The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  One day—it was August 27—the office door opened, and Vera Ketlinskaya saw a small, graceful woman wearing a light coat and a coquettish hat under which struggled a mop of curly grayish hair.

  “How do you do!” the woman said. “I’m Vera Inber.”

  She walked across the room, her high heels ringing on the parquet.

  To Vera Ketlinskaya it was like an appearance from Mars. Vera Inber was fifty-three years old and a well-known Moscow poet. Her husband was the distinguished physician, Professor Ilya Davidovich Strashun. What was she doing in Leningrad?

  “My husband and I have come to live in Leningrad,” she said simply. “I don’t know for how long, but at least until spring.”

  Was it possible that this chic, self-possessed woman did not know what she had walked into, did not know that at any moment the Germans might break into the streets of Leningrad, that the city might soon be encircled, indeed might already be within a German ring?

  Vera Ketlinskaya hurriedly cleared the room and began to speak confidentially with Vera Inber.

  “I know all that,” Vera Inber replied. “You see, my husband had a choice —to be chief of a hospital in Archangel or in Leningrad. We decided that since my daughter and granddaughter have been evacuated and since, as a poet, I should in time of war be in the center of events, naturally Leningrad would be much more interesting.”

  “But—” Vera Ketlinskaya interrupted.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Vera Inber continued. “But, first of all, I believe that Leningrad will not give up. And second, well, we are not young. And for the middle-aged to sit in the rear is somehow very shameful.”

  That night Leningrad was put under curfew. Movement in the streets between 10 in the evening and 5 A.M. was forbidden without special pass. And that evening Vera Inber spoke for the first time on the Leningrad radio. She recalled that Alexander Herzen, the nineteenth-century Russian critic, democrat and patriot, once said that “tales of the burning of Moscow, of the Battle of Borodino, of the Berezina Battle, of the fall of Paris, were the fairy stories of my childhood—my Iliad and my Odyssey.” So in these present days, she told her listeners, Russia was creating for future generations new Odysseys, new Iliads.

  In the fortnight during which August imperceptibly blended into September the city never had seemed more beautiful. It stood brooding and grim, Peter’s military city, on guard, under heavy attack, firm, belligerent. Never had there been such an August—hot, dry, summery, a clear sky of distant blue curved like a saucer high over the city, the trees and shrubs flowering magnificently. The great lindens glowed with gold and purple and russet along the wide avenues, under the trees carpets of mushrooms. An ill omen, the babushkas said. Many mushrooms, many deaths. The green lawns and flowerbeds of the parks were crisscrossed with trenches and packed with gun sites.

  Leningrad was preparing to meet the enemy. Catherine’s equestrian Peter no longer reared his mighty chargér on the banks of the Neva. Around the heroic figure were piled layer after layer of sandbags, covered with gray wooden planking. Gone were the Klodt stallions from the Anichkov Bridge, buried in the Summer Gardens and protected by mounds of earth. Only the stone sphinxes with their great paws still guarded the Neva embankment, and the bowed caryatids still shouldered their terrible burdens at the portals of the Hermitage. And the ugly monument to Catherine II stood in all its ugliness in Ostrovsky Square.

  The weather continued hot. Kirov Prospekt, always so clean and sparkling, always washed down each morning just after dawn, always swept each night, now was dusty and dirty. Rubbish was collecting in the gutters. The Prospekt was the grand boulevard that cut across Kamenny Ostrov—stone island. Once it had been Kamenny Ostrov Prospekt, but like so many of Leningrad’s boulevards its name had changed. Thus, Sadovaya (Garden) Boulevard had become Third of July Street. Morsky (Sea), Teatralny (Theater), Ofitsersky (Officer), Millionnaya (Million)—all had been changed. You could almost write a history of Leningrad by chronicling the names of the streets. There was the time early in the 1920’s when Nevsky Prospekt was known as NEPsky—after the NEP men or private traders whom Lenin had brought back under NEP or the New Economic Policy. In those days NEPsky was graced by the fine fish monger, Zolotsev, and the sausage king, Marshan. There was a gambling club on Graf sky (Count) Street, across from the trotters on Troitsky (Trinity). Later Grafsky was changed to Proletarian Street. But always, whatever the changes, the streets seemed to come back to their original names. No one ever got used to calling the Nevsky Twenty-fifth of October Street, and soon it would be officially the Nevsky once again.2

  Day by day long military columns moved through the city, slowly pushing down the boulevards, many made up of broken units, men who had survived one battle and were en route to another which they might not survive. Beside the Karpovka embankment stood a number of dusty carts and horses. Red Army men clambered down to the river with buckets and pans. A crowd of forty or fifty silently watched them.

  The sight of the Red Army men drinking water from the river when there was a tap in every apartment in the city somehow seemed unbelievably grievous.

  Finally someone shouted, “Fellows! What are you drinking that dirty water for? Come around to the courtyard.”

  Aleksandr Shtein had a room at the Astoria Hotel. That was the hostelry where the Germans planned to hold a joint victory dinner with the Finns. Residence in the hotel was controlled by the Leningrad City commandant. Shtein gave the hotel director Shanikhin his order and got the key to a corner room on the mezzanine floor, looking out on the square across from the handsome monument to Nicholas I.

  The Astoria had become headquarters for Soviet war correspondents, for the pilots of the Soviet-produced Douglas DC— 3’s who flew back and forth, low over the fighting lines, usually without fighter cover. Here were the chiefs and technical assistants of big Leningrad factories, awaiting evacuation, representatives of the central ministries, important and not-so-important refugees from the Baltic states. Here were a few ordinary Leningraders and singers like Lydiya Sukharevskaya and Boris Tenin. Here the newspaper Red Star parked its Emka, the battered light car used by the poet, Mikhail Svetlov, and the prose writer, Lev Slavin.

  Shtein looked out on the cast-iron figure of Nicholas I, astride his cast-iron horse, and beyond that to the dark-red granite of the old German consulate. It had flown up to June 21st an enormous Nazi banner which flapped from the roof. It had been broken by angry demonstrators on the second day of the war and not repaired.

  At dusk a maid made the rounds of every room to be certain that the heavy blackout curtains were drawn. If any light showed, Shanikhin was on the spot instantly with his chief assistant, Nina.

  Down the corridor from Shtein came the sound of a husky, bold, coarse voice singing:

  My Marusichka

  Oh,my darling,

  My Marusichka,

  Oh, my sweetheart.

  Shtein had heard the voice and the song before—in the Golden Lion in Tallinn. It was a record by the White Russian cafe singer Leshchenko singing his favorite Paris song, “Marusichka.” Who was playing it? Shtein found the room occupied by a big, bluff submarine commissar, a man who had fought through the Finnish war, the wearer of an Order of Lenin, a man who reminded him of the correspondent Vsevolod Vishnevsky. The commissar was suffering from a light case of tuberculosis and had been sent back from Kronstadt for treatment. He had gotten as far as the Astoria. Where he would go next no one could say. He sat in his room playing “Marusichka.” Then he played “Tatyana”; then “Vanya”; finally, “Masha.” He was indefatigable. So was Leshchenko.

  The commissar had a stock of Leshchenko records and a case of beer. As long as the beer lasted, as long as the records lasted, the commissar sat in his room. Finally, the beer ran out, the phonograph broke. He packed up his things and went back to Kronstadt.

  In the restaurant the band still played. No one had thought of evacuating the musicians. No one had thought of mobilizing them to mi
litary duties. They were incorporated in the ARP squad “without release from production duties.” They played on.

  The restaurant was directed by a lady with a grand manner whom the correspondents called “Lady Astor.” One night when all the rumors were bad S. Abramovich-Black, director of one of the fleet newspapers and the descendant of a long line of Russian and non-Russian naval officers, approached her with all his gallantry and announced: “My cutter is at your service at the pier on Lake Ladoga. I give you my word of honor as an officer, madam, that without you we will not leave. You may go on working in peace.”

  The fact that Abramovich-Black had no cutter and that there was no cutter waiting on Lake Ladoga made no difference.

  The band struck up the “Barcarole.” Everyone felt better.

  German leaflets began to appear in town, scattered from planes by parachute: “Beat the Jews. Beat the Commissars. Their mugs beg to be bashed in. Wait for the full moon. Bayonets in the earth! Surrender!”

  A well-known writer visited Shtein’s next-door neighbor. The writer’s lips were white, his hands shook and somehow he looked obnoxious. He knew that the Germans had launched a new assault on the city and he had read the leaflets. He began to reason with himself aloud: “I have never said anything publicly against Fascism. I never signed any petitions. I’m not a Party man. My mother, it is true, was a Jew, but, on the other hand, my father was from the nobility. I’ve found some papers which verify that.”

  In a three-room de luxe suite lived some young Estonians. One was playing a ukulele. Each had a wine glass, and a bottle of champagne stood on the table. A young girl in a tight sweater was doing a tango with a blond young man. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world. But at dawn they would be parachuted behind the German lines to organize resistance in Estonia.

  Vladimir Gankevich, the Leningrad athlete who was now a Red Army lieutenant, had been given a responsible task by his commander, Colonel Pavlov. The order came from Marshal Voroshilov himself. Gankevich was to go to Murmansk and inspect the Fourteenth Army preparations for ski operations, which would commence once the snow had fallen. On the morning of August 29 Gankevich kissed his sweetheart, Galya, good-bye at the Moscow station. The hubbub was overwhelming. He heard a woman crying, “Senushka, what will happen to you? And to me? God help us! You are abandoning your home and going God knows where!”

  Gankevich looked from the window as the train pulled out and saw mostly men in uniform. Some had handkerchiefs at their eyes. Most of the passengers were women and children, part of the hasty new effort to evacuate from Leningrad those not necessary for the city’s defense.

  Across the compartment sat a youngster, eight or nine years old. His mother was crying. The youngster said, “Don’t cry! We’ll beat the Germans and soon be back with Papa. Did you see the gun he was carrying?”

  Gankevich turned to a woman beside him and asked where she was going.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The evacuation has begun. All those with children are supposed to leave Leningrad—for somewhere in the Urals.”

  Suddenly a youngster named Volodya shouted, “Look at the balloons. Look, Mama! So many!”

  Gankevich looked, too. To his amazement he saw German paratroops descending in a broad meadow near the railroad tracks. He heard the heavy thump of antiaircraft guns and saw the Germans begin to form up at the far edge of the field.

  The train picked up speed and roared down the tracks past a small station without stopping. Gankevich got just a glimpse of the name: Mga.

  An army captain quieted the passengers. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “Nothing dangerous about that. The Germans will all be wiped out before we get to Volkhov.”

  He walked from compartment to compartment, joking with the children. Finally he slid into the seat beside Gankevich.

  “Do you have some tobacco?” he asked pleasantly, then whispered, “You understand what’s happened? The Germans have captured Mga. Connections with Leningrad have been broken.”

  Aleksandr Rozen, the war correspondent, made his weary way into Leningrad. He had been with the 70th Division at Medved during the exciting days in July when they roughed up Manstein’s 56th Panzers at Soltsy. He was wounded in the savage Nazi assault which broke the division and sent it reeling back toward Leningrad. Sent to Novgorod, the day the city was falling to the Germans, he wandered through the city’s ancient Kremlin, older than Moscow’s, through echoing corridors, empty rooms, the abandoned headquarters of the Soviet command, which had already evacuated the city.

  Painfully, he had made his way north, stage by stage, seeking the remnants of the division, remnants which constantly eluded him. Valdai, Kuzhenkino, Bologoye, Uglovka, Borovichi, Khvoinaya. At each ancient Russian village he was a little late. Finally, at Khvoinaya a commandant—against strictest orders—put him on a hospital train for Leningrad. The old engine pulled the train through one station after another, all in ruins. He saw smashed trains lying on sidings, stations burning, towns leveled.

  The train passed through a little station—Mga. Rozen had never heard the name before. Soon he was at Obukhovo on Leningrad’s outskirts. One more stop, then the Leningrad freight station.

  At headquarters he inquired about the 70th Division. It was in bits— one unit fighting at Lisino-Korpus, another near Tosno, a third at Ushaki. He hunted out the commanders. Fedyunin was dead. Krasnov was in the hospital. Not a man remained of Krasnov’s regiment. Colonel Podlutsky of the artillery unit was heavily wounded—in the hospital. He had led his detachment out of encirclement 125 miles behind the German lines.

  Rozen walked out of the hospital down Engineers Street and turned into the Sadovaya. He went slowly, not hurrying. Strangely, his spirits had begun to lift as he walked down Leningrad’s boulevards. It seemed to him that he had already survived the worst, that Leningrad would stand, that Leningrad would survive, that Leningrad would conquer death.

  He walked on down the street to the offices of the newspaper, On Guard of the Fatherland, for which he had written during the winter war with Finland. He met Editorial Chief Litvinov and asked what he could do to be useful. Litvinov thought for a moment.

  “I think I’d like to have you go over to Lake Ladoga and interview the chief of the Ladoga flotilla.”

  Rozen couldn’t understand. Why should he go to Lake Ladoga? The battle was being fought at Pushkin, at Kolpino.

  “Well,” said Litvinov, “you see, railroad connections between Leningrad and the rest of the country have been cut.”

  Mga . . . Rozen’s hospital train had been the last to go through the little station.

  The Leningrad Public Library had shipped off 360,000 of its most priceless items (out of a collection of 9,000,000). Voltaire’s Library, the Pushkin archives and the incunabula had gone off in July. Now the attic had been filled with sand and the most precious remaining books were removed to the cellars. The main reading room was closed, and a smaller room on the first floor was opened for 150 readers. The card catalogue, the information bureau, the print collections, had been put in the subbasement, and many treasures had been transferred to the gloomy subterranean galleries of the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Alexander Nevsky catacombs.

  Some fifty-two boxes of treasures from the great Pushkin palaces of Catherine and Alexander had been shipped out before the Germans swept in. The valuables of the Russian Museum were sent to Gorky and then, to the horror of Director P. K. Baltun, on to Perm by river barge.

  During the second half of July most of the animals in the Zoological Gardens had been evacuated. So had the Lenfilm studios, the scientific institutes of the Academy of Science and other institutes, totaling ninety-two in all.

  Most of the great artistic ensembles had now left Leningrad. The Philharmonic and the Pushkin Drama Theater went to Novosibirsk, the Conservatory to Tashkent, the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet to Perm, the Maly Opera to Orenburg. Two great trains, on July 1 and July 20, had carried off the treasures of the Hermitage and a third was
being prepared.

  Director Orbeli had fifty tons of shavings and three tons of cotton wadding in which to pack the first two trainloads. But for the third he had nothing but wood for boxes. By August 30 he had packed 350 boxes. Work was starting on the 351st when the order came through to halt. The Germans it seemed, had captured Mga, a little station on the last railroad linking Leningrad with mainland Russia. Perhaps it would soon be recovered. Meanwhile, hold up on the packing. The boxes stayed for a time in the main vestibule of the Hermitage. Just outside, the lindens had begun to turn yellow, but their leaves did not fall. The days were so sunny. It was still as warm as midsummer with nights that were calm, clear, moonlit.

  * * *

  1 For many years Shvarts and Nikolai M. Oleinikov had edited a children’s magazine called Chizh i Yezh. Oleinikov had been a Party member since the first days of the Revolution. He was arrested and executed in 1937 as an “enemy of the people.” Shvarts was so shaken he was unable to write for several years.

  2 The change was made January 15, 1944.

  26 ♦ Will the City Be Abandoned?

  ADMIRAL KUZNETSOV ARRIVED IN LENINGRAD SHORTLY before the fall of Mga. He does not give the exact date of his departure from Moscow in his memoirs, but it must have been August 27, and he arrived in Leningrad on August 28. Kuznetsov says he originally planned to go to Leningrad somewhat earlier but that “I was summoned by Stalin on some question or another at the end of August” and was then dispatched to Leningrad with what he calls “responsible representatives of the Stavka,” as part of a special commission representing the Central Committee of the Party and the State Defense Committee. At no point in his wordy memoirs does Kuznetsov name those “responsible representatives.” The only name he mentions is that of Marshal Voronov, who left nearly a week earlier.

  This is not accidental. The fact is that the “responsible representatives” were none other than two members of the State Defense Committee, Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Georgi M. Malenkov.