The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  Meretskov could consider himself fortunate. He came out of the bitter March, 1940, post-mortem by the Central Committee on the Finnish operations in fairly good order. Many had been sharply criticized, especially the Defense Commissar, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. L. Z. Mekhlis, Beria’s secret police crony, who was sent by Stalin to advise the Ninth Soviet Army, arrested many commanders and sought to shift the blame from himself but underwent some criticism as well.

  A series of decisions flowed from the spring post-mortem, many of them useful and sound. Young commanders with battle experience in Spain, the Manchurian border war with the Japanese at Khalkin-Gol and the Finnish campaign were promoted to new responsibilities.5

  The fact that Meretskov was given only three days to work out a plan for his offensive against Finland probably saved him from serious consequences. In any event, he was promoted to the rank of full general in June and became Chief of Staff in August, 1940.

  Now, in the last minutes before his arrival in Leningrad, Meretskov could look back on the past two years and, speaking as a military man, find much for which to be thankful.

  The defensive position of Leningrad, for example, was infinitely better, at least on paper, than it had been in 1939. Before 1939 the frontier had lain only twenty miles to the north. Leningrad had been within long-range artillery fire from the Finnish frontier. The sea approaches had been equally vulnerable. Finnish forts commanded the entrance to the Gulf of Finland from Hangö and the nearby shore. Soviet warships came in and out of the Kron-stadt base at their peril.

  The situation along the Baltic littoral in 1939 was equally dangerous. Now, with the incorporation into the Soviet Union of the Baltic states, the frontiers had been pushed four hundred miles to the west. There was depth for maneuver, breathing space. Leningrad no longer lay open to attack by enemy planes based only a few minutes’ flight to the west or north.

  The Baltic Fleet had new bases two and three hundred miles closer to the enemy.

  Leningrad again might be regarded as a secure military bastion, the bastion Peter intended it to be.

  Today—or so it might well seem to a military man like Meretskov— thanks to the foresight of Stalin and Zhdanov, Leningrad once more stood strong and powerful, a defensible position even under conditions of modern warfare.

  But, to be sure, a thousand things must be done. Work on the fortifications must be speeded. Troops must be moved to the frontiers. Airports must be put in working order. Guns must be installed in forward positions. All of this must go ahead at fever pace because at any moment the German attack might start. Yet, at the same time, every effort—and these were the last words from Timoshenko and Zhukov before Meretskov took leave of them in the Defense Commissariat Saturday night—every effort must be made to avoid action which might provoke a German attack. In no case must fire be opened upon a German plane. And no unusual move—of any kind—was to be taken without prior consultation with Moscow.

  How would Russia emerge from the crisis? How ought he to begin in order in the shortest possible time to bring the Leningrad Military District to the peak of fighting effectiveness? What steps had to be taken to strengthen the city’s defenses? And what had been happening along the troubled frontier as he traveled north through the long white night?

  The questions chased around and around in Meretskov’s head as he watched the approaches of the October Station glide past the open window of his compartment. He rose and went to the corridor. An aide carried his briefcase and bag. The train came to a gentle stop, and Meretskov stepped onto the platform.

  The Leningrad officers saluted. Meretskov was surprised to see that General Popov, the district commander, was not on hand—contrary to protocol. From the solemn faces of the welcoming delegates he could see that something had happened.

  “Well?” Meretskov asked.

  “It’s started,” one of them replied.

  The group walked swiftly through the side entrance of the station to the military limousine which waited, its motor running. Meretskov took the customary seat of honor, next to the chauffeur. The others piled in back, two on jump seats. The car moved swiftly forward, circling the square and down the Nevsky Prospekt. The Prospekt was alive with pedestrians, going in and out of the great stores, sauntering down the street, basking in the warm sun. At the kiosks yellow daffodils and pink cherry blossoms were on sale. No one gave heed to the black Packard as it whirled past Eliseyev’s grocery store, past the bright-windowed shops of the Gostiny Dvor, past the clock tower of the City Hall, the circular fagade of the Kazan Cathedral, past the Admiralty, through Palace Square and on to Smolny Institute, the Party headquarters.

  Here Meretskov and his colleagues listened to the government broadcast at noon which brought to the still peaceful city the news that Russia had been at war since 4 A.M.

  The eloquent words of Molotov—"Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten. We shall triumph"—still echoed from the loudspeakers when Meretskov sat down with the Leningrad Military Council. Absent was Andrei Zhdanov, the city’s boss, the master of every detail of Leningrad’s fate. Absent, too, was Lieutenant General Markian M. Popov and most of the top Leningrad commanders.6

  Those who met in the council room to determine what first steps must be taken to secure Leningrad’s defense were: General Meretskov; A. A. Kuznetsov, Party Secretary and Zhdanov’s first deputy; Deputy Commander of the District, General K. P. Pyadyshev; Terenti F. Shtykov, a Leningrad Party secretary clÖsely identified with military and security questions; N. N. Klementyev, political officer for the Leningrad Military District (who had been in the field with Popov but returned ahead of him); and General D. N. Nikishev, Chief of Staff and the man who had taken such action as had been accomplished for the city’s defense.

  Four major decisions were made that afternoon by the Military Council, and each was to play a vital role in Leningrad’s defense.

  First, the Pskov-Ostrov fortifications 150 miles southwest of the city were to be completed immediately. Second, a new fortified line was to be built along the Luga River, about 120 miles southwest of the city from Lake Ilmen to the vicinity of Kingisepp. Third, the fortifications north of Leningrad, along the old (not the new) frontier with Finland, were to be put into full defensive order. Fourth, a new defense line was to be built in the Volkhov region, southeast of the city.

  There was one notable feature about the decisions. Each was predicated upon the necessity of defending Leningrad in depth, of protecting the city against an encircling attack which might overrun the half-finished fortifications along the new frontiers to the west and to the north.

  Thus on the very first day of war the acting commanders of the Leningrad front sought to correct what had suddenly smashed into their consciousness as the weakness inherent in the whole new concept of Leningrad’s defense. Because for so many years Leningrad had lived with a frontier only twenty miles to the north, because it had been obvious for so long that an enemy to the north might almost instantly overwhelm the city, almost all of the Leningrad defense precautions had been concentrated to the north.

  The splitting off from the Leningrad Command of direct responsibility for defense of the Baltic littoral and the creation of the Special Baltic Military District were evidence of Leningrad’s preoccupation with the threat to the north. The Baltic Command was to provide a shield for the state frontiers, four hundred miles to the west. It was to protect the new states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia from attack. It was to keep an aggressor from plunging through the littoral and jabbing deep into the Russian heartland.

  Now on this afternoon of June 22 the Finnish frontier, however dangerous, was still quiet. It had not gone into action. But from the southwest the din and clatter of the German Panzers had already begun.

  Leningrad had not one division, not one regiment, not one active military unit deployed to the south or southwest of the capital.

  What if the Germans broke through those new frontiers so far west? What then?

  All th
e decisions taken by the makeshift Leningrad Military Council were designed to cope with this new and unforeseen danger. From now on all powers connected with defense, with social order, with state security, were concentrated in the hands of the Military Council. It formed a junta with powers of life and death over Leningrad.

  These first-hour decisions would go far to spell the difference between success and failure of the German drive to capture Leningrad.

  * * *

  1 Meretskov himself was named by Khrushchev among officers who had suffered from the purge, but whether this occurred on his return from Spain in 1937 or later is not certain. By 1938 Meretskov was in good standing and was made commander of the Leningrad Military District. Robert Conquest is mistaken in saying Meretskov was released from prison in 1939. (Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, New York, Macmillan, 1968, p. 486.)

  2 But in October, 1941, and again in the summer of 1942 some of the Red Army officers still held in the camps were shot at Stalin’s order, perhaps in panic because of the disasters at the fronts. After his “interrogation” in 1938 Marshal Rokossovsky had no fingernails left on one of his hands.

  3 Vannikov’s memoirs, first suppressed, now are being published in a highly tendentious version (Voprosy Istorii,No. 10, October, 1968, p. 116).

  4 Degtyarev was released from camp in time to take his place in the Fifty-fourth Army, which defended the Leningrad supply route.

  5 Following the April post-mortem into the Finnish campaign Marshal Timoshenko replaced Marshal Voroshilov as Defense Commissar. A special commission headed by Zhdanov and N. A. Voznesensky, Soviet Planning Chief and a close associate of Zhdanov’s, was set up by the Party Central Committee to seek to strengthen the army, improve its vigilance and fighting ability and heighten its political awareness, (jo Let Sovetskikh Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR, p. 244.)

  6 Colonel B. V. Bychevsky, chief of Leningrad engineering troops, in one context reports that Popov returned to his command post from a field trip about 10 A.M. Sunday. In another he speaks of getting orders from Popov on the General’s return June 23. Had Popov been in Leningrad, he certainly would have attended the Council, which did not meet before 1 P.M. The Leningrad Party history says he was not present and that General Pyadyshev presided in his place. (Na Zashchite Nevskoi Tverdyni, p. 16.)

  12 ♦ Even the Dead

  THE PEOPLE—IN THE STREETS, IN THE PARKS, IN THE SHOPS, in the working factories—listened to Molotov’s broadcast at noon, announcing the outbreak of war with rapt attention. He spoke flatly in his usual unemotional way. Only an occasional tremor revealed his tension. He began:

  “Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Government and its head, Comrade Stalin, have instructed me to make the following announcement: At 4 A.M., without declaration of war and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country, attacked our frontier in many places and bombed from the air Zhitomir, Kiev, Sevastopol, Kaunas and other cities. . . . This attack has been made despite the fact that there was a nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, a pact the terms of which were scrupulously observed by the Soviet Union. We have been attacked although during the period of the pact the German Government had not made the slightest complaint about the U.S.S.R.’s not carrying out its obligations. . . .

  “The government calls upon you, men and women citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally even more clÖsely around the glorious Bolshevik Party, around the Soviet Government and our great leader, Comrade Stalin. Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.”

  Only a few wondered why it was Molotov, not Stalin, who spoke to the country. And certainly none, outside the tightest, inmost circle of the Kremlin, suspected the truth—that Stalin had been thrust into traumatic depression from which he would not emerge for many days and weeks.

  What people did realize was that war had started. By 1 P.M., a few minutes after Molotov’s speech, queues, especially in the food stores, began to grow. At the State Savings Banks lines formed. Depositors wanted their money. The women shoppers in the gastronoms or grocery stores started to buy indiscriminately—canned goods (which Russians do not like very much), butter, sugar, lard, flour, groats, sausage, matches, salt. In twenty years of Soviet power Leningraders had learned by bitter experience what to expect in time of crisis. They rushed to the stores to buy what they could. They gave preference to foods which would keep. But they were not particular. One shopper bought five kilos of caviar, another ten.

  At the savings banks the people clutched worn and greasy passbooks in their hands. They were drawing out every ruble that stood to their accounts. Many headed straight for the commission shops. There they turned over fat packets of paper money for diamond rings, gold watches, emerald earrings, oriental rugs, brass samovars.

  The crowds outside the savings banks quickly became disorderly. No one wanted to wait. They demanded their money seichas—immediately. Police detachments appeared. By 3 P.M. the banks had closed, having exhausted their supply of currency. They did not reopen again until Tuesday (Monday was their closed day). When they opened again, the government had imposed a limit on withdrawals of two hundred rubles per person per month.

  The food and department stores stayed open. So did the commission shops. Many persons had hoards of paper rubles hidden at home. They took the money and bought anything which had a hard value.

  Leningrad housewives cleaned out many smaller grocery stores on Sunday afternoon. It was their second recent experience in food hoarding. They had descended like locusts on the stores at the time of the winter war with Finland. Hoarding was an old Russian custom. No one who had lived in Leningrad since World War I had much confidence in the government’s ability to maintain normal supplies of food. The story of every past war— and not a few peacetime years—had been one of short supplies and hardship.

  There was a run on vodka stocks. By midevening bottle supplies were exhausted. Not a few cafés and restaurants sold out, too. The vodka was not for immediate drinking. It was also being hoarded.

  In the factories and offices mass meetings were called. Many big factories were operating that Sunday, among them the Elektrosila, the Krasny Viborzhets, the Skorokhod, because the city was experiencing a power shortage and Sunday operations had been instituted to spread the load. Party secretaries at these plants got a warning call from Smolny about 9 A.M., and in many of them there were secret meetings of key Party workers before 11 A.M. Then, after Molotov’s radio speech, public meetings for all the plants were held.

  That Sunday afternoon, Olga Berggolts was sitting in her flat in Leningrad. She lived in a curious apartment built as a cooperative early in the 1930’s by a group of young (very young, it now seemed) engineers and artists. The official name of the building at No. 9 Ulitsa Rubinshtein was “The Communal House of Artists and Engineers.” But to all Leningrad it had long been known as the “Tears of Socialism.” It was an unusual house— a monument to the burning passion of the writers and engineers in the early days of the Revolution to have done with the hideous trappings of bourgeois existence. There was nothing in the “Tears of Socialism” to remind one of old, outmoded ways. No kitchens. No mops. No place in the whole building for cooking or individual meals. No entryways with coat racks. No coat racks—except for communal ones.

  The house had been built for collective living of the most collective kind. Its architecture was pseudo Le Corbusier. Leningraders liked to joke that in the “Phalanstery on Rubinshtein” no families were permitted.

  The jokes long since had gone as stale as the experimental theories of communal existence. But Olga Berggolts and most of the inhabitants of the building had a desperate fondness for it, despite its crankiness. It was, in a sense, a link to their youth and to a time of enthusiasm which now seemed to belong to a different age and even to a different generation and different people.

  It was not merely that communal living had turned out to be a more depressing fad than anyone could h
ave imagined. It was all the rest that had happened during the 1930’s. Olga Berggolts was a poet, a child of the Revolution, a woman of talent and of courage, a woman whose clear blue eyes saw the world with a sad honesty taught by the harsh Russian life, a woman whose wide Russian brow bore the imprint of suffering, a woman whose gentle tenderness had been forged in sorrow and injustice. As a schoolgirl on the day of Lenin’s funeral, at 4 P.M., Sunday, January 27, 1924, Olga Berggolts stood with a friend outside the old house near the Narva Gates where she lived. She listened to the din of the factory whistles, the blast of the steam locomotives, the bells and the sirens which at that moment sounded all over Russia in tribute to Lenin. When quiet returned and the air still seemed to vibrate with the departing echo of the sound, she turned to her friend and announced: ‘Tm going to join the Young Communists and be a professional revolutionary. Like Lenin.”

  By the 1930’s that brave resolution was being sorely tested. The thirties took from her two daughters, one dying after the other. And then came what she still called the “heavy experience” of 1937-39, the years in which she was in prison and labor camps, one of the countless victims of Stalin’s endless purges.

  Before the years in prison she had been a lyric poet, a writer of verses and stories for children. But prison brought her to maturity, as a woman and as an artist. Now on this lovely June 22 .Olga Berggolts put down on paper her thoughts—a poem which was not (and could not be) published for many years. She tried to express what she felt for her country, for her Motherland, for herself:

  I did not on this day forget

  The bitter years of oppression and of evil.

  But in a blinding flash I understood: