The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  It was not I but you who suffered and waited.

  No, I have forgotten nothing,

  But even the dead and the victims

  Will rise from the grave at your call;

  We will all rise, and not I alone.

  I love you with a new love

  Bitter, all-forgiving, bright—

  My Motherland with the wreath of thorns

  And the dark rainbow over your head. . . .

  I love you—I cannot otherwise—

  And you and I are one again, as before.

  In those hours after the German attack became known many citizens of Leningrad were subjecting themselves to a new examination of conscience, a difficult and searching inquiry into the precise nature of their feelings.

  Not all were like Olga Berggolts; not all were able to put behind them the cruelty, the suffering, the savagery, the smashed dreams and the broken illusions of the past decade; not all were able to feel in this fateful hour that patriotism and the Motherland came first. There were those who privately, or perhaps not so privately, saw in the German attack a cause for rejoicing. The Germans, they thought, would liberate Leningrad and Russia from the rule of the hated Bolsheviks.

  It is not likely that anyone will ever know how many of these dissidents there were, but certainly some thousands of people in that first moment did not view the German attack as sheer tragedy. Dmitri Konstantinov, who went on to become a Red Army commander and who fought through the most savage Leningrad battles, was one whose thoughts were a mixture on that Sunday afternoon.

  The idea of war was terrible, but he could not turn his mind away from the past decade—the executions, the exiles, the arrests, the terror, the informer, the fear, the midnight knock on the door. How many now languished in Stalin’s prisons and camps? Possibly twenty million, he thought. Might not the war bring freedom to them? Might not this new horror bring in its train some good? Might it not lift from Russia’s back the savage burden of the Bolsheviks and give the nation a chance for a new, normal, humane life?

  The answer was beyond discovery. He well knew the agony of modern war. He knew, too, the bestiality of Hitler, his racist theories, the insane pretenses of Mein Kampf. Which would bring the worse tragedy to Russia —Stalin or Hitler? Who could say?

  That evening Konstantinov and a friend went to the Maly Opera Theater and sat through the performance of Gypsy Baron. The theater was two-thirds full. During the entr’acte the audience promenaded in the foyer. But there was not the usual animation. People were silent or spoke in hushed whispers.

  After the performance Konstantinov and his friend walked as far as the Troitsky Bridge. It was full daylight, of course, but automobiles had begun to show dim blue headlights. Blue lights had been installed on the streetcars and in the entrance halls of buildings.

  The Neva flowed quietly and grandly past the great buildings of the city, washing the granite embankments with its restless current.

  The talk of Konstantinov and his friend was gloomy. They would, of course, go into the army and fight for their country. But what would the future bring?

  In the communal apartment where Yelena Skryabina lived there lived as well a microcosm of Leningrad. Across the hall resided Lyubov Nikolay-evna Kurakina. For the past two years Lyubov’s husband, a dedicated Communist and Party worker, had languished in prison, convicted as an “enemy of the people.” He was still there. His wife, a staunch Communist, had wavered in her convictions during the imprisonment of her husband, but on Sunday evening her Communist feelings flowed back in full vigor. She forgot the injuries she had suffered and treated her neighbors to a windy oration about the invincibility of Soviet Russia.

  Listening from a perch on a tall chest was another neighbor, Anastasiya Vladimirovna. She smiled sarcastically at the oratory of Lyubov. She had never bothered to conceal her hatred for the Soviet regime. With the onset of war she saw for the first time hope of rescue from the Bolsheviks.

  Yelena Skryabina shared not a few of Vladimirovna’s sentiments. But she was wise and experienced enough to know that the future held no simple or easy choice. She, like most of her countrywomen, was a Russian patriot. She could not wish for Russia’s defeat at the hands of an hereditary enemy. Yet she knew that such a defeat might well be the only way of ending a regime which was cruel, eccentric and vicious.

  The question was different for Dmitri A. Shcheglov, a writer and a firm Party member. He had come back Saturday night from Petrozavodsk in Karelo-Finland, where he had gone for the premiere of a new play, The Treasure of Sampo. In the train compartment a Red Army colonel and a major were talking about the large numbers of German troops in Finland. The talk left him worried. He was not too surprised when his wife, who had gone to the theater where she worked, telephoned on Sunday and told him about the war. His wife was going on to a Party meeting.

  Shcheglov sat for a time, trying to decide what to do. It was quiet. The clock ticked monotonously. Probably this is the last quiet moment in a long time, he thought. His daughter came into the room.

  “What shall we do?” she asked.

  By this time his mind was clear. “Go on the same as every day,” he said firmly, little knowing that within ten days he would be signing up for the front in the People’s Volunteers.

  It was different, too, for youngsters like Ivan Kanashin and Andrei Piven in the town of Gryady in the Leningrad region. The two boys found most of their high school graduating class gathered in the central park a little after noon. The whole town was there as well. Grigori Vasilyevich Vol-khonsky, the Soviet deputy, was making a patriotic speech.

  When the talk was over, the youngsters conferred excitedly. What should they do? Where should they go? They were seventeen, too young for the Red Army. But there must be some place. They headed for Malaya Vishera, the nearest larger town. There they were sure they would be able to volunteer. They went to the Communist Youth office. Dozens of youngsters were ahead of them. Only seventeen-year-olds were accepted. Exactly what their duties would be none knew. But Andrei Piven, Kolya Grishin, the best football player in school, Misha Vasilyev and Ivan Kanashin signed up. They were told to go home, collect some clothes, say good-bye and report for duty on Tuesday. Their parents cried, but there were no clouds in the minds of the youngsters. They were off to serve their country.

  The reasons for the doubts, the torment, the hesitations, the mixed mood of so many Leningraders were deeply rooted and profoundly tragic.

  From the moment of its founding by Peter on May 16, 1703, Leningrad, or Petrograd, or St. Petersburg—whatever name it had borne—had been a special city and its people a special people. The character of the northern capital was fully formed long before the 1917 Revolution, and it was this character which gave to that Revolution its essential spirit.

  In St. Petersburg for a hundred years before 1917 the Revolution had been in gestation. The tragic failure of the noble young officers who in 1825 sought to bring the government enlightenment within the framework of czarism by converting it to European parliamentarianism—the ill-fated Decembrist movement—had been the initial effort by the northern capital to propel the Romanovs out of medieval tyranny.

  When the Decembrists failed (and were executed or exiled with their young wives to the most remote and harsh lands of the Empire, east of Irkutsk to the dismal mines of Petrovsky Zavod), their example lived on as an inspiration for generation after generation of Petersburg youth.

  To this was joined the legend of Pushkin, the poet whose Byronesque image became the ideal of Russian youth. Pushkin was a martyr in the same cause. There was hardly a youngster in “Piter” (as they called their northern capital) who did not believe that Czar Nicholas I had a hand in provoking the quarrel which led to Pushkin’s fatal duel and death.

  Decade succeeded decade through the nineteenth century. Each brought to St. Petersburg new martyrs, new revolutionaries, new idols. The roll grew too long to recite—Alexander Herzen, Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Cherny-shevsky, the young men
and women of the Narodnya Volya—the People’s Will. The anarchists, Bakunin, the assassins, young Aleksandr Ulyanov, Lenin’s older brother, the writers, the Dostoyevskys, the Turgenevs, the Chekhovs, the Tolstoys. Not all lived or worked in “Piter.” But they contributed to its spirit.

  The city grew great. It was Russia’s window on the West—the center of the most advanced, the richest, the most cultured, the most revolutionary society of the land and a burgeoning industrial center. Here the new Russian industrial aristocracy had its birth. Here rose the smoky chimneys of the Putilov steel works. Here became established the big foreign entrepreneurs, Siemens and Hals, Thornton, Langesippen, Laferme, Grapp, James Beck, Stieglitz, Maxwell, Frank, Singer Sewing Machine, International Harvester, McCormick.

  On the Nevsky Prospekt, great billboards proclaimed the virtues of the Singer Sewing Machine. The Equitable Life Insurance Company occupied handsome quarters, and nearby were the stores of the Bessels and the brothers Mory.

  It was here that the Academy of Sciences had been founded by Peter and developed by Catherine. Here the flower of Russian science and scholarship —Lomonosov, Mendeleyev, Sechenov and the great Pavlov—had lived and worked.

  St. Petersburg was an imperial city, the Imperial City. It had been created in imperial scope. Its architecture, its buildings echoed this theme. Peter and Catherine and their successors consciously and devotedly sought to erect on the Neva a capital grander than any in the world. In this they in large measure succeeded. The great ensembles, the long promenade of palaces along the Neva embankments, the network of canals and small streams—the Fontanka, the Moika, the Catherine Canal, Nevsky Prospekt and the palaces of the Stroganovs, the Anichkovs, the Engineers Castle, the Tauride Palace, the Champs de Mars, the Summer Gardens, the more distant grandeurs of Peter-hof, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo—all this made “Piter” a magical and remarkable metropolis.

  Yet the capital not only was built on a dismal marsh which had claimed the lives of thousands of the laborers whom Peter assigned to it; it was erected upon the ramshackle, shoddy, cruel foundations of czarist despotism combined with the worst oppressions of the early industrial era. Poverty, starvation, beggary, prostitution, all the diseases of malnutrition and the afflictions of illiteracy marked the slums and the workers’ quarters of the Petrograd side and the Vyborg quarter.

  Out of this breeding ground and the incredible decadence of the court of Nicholas II in its last phases of Rasputin and World War I the Russian Revolution had been born.

  It was born as every Leningrader knew (and took pride in) in Petrograd. It was born of Petrograd suffering, Petrograd spirit, the Petrograd milieu. And it was born, as it were, spontaneously. No one organized it. No one plotted it (although generations of young Russians had plotted revolution for years, they had no hand in this). It took its origin from the despair and rebellion of women, standing in queues at the bread shops, day after day, only to receive no bread. Finally, in March of 1917 (February 26 by the old Russian calendar) these feelings boiled over.

  Within three days the structure of the Russian imperial rule collapsed like a punctured puffball. All that remained was a little dirty powder in the palm of the hand.

  Petrograd was the site and scene of the second revolution—the Bolshevik Revolution. It was to Petrograd that Lenin returned, to the Finland Station, on that April day of 1917 to proclaim his Maximalist demands—revolution, no quarter to the provisional government, all power to the Soviets—the demands which so disturbed, frightened and surprised his home-grown followers like Stalin and Molotov, the young men of the Bolshevik movement who really did not know what Bolshevism was until Lenin had defined it with his quick, dark brush strokes.

  Here Lenin brewed his coup d’état and rode to power over the backs of Kerensky and his provisional moderates, who fell almost as easily as had imperial czardom.

  It was a Petrograd tragedy, still deeply felt by its citizens, that in the hour of desperate German threat in March of 1918 Lenin “temporarily” removed the seat of Soviet Government to Moscow.

  More than twenty years had now passed on this June 22, 1941, and the Soviet capital was still in Moscow. The years had not been easy for Leningrad. Even before Lenin’s death in 1924 the change had begun. With Moscow as the center, the Revolution took on a different tone, a different content. Perhaps this was inevitable. Perhaps it would have happened even if the capital had not been moved to Moscow. But no one in “Piter” felt quite sure of this.

  For the fact was that for two hundred years a struggle for the soul of Russia, for the leadership of the great Slav land, had been in progress.

  On the one side were the Muscovites, dowdy, greedy, rude, vigorous, led by the conservative Orthodox clergy and the grasping Moscow merchant class, the “meshchanstvoy“ the tough, heavy-handed, vodka-drinking families which had risen from the peasantry over the backs of their own kind, conservative, set against change, isolationist, fearing and hating Europe, fearing and hating St. Petersburg, which symbolized for them all that was new, progressive, stylish—and dangerous.

  And on the other side was St. Petersburg, its eyes on the brilliance of Paris and Rome (although its heart might still be on the Volga), its style set by the West, ecumenical, industrial, heavily foreign (French, not Russian, was the language of society), looking down on backward, muddy, dusty Moscow as the back country from which it had sprung, regarding Moscow as the symbol of red ta|>e, backwardness, crudeness, vulgarity, provinciality.

  With the transfer of the capital back to Moscow, Leningrad began to feel the change—and to fear it a little. For two hundred years “Piter” had lorded it over Moscow. Now it was Moscow’s turn.

  And so it proved to be—with a vengeance, the vengeance of a paranoid and dictatorial ruler whose like Russia had not seen since Ivan the Terrible.

  The first signs became evident within a year or two of Lenin’s death—in the sharpening struggle between Stalin and the Old Guard Bolsheviks, among whom was numbered Grigori Zinovyev, the Party boss of Leningrad, one of Lenin’s closest associates, the second or third most influential man in Russia.

  Zinovyev fell in 1927, and Leningrad saw that its fears of Moscow were not without foundation. Still, at first the change was not too great. Stalin was involved in launching the first Five-Year Plan and embarking on the tragic and bloody collectivization of the peasants. Leningrad stood aside from these massive conflicts. Moreover, she had developed a new and brilliant leader, Sergei Kirov, an adherent of Stalin’s but an attractive, able man who was winning the heart of Leningrad and the support of members of the Central Committee who had been frightened and appalled by Stalin’s heavy-handed ruthlessness. Indeed, it was rumored that at the great “Congress of Victors,” the Party Congress in January, 1934, at which the worst troubles of both industrialization and collectivization seemed over, Kirov had gotten more votes than Stalin in the elections to the Central Committee.

  Then on December 1, 1934, occurred an event which was to mutilate life in Leningrad for years to come. On that day a young man named Leonid V. Nikolayev walked into Kirov’s office in Smolny and shot him dead.

  That act unleashed upon Leningrad such terror as the world had not seen since the Paris Commune, and not even then. Thousands were arrested. They were shot or sent to concentration camps, labor camps and so-called “isolator prisons.” They were so numerous that they came in later years to be nicknamed “Kirov’s assassins.” Swept into the net with these Leningraders (the arrests heavily concentrated among young people, intellectuals, anyone who might by remote classification have indicated in the past any lack of sympathy for the regime), of course, was Zinovyev and with him most of the Old Bolshevik opposition to Stalin.

  In fact, the Kirov assassination was the keystone to the terror of the 1930’s. It was on the day of Kirov’s assassination that the secret police were given special powers, never before granted, under which they could sentence and execute by administrative process anyone in the Soviet Union.


  From this assassination flowed the whole regime of terror which bloodied Russia from one end to the other in the ensuing years, continuing up to the start of World War II (although beginning in 1939 a damper was placed on word of arrests—the formality of trial long since had been dispensed with —and many persons, even in Russia, were not quite aware that the purges were continuing).

  Nowhere did the terror strike more harshly than in Leningrad.

  In Leningrad occurred the worst repressions of 1937–38. Hundreds of leading Party members and important officials were wiped out—among them four secretaries of the city and regional Party committees, four chairmen of the city executive, the head of the young Komsomols and dozens of other top Party figures.

  The story of the purge in just one Leningrad factory—the great Red Putilov steel works—has been painstakingly pieced together. The first blows fell on all who had in any manner been connected with the old Zinovyev group. The plant had hardly been rechristened in Kirov’s name before the deputy director, the chief of the Party committee and the foremen of a dozen shops were summarily thrown out of the Party and out of their jobs. In January, 1935, more than 140 persons were dischargéd—and then arrested—on grounds they had some past connection with the czarist regime, with former industrialists, businessmen, shopkeepers or well-to-do farmers. In short order another 700 persons were rounded up under the category of “class enemies.”

  Production declined. Every failure to meet a quota and every mistake was blamed on “enemies of the state,” either already unmasked or about to be unmasked.

  The plant director, Karl Martovich Ots, an honorable man, one of the outstanding industrial executives in the Soviet Union, attempted to maintain some order, to protect his personnel from the waves of arrest and vilification. But it was hopeless. One day a T-28 tank was being checked out for delivery to the army when a bolt was found missing. Demands were made to bring the “enemy saboteurs” to light. Ots knew that the fault lay with a mechanic who had simply forgotten to screw in the bolt. At personal risk, Ots refused to permit a witch hunt. But it was like attempting to hold back the tide with a sand pail. A purge of Party members in the factory was carried out, in which more hundreds vanished.