The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  “What did I fight for?” he shouted. “I fought for my country. And I can’t buy a pack of cigarettes?”

  Someone tried to quiet him, but as the train pulled out Panteleyev still heard him crying, shouting and tearing at his clothing.

  Pavel Luknitsky was with the advancing troops at Rybatskoye on the evening of January 27. He had gone up through the ruined suburbs. Earlier he had stood outside the shell of Peterhof, had seen the arctic precipice which the great cascade of fountains had become, had seen the gaping hole where once Samson rested among the fountains, had stumbled through the dugouts and gun emplacements on the terraces leading down to the Baltic Sea. He and the poet Aleksandr Prokofyev stood beside the ruined cascade when Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov, Mayor Peter Popkov and other high officials and generals arrived to inspect the damage.

  “We will not rebuild it,” Popkov said. “We will level it all.”

  Luknitsky interjected: “No, Peter Sergeyevich. We must preserve it. For all time.”

  Many who saw the ruins agreed with Luknitsky that they should be preserved as an eternal reminder of German barbarity.8

  Luknitsky was with the Soviet troops who entered Pushkin. The façade of the great Catherine Palace was intact. But inside the building was a ruin. The great hall was gone. So was the amber room. The amber had vanished, along with it the parquet floor of amaranth, rosewood and mahogany. The Zubovsky wing had been turned into a barracks for the Spanish Blue Division. Under the great Cameron Gallery a 500-pound bomb had been placed. Fortunately, it had not gone off. The Half-Moon where Popov and his wife played piano duets had been smashed by shellfire. Just beyond the Half-Moon stood a great linden tree under which Konstantin Fedin and Popov had talked not long before the Germans entered Pushkin. As Luknitsky stood, dazed by the sight, a Red Army officer came up and directed his attention to four great hooks which swayed from a limb of the tree. “That’s where the Nazis hanged their victims here in Pushkin,” he said. “We cut down four bodies which we found there.”

  Vera Inber found it impossible to write about the end of the siege. On the night of January 27 she put down in her diary: “The greatest event in the life of Leningrad: full liberation from blockade. And I, a professional writer, have no words for it. I simply say: Leningrad is free. And that is all.”

  Olga Berggolts visited Peterhof and Pushkin. She wrote a brief poem:

  Again from the black dust, from the place

  Of death and ashes, will arise the garden as before.

  So it will be. I firmly believe in miracles.

  You gave me that belief, my Leningrad.

  It was quiet in Leningrad now, Olga Berggolts noted. Only a few days ago, as recently as January 23, shells had fallen in the city. Now it was so still that it was hard to believe.

  “In Leningrad it is quiet,” she wrote.

  And on the sunny side of the Nevsky, the “most dangerous side,” children are walking. Children in our city now can peacefully walk on the sunny side. . . . And can quietly live in rooms letting on the sunny side. And can even sleep soundly at night, knowing that no one will kill them, and awake in the quiet, quiet sunrise alive and healthy.

  She remembered how the workers of the old Putilov factory, the Kirov works, had said in September, 1941: “Soon death will be more afraid of us than we of death.” Now, she thought, it was finally clear. It was not Leningrad which had been frightened by death. It was death which had been frightened by Leningrad.

  The long ordeal, the ordeal of the nine hundred days, was over. Or so it seemed on the evening of January 27, 1944.

  * * *

  1 A rumor went around Leningrad that only soldiers and “the specially chosen” would get medals. Vishnevsky wrote a story which was published in Leningradskaya Pravda July 4, emphasizing that all Leningraders who had been in the city during the siege would be so honored. (Vishnevsky, Sobrannye Sochineniya, Vol. 3, p. 246.)

  2 Tairov’s Kamerny Theater was suspended in 1950 after a long period of harassment by the literary dictators of the late Stalin era.

  3 Vishnevsky and his wife left for Moscow December 9. He carried the manuscript of The Walls of Leningrad with him. His wife had made a scale drawing of the stage settings. Vishnevsky, against his violent protest, was compelled to take a medical examination and go to a convalescent home because of his “nervous condition.” He did not leave Moscow to return to Leningrad until March 5, 1944. In the interval he revised and watered down The Walls of Leningrad. It was viewed by Rogov, the iron naval commissar, June 30, 1944, and finally publicly presented in Moscow August 21. The original version has never been published. (Anisimov, Literaturnoye Nasledstvo Sovetskikh Pisatelei Na Frontakh Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny, Vol. II, pp. 239-240; Vishnevsky, Sobrannye Sochineniya, Vol. Ill, pp. 458 et seq.)

  4 The rows between Stalin, the Stavka, the Politburo and the generals grew more savage as the war advanced. Stalin intervened in the most trivial decisions. If an antiaircraft unit was to be moved, he would insist, “Who will take responsibility if the German planes attack this objective?” No one could guarantee anything in war and if, as was often the case, a man like Marshal Voronov assumed responsibility, Stalin could have his head if something went wrong. If Stalin gave an order, it did not mean that Malenkov or Beria would carry it out. One day Stalin ordered Malenkov and Beria to give Marshal Voronov 900 trucks for a sudden troop movement. Later Beria said, “I’ll give you 400 machines and this conversation is finished!” Only when Voronov threatened to go back to Stalin did he get the 900 trucks. The common penalty with which Stalin threatened his associates and with which they threatened each other was death—execution by the firing squad. (Voronov, Istoriya SSSR, No. 3, March, 1965, pp. 9 et seq.)

  5 Only 109 planes were able to participate in the preattack strike because of the bad weather. (Barbashin, op. cit., p. 331.)

  6 The Volkhov artillery preparation laid down 100,300 shells. (N.Z., p. 561.)

  7 The length of the siege is sometimes calculated at 882 days (from August 28, 1941, when rail communications via Mga were cut) or at 872 days (from the fall of Shlissel-burg, September 8, 1941). The 880 days is calculated from August 30, 1941, the date of the fall of Mga.

  8 A decision was made almost immediately to restore Peterhof and all the ruined imperial monuments. Years of labor and millions of rubles have gone into the effort, not yet completed.

  EPILOGUE

  Oh, stones,

  Be as firm as people!

  50 ♦ The Leningrad Affair

  AT SIX IN THE EVENING ON APRIL 30, 1944, PAVEL LUKNITSKY made his way by streetcar to the Swan Canal and then on foot to Solyany Park. In one of the few buildings that still stood in the old “Salt Port” where nearly every house had been turned to a skeleton by German shells and bombs, an exhibition dedicated to the heroic defense of Leningrad was being opened.

  In December, 1943, the Leningrad Front Military Council had given orders for the preparation of the exhibition. Most of the artists in Leningrad worked on the dioramas and panoramas. Outside the building on Market Street stood enormous German cannon, 406-mm siege guns, Tiger tanks, Panthers, Ferdinand self-propelled guns—the weaponry the Nazis brought to bear on the city. There were 14 rooms holding 60,000 exhibits, 24,000 square feet of floor space.

  Luknitsky could not tear himself away. For four hours he went from room to room, reliving the blockade, day by day, week by week. Of course, he thought, as a Leningrader he knew much much more than was shown here, particularly about the deprivations. The horrors of starvation, for instance, were conveyed most delicately as contrasted with a vivid portrayal of the Ladoga Road of Life. The artists had somewhat romanticized the siege. They had not captured the simplicity and triviality of real life. The presentation was weak on literature, a few books of Nikolai Tikhonov, Vissarion Sayanov, Vera Inber, Olga Berggolts, Vsevolod Azarov and little more.

  The exhibition moved Luknitsky strongly. The rooms were thronged with visitors and an orchestra played in the central
hall. Nonetheless, he thought, for those like himself who had survived the blockade it presented only a weak shadow of reality.

  Everyone in Leningrad crowded into the display rooms. They could not get enough of the experience of reliving the heroic and tragic days which they had survived.

  When Vsevolod Vishnevsky visited Solyany Park, he was overwhelmed by the realization that the blockade days had now been put behind glass. That meant the worst was over, a whole chapter in his life had ended. What next? He felt nervous and upset. He had survived the blockade. Now he hungered for new aims, a new rhythm in his life.

  Before Vera Inber and her husband, Dr. Ilya Strashun, left Leningrad that spring to return home to Moscow they, too, went to the exhibition. They exchanged few words as they walked about the display, which, Vera Inber thought, showed everything that had threatened Leningrad and everything that had saved it.1

  Here she saw the very gun, a 154-mm cannon, which had fired on the Erisman Hospital (Objective No. 89 on the German artillery map). And here was “their” bomb-—the evil monster which had fallen next to the hospital in September, 1941. She read the placard: “Weight 1,000 kilograms. Diameter 660 millimeters. Length 990 millimeters. Defused October 10, 1941, by Engineer-Captain N. G. Lopatin and Commander A. P. Ilinsky.”

  She and Dr. Strashun stood for a long time looking at the model of a Leningrad bread shop. The window was covered with a frosting of ice so thick you could only see through a narrow opening in its center. Within there stood a scales, on one side four small weights, on the other 125 grams of bread. Above the scales was listed the composition of the “bread”:

  Defective rye flour 50 percent

  Salt 10 percent

  Cottonseed cake 10 percent

  Cellulose 15 percent

  Soya flour, reclaimed flour dust, sawdust, 5 percent

  These days were a time of creative work and enthusiasm for Leningrad writers. True, Vishnevsky had gone through agonies with his play, The Walls of Leningrad. But every writer who had spent the blockade in Leningrad was busy on an epic novel, a play or a great poem. Anna Akhmatova, the queen of Leningrad literature and princess of Russian poetry, had returned to her old quarters beside the Sheremetyev Palace gardens. She had spent the war in Tashkent, in Central Asia, and in Moscow, working and dreaming of her beloved northern capital.

  Now she was back. On her breast she proudly wore the Medal for the Defense of Leningrad. It was awarded for her weeks in the city in the autumn of 1941 and for her patriotic poem, “Courage.” Never had she seemed more cheerful, more at ease, more expansive. Pavel Luknitsky had last seen her in a bomb shelter as she was about to leave in the autumn of 1941, ill and depressed. Now she was a different woman.

  Tomorrow, she told Luknitsky, was her birthday. “What are you going to give me—Cherbourg?” she joked. (The Allies were advancing in France.)

  Luknitsky laughed. “Actually —Medvezhegorsk!” This was a town in the then Karelian Soviet republic where Soviet troops were rapidly moving forward.

  The city was nearly back to peacetime. Or so it seemed to Luknitsky watching the girls in their short dresses, loading rubble from a ruined building on the Nevsky at Vosstaniya Square. He sat in the evening at the Buff Gardens on the Fontanka and drank beer. The garden was almost empty. But nearby two good-looking girls argued with a naval cadet whether they should go dancing or rowing. The work of restoring Palace Square was under way. They had begun to take the scaffolding down from the Alexander column. Soon the Klodt horses would be back on the Anichkov Bridge and the bronze horseman would emerge from his sandbox on the Senate Square.

  The Renaissance of Leningrad was about to be undertaken. Its general outline had been presented by Party Secretary Zhdanov in a two-hour speech on April 11, 1944, at the first plenary session of the Leningrad City and Regional Party which had been held since the start of the war.

  “Our task,” said Zhdanov, “is not just reconstruction but the restoration of the city—not to restore it as it was, or simply to change its fagade, but to create a city even more comfortable than it was.”

  Some notion of what was meant by the Renaissance of Leningrad was provided by the grandiose plans and sketches drafted by the city’s architects and published in a handsome quarto volume under the direction of Chief Architect N. V. Baranov in 1943, a massive achievement for a city whose publishing facilities had not been restored.2

  A vast square was to be created before the Smolny ensemble, and the whole area around the Finland Station was to be transformed into a vista honoring Lenin (to be depicted in the center atop the famous armored car from which he delivered his first address on his return to Petrograd in April, 1917). The city was to double in size to the south, southeast and west in order to provide direct access to the Baltic along the Gulf of Finland. The plans were based on a city population of 3,500,000, substantially above the prewar level of 3,193,000.

  Everything was to be restored—everything historic and grandiose, that is. The Germans had destroyed 15,000,000 square feet of housing, depriving 716,000 Leningraders of homes; 526 schools and children’s institutions; 21 scientific institutions, 101 museums and other civic buildings, the Pulkovo observatory, the Botanical and Zoological institutes, much of the Leningrad University, 187 of the 300 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings preserved by the government as historical monuments, 840 factories, 71 bridges—the catalogue ran on and on. Thirty-two shells and two bombs had hit the Hermitage alone. More than 300,000 square feet of rooms and 60,000 square feet of glass and windows had been damaged at the Hermitage. The total damage in Leningrad was estimated at 45 billion rubles.

  Ilya Ehrenburg had a vision of the future which Leningrad saw for itself. He was present in Palace Square on July 8, 1945, when the Leningrad troops returned for their victory parade. The city looked forward to no mere cosmetic repair of the broken walls of the Engineers Castle, the crumbled cornices of the Hermitage. Leningrad, the eternal city, as Ehrenburg called it, was to be transformed. Already the Leningrad writers were arguing whether they should or needed to keep fresh the memory of the agony of the city. Ehrenburg thought it a pointless argument. It was not possible to forget what had been suffered, just as it was not possible to live only in those memories. While remembering its sacrifices Leningrad dreamed of new glories.

  Ehrenburg, like so many others, thought that the ruins of the Peterhof and Pushkin palaces should be left as monuments of Nazi brutality. But for the city itself, of course, there would be a greater, a brighter life than ever.

  He stood at Strelna one night and gazed out to the sea. He saw Russia once again setting out on a great journey. Petersburg had been envisioned as Russia’s “window on Europe.” That was far in the past. Long ago Russia, he thought, had become part of Europe, indivisible from the West. And if the young Decembrist officers had brought the idea of liberty back from the Seine to Petersburg’s Senate Square then, now a new Russian generation had brought the idea of justice from the Neva to the squares of Paris.

  “We have become the heart of Europe,” said Ehrenburg, “the bearers of her tradition, the continuators of her boldness, her builders and her poets.”

  The new Leningrad was to be the symbol of this Russia, European and ecumenical.

  A group of American correspondents visited the city in February, 1944, a few days after the siege was broken. They talked with Mayor Popkov, with Chief Architect Baranov, with Director Nikolai Puzerov of the Kirov works, with the survivors of the blockade. The correspondents saw the great architectural ensembles which had emerged from the drafting boards in the freezing days of 1941–42. They listened to the men and women of Leningrad talk quietly, confidently, earnestly, of how they would build their city anew.

  Like Ehrenburg, the visitors caught the enthusiasm of the role which the northern capital hoped to play. Leningrad aspired to stand again as the window on the West or, as Ehrenburg suggested, as the gateway through which Russia, the new bearer and defender of Western culture, would emer
ge. There were some who thought that in the postwar metamorphosis of Russia Leningrad once again might become the capital city, might displace rude, peasant Moscow, might resume its role as the imperial city Peter planned.

  It was a dream on a scale of magnificence worthy of the traditions of Peter, a dream which had been born in the depths of the hell which the people had survived.

  Pushkin, in awe and pride and terror of Peter and his bronze horse, had written:

  Where are you flying, proud horse,

  And where will your hooves fall?

  Where, indeed? Leningrad had survived without light, without heat, without bread, without water. It had, Ehrenburg felt, lived because of pride in the city, because of belief in Russia, because of the love of the people. Had there been in human existence an example more noble, more edifying? Petersburg, now Leningrad, symbolized the soul, the strength, the nature, the mission of Russia. It had its own style, its own spirit. A man came to Leningrad from the Urals or a woman from Tula. In a few years they were Leningraders.

  So thought Ehrenburg. So thought many visitors. So thought the men and women of the city.

  But there were other plans for Leningrad than those born in the city’s agony. The plan for the Leningrad Renaissance was founded upon a decree of the State Defense Committee of March 29, 1944. This, naturally, gave priority to the restoration of heavy industry, to the rebuilding of the demolished machine shops, the specialized metallurgical crafts, the factories which were the bone and sinew of Russia’s military and industrial capability.

  Leningrad’s population in January, 1944, had been estimated at only 560,000. Workers must be rushed back—never mind where to house them. Population must be rebuilt to one million by the end of the year. By July there were 725,000 in the city; by September, 920,000; by September, 1945, 1,240,000. Conditions of life and work became incredibly difficult.