The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The process of forgetting, as Vishnevsky was to learn, had only begun. Early in the year a new House of Scientists had been set up by the City Party organization. It set out to produce a book on the role of Leningrad scientists in the days of the war and blockade. The printer’s proofs of this work still lie in the archives of the Leningrad Public Library. Its publication was never permitted.

  Late July and August brought the worst shelling of the war to Leningrad. Never had Vera Inber experienced so terrifying a day as July 24. The Germans fired in short bursts. One shell hit an overloaded streetcar on the Liteiny Bridge. Vera Inber saw from her window an ordinary pickup truck arrive at the hospital filled with wounded. An hour later another truck arrived, filled with bodies. She saw an exposed shinbone poking out from under the canvas. The admitting director took one look at the truck’s load and ordered it to the morgue. That evening Vera Inber talked with a surgeon. The summer’s problems were bad, but those of the winter of 1942 had been worse. Then, he recalled, when he was doing an operation, the blood and pus froze on his hands, covering them like gloves. Now he had more wounded to care for, but primitive sanitary conditions had been restored to the hospital.

  Vera Inber found the new shelling worse to endure than the trials of the winter of 1941–42. She began to be afraid—involuntarily afraid—of going out on the street. The whine of shells filled the air. “Already the first yellow leaves lie on the asphalt,” she noted August 10. “Day after day the threatening monotone of whining shells. (Even right now.) I can’t help it. I’m afraid to go on the street. And not only me. It is very hard.” Even Vsevolod Vishnevsky found his optimism deserting him. His diary entries noted how tired he was, how difficult to keep up his spirits. “I feel tired and washed out,” he wrote September 1. “It’s from the blockade. We’ve got to break the blockade—completely—and we are falling behind.”

  The shelling was so heavy that the square in front of the Finland Station began to be called “the valley of death” and the Liteiny Bridge was christened “the devil’s bridge.” Extraordinary steps were ordered to reduce casualties. Trains were rerouted from the Finland Station to the Piskarevsky and Kush-elevka stations. The Aurora and Molodezhny movie houses were closed. Changes were made in 132 streetcar stops, hours were revised for movies and theaters, special sandbagging was ordered at ninety stores and eight establishments were moved. In street after street new signs in white and blue paint went up: “Citizens: In case of shelling this side of the street is the most dangerous.” The July, 1943, casualties were 210 killed and 921 wounded. There was serious reason to believe that the Germans had infiltrated agents who were giving their gunners corrections on their fire. Colonel N. N. Zhdanov was placed in chargé of a special counterbattery offensive to try to bring the Nazi guns under control.

  Rumors swept Leningrad that the war would be over September 15. Vishnevsky, typically, blamed the rumors on Nazi agents. An elderly writer told him that the poet Nikolai Tikhonov had predicted the war would last at least another year. What was Vishnevsky’s opinion? Vishnevsky hedged. The war would go on through the winter, but it might be shortened “if our allies fight.” (This was at the height of the Soviet campaign for a second front.) Vishnevsky’s friend persisted. Was there any chance of the shelling coming to an end? Vishnevsky said, accurately, that there was no hope until the blockade was finally lifted. The German shelling remained at a very high level. In September, 11,394 shells fell in the city, 124 persons were killed, 468 wounded. For the first time since the start of the war the artillery barrage had become the chief concern of people. There were days when the life of the city was brought almost to a halt. Even so, Luknitsky noticed, the militia girls who had replaced regular police in directing traffic stayed on the job, calm, lively and jolly. Not infrequently they were wounded or killed by shell fragments. Another girl would promptly fill the spot. Men and women were better dressed, men mostly in uniform. But women looked much prettier, their summer clothes bright and attractive. Everyone again had a garden plot. In the Champs de Mars on benches surrounded by patches of potatoes and turnips, well-dressed (but callus-handed) ladies sat in the sunshine reading Shakespeare, the stories of Jack London or the newest issue of the literary journal Oktyabr. Nikolai Chukovsky believed that never in history had Leningrad been so beautiful as in the summer of 1943. The emptiness of the city emphasized for him its unbelievable beauty. Even the ruins seemed to possess an unearthly quality, particularly when the northern lights played across the sky and shed their curious flat colors on the gardens, courtyards and squares.

  The city was still filled with empty apartments, but a commission had begun to inspect them, carefully noting the contents and attempting to ascertain whether the owner was dead, evacuated or serving at the front. People put carpets down on their floors, pictures back on the walls. A woman told Luknitsky, “I don’t want to live any longer like a pig. I don’t know whether I’ll survive the next hour, but right now I am going to live like a human being.” Schools slowly resumed—374 had opened before the end of the year—but industrial life barely flickered. Many plants produced only 5 or 10 percent of prewar output, and the number of factory workers was five times less than in 1940. Leningrad was still a front-line city.

  In the worst days of blockade, in February, 1942, when the city lay dark, frozen, starving and near death, the City Council had set its surviving architects, among them Academician Nikolsky in the cellar of the Hermitage, to drafting plans for the future Leningrad—not just the reconstruction of Leningrad but what came to be called the Restoration, the Renaissance of the Northern Palmyra. Created by men working without light, without heat, with mittened hands, the plans gradually took shape—the dream of the new Leningrad, a city that would combine the old grandeur of imperial Petersburg with the new greatness of Soviet Leningrad. On January 19, 1943, the day after the breakthrough, the City Council ordered the plans put into action. At first, of course, only repairs could be considered (and in the summer of 1943 the German bombardment was destroying Leningrad more rapidly than it could be rebuilt). Indeed, in all of 1943 only eight buildings and 60,000 square feet of housing were rehabilitated. But on October 14 the City Council ordered ready by January 1 a complete architectural and technical design for a new Leningrad which would transform the city into a monument of contemporary technology, appearance and comfort.

  People began to count on change, on better times. Vera Inber overheard a remark: “In such a time humor has to be kept on a leash.” She wondered about that. So did others. Leningrad had begun to tell jokes—not very good jokes, but jokes. Vishnevsky scribbled them in his diary:

  Two German soldiers talking:

  Fritz: “How would you like to fight?”

  Hans: “I’d like to be a German soldier with a Russian general, British arms and American rations.”

  “Why are you fighting?”

  Hitler: “For living space.”

  Stalin: “Because we were attacked.”

  Churchill: “Who told you we are fighting?”

  Vera Inber jotted down a couple of children’s blockade remarks:

  Child: “Mama,

  what’s ham?”

  The mother explained.

  Child: “And has anyone ever tasted it?”

  A little girl to her mother: “Mama, what’s a giant and what kind of a ration does he get?”

  Vissarion Sayanov put down some exchanges:

  “Where are you from?”

  “I’m a Leningrader from Tambov.”

  A front soldier: “Yesterday I suddenly saw a crow fly out of some bushes on the other bank. I thought there must be Germans there so I gave a shot and a wolf ran out.”

  “There are a lot of animals around.”

  “Yes, especially two-legged ones.”

  Leningrad was coming to itself again. As Vishnevsky put it: “The Germans now are just a hindrance. The people have begun to plan the future.”

  But there were other aspects of Soviet life, not so ple
asant, that once again came to the fore: the sharp literary and political quarrels, the inner tensions which so often turned Soviet life into agony.

  During the worst days almost all of this had vanished. Leningrad had become one family. Again and again the diarists of Leningrad, the survivors, spoke of this feeling. As seventeen-year-old Zina Vorozheikina, a student in the tenth grade, put it: “All of us Leningraders are one family, baptized by the monstrous blockade—one family, one in our grief, one in our experience, one in our hopes and expectations.” Some even suggested that when the war ended Leningrad boys should marry only Leningrad girls—they had become a special breed, a special people.

  But the blockade did not end the political and social processes of Soviet life. Vishnevsky noted that even so fine a woman as Vera Inber could not resist delicately “sticking a knife in the ribs” of her fellow poet, Olga Berg-golts, for writing “minor, sad, old-fashioned” poems about the blockade.

  In late October Olga Berggolts and Georgi Makogonenko, one of the Radio Leningrad staff who had sat up all through the night of January 12, 1942, outlining their projected book, Leningrad Speaking, presented to the Leningrad Writers Union a scenario for a film about the Leningrad siege. Vishnevsky found it observant, precise, sincere, pure. It was a story which centered about Young Communists who helped the people in their frozen, bleak, starvation-haunted flats during the winter of 1941–42.

  “But,” wondered Vishnevsky, “can the cinema convey the truth about Leningrad, about its people, about their spirit?”

  The question was pertinent. The film, in fact, suffered the same fate as Leningrad Speaking. It never saw the light of day.

  Vishnevsky himself was preoccupied with his play about the siege, The Walls of Leningrad. He had begun work on it late in 1942 and telegraphed his close friend Aleksandr Tairov, director of Moscow’s Kamerny Theater,2 January 2, 1943, that he was “writing a big play.” He gave a first reading May 25, 1943, to a group of Baltic Fleet propaganda workers and the director of the Baltic Fleet Theater, L. Osipov.

  On June 17 he read a new version to a group that included Nikolai Tikhonov, Vissarion Sayanov, Vera Inber, Aleksandr Zonin and some others.

  He capsulized their opinions for Tairov:

  Tikhonov: This is one of your strongest things ... a saga of the sailors. . . .

  Inber: The play is remarkably strong and emotionally fulfilling. There will be difficulties. . . .

  L. Osipov (director of the Baltic Fleet Theater): Vsevolod Vishnevsky has given us a play, very close to us, very strong. . . .

  A. Zonin: The play is philosophical—the people are connected with the fate of their country, with history and not with sexual-personal themes.

  Pilyugin (director of the Bolshoi Drama Theater): It is an attractive work. Like all plays of Vishnevsky, it is difficult for the theater.

  By mid-August the play was put into production by the Baltic Fleet Theater. In October the chief naval propaganda commissar, the fearsome Ivan (the Terrible) Rogov, asked Vishnevsky to play down one of his chief characters, Prince Belogorsky, a naval officer who had served under the Czar and was a member of the nobility. Rogov also wanted more “discipline and heroism.”

  At 6 P.M. on November 23 Vishnevsky appeared at the Vyborg House of Culture, where the play was to be performed. The cast gave him a present, a desk set and two candlesticks, made out of shell casings.

  There was a full house—members of the Fleet Military Council, members of the City Council, girls from the AA batteries, sailors and friends of Vish-nevsky’s. The audience was excited. At the conclusion the curtain had to be raised eleven times in response to applause. The chief of the Leningrad Arts Committee, Boris Zagursky, congratulated Vishnevsky. Everything seemed fine. Then the director rushed to Vishnevsky pale and trembling: “The Military Council member forbids the play to be performed. In fact, he said, he strongly forbids it.”

  This was Vice Admiral N. K. Smirnov, and his complaint was simple: Too many negative characters; the portrait of the commissar was almost a burlesque, that of Prince Belogorsky dubious; regular officers played too small a role.

  As Vishnevsky commented: “In their opinion the tragic days of September, 1941, should appear on the stage in ordinary colors, all ‘cleaned up.’ To show openly the trials, the trauma, the difficulties, and how they were overcome grates on their eyes and ears. Maybe this is understandable from the point of view of 1943. Maybe it is fully understandable (?).”

  What Vishnevsky meant to convey by the question mark is not clear. But he went on to recall bitterly the fatal literary wars of the 1930’s. Neither in his extended correspondence with Tairov nor in his bulging diary did he confide his innermost thoughts. Instead, he noted in his diary that he had placed an exact account of what had happened and of all the discussions in a special folder in his files. It remains there to this day, unpublished.

  He struggled to control his feelings:

  I am thinking intensely about the general tasks of literature, about the difficulties of the work of writers, of how practically I can determine the fate of this play. Evidently what is needed now by the situation is not philosophical argument, not a tragic painting, but simple shock, agitational messages. I understand that, but it seemed to me that this time I had written an “optimistic” tragedy. I thought all evening, all night. I must save this work—the first important play about the defense of Leningrad. I must rework and revise it.

  Unable to sleep, he picked up William Shirer’s Berlin Diary and tried to read. But he could not keep his mind off his play. His telephone kept ringing, with people complimenting him, asking him when the premiere would be.

  He decided to send a letter to one of the Leningrad Party secretaries, Makhanov, to enlist his support:

  I have written a play on a most difficult theme . . . about one of the most tragic moments in the history of the war—about the autumn of 1941 in Leningrad. . . . This production is part of my soul, part of my heart. You had a good reaction to the play and approved its appearance in Zvezda [the magazine]. Then came a sudden turnabout. Evidently on the stage the text sounded sharper and more tragic than in the reading. The army and the fleet are on the eve of the decisive offensive on the Leningrad front, and they need some other kind of play. . . .

  Vishnevsky’s appeal was fruitless. The verdict was simple: “The negative characters are clearly stronger than the positive. The former prince is a patriot and a hero. The commissar is a fool.”

  As Vishnevsky bitterly commented: “Really—haven’t commissars ever been fools?”

  The question was vain. The play was dead. Nothing Vishnevsky could do would revive it. Something worse was at hand. Leningrad did stand on the eve of liberation. The moment for which Vishnevsky had been waiting for nearly nine hundred days was near. But he was not to be there to witness it. On December 6 he was at the Party Bureau and got an outline of the forthcoming offensive. The news bolstered his shaken spirits. The next day he was summarily ordered to Moscow. No protest availed. He was not to see the end of the blockade. Orders were orders. Like a good soldier he made his preparations, typically noting in his diary: “Moscow! The heart of Russia, the center of the new world! I will have interviews and meetings. How has it changed in two and a half years? How will we find our home?”3

  Preparations for the liberation of Leningrad had begun in September, 1943. All summer long fighting had gone on in an effort to wrest the Sinyavino Heights from the Germans. The Sixty-seventh Army attacked July 22 and was engaged until mid-September, but despite heavy losses the Russians could not dislodge the Germans. On the Central Front the Russians had defeated the Germans in the savage Battle of Kursk-Orel and had liberated Kharkov once again. German losses had been heavy, and the Soviet High Command was now planning with confidence for fall-winter offensives to drive the Nazis from central Russia and the Ukraine.

  General Govorov held his first staff meeting to draw up plans for finally smashing the blockade on September 9. Two variants were draf
ted: Neva I and Neva II. Neva I was for use in the event the Germans, weakened on other fronts, withdrew on their own from the Leningrad area. The Stavka in Moscow warned General Govorov of this possibility, and Leningrad had similar intelligence of its own. The Germans had begun to set up defense posts at river crossings which would be used in a retreat. They were putting in mine fields and preparing to destroy bridges.

  The principal effort, naturally, was devoted to Neva II. In its final version it called for a three-pronged offensive, driving from the Oranienbaum foothold, the Pulkovo Heights and in the direction of Novgorod (this attack to be carried out by General Meretskov’s Volkhov front).

  The offensive would not start until winter, when the ice was hard and troops could move more easily. The Leningrad Command had long since discovered that winter was the season which gave them a natural advantage over the Germans.