The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  4 At the start of the war Zuyev was a political commissar in General Morozov’s Eleventh Army headquarters at Kaunas, where he distinguished himself in leading units of the Eleventh Army out of the initial Nazi encirclement.

  5 There is uncertainty as to the precise date when Vlasov took command of the Second Shock Army. Luknitsky gives the date as March 6, obviously incorrect, since Vlasov did not arrive at Meretskov’s headquarters until March 9. Meretskov says Vlasov took over the Second Shock Army a month and a half later. The formal command change apparently was April 16. (Luknitsky, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 322; Meretskov, Voyenno-lstoricheskii Xhurnal, No. 12, January, 1965, pp. 66-67; Barbashin, op. cit., p. 603.) Krykov was flown out April 16. (Smert Komissara, p. 102.)

  6 Malenkov seems to have had special responsibilities for the Leningrad front.

  7 Vlasov and his associate anti-Soviet officers fell into Russian hands at the end of the war. His execution along with that of some associates was announced August 2, 1946. (Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945, London, 1957, p. 659.) Malenkov lost his post in the Party Secretariat about this time, possibly in connection with the Vlasov affair. However, his fall from favor was brief.

  48 ♦ Operation Iskra

  THE WHITE NIGHTS BROUGHT BACK TO LENINGRAD AN appearance of ease and relaxation. In the Summer Gardens fields of cabbages replaced grassy lawns. Between the antiaircraft batteries on the Champs de Mars sprouted potato patches. Here and there were small signs: “Dr. Kozin’s garden,” “Aleksandr Prokofyev’s garden” and dozens like it. On the steps of the Kazan Cathedral a copper samovar bubbled and women drank tea made of some kind of herbs. Everyone rolled his own cigarettes with paper torn from strips of old Pravdas. They lighted them with magnifying glasses. No matches were needed so long as the sun shone.

  There were flowers in the city—mignonettes, daisies, field roses. The streetcars were jammed. Only lines Nos. 12, 3, 7, 30, 10, 20 and 9 ran regularly. Often they stopped because of shelling. There were no buses, no taxis. Signs appeared on the streets: “In case of shelling this side is the most dangerous.” Girls sold soda water at sidewalk stands, and a kvass wagon was parked on the Nevsky. Old fishermen tried their luck along the Fon-tanka and the Moika.

  Death was more rare. Pavel Luknitsky walked through Leningrad one July day. He saw only two corpses—one on the Fontanka wrapped in a blanket on a wheelbarrow, the other in a coffin being pulled in a hand cart.

  To be sure, people were thin and drawn. But they moved more swiftly, and many were ruddy from the summer sun. There were not many queues and, truth to say, not many people. The streets were empty. Too many had died, too many had been evacuated, and more were going all the time.

  Everywhere people picked greens. Posted on the walls of buildings were check lists of edible wild plants. They recommended young nettles, dandelions, burdocks, goosefoot, rape, sorrel. One woman discovered a nettle patch outside the Catherine Gardens. She picked a panful and made a delicious summer soup. Never mind her nettle-burned hands.

  There were still children in Leningrad. They ran and played. Sometimes it was “war,” sometimes doctor-and-nurse with dystrophy victims. Sayanov encountered some youngsters who made their “patient” lie on a stove while they debated whether she should be evacuated or whether she could be cured by a special diet.

  Luknitsky was sitting on a street bench one day, writing in his diary. An old woman (he knew instantly that she was really young and that only starvation and hardship made her look old) came up to him, carrying a portable phonograph in a red case, a black umbrella and a battered bag on her back. She tried to sell him the phonograph. She told him her husband was at the front, she had had no word from him, had been evacuated from her home and had no place to go with her child.

  The Writers’ House on Ulitsa Voinova was clean once more—no more bodies in the back rooms. Meals were served in the dining room by waitresses in neat uniforms—supper from three to five without ration coupons for members of the union: a full bowl of good barley soup, borsht, kasha and, for dessert, a kind of glucose or a chocolate bar.

  No great problem now about looking after writers. Ilya Avramenko, the poet, and Luknitsky decided to evacuate all those not doing war work. They checked the prewar list of 300 members. There were 107 in the army, mostly on the Leningrad front; 33 had died of hunger, n had been killed at the front, and 6 had been arrested.

  Of those arrested two, Lozin and Petrov, had been shot. Three had been put in prison on political chargés. These included one whose name Luknitsky did not remember and another named Borisoglebsky. The third was Abramovich-Blek—the gallant, onetime officer in the Czar’s navy who had jokingly promised in September, 1941, a place in his nonexistent barge on Lake Ladoga to “Lady Astor,” the manager of the Astoria Hotel restaurant. Another writer, named Herman Matveyev, had been arrested for speculation. Already 53 writers had been evacuated. There remained about 30 in civilian status to be sent out.

  What tragedy befell Abramovich-Blek is not clear. But a grim clue can be found in Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s diary. Vishnevsky had “discovered” Abramovich-Blek as a writer, had sponsored his literary debut. On July 24, 1942, Vishnevsky noted:

  A certain B——k somewhere in an after-dinner conversation openly defended Fascist conceptions. . . . He was removed from the ship and taken into custody. Where do such types come from?

  B——k, Vishnevsky insisted, secretly was hoping for Hitler’s victory. Vishnevsky claimed he had seen a certain number of writers of the B——k type. They disguised themselves in Soviet colors, and their work was inevitably false and hypocritical.

  Whether Vishnevsky believed his protégé was a traitor or whether he was covering his own tracks, there is no way of telling. The incident underlined the fact that the vigilance of the secret police had not slackened despite the heroism of the Leningraders.

  Vissarion Sayanov decided to visit the composer Boris V. Asafyev. The wonderful old Leningrad bookstores were open again. Many book lovers had sold their libraries for bread. Many had died and left their books to be sold by their heirs; many were sold by thieves who ransacked empty apartments. Book trade was one of the few that thrived in Leningrad. (There was no basis for Vishnevsky’s paranoid suspicion that saboteurs had burned up the total stock of new editions of War and Peace and Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories.)

  Sayanov stopped in a bookshop on his way to Asafyev and picked up a pamphlet about a production of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at the Mariinsky Theater, May 3, 1921. The author was Igor Glebov—the nom de plume of Asafyev. He opened the pages and was struck by a phrase: “From the beginning to the end of the opera the claws of death quietly and steadily draw the victim closer and closer.”

  He read on:

  “The terrible design of the music of The Queen of Spades is to be found in its ceaseless beating into our brain of a feeling of the inevitability of death and, thus, delicately, frighteningly, moving us nearer and nearer to the terrible end.”

  Sayanov bought the book and presented it to Asafyev.

  “How strange!” Asafyev said. “It’s as though I had not written this, but someone else.”

  They came upon another sentence written by Asafyev twenty years before: “When spring came, there was no one in the world as happy as the people of this sovereign city.”

  Of this they had no doubt.

  Sayanov was struck by his conversation with Asafyev. It dealt not with everyday living problems, food, rations, hunger. Asafyev had lived in the bomb shelter of the Pushkin Theater most of the winter. He had come to the margin of death. But he did not talk about his personal problems. He talked about the musical structure of the songs of the western Slavs and gave Sayanov a paper he had written on the opera The Bronze Horseman. Not a word about the terrible January days when Asafyev lay in his bed in the dark to conserve heat, light and strength, composing music in his mind and then, after daylight came, quickly writing down the notes while he still had the strength. In those days
Asafyev wrote his whole autobiography in his mind, but it was many months before he was able to put it on paper.

  Walking the streets of Leningrad, Luknitsky saw a group of women at the bridges over the canals and rivers, washing clothes or dishes. They looked healthy. Some had lipstick. Their clothing was not only washed but ironed.

  On the Liteiny a hunchback set up a scales and did a rushing business. Everyone wanted to know how much weight he had lost during the winter. An old bootblack appeared at the corner of Sadovaya and Rakhov streets. He had to rest between shoeshines, he was so weak. A shine cost 5 rubles, a can of shoe polish the same. There were cigarettes for sale at street corners. Prices in the black market were becoming stabilized: a quart of vodka, 1,500 rubles; 100 grams of bread, 40 rubles; a pack of cigarettes, 150 rubles; fishcakes, 3 rubles. Musical comedy tickets were exchanged for two bread rations.

  On the Nevsky the rubble of broken buildings had been carted away to be used in making bomb shelters and pillboxes. In the dental gaps made by destroyed buildings false fronts were erected. They were painted to resemble the building exteriors, windows and doors faithfully reproduced. Going quickly down the street it seemed undamaged. On the false front of a building at the Nevsky and Morskaya the date “1942” appeared – whether to mark the date of destruction or pseudo reconstruction was not clear. A shell went through one onion tower of the “Church of the Blood” erected on the site of Alexander IPs assassination. It was repaired with plywood, and no damage could be seen. The Engineers Castle took a direct hit (many persons were killed, for it was being used as a hospital), but from the outside it appeared whole.

  The exterior appearances were deceptive. The city looked more peaceful. It seemed more peaceful. But in reality it still stood in deadly danger. And the danger was growing. To the south the German summer offensive was in full swing. Soviet troops had yielded Sevastopol and the Crimea. The Germans were in motion across the broad waist of the South Russian steppes, driving toward the Volga. Nazi troops were thrusting deep into the Caucasus.

  Everywhere there were signs that they would soon try once again to take Leningrad. For more than a month German troop movements had been seen. Vishnevsky heard that German strength was 50 percent higher than in the spring. There were more and more reconnaissance flights. On July 10 Lieutenant General Leonid A. Govorov told the Leningrad commanders that a new test of strength was in the offing. Party Secretary Zhdanov warned that the Germans would again try to take the city by storm. With the occupation of the Crimea, Hitler had ordered Manstein’s Eleventh Army north for a new offensive against Leningrad. The 24th, 28th, 132nd and 170th infantry divisions of the Eleventh Army quickly appeared before Leningrad. They were followed by the 5th Mountain Division, the 61st Infantry and the 250th Spanish “Blue” Division. Vast quantities of heavy siege guns (including a 440-mm Big Bertha), many from the Skoda, Krupp and Schneider works, arrived. They had been successfully used by the Nazis in taking Sevastopol. By the end of July the Germans had massed twenty-one infantry and one tank division and one separate infantry brigade before Leningrad and at nearby Mga and Sinyavino.

  In this atmosphere the Leningrad troops were once again ordered to take the offensive. The objective was to lift the siege—the fourth attempt. But there were other objectives: to lessen, if possible, the terrible German pressure in the south. The worst crisis of the war was at hand. Leningrad must, at any cost, prevent the Germans from shifting forces to the south and southwest.

  The main responsibility of the new offensive was placed on General Meretskov’s Volkhov command, which was stronger than the Neva Operating Group of General Govorov.

  Steps were taken to boost Leningrad’s morale. On July 25—Navy Day— for the first time German prisoners of war were paraded down the Nevsky, the only Germans to reach the heart of Leningrad. There were several thousand of them—unshaven, dirty, lousy, wearing jackets of ersatz wool. Many were plainly afraid of the crowds, mostly women who set up a shout: “Give them to us! Give them to us!” Troops and police held the women back. Here and there a child threw a stone or stick at the bedraggled Nazis. Not all, however, were cowed. Some sneered at the crowd, some laughed.

  Vishnevsky noted discouragingly in his diary that some of these “whorehouse dregs” were the sons of workers, that many failed to bow under cross-examination, continuing to mouth Nazi slogans. Some, he said, burst into tears when told they would have to rebuild all that had been destroyed in Russia before being permitted to return to their homes.

  At 7 P.M. on August 9 the doors of Philharmonic Hall opened. Again there were lights—some lights anyway—in the crystal chandeliers. Sunlight streamed through the great windows, repaired with plywood after the winter’s bombing. Here was everyone in Leningrad: Vsevolod Vishnevsky and Vera Inber (by chance they met, walking in the greenhouse of the Botanical Gardens that afternoon, the one where the palms had frozen to death in the winter and where now, again, Victoria Regina lilies were beginning to bloom, where peonies were being cut and dark barberry branches were sending forth shoots); Lieutenant General Govorov, handsome in his uniform; Party Secretary Kuznetsov, dark, lean-faced but more at ease than during the winter months; and on the podium, Director Karl Eliasberg. Everyone was wearing his good black suit or her best silk dress, the most fashionable crowd the siege had seen. The score of the Seventh Symphony had been sent to Leningrad by plane in June, and rehearsals had gone on for more than six weeks.

  The glory and majesty of the symphony were played against a crescendo of Leningrad’s guns. General Friedrich Ferch, Chief of Staff of the Nazi Eighteenth Army, learning that his troops were listening to a radio broadcast of the symphony (it was carried by direct hook-up to all parts of the Soviet Union and by shortwave to Europe and North America), ordered cannon fire into the area of the Philharmonic Hall. But General Govorov, the counterbattery specialist, had foreseen this possibility. Soviet guns silenced the German batteries.1

  Generals Meretskov and Govorov, Admiral Tributs, and Party secretaries Zhdanov and Kuznetsov met August 21 near Tikhvin to agree on final plans for the new effort to lift the blockade. There was dispute between Leningrad and Volkhov, between Zhdanov and Govorov on one side and Meretskov on the other. Leningrad wanted to take the lead. Stalin supported Meretskov and insisted that “the basic weight of the proposed operation should lie on the Volkhov front.”

  Zhdanov sharply challenged Meretskov, insisting that Leningrad could lift the blockade by forcing the Neva with the Neva Operating Group. Meretskov and Stalin thought—correctly—that he was wrong.

  Meretskov got more in reinforcements and arms than he had expected from Moscow in the light of the Stalingrad crisis. Stalin sent him 20,000 rifles and tommy guns, although he had asked for only 8,000 to 10,000. They were shipped by a roundabout route to deceive the Nazis about the coming offensive. The men were sent in closed railroad cars marked “fuel,” “food,” “hay.” Tanks were sent on flatcars covered with hay.

  The offensive failed. It rumbled on into October but never gave promise of breaking the German lines. Once again Leningrad troops forced the Neva River, sending three rifle divisions across in daylight September 8 in the face of terrible German fire. Govorov took the responsibility for the fiasco and proposed to try again. He especially trained some troops and brought in amphibious tanks. The new action started September 26. It went just as badly. Rain set in. Once again Govorov took the hard decision. He ordered the place (Varmes liquidated and the troops withdrawn to the north bank of the Neva on October 8.

  Meretskov had no better luck. His troops pushed forward a short distance, but by September 20 Manstein was counterattacking, trying to cut off the Soviet forward positions. The bad-luck Second Shock Army bogged down in the marshes. General Meretskov plunged into action to help extricate the 4th Guards Rifle Corps. Twice his personal car was destroyed by a direct hit. He got word that Stalin was urgently calling him on the VC high-security phone, but not until September 30 did he emerge from the marshes and put thr
ough the call.

  “Why didn’t you come to the direct wire?” Stalin demanded.

  “I lost two machines,” Meretskov replied. “But more than that I was afraid that if I left the command point of the corps, behind me would come dragging the staff of the corps and after them the staff of the units.”

  He reported he had extricated the surrounded troops. That was the end of the fourth effort to lift the Leningrad siege. It was October 6—the 402nd day of the siege. But the threat of a new German attack on Leningrad had been removed. Manstein had lost 60,000 men, killed or taken prisoner, 260 planes, 200 tanks and 600 guns and mortars. “Better be three times at Sevastopol than stay on here,” men of the Manstein command said.

  Yet somehow the mood of Leningrad was changing. The city was preparing for its second winter of war in a new spirit. The manager of the Astoria Hotel, a young woman named Galina Alekseyevna, mascara on her eyelashes, sang as she mounted the marble, circular staircase. “Why am I so happy?” she asked Pavel Luknitsky. “I really don’t know. The city is being shelled, and I am singing. I never used to sing in the morning. I used to live quite well, but I cried all the time. The things I cried for! It makes me laugh to think of them. Now I’ve lost everyone. All my dear ones. I thought I couldn’t survive that. But now I’m ready for anything. If I die, I die. I’m not afraid of death any more.”