAN had been set up to collect precious metals and jewellery. There were thirty-three depositories for such items in Petrograd, and Maxim Gorky was put in charge of the eighty experts evaluating them. His team amassed 120,000 pieces for the first wave of selling from 1920-24. A second wave, from 1928-31, offered paintings that included masterpieces from the Hermitage. The museum had taken possession of a huge number of new treasures after private collections were nationalised in 1923 and Petrograd’s Stieglitz Museum was shut down.49
Given the financial instability in the West at that time, it was not the most propitious moment to sell, but the scheme was considered unavoidable. The Commissariat for Foreign Trade and the somewhat shifty Soviet trade delegations in several foreign capitals contacted interested buyers. A sensational auction fetching miserable prices was held in Berlin in May 1931 – just over $600,000 was obtained for 256 lots, including important Van Dyck portraits, an Adam and Eve by Cranach, and Rembrandt’s Christ and the Samaritan at the Well. In America, Victor and Armand Hammer became the agents selling Fabergé jewels in New York. Andrew Mellon, First Secretary to the American Treasury, bought twenty-one canvases from the Hermitage, including Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation and two important Rembrandts. When Mellon founded the National Gallery of Art in Washington, these were among the paintings he donated to the collection. Other interested parties also came forward. The Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired Poussin’s Birth of Venus through the Soviet-New York trade delegation, AMTORG. The British-Armenian head of Iraq Petroleum, Calouste Gulbenkian, acquired a Rembrandt portrait for a mere $30,000.
In a move to increase the prestige of the new Soviet capital, 400 paintings were transferred from the Winter Palace to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. By way of compensation, the Hermitage received 100 works from the fabulous Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early-twentieth-century paintings collected by the Moscow merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. These included important canvases by Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne, along with Matisse’s large and sublimely affirmative masterpiece The Dance. In 1932, these new acquisitions were re-contextualised. Post-Impressionists were exhibited as examples of art from the ‘era of rotting capitalism’. Picasso and Matisse – appropriately given the visual vocabulary borrowed from exoteric cultures – were examples of painting in ‘the era of imperialism’. It was all part and parcel of the museum’s Marxist restructuring, in which early-eighteenth-century French art was seen as painting from the ‘era of the disintegration of feudal society and the bourgeois revolution’.50
During the Stalin era, Leningraders were denied the vitality of a flourishing literary scene. Of the 700 people who attended the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, only fifty were alive to attend the Second, twenty years later. Disease, old age and war played their part – but so did the dictator. Osip Mandelstam wrote a withering poem about a man for whom ‘every killing is a treat’, whose laws are ‘flung, like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin’, whose sycophants circle as the ‘cockroach whiskers leer’ and words, ‘final as lead weights, fall from his lips’. It was circulated on scraps of paper – or, more safely, by word-of-mouth.51 But the NKVD had eyes and ears everywhere, and Mandelstam was arrested. Saved from immediate execution, he was exiled to a gulag in 1938, where he attempted suicide and eventually died. Mikhail Bulgakov’s writing was banned. Boris Pasternak wrote in secret. Anna Akhmatova, like Shostakovich, managed to survive, while speaking out against the ‘voiceless terror’. Meanwhile, comrades were regaled by Five-Year Plan pulp, such as People of the Stalin Tractor Works or Alexei Tolstoy’s Peter the First, which recast the founder of St Petersburg in Stalin’s image. By 1939, however, adult male literacy stood at an impressive 94 per cent, and print runs of permitted reading – Pravda and Izvestia – rose from just under ten million in 19Z7 to thirty-eight million by 1940.52
Horseracing had been the only popular sport in St Petersburg before the revolution. During the 1930s gymnastics flourished, adding grace and muscle to the great parades flaunting Soviet might. Football, along with fencing and rowing, became popular.53 Sports clubs opened and entertainment thrived, to beguile an embattled population. The circus, attacked in the first days of the revolution as vulgar, cruel and demeaning, had been nationalised in 1919 and became very popular. At the Kirov Theatre – where conductors still appeared in white waistcoats and tails54 – the audience of white-collar workers and the party elite was able to watch one of Russia’s greatest ballerinas. Both her parents had been dancers, and she remembered watching one Mariinsky performance of The Sleeping Beauty when she was four. When the Lilac Fairy came onstage, she had screamed, ‘That’s Mama, my Mama.’ She also remembered that when she was about seven and the revolution was in full swing, her parents gave free recitals to film audiences before the screening started, in an effort to introduce their art to the people. Galina Ulanova was taken into the ballet company in 1928 and made her debut as Princess Florinda, following that with a sensational performance as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. Her mother was in the audience. She didn’t scream, but when it came to the infamous thirty-two fouettés in the third act, she left her seat and went to the rear of the box to say a silent prayer for her daughter. Ulanova went on to a great career, first at the Kirov and then at Moscow’s Bolshoi.”55
Despite attempts to displace religion with Soviet festivals, the Church still made a powerful claim on people’s embattled souls. St Isaac’s had been turned into an ‘anti-God’ museum, and the cathedral at Peterhof was used as a cinema, yet a variety of Christian denominations still exerted their spell over Leningrad’s population. Socialist May Day celebrations fought hard against the opulence of Easter Mass in 1937, when the festivals clashed.56 More than 80,000 people crushed into Leningrad’s remaining churches, with up to a 100,000 disappointed believers gathering outside. The state became intolerant of such a popular rival, and Stalin not only demolished churches, but also exiled or imprisoned priests.
Russia’s highest concentration of urban Jews was to be found in Leningrad and, just as they had been denounced as revolutionaries by the last tsars, Stalin targeted them – incredibly – as Hitler’s spies. Forming a significant portion of the party elite, intellectual Jews were resented and figured as high-profile victims in the show trials that continued until Stalin’s death.57 AntiSemitism accounted for Stalin’s strange scheme to purge western Russia of Jews by transforming a segment of Far Eastern Siberia into a ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’. Birobidzhan, the designated area, was about half the size of England and was located in a harsh region, vulnerable to possible attack from China or Japan. In the event, Stalin took care of the Jews – almost all of those who were settled in Birobidzhan were killed during the purges of 1937–8.58
Towards the end of the Thirties, the incessant hiss of outdoor loudspeakers spewing uninterrupted party propaganda and muzak polluted the Leningrad streets. Juvenile crime had increased and hooliganism persisted. The Australian visitor Betty Roland spoke of organised criminals emptying entire apartments. Otherwise, she was enchanted by the continued use of the frozen Neva as a thoroughfare and a place for pleasure. She watched Red Army soldiers doing manoeuvres on skis while, on land, floodlit tennis courts were transformed into skating rinks. She noticed how, in the depths of winter, astute Leningraders would stand on the steam vents of the city’s heating system while waiting for trams, in order to keep warm. She also witnessed one event that was redolent of old St Petersburg. A fur auction for foreign buyers took place in the Winter Palace, where there was a good deal of ‘drinking, toasting, guzzling and gorging’ before the visitors inspected the pelts of ermine, sable, mink and fox laid out in the ballroom.59
Central part of the frieze on the House of Soviets, built between 1936–41, fronting Moskovskaya Square in southern Leningrad.
As the terrible Thirties moved towards a combustible future, Leningrad was listed as a special area for defe
nce purposes, and foreigners – including diplomats – were no longer permitted to live there. Una Birch, Dame Pope-Hennessy, was one of the last to arrive before the embargo. She was on a visit to Lady Muriel Paget, who had administered the Anglo-Russian Hospital in Petrograd from 1915 to 1918. Dame Pope-Hennessy dined well with Lady Paget on ‘red brown crayfish, slices of grey bread, a jar of sour cream, some butter and a bowl of small thick-set cucumbers’. She marvelled at the brightly coloured mosque on the Petrograd side and at Gavriil Baranovsky’s Buddhist temple overlooking the northern branch of the Neva. But she found, to her dismay, that the famous Nevsky Prospekt had been renamed, and what little was left of fashion was obliged to stroll down ‘The 25th of October Street’. In de la Mothe’s sumptuous Yusupov Palace, rows of iron beds filled the rooms and corridors, making a dormitory for visiting engineers working in the city. Schlüsselberg Fortress had been allowed to crumble. Rather than restoring it as a testimony to tsarist tyranny, workers protested that they had suffered too much themselves to bother. There were ‘aggressive, persistent’ flies everywhere, and muslin was used to cover food. Yet – despite new and perennial inconveniences – Dame Una summed it up: ‘Leningrad, one is glad to see, is still Petersburg, poorer, shabbier, but in outline unchanged.’60
14
DARKEST AND FINEST HOUR
1941–4
‘For 23 years we have all been on death row . . . but we have reached the epoch’s grand finale.’ That diary entry was written by the puppeteer Liubov Shaporina a few days after the Nazis started shelling Leningrad in September 1941.1 In her early sixties, Shaporina had lived through famines, wars, revolution, civil war and Stalin’s terror. One of the most self-destructive aspects of that terrifying purge was Stalin’s execution of 512 members of the Soviet high command, among them the civil-war hero who had suppressed the Kronstadt rebellion, Marshal Tukhachevsky tortured and then executed for allegedly plotting a coup d’étatr.2 Accused in a fabricated document purchased from the Germans with forged marks, Tukhachevsky was clearly framed. Hitler’s immediate objective was to cripple the Russian military through the inevitable purge that would follow the exposure of the alleged coup. Hitler could dominate eastern Europe without Russian interference.
Released in 1937, the year that Tukhachevsky was executed, Sergei Eisenstein’s historical epic Alexander Nevsky told the story of the thirteenth-century invasion of Teutonic knights and acted as an explicit, unremitting warning of the dangers of German aggression, laced with a celebration of Soviet virtues and a rousing spur to resist invasion. Stalin – without the caution of generals who knew better – signed the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939. It came as a thunderbolt for communists and fellow travellers across the globe. Humanité, official organ of the French Communist Party, claimed that it demonstrated Stalin’s supreme effort to prevent war. For Arthur Koestler, it was ‘the funeral of his illusions’. Squealer, in Orwell’s Animal Farm, would have called it ‘Tactics, comrades, tactics.’ But for once, Stalin’s overweening paranoia deserted him. Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed that during his ‘suspicion-ridden life’, Stalin ‘only trusted one man . . . Adolf Hitler’.3
Between November 1939 and March 1941, Stalin fought the territorial Winter War against Finland. Leningrad proved an unreliable arsenal, its factories frequently crippled by power outages. Food shortages continued. People clamoured for rationing and were rewarded with price rises. Work conditions became terrifying, as bosses struggled to meet impossible quotas proposed by the Third Five-Year Plan. Employees arriving a few minutes late for work were sent for trial. During an eight-month period in the year before the Nazi invasion, more than 140,000 Leningraders were sentenced to corrective labour in a misguided effort to curb absenteeism.4
During the Winter War between 125,000 and 200,000 Russian soldiers lost their lives and the Finns lost territory between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland.5 While Stalin was thus preoccupied, Hitler was planning his attack. In the spring of 1941, the Nazis massed enormous forces on Stalin’s western frontier. Churchill warned the Kremlin about Hitler’s intentions. Soviet agents sent incontestable evidence of impending invasion. German soldiers defected to warn the Russians. But Stalin trusted Hitler. The defecting German soldiers were shot as spies.
At 3.15 a.m. on 22 June 1941, the Germans crossed the River Bug. Operation Barbarossa was under way. Russian border guards were surprised. Stalin – despite the warnings, despite Luftwaffe sorties over Russian air space – was surprised. Habitually over-quick to react, the Soviet leader hid in the Kremlin and made no official statement until 3 July. He had been stunned by the largest invasion ever mounted: 5,000 aircraft, 3,000 tanks and five and a half million troops sweeping into Soviet territory along a 3,000-kilometre front,6 capturing towns, cities and taking three million prisoners of war in the first sixth months of the campaign. The one man Stalin trusted intended to enslave the Slavic people and exile them to the wastes of Siberia. He wanted the rich farmlands of southern Russia, the oil fields at Baku, a Black Sea port and Lebensraum – space for the expansion of the Third Reich. The shipyards, industry and arms manufacturers of Leningrad would be a prize, but with characteristic fanaticism, Hitler wanted to wipe the cradle of the communist revolution off the face of the earth.
In the early hours of 22 June – the night after Wagner’s Lohengrin was given at the Kirov – Russian ships were torpedoed in the Baltic and foreign planes were in the skies above Leningrad. It was a lucid White Night, during which the city’s high-school students celebrated their graduation. At 4 a.m. a Soviet squadron scrambled from the Vyborg Sector to chase off the Luftwaffe. At 5 a.m. the German Consul announced that Germany was at war with Russia. Stalin’s protégé, Molotov, was on the radio claiming there had been no warning. Patriotic songs played all day and, within twenty-four hours, 100,000 Leningraders had volunteered to defend the motherland.7
Guide books, maps and cameras were confiscated by the authorities. Street signs and direction panels were dismantled or painted over. Civil defence was swiftly mobilised. The deportation of ‘enemies of the people’ – Germans and Finns, ethnic minorities, old bourgeoisie – combined with conscription and the evacuation of nearly 650,000 inhabitants, of which nearly two-thirds were children, reduced Leningrad’s population to around 2.5 million by the beginning of September, when the siege closed around the city. There was chaos and danger in the evacuations. Some of the chosen destinations lay in the direct line of the German advance, and trains were harassed by Stuka dive bombers.8
Throughout the summer, thousands of old men, women and teenagers dug trenches and tank-traps to protect the southwestern approaches to Leningrad. Also under construction was a second line of defence stretching from Peterhof south-east to Gatchina, and then north-east to Kolpino. A third, last-ditch defence was prepared at the city limits. Despite the summer storms that bogged the German advance, Novgorod fell. Then Chudovo, on the Leningrad-Moscow railway line. Along the gulf coast to the west of the city, only the sixty-kilometre-wide ‘Oranienbaum Pocket’ held out against the invaders. To the north, the Finns reached Lake Ladoga. After weeks of defeat and heavy losses, Stalin ordered the catastrophic naval withdrawal from Tallinn in the last week of August. Many ships were sunk, numerous lives were lost, and Leningrad was left almost defenceless. On 8 September, the Nazis reached the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, and Schlüsselberg was taken.9 As the siege ring closed around Leningrad, Nazi intentions were perfectly clear: ‘Any requests for surrender . . . will be categorically rejected since the problem of maintaining and feeding the population should not and cannot be solved by us . . . We have no interest in saving any party of the civilian population of this large city.’10
Evacuation of industrial machinery began in the first weeks of the invasion and, by the time rail and road links were cut, nearly 100 ordnance factories and well over 150,000 workers had been moved east. Plans to destroy nearly 60,000 strategic targets were put in place, should the Nazis break through. Guns were
taken from ships at Kronstadt to defend the city and contingency procedures to scuttle the fleet were prepared. Windows were taped, then boarded. Falconet’s Bronze Horseman, the proud symbol of the energy of the city, was sandbagged and boarded up.11 The Alexander Column was sheathed in wooden scaffolding, but the sculpture of the militant, yet angelic Alexander atop the column – the image of Russia triumphant – was left to stand out against the sky. Rollers of wooden logs were used to slide the equestrian statues off the four corners of the Anichkov Bridge over the Fontanka and trundle them to the nearby Alexandrin-sky Gardens for burial. A Gutenberg Bible, an early Greek Old Testament and Pushkin’s letters were removed from the library on the Nevsky. The most valuable manuscripts were transfered from the Academy of Sciences. At the Hermitage, the curator started to move paintings to the security of the reinforced jewellery room, immediately after Molotov spoke to the nation on 22 June. Six days and six nights of hectic packing began. Small pictures were placed in crates with cloth dividers, and large canvases were rolled. On 1 July, nearly half a million treasures were carried out of the city in twenty-two freight wagons with an armoured car harbouring the most valuable items. A second train followed on 20 July, with twenty-three freight wagons and a million objects. But before a third train was loaded with 350 packed crates, the Germans had gained control of the railways and so the boxes remained in the Winter Palace.12
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