The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The pace of arrests slackened a bit in 1936, then resumed with a rush in 1937. Into the maw vanished Ots, who had just been named to head the great Izhorsk factory and for whom a gleaming tablet of honor had been erected in the reception room of the Kirov plant. Along with him went his successor at the Kirov works, M. Ye. Ter-Asaturov, the heads of the bookkeeping department, the tank production units, the personnel department, the machine-tool shop and dozens of others. Not to mention former Kirov plant workers who had risen to high government and Party posts—the Mayor of Leningrad, Aleksei Petrovsky; the secretary of the Neva Party region and the Novosibirsk Party secretary, Ivan Alekseyev.

  Most of the chiefs of big industrial organizations were shot, among them Ots, Ter-Asaturov, and I. F. Antyukhin, head of the Power Trust. Almost every Leningrad industry lost its director and most of its top personnel. The Leningrad military command was wiped out with the execution of the District Commander, General P. Ye. Dybenko, and the commander of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral A. K. Sivkov.

  A new Party leadership was installed and Zhdanov was brought in from Nizhni-Novgorod (now Gorky) for that purpose. Zhdanov, a powerful, ambitious man, never won the love of Leningrad, but by the outbreak of World War II he had stamped his mark on the city and was to impress it even more indelibly as the war went on.

  Not only did the purges start in Leningrad. It was in Leningrad that they were given their characteristic leitmotiv of macabre paranoia. For, as was obvious even at the time, long suspected by Leningraders, and confirmed after Stalin’s death, the assassination of Kirov was not the act of a single disgruntled, deranged individual. There was something very, very peculiar about the murder. It was, in fact, inspired or contrived by Stalin himself. The murder was arranged by Stalin’s own police, and among the first victims of the post-assassination purge were the police officers who had a hand in setting up the situation which made Kirov’s killing possible.

  It was this circumstance—the impelling evidence that Moscow now had ascendancy over Leningrad; the tangible clues of a persisting fear, if not hatred, of Leningrad on the part of Stalin; the general atmosphere of terror, banality and vulgarity which had been brought to the Soviet scene by Stalin —which created in Leningrad at the outbreak of war an atmosphere of unusual inwardness and self-examination.

  There were few Leningraders of intellectual capacity who would not have viewed the overthrow of Stalin with emotions ranging from grim satisfaction to unrestrained delight. But few were so unsophisticated as to suppose they would be confronted with a simple choice. The alternative of Hitler— even though they had not yet experienced directly the horrors of Nazism— was not really a viable alternative to the horror of Stalin.

  With occasional exceptions, therefore, it could be predicted on June 22 that Leningrad and the Leningraders would close ranks and defend their great city with the patriotism and love which had always been their strongest characteristic.

  It was, after all, their city and their Russia, and for those of revolutionary spirit it was their Revolution—not Stalin’s. Leningrad was steadfast. As their greatest poetess, Anna Akhmatova, had written in a time of incredible tragedy only a year or so before:

  No, I lived not under foreign skies,

  Sheltering under foreign wings:

  I then stayed with my people,

  There where my people, unhappily, were.

  Leningrad would, when all was said and done, fight—fight to the best of its capacity and hope that victory might bring a better day.

  This, quite naturally, was the mood of Iosif Orbeli, director of the Hermitage, that Sunday afternoon. He slammed the door of his office and chargéd up the staircase to the long corridor that flanked the galleries. He strode forward, looking to neither one side nor the other. But he was on no urgent mission; he was simply working off anger. He had telephoned the Committee on Arts in Moscow half a dozen times in the past two hours, trying to get instructions, or clearance to go ahead with the evacuation of the Hermitage. That it must be evacuated he had no doubt. Already German bombers had attacked a dozen cities. At any moment they might appear over Leningrad. He stopped a moment and looked out across the Neva. He saw beyond the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress a fat gray sausage—one of the first antiaircraft balloons rising into the air. Orbeli made up his mind. He told the guards to close the museum halls and admit no more visitors. Then he went to his office and summoned his colleagues. Moscow hadn’t called yet. All right. He would go ahead without Moscow. Forty of the most precious treasures—the Leonardo da Vincis, Raphaels, Rembrandts and Rubenses—would be taken from the walls and carried down to stone vaults in the cellars. Plans would be made for evacuation. If it wasn’t possible to begin packing this afternoon, then the work must start first thing Monday morning.

  Suddenly he looked at the calendar. It still showed Saturday’s date. Mechanically, he tore off the Saturday sheet. The new date, Sunday, June 22, appeared.

  Orbeli looked up. A thought had come to him: “Napoleon, if I’m not mistaken, attacked Russia also in June—was it the twenty-fourth of June?”

  The thought of Napoleon changed Orbeli’s mood. He smiled, looking a bit like Mephistopheles when he did so. Napoleon and now Hitler. Not a bad precedent to bear in mind.

  PART II

  The Summer War

  Beat, heart!

  Hammer away—no matter how tired.

  Listen!

  The city has sworn that the enemy will not enter.

  13 ♦ The Dark Days

  THE FIRST DAYS OF WAR SET IN TRAIN A DEADLY SEQUENCE of events within the Kremlin. Two men shared primary responsibility for the catastrophe which struck Russia—losif Stalin and his Leningrad lieutenant, the man whom most believed he had chosen as his successor, Andrei Zhdanov.

  It was Stalin who had held his country on the path of collaboration with Nazi Germany, who had refused to believe on the war’s eve that Hitler would betray him and who was confident down to the last hours that, if Germany was bent on attack, some way out could be found, even if a huge price had to be paid.

  It was Zhdanov who had been the architect of Stalin’s policy vis-à-vis Germany, the man who had conceived the idea of opening a diplomatic initiative with Germany, the man who had said again and again, after the outbreak of war in 1939, that Germany “cannot and will not fight on two fronts.”

  Now the Nazi attack sent Stalin into a state of psychic collapse which verged on a nervous breakdown. He was confined to his room, unable or unwilling to participate in affairs of state. And Zhdanov was neither in Leningrad nor in Moscow; he was on vacation in the Crimea. For days the great Soviet state was virtually leaderless, drifting like a rudderless dreadnought without a pilot, in the face of mortal danger.

  Zhdanov’s responsibility for the crisis was deep. It was he who had first publicly sounded a note of skepticism over the possibility of Russia’s reaching agreement with England and France on the eve of war in 1939. It was he who wrote and published in Pravda on June 29, 1939, an article in which he expressed what he described as his “personal views” that England and France were not serious about an alliance with Russia, that they were engaged in a maneuver to entrap Russia into war with Hitler. He conceded that “some of my friends” disagreed with this assessment but added that he would attempt to prove its validity.

  The fact that Zhdanov had been named by Stalin to be chairman of the Party Central Committee Department of Propaganda and Agitation and was, of course, generally known to be Stalin’s heir apparent left no doubt as to the significance of the article. It was a warning to the West that Russia might look elsewhere for arrangements to guarantee her security and was so interpreted by the Germans, already deep in preliminary conversations with the Russians. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact on August 23, 1939, Zhdanov emerged as the author of the new Soviet policy of alignment with Germany. Diplomats in Moscow called him the “architect” and Molotov the “builder” of the German-Soviet treaty.

  The exact nature
of the divisions within Stalin’s Politburo over the German pact has never been revealed. That there were differences was never doubted and, indeed, was explicit in the wording of Zhdanov’s article of June 29, 1939.

  The Politburo under Stalin (and after him) was the scene of acute rivalries, tensions and ambitions. Zhdanov was the rising star, but there were other men of great power and skill in intrigue. There was Beria, the police chief, who was busy completing the “purge of the purgers"—the liquidation of the old police apparatus which had carried out the final phase of Stalin’s mad repression of the 1930’s, the so-called “Y ezhovshchina” Beria had come up to Moscow from Stalin’s native Georgia in December, 1938, after a decade as chief of politics and police in his native Caucasus. Now he was bidding for broader powers and already had deeply involved himself with foreign affairs. One of his closest lieutenants, Dekanozov, had been installed as First Vice Commissar of Foreign Affairs under Molotov, and in November, 1940, Dekanozov was sent to Berlin as Soviet Ambassador, there to remain during the last fatal months. Another Beria lieutenant, Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the infamous prosecutor of the purge trials, had also been placed in the Foreign Commissariat as deputy to Molotov.

  There was another powerful contender for influence within the Politburo. He was Georgi M. Malenkov, then the newest of Stalin’s secretaries, a daring young man who was being set into very rapid orbit by Stalin. Malenkov, too, was deeply involved in the new German policy.

  In political prestige Zhdanov held many advantages over Beria and Malenkov. He had occupied a high Party post since December, 1934, when he was summoned from the comparative obscurity of provincial Nizhni-Novgorod on the Volga to take over leadership of Leningrad after Kirov’s assassination. Zhdanov was Stalin’s choice to bring stability and order to the city of the Revolution’s birth, a city and a milieu which Stalin found difficult, unfamiliar and dangerous.

  Stalin’s relationship to Leningrad was anomalous. While he had lived in Petrograd and St. Petersburg, as an underground Bolshevik and briefly as a very junior editor of Pravda before World War I, he never visited it between the time of Lenin’s death in 1924 and that of Kirov in 1934. Actually, Stalin rarely left Moscow for any reason except for vacations to the Crimea or Sochi. He made one trip to Siberia during the 1920’s. He visited his native Georgia two or three times, principally to see his mother. Aside from these excursions he usually kept to a narrow path that led from the Kremlin to his dacha on the Mozhaisk Chaussée and back again.

  There were many who thought that Stalin felt that the northern city might challenge, and perhaps had already challenged, his power. Possibly a lurking feeling of inferiority toward Leningrad’s superior culture and vivid revolutionary tradition may have played a role in Stalin’s attitude toward that city.

  Zhdanov had built himself into Stalin’s confidence in his six or seven years in Leningrad. He not only was unchallenged in Leningrad; he was extraordinarily close to Stalin. He often spent weeks at a time in Moscow or accompanying Stalin on extended stays in the Crimea or in Sochi. Stalin seemed to like Zhdanov and the Zhdanov family and even entertained hopes for a closer association—ultimately fulfilled when his daughter, Svetlana, married Zhdanov’s son, Yuri.

  Zhdanov played a special role with Stalin in the launching of the most savage of the purges of the 1930’s. Khrushchev made public in his secret speech of 1956 a telegram dispatched over the names of Stalin and Zhdanov from Sochi September 25, 1936, to the other members of the Politburo in Moscow.

  The telegram said:

  We deem it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be nominated to the post of People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs. Yagoda [the police chief who carried out the earlier phase of the purge] has definitely proved himself to be incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite-Zinov-yev bloc. The OGPU is four years behind in this matter. This is noted by all Party workers and by the majority of the representatives of the NKVD.

  Khrushchev’s implication was explicit. Zhdanov shared with Stalin full responsibility for launching the worst of the purges—the Yezhovshchina.

  Zhdanov was a dark-haired man with brown eyes and, in his early years, considerable physical attraction. But as with many Soviet functionaries the ceaseless hours of work (often at night because of Stalin’s habit of keeping late evening hours), the lack of physical exercise, the multitude of ceremonial banquets took their toll. By the eve of the war Zhdanov was overweight, pasty-faced and prey to severe asthmatic attacks. He was a chain smoker, lighting one Belomor after the other until the pepelnitsa on his desk was cluttered with stubs. He was forty-five years old and had come a long, long way from his boyhood in Mariupol on the Black Sea shores. Like many prewar Bolsheviks his background was bourgeois. His father was an inspector of schools and possibly a member of the “white” or secular Orthodox clergy.

  Zhdanov’s preoccupation with foreign affairs dated from 1938, when he became head of the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Commission. He had watched the events of the 1930’s with concern. He was acutely aware of the threat which Hitler posed. But he was also confident that a policy could be devised which would avert that threat—at least for a time.

  Speaking with Admiral Kuznetsov during a long trip which the two made to the Soviet Far East between March 28, 1939, and April 26, 1939—at a time when the air was filled with repercussions of Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia and his occupation of Memel—Zhdanov expressed conviction that Europe was headed for war. He said that he doubted that “such a fatal turn of events” could be avoided.

  Admiral Kuznetsov, who shared this opinion, was alarmed. The Soviet Union was just embarking on a very ambitious long-term program of naval construction. Would there be time to complete it if events were hurrying toward so fateful a conclusion?

  “The program will be completed,” Zhdanov said firmly.

  Kuznetsov (unknown to himself, he was being sized up by Zhdanov, who was soon to recommend to Stalin that the Admiral be named Navy Commissar) formed a favorable opinion of Zhdanov during the long train journey. The two spent hours, sitting in their compartment, gazing out as the Siberian taiga flowed past, discussing politics and personalities. Kuznetsov had headed the Soviet naval mission to the Spanish Republicans during the Civil War. There was talk about Spain and of men whom Kuznetsov had known well there—Marshal Kirill Meretskov, Marshal N. N. Voronov, General D. G. Pavlov and others. Zhdanov was a font of questions concerning naval commanders. Kuznetsov spoke his mind freely and frankly. The two men were delighted to find that in most instances their views coincided. Occasionally, however, a chill came into the conversation—or so it seemed to Kuznetsov as he looked back twenty-five years later. Once Zhdanov casually remarked that he had never dreamed that Admiral M. V. Viktorov, former fleet commander in the Baltic and the Pacific, could be “an enemy of the people.” The names of other naval “enemies of the people” swam in and out of the conversation. Judging by his tone of voice, Kuznetsov recalled, Zhdanov’s feeling in these matters was one of surprise. Certainly there was no hint of skepticism or disbelief.

  Zhdanov spoke little of himself. As the train crossed the long bridge over the Kama River at Perm, he remarked that he had fought over this territory in the Civil War days and had started his Party work in this region.

  “In general,” he remarked, “I am more of a river man than a seaman. But I love ships and enjoy naval affairs.”

  At the end of July, 1939, almost on the eve of war and of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Zhdanov accepted Admiral Kuznetsov’s invitation to join him on a brief cruise in the Baltic. They boarded a cruiser at Kronstadt and headed out to sea. Kuznetsov drew to Zhdanov’s attention the fact that they could not go a hundred miles without threading their way through Baltic islands—Seiskari, Lavansaari, Gogland—all belonging to Finland, all potential enemy bases in event of war, all in a position to observe the slightest move by the Leningrad fleet. The next day they sailed past Tallinn and Helsinki, two great ports long linked to the glory of Russian naval p
ower, now both in other hands, Estonian and Finnish. Two senior commanders who had served in the Imperial Navy in World War I, L. M. Galler and N. N. Nesvitsky, pointed out to Zhdanov the area in which mine fields had been laid down in 1914, from the island of Naissaar off Estonia to the Porkkala peninsula in Finland, to bar German access to the Russian bases at Kronstadt.

  The talk with Zhdanov centered not on ancient history, however, but on the problems which would confront the Baltic Fleet in event of war. The Baltic Fleet was Russia’s strongest. But how could it get to sea? Even when the ships were at anchor at Kronstadt, they lay under direct observation from the Finnish shore near Sestroretsk. A man with a pair of binoculars could see exactly which ships were at harbor, when they were preparing to go to sea and when and if they returned. What would happen if war should come?

  The admirals and Zhdanov may well have talked about the possibility of coercing Finland, by military threat or diplomatic maneuver, into making concessions which would increase the security of the chief Russian naval base, Kronstadt, and the chief Russian fleet, the Baltic.

  There is no record of such conversations. But the topic must have come to mind. The admirals were showing Zhdanov the kind of protective barriers the czarist Imperial Navy possessed. They would hardly have been human had they not suggested that the time was at hand when the Soviet Union must have similar protection for the Soviet fleet.

  It seems logical to suppose that the genesis of the winter war with Finland, which lay only a few months distant, can be found in this pleasant summer cruise in the wooded islands and blue waters of the Gulf of Finland. For Zhdanov was destined to play the leading role in that war. If he was not the inspirer of the policy which led to hostilities with Finland, he was the man who was chargéd with the ill-fated effort to carry it out, using the local forces of his Leningrad Military District.