Now that they had mastered the continent of Europe, where would the Nazis strike next? England was the obvious answer, but from time to time Leningrad heard rumors that Russia was next on Hitler’s list. Moscow denied these reports (the most recent denial had been only a week ago), and no one was likely publicly to challenge Stalin’s confident assurances about the pact with Berlin. Far safer to accept the Party line and bury deep within one’s consciousness any reservations. Yet the concern persisted in many minds. If—contrary to all pledges, promises and assurances—Hitler did attack Russia, Leningrad would not escape. The city was military by history and military by tradition, founded by Peter the Great in 1703 as a bastion against the Swedes, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Finns and the Germans, who century after century had fought to breach the gateway to the Russian lands.
But few of those who began their vacation exodus to resorts in the islands of the Gulf of Finland, to the new seashore and lakes that had been won from Finland in the winter war of 1939–40, were giving serious thought at that moment to the Nazi menace. The day was too lovely, the portents reassuring. To most Leningraders it seemed that their city was more secure than it had been for many years, more secure than it had been since Lenin was compelled “temporarily” to transfer the Russian capital back to Moscow in 1918 in the face of a threat that the Germans would overrun it. The “temporary” transfer had become permanent when Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania split off from Russia after 1917, leaving the Finnish-Soviet frontier hardly twenty miles from Leningrad and exposing the city to easy conquest.
Now, thanks to the winter war with Finland, Leningrad had a little room for maneuver. Indeed, that room had been the objective of the brutal Soviet attack on her small northern neighbor. The frontier had been pushed back many miles, and when Stalin forced the Baltic states to return to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940, Leningrad had been given a new protective shield along the Baltic coast.
With the perfect weather of the summer solstice the city rapidly emptied. The staff of the newspaper, Leningradskay a Pravda, had acquired a villa at Fox’s Bridge on the Gulf of Finland about twenty miles north of Leningrad. They had their material for the Sunday morning issue of June 22 well in hand by Saturday afternoon—nothing of consequence was going on—and most of the staff managed to get away early in the afternoon for the resort.
Not everyone was able to leave Leningrad. Iosif Orbeli, director of the great Hermitage Museum, a man whose Jovian beard made his friends think of an Old Testament prophet, spent the day at his desk in the vast galleries on Palace Square. A dozen problems concerned him. There was his new Department of Russian Culture, just established May 26, after a long effort. Packing cases with at least 250,000 exhibits for the new section jammed the storage area and blocked the emergency exits. There were expeditions preparing for a summer in the field, and at the museum a painters’ crew had put up a scaffolding after the May 1 holiday but work had not yet begun. Now, the year’s busiest season was at hand, and Orbeli was angry at the delay. He telephoned the Construction Trust. They tried to put him off, promising to start painting at the “earliest possible moment,” but he did not hang up until he got a firm date. The work was to start Monday, June 23.
Orbeli left his office late. He expected a large crowd on Sunday. Everything had to be in order. On his desk, marked in blue pencil, was a copy of Saturday’s Leningradskay a Pravda. The item Orbeli had encircled was headlined: “Tamerlane and the Timurids at the Hermitage.” It described two halls devoted to artifacts of the Mongol era. That would bring extra visitors on Sunday, Orbeli knew. Interest in Tamerlane was running high in Leningrad. A week ago a scientific expedition had arrived in Samarkand to examine the Gur Emir mausoleum where Tamerlane was buried. It was gathering material for the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of Alisher Navoi, the great poet of the Tamerlane epoch. Each day Leningradskay a Pravda had printed a dispatch from Samarkand, telling of the progress of the work. On Wednesday the Tass correspondent described the lifting of the slab of green nephrite from Tamerlane’s sarcophagus. “Popular legend, persisting to this day,” wrote the Tass man, “holds that under this stone lies the source of terrible war. . . .” The story brought chuckles to many readers. Such a fantastic superstition—to believe that by moving an ancient stone war could be unleashed in the world. On Friday Leningrad- skaya Pravda reported that Tamerlane’s coffin had been opened. Examination of the skeleton showed that one leg was shorter than the other. This verified the tradition that Tamerlane was lame.
There was no story from Samarkand in the Saturday paper. Perhaps, mused Orbeli, that is why they printed the item about the exhibit at the museum. He locked his office, bade good night to the guard at the service entrance and walked out into Palace Square. It was, Orbeli thought, the most imposing architectural ensemble in the world—the magnificent Winter Palace and the Hermitage along the Neva embankment, the massive General Staff building and arch across the square and in the center the column commemorating Alexander I. It echoed empire. It had echoed empire since the day when Peter began to sink massive piles into the morass of the Neva estuary at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, to build first his fortress, the gravelin and bastion hulk of Peter and Paul, then the Kronstadt naval base on one of the hundred islands of the Neva Delta and finally to erect the palaces, the boulevards, the grandiose squares which evoked such flamboyant comparatives—the second Paris, the Venice of the North. Just as Petersburg came to call Catherine II the Northern Semiramis, ultimately her capital acquired the denominative which Orbeli most treasured—the Northern Palmyra; Semiramis and Palmyra—the ancient romance and mystery of Asia Minor transmuted into the ice and winter of the Russian north. St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, Palmyra—whatever its name, surely there was no city its equal even though at the moment the view from Peter’s “window on the West” might be somewhat obscured by Stalin’s tyranny.
Orbeli strolled toward the Admiralty with its graceful spire. Across the Neva rose the answering spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress and the fa$ade of the university buildings on the Petrograd side of the river. He turned toward the Nevsky Prospekt, the great boulevard which the poet Aleksandr Blok thought “the most lyric street, the most poetic in the world,” where as nowhere else there was a mystery to the women, a dark handsomeness in their appearance, a ghostliness in their promise. Always the city had deeply moved those who saw it. To some it was oppressive, mystical, tragic; to others ethereal, magical, miraculous. To Lenin it was a sweated slum, ripe for agitation, intrigue, revolution. To the Romanovs it was the capital of the world, the seat of absolute authority, the mandate anointed by the blessing of the Orthodox faith.
Always the city evoked superlatives, swaying the beholder by the majesty of its spaces, the richness of its planes, the interplay of water and stone, of granite piles and slender bridges, lowering skies and the endless cold and snow of winter. It was Russia’s workshop, Russia’s laboratory, the cradle of Russian scholarship and art. Here Mendeleyev discovered the periodic table of the elements. Here Pavlov worked with his dogs on conditioned reflexes. Here Mussorgsky wrote his wild, dark music, Pavlova’s fairy feet won the hearts of the grand dukes and the Imperial Ballet spawned Bakst, Diaghilev, Fokine and Nijinsky.
Leningrad was the capital of Russian creative life. On this Saturday, June 21, work went on all day in the rehearsal rooms of the State Ballet School on Alexandrinsky Square. The grande dame of Russian ballet, Agrippina Vaganova, was a strict taskmistress. On Sunday the twenty-second the corps was presenting a program at the Mariinsky Theater to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of the ballerina Ye. M. Lukom. The graduation performance by Madame Vaganova’s 1941 class of the ballet Bela was scheduled for Wednesday the twenty-fifth. All day Saturday work at the barre went on, hour after hour. Madame Vaganova was sixty-three, but she had lost none of her vigor and, as one of her ballerinas looted, “Madame Vaganova was strict as ever.”
Karl Eliasberg, director of
the Leningrad Radio Committee Symphony, returned to his apartment on Vasilevsky Island rather late that Saturday. He, too, was busy all afternoon with rehearsals. Now he sat down to read the paper and noticed that an exhibition was opening on Sunday in the Catherine Palace at Pushkin to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the death of the poet Lermontov. He decided to attend it. Another musical figure, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, had quite different plans. Shostakovich was a football fan. Saturday afternoon he bought tickets for the Sunday, June 22, game at Dynamo Stadium.
There was much activity on Saturday at the rambling studios of Lenfilm across the Neva on the Petrograd side. There at No. 10 Kirov Prospekt on the site of the old Aquarium Gardens (where an ice palace had delighted generations of Petersburg youngsters) a film about the composer Glinka was about to get under way. Lyudmila, wife of the playwright Aleksandr Shtein, spent the day making beards for patriarchical boyars, fitting costumes for Cbernomor, Ruslan and Lyudmila, putting into shape the delicate old Russian headdresses, called kokoshniki. Shooting would begin on Monday. Shtein was not with his wife. As an officer in the army reserves he had been called up in early spring for three months’ service. He had finished his tour of duty a few days earlier and had gone to relax at a new writers’ resort in the formerly Finnish section of Karelia, a few miles north of Leningrad. He spent Saturday night sitting on a rambling wooden porch, talking through the endless twilight with a fellow playwright, Boris Lavrenyov. The evening was tranquil, but later Shtein remembered seeing rockets on the distant horizon and, as he was going to bed about 4 A.M., he thought he heard the drone of airplane engines out over the Gulf of Finland.
All day Saturday there had been comings and goings at Smolny, the rambling complex of classic Russian buildings along the Neva River, once a school for noble gentlewomen, but since 1917 a symbol of revolution. It was here that Lenin and his Bolsheviks set up their command post for the November, 1917, coup d’état, and here, since that time, the Leningrad Communist Party apparatus had had its headquarters.
On this Saturday the Leningrad City Party was holding what was called an enlarged plenary session—a general meeting at which secretaries of the city organization, factory directors, economic specialists, labor union representatives and city officials were discussing several important questions—the carrying out of directives which had been approved at the Eighteenth All-Union Party Conference and new plans for industrial construction.
The meeting in the Smolny Assembly Hall, the room in which Lenin proclaimed the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, did not end until evening. Some delegates headed home. Others joined the casual strollers on the city’s broad boulevards, sauntering idly in the filtered midnight light. They paused to stare in curiosity at posters plastered on lamp posts advertising Romeo and Juliet, the Prokofyev ballet in which Galina Ulanova was dancing at the Mariinsky Theater the next day. Other posters read: “Anton Ivanovich is Angry . . . Anton Ivanovich is Angry.” Not all the delegates recognized this as a teaser for a new movie which was to open soon at the leading houses. They shook their heads in puzzlement and wandered on to peer into the bright shop windows of Nevsky Prospekt.
The top personnel at the meeting did no strolling. They went straight to their offices and waited beside telephones in case of a call. Just before they left Smolny the word had quietly been passed: “Don’t get too far away. There may be something coming up tonight.”
They had been offered no clue as to what might be happening. Disciplined to carry out Party orders meticulously and without question, they now sat by their telephones, smoking cigarettes, poring over the mountains of paper that perpetually overwhelmed them and wondering what was in the air. Not all went to their offices. Mikhail Kozin, Party organizer for the great Kirov steel works, drove to his summer cottage at Mill Stream, a few miles outside Leningrad, to spend the night with his family. He had no telephone in the country, but his chauffeur went back to the factory, ready to alert him if anything happened.
In the suburb of Pushkin, the old imperial village of Tsarskoye Selo, the soft air and pale light attracted scores of young couples to the linden alleys and stately parks surrounding Rastrelli’s exquisite Catherine Palace. Here where the poets Alexander Pushkin and Aleksandr Blok once lived, a new generation of Russian youngsters, many of them fresh from graduation exercises, strolled through the long night. As they passed the squat buildings known as the Half-Moon near the gates of the palace they paused. From the open windows of the Half-Moon came the haunting sounds of a Skrya-bin sonata. It was the composer Gavriil Popov and his wife, playing two grand pianos in adjoining rooms, separated only by curtains. Popov’s opera, Alexander Nevsky, was at that moment on the rehearsal schedule of the Mariinsky Theater, being prepared for an autumn premiere.
The Catherine Park was a nest of creative artists. Nearby the composer, Boris Asafyev, was at work, instrumentalizing his opera The Slav Beauty, commissioned by the Baku Opera Theater for the forthcoming Nizami festival. In an adjacent apartment the novelist Vyacheslav Shishkov, back a day or two from a vacation in the Crimea, sat at his desk, correcting proofs of a long historical novel.
All winter the young writer Pavel Luknitsky had worked in the same house with Shishkov—it was Alexei Tolstoy’s old villa, now a writers’ rest home. On June 16 Luknitsky, thin, dark, handsome, intense and as yet unmarried, finished his novel and sent it off to the publisher. Now he was in Leningrad, wondering what to do with his summer. Possibly he would go to the new writers’ resort in Karelia. There were lovely grounds there and a beach. In any event he thought he would accept an invitation he had received in the mail the day before. The writers’ organization was sponsoring a tour of the old Mannerheim fortified line across Karelia which had lain in Soviet hands since the winter war. Special buses would leave promptly at 7:30 A.M., June 24.
In a big house at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal, not far from the Nevsky Prospekt, the poet Vissarion Sayanov talked through Saturday night with an old friend, a factory worker whom he had met during the winter war with Finland. Sayanov had been a war correspondent, his friend a political officer with a reconnaissance unit. Over a bottle of vodka they recalled the bitter cold in the Finnish forests, comrades who had survived and some who hadn’t. It was a leisurely, reminiscent evening, and they did not separate until long past midnight.
Sayanov, a middle-aged poet with a round face and gold-rimmed spectacles, walked a bit with his friend before turning back to go to bed. The city was quiet in the hours before morning—quiet but lighted by a refracted luminosity which flattened the colors, melted out the shadows and washed the great stone buildings with eggshell tints. From a distance came the sound of young voices. They were singing a popular Soviet song: “Daleko . . . daleko . . . Far away ... far away,” a plaintive song of a lover far from his sweetheart and home. The chant rose clear and fresh, and down the street appeared a band of students, the girls’ dresses white against the darkness of the pavement, the boys in light shirts and navy-blue trousers. Their arms were linked and they slowly walked, singing with a beauty that was rare and unearthly.
For the most part Leningrad now slept, except for wandering youngsters. Over on the Petrograd side the writer Vera Ketlinskaya, walking home along the Kirov Prospekt, watched a slim young boy pause and lift a girl to his shoulders so she could pick a spray of jasmine from an overhanging limb. The boy and girl came up to the Kamenny Ostrov Bridge over the Malaya Neva River. The draw was raised and they waited at the embankment, the girl shivering in the coolness of the night. When the boy tried to put his arm around her, she pulled away willfully and said: “One thing I would never be so stupid as to do is to marry you!”
“Why not?” the boy asked in despair. “Why not?”
“That’s what I’m trying to understand myself,” the girl said.
Finally, the drawbridge was let down. The boy and girl silently crossed over, the girl still holding the sprig of jasmine. They parted at the corner; then the girl called back: “Fedya!”
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br /> “What?” the boy replied.
“Nothing. Come by day after tomorrow. I’ll give you back your books.”
“All right,” the boy said. “Leave them with your mother if you’re not home. I’ll drop in during the afternoon.”
The young couple vanished. Now the avenue stretched empty and quiet. Leningrad was sleeping through the night that was no night . . . the longest of the white nights.
2 ♦ Not All Slept
NOT EVERYONE SLEPT THAT NIGHT.
Not Army General Kirill A. Meretskov, Deputy Commissar of Defense, who boarded the Red Arrow express in Moscow at midnight, June 21, on an urgent mission to Leningrad. Hour after hour he stood looking out the window of his polished-mahogany compartment with its heavy brass fittings, its Brussels carpet, its French plumbing. He was riding in an old International car of the French Wagon-Lits Company, a heritage of the imperial past. North of Moscow the searchlight of the Red Arrow’s locomotive cut through the dusk and, then, as the train hurtled down the straight course laid out by the engineers of Czar Nicholas I, the horizon slowly lightened. Meretskov knew this country well. During the years 1939–40 he had headed the Leningrad Military District. It was he who commanded the Soviet troops in the winter war on Finland. He had known Leningrad since the days of the Revolution. Almost every mile of broken birch and fir forest between Moscow and Leningrad was familiar to him.
As the landscape spread out in the cool light, he stared from the window, watching the sun rise in a pale-blue sky. The train plunged through the deep green of the forest and then out across watery marshes. Suddenly he heard the wheels echo hollowly on a bridge, and before him appeared the quiet waters of the Volkhov River. Then again swamps, more fir forests, more swamps.
General Meretskov felt a sense of mounting excitement as he saw the Leningrad land again, excitement and a sense of concern, a sense of pride and a sense of history. Pushkin’s line ran through his mind:
The 900 Days Page 2
