The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The “agent’s report” bears a striking resemblance to the events of February, 1917, when women in Petrograd, tired, angry and cold from standing day after day in the lengthening bread lines, began to demonstrate, touching off the revolution which brought down Czar Nicholas II.

  The efforts of the German agents (if any) to produce in the leaden streets of Leningrad in January of 1942 a re-enactment of the events of 1917 did not succeed. But Andrei Zhdanov and the Leningrad leadership took the threat with grim seriousness despite their knowledge that Leningraders by this time hated the Germans with passion. (Desertions had long since ceased because the Russians had learned too much concerning Nazi treatment of prisoners and the occupied villages.)

  The “open city” agitation obviously went a good deal further than letters to the Soviet authorities. It was a subject of conversation, if nothing more, among Soviet citizens. Special propaganda detachments were sent into many regions of the city to counteract this and other threatening or hostile moods of the populace.5

  The city became quieter as its suffering grew. There were no Nazi bombing raids, less frequent shelling.

  “The Hitlerites are confident,” Yelizaveta Sharypina wrote, “that hunger will break the resistance of the Leningraders. Why waste bombs and shells?”

  There came to her mind a line from a poem by Nekrasov:

  In the world there is a czar

  And that czar is without mercy—

  Hunger is what they call him.

  * * *

  1 The size of the Leningrad police force can only be guessed at. In the summer of 1941 the police street patrol force (exclusive of traffic police and men in stationhouses) numbered 1,200. (Skilyagin, Dela i Lyudi, p. 247.)

  2 The date is given incorrectly as January 17 by Chakovsky (pp. 62-63). The text of Popkov’s remarks was published in Leningradskaya Pravda January 13.

  3 Pavlov, op. cit., 2nd edition, p. 147. The figure is given as 36 trainloads by N. A. Manakov. (Voprosy Istorii, No. 5, May, 1967, p. 17.)

  4 Kochetov heard of something like this in September.

  5 There is some reason to believe that the “open city” proposals did not, as the Soviet historians insist, originate with German agents. The basic account presented by A. V. Karasev in his authoritative Leningradtsy v Gody Blokady is followed almost word for word in the official war history of Leningrad, a sign that security considerations are involved. Karasev cites a Leningrad propaganda work, published in 1942, to explain the “open city” agitation, another source of doubt. There is no indication from German sources that such an “open city” maneuver was undertaken in January, 1942. The Nazi line then was to starve Leningrad into oblivion and to reject any “open city” proposal that might emanate from the Soviet side. (Karasev, pp. 120, 204, 205; Leningrad v VOV, p. 214.) The flat assertion by D. V. Pavlov that not one of the thousands of letters received by the Party committee during the blockade expressed any despondency, bitterness or opinions differing from those of the majority of the city’s defenders is obviously inexact. (Pavlov, op. cit., 2nd edition, p. 142.) A letter written by a professor from his deathbed at the Astoria Hotel in late January, 1942, to Andrei Zhdanov clearly indicates that many Leningraders blamed him and the Party for the city’s plight. The professor went out of his way to exempt Zhdanov for responsibility for the Leningrad tragedy. The implication was clear that others, in contrast, did hold Zhdanov responsible. (P. L. Korzinkin, V Redaktsiyu Ne Vernulsya, Moscow, 1964, p. 264.)

  42 ♦ The City of Ice

  WHEN THE WRITER LEV USPENSKY WENT TO RADIO HOUSE one winter day, he was puzzled to find in the cold studio a curious wooden device, a kind of short-handled rake without teeth, shaped like a letter T. The director, Y. L. Babushkin, told him it was a support to enable him to read at the microphone if he was too weak to stand.

  “And you must read,” the director said. “In thousands of apartments they are awaiting your voice. Your voice may save them.”

  The wooden T was not just a gadget. Vladimir Volzhenin, the poet, had collapsed in the studio from hunger after reading his verses to the Leningrad public. He died a few days after being evacuated to Yaroslavl. Aleksandr Yankevich, his face black, and breathing with difficulty, read Makarenko’s “Pedagogical Poem” over the radio, although he was so ill that Babushkin quietly stood by to “double” in case Yankevich was unable to finish. Ivan Lapshonkov sang a role in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden for Radio Leningrad. He was so frail he had to support himself with a cane. By nightfall he was dead. Vsevolod Rimsky-Korsakov, a nephew of the great composer, did fire-watching duty on the roof of the seven-story Radio House. One January night he stood his post, as fires blazed up on the Leningrad skyline, talking with a friend about the Victory Day which he was sure would come. Before morning he was dead.

  By January the life of Radio House centered in a long room on the fourth floor that looked a bit like the steerage of an emigrant ship or, as Aleksandr Kron thought, like a gypsy tent. There were cots and couches, office desks and wooden packing boxes, stacks of newspapers, files, and always twenty or thirty people—a youngster with a lock falling across his forehead bent over a desk, patiently writing; a middle-aged woman with signs of tears on her face, pecking at a typewriter; people sleeping where they had collapsed; a five-year-old girl asleep with a doll clutched in her hand. There were two small stoves in the room on which people cooked meals and heated water. Here a thin girl with a white bodice and padded army jacket was washing her long hair. Next to her a bleached blonde was reading sentimental verses. When the cold, bombardment and hunger were at their worst, microphones were set up in this room to spare weakened people the exertion of climbing the stairs. Anything to keep the radio going, to keep the rhythm of the city’s pulse, the tick of the metronome sounding in the loudspeakers set up in the streets and in almost every apartment and office of the city.1 Radio House was never hit by bombs, although adjacent buildings were badly damaged in September.

  On January 8, 1942, the radio, in most areas of Leningrad, fell silent. There was no power for transmission. People from all ends of the city began to appear at Radio House, to ask what the matter was and when the station would be back on the air. An old man tottered in from Vasilevsky Island, a cane in each hand. “Look here,” he said, “if something is needed, if it is a matter of courage—fine. Or even if it is a matter of cutting the ration. That we can take. But let the radio speak. Without that, life is too terrible. Without that, it is like lying in the grave. Exactly like that.”

  It was two days later, on January 10, that Olga Berggolts sat in the Radio Committee room (she thought it looked like a great long wagon). As always, it was filled with people, some working, some sleeping and one, a newspaperman named Pravdich, who seemed to be neither breathing nor moving. In the morning, as some had suspected hours earlier, it was discovered that he was dead.

  Olga Berggolts remembered this evening as one of the happiest of her life. She and several colleagues, the artistic director of the Radio Committee, Y. L. Babushkin, the leader of the Literary Department, G. Makogonenko, among them, spent the night working on plans for a book they had decided to publish. It would be called “Leningrad Speaking . . .” It would tell the story of Leningrad, of its people, of its intelligentsia, in the struggle to overcome the Germans—the whole story, the Nazi attack, the suffering, the sacrifices and the ultimate victory. Of victory they had no doubt as they talked beside the tiny flickering lamp, shaded by a newspaper from their sleeping colleagues.

  “Will we really live to see the day?” asked Babushkin. “You know I wildly want to live and see how it is all going to come out.”

  He smiled and laughed, his eyes sparkling with impatience, and Olga Berggolts quickly said, “Of course, you will live, Yasha. Naturally. We will all live.”

  But she saw that Babushkin was very weak. For a long time he had been bloated and green and could climb the stairs only with difficulty. He slept less and less and worked more and more. There was no way to get
him to conserve his strength. He smiled at her reply, closing his eyes, and im mediately became very, very old. His friends did not believe Babushkin would survive the winter, but he did—only to be killed at the front, fighting as an infantryman in 1944 near Narva in the final battles to liquidate the Leningrad blockade.

  But that night in January no one knew what the future held; everything went into the plan for the book: the gardens of the future city, the performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (no one knew that Shostakovich had already finished work on it, and, of course, the Radio Committee orchestra was almost nonexistent).

  Not many mornings later Yasha Babushkin was dictating to Olga Berggolts the regular weekly report on the condition of the orchestra (“The first violin is dying, the drummer died on the way to work, the French horn is near death”).

  The radio, in the belief of those who worked on it and those who lived through the Leningrad blockade, was what kept the city alive when there was no food, no heat, no light and practically no hope.

  “Not a theater, not a cinema was open,” Olga Berggolts recalled. “Most Leningraders did not even have the strength to read at home. I think that never before nor ever in the future will people listen to poetry as did Leningrad in that winter—hungry, swollen and hardly living.”

  Aleksandr Kron, the naval writer, felt that the winter of 1941–42 blazed with intellectual incandescence. Never had people talked so much and so openly, never had they argued so strongly, as during long evenings around the little temporary stoves by the light of flickering lanterns. Even in the fleet Kron found sailors studying art, music and philosophy. Thousands of soldiers read War and Peace. On one submarine frozen in the Neva the whole command devoured Dostoyevsky’s works in the course of the winter.

  The book Leningrad Speaking never was published, but it kept the circle at Radio House alive. It captured their imagination. It made difficult days pass more swiftly. But it was never published. No explanation for this is offered by Olga Berggolts and her Radio Committee associates. Presumably it fell afoul of the same censorship, the same repressive bureaucracy, that affected so many projects launched with joy and hope in besieged Leningrad.

  Vera Ketlinskaya and her friends of the Writers Union conceived the idea for a book to be called One Day—one day in the life of Leningrad under siege. Leonid Rakhmanov, V. Orlov and Yevgeny Ryss were among the writers who worked with her. They were imitating a scheme Maxim Gorky had proposed in the 1930’s for a book—twenty-four hours in the life of the Soviet Union. It was Vera Ketlinskaya’s idea to present twenty-four hours in the life of Leningrad, in all the regions of the city, the front, the rear, the factories, the ARP units, the fire brigade, the bakers, the scientific institutions, the artistic organizations. There would be a section on the High Command and one on the little sewing shops where they made cotton-padded jackets for the troops.

  Every day writers came to the Writers Union offices in the old stone house on Ulitsa Voinova, their faces puffy with hunger and sleeplessness, and asked, “When will we be doing One Day? Let me know because I am ready to go anywhere you send me.” But Ketlinskaya couldn’t get clearance from the higher authorities. Once while she was talking by telephone to one of the Leningrad bosses Yevgeny Shvarts was in the office. He could not restrain himself. “Tell him that writers are dying without this work, that they cannot live without it.”

  Ketlinskaya knew this. Living in the cold, hungry, dark city, people held themselves together by the consciousness of being needed. They began to die when they had nothing to do. Nothing-to-do was more terrible than a bombing raid.

  But try as she would she could not get permission for the book. She became convinced that though no one really opposed the book, no one wanted to take responsibility for approving it; the old Russian problem: bureaucracy. Finally, toward the end of December clearance came through. But by this time many of the writers were dead, the city was frozen and lifeless, and the writers still alive were almost too weak to work. The project was never carried out.

  Rakhmanov called the failure of this project, which he blamed on “bureaucrats and reinsurers,” sheer tragedy—not because the book would not be published but because collapse of the project brought down with it so many talented Leningrad writers, deprived of hope on which to live.

  Rakhmanov had thrown his time and energy into the idea of One Day in the Life of Leningrad. He himself might not have survived had not another project been advanced just as One Day died. This was a new magazine, to be called Literary Contemporary. The magazine originally had been planned in the summer of 1941, but the editor, Filipp Knyazev, was killed in the fighting at Tallinn. Now Rakhmanov was named to head the magazine and by mid-January had material ready for his first two issues and was working on the third. But within a month he saw his latest dream go glimmering. At a moment when Leningradskaya Fravda was appearing in one single gray page, when old established magazines like Krasnaya Nov in Moscow had been suspended, no bureaucrat was going to approve the publication of a new, untested, uncertain journal.

  But it would take more than censorship, more than bureaucracy, more than lack of paper, to stifle the spirit of Leningrad. Posters went up in the city—two or three, at any rate:

  A Half-Year of the Great Fatherland War

  January 11, 1942, Sunday

  Literary-Artistic Morning

  Beginning at 1:30 P.M.

  Writers, Scientists, Composers, Artists—On the Fatherland War

  Collection for the Defense Fund

  Sunday, January 11, was sunny but very cold. The meeting was at the Academic Chapel at the Pevchesky Bridge, catty-cornered from the Winter Palace. It was as cold within the white, gold and red-velvet little hall as it was outside. The audience gathered slowly, wearing heavy coats, fur collars and felt boots. Probably not many recalled the occasion when Vladimir Mayakovsky had recited in the same hall years before. It was so hot that day that Mayakovsky had to pull off his jacket and sling it over the back of his chair.

  To the platform slowly walked an elderly man in a coat that reached almost to his ankles. He began to talk in a weak voice that could hardly be heard. Slowly his voice began to strengthen. The speaker was Professor L. A. Ilyin, chief architect of Leningrad. He apologized for being late. He said that he had tried to save his strength by taking the shortest route in walking to the chapel on this cold Sunday, but Leningrad looked too beautiful in the sunshine and snow. He could not tear himself away from the marvelous boulevards and the grandiose architectural ensembles. As he talked on, Rakhmanov was struck by the thought that if the beauty of Leningrad could inspire such feeling, then truly the city was immortal. The city was immortal—but its people? Vsevolod Vishnevsky made a typical comment: “A beautiful city. I am happy that I am in Leningrad at my post and doing my job.”

  One February day Vissarion Sayanov was walking again on the Nevsky. Not much resemblance to those magic lines of Pushkin: “The sleighs race down the cold Neva [embankment], the girls’ faces brighter than roses!” Steam was boiling up from a hole in the ice of the Fontanka where women were drawing water. It covered the trees in the Yusupov Palace gardens with frost. There was a line of women and old men with teakettles and pots. A soldier was pulling the water up with a pail on a rope.

  At the Anichkov Bridge Sayanov encountered a man in a strange costume. Over his shoulders was draped a woman’s fur cloak, a very wide one, as though it had been made for a giant. He wore valenki or felt boots on his feet and overshoes, wrapped in rags, over them. The man had a brush in his hands and an easel before him. Sayanov stopped to watch. It was a frosty day but sunny, and he could not but remember Professor Ilin’s words: “I am happy that I can see the city in the snow with the sun shining on it, and in these difficult days how much I want to live. . . .”

  The artist blew on his fingers and said quietly, “You must recognize your old acquaintance, comrade soldier.”

  The voice sounded familiar, but Sayanov did not recognize the strange artist. />
  “You don’t know me,” the man said.

  “Vyacheslav!” Sayanov suddenly cried. “I never thought I would meet you on this day.”

  It was Vyacheslav Pakulin, a man with whom in the early 1920’s, Sayanov had often engaged in violent arguments about the nature of the world and the kind of painting and poetry that should illuminate it. In those days, Say-anov recalled bitterly, each thought that he would be able to tell the truth about life through his own medium. How naive! How distant from this frozen Nevsky Prospekt!

  “One must paint more and talk less about art,” said Pakulin, reading Sayanov’s thoughts. “In the end an artist is judged only by his pictures.”

  “That’s a one-sided view,” Sayanov replied. “The personality of the artist is not to be separated from his creations.”

  Pakulin sighed. “It seems to me that I will never succeed in doing anything important in art. It is very hard.”

  A woman came by. She looked at the canvas, then at Pakulin and said, “I am also one of your admirers.”

  “Do you like this?” Pakulin said to Sayanov. “It seems to me that I have put my soul into this picture.”

  Sayanov looked again—the strange white sky, the soft violet clouds, the people walking on the Prospekt, the Anichkov Bridge without the Klodt horses.

  “You understand,” Pakulin said. “It is all strange. It is all alarming. But the sky is quiet as always.”

  “I understand,” Sayanov said. He looked back at Pakulin as he went on his way. He would not live till spring. It was not possible. But Sayanov was mistaken. Pakulin lived for several years after the war, and when Sayanov went to the studio for the funeral, he saw many good pictures. But none of those painted during the war. For the official guardians of Soviet culture would not let the strange and terrible works of Pakulin in the time of the Leningrad blockade be shown publicly. Not for many years. They were too terrible, too alarming.