The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  The sums advanced for rehabilitation and restoration were niggardly. The 1945 capital construction budget was 398 million rubles, of which 200 million were for housing. This was about that of the peacetime 1940 budget. The appropriations for restoration of historic buildings were 39 million rubles in 1945, 60 million in 1946, 80 million in 1947 and 84 million in 1948.

  Leningrad began to scale down its vision and cut the corners off its dreams. During the summer of 1945 meetings were held to discuss the plan for the city in the factories, in individual regions of the city, in meetings of writers, artists, scientists. The vast extensions to the south and to the east were “temporarily” postponed. Because destruction was so extensive, because suburban areas like Ligovo and Strelna had been demolished, not so much land, it was said, would be required for housing and parks. Apartment buildings could be erected in areas where the wooden houses had been torn down for firewood during the winter of 1941–42. The emphasis shifted to ordinary housing, to the reconstruction of factories rather than imperial vistas and Florentine plazas. About the only vestige of grandeur which seemed likely of fulfillment was Academician Nikolsky’s plan for a new Victory Stadium.3

  Sometime in 1946 Party Secretary Kuznetsov and Mayor Popkov presented to Moscow a new and revised plan for the development of the city, which “reflected the experience and creative thought” of the city’s architects, production workers, technologists and scientific intelligentsia. It provided for the “renaissance and further development of Leningrad as a great industrial and cultural center of the country.” The plan revived the original Leningrad hope for a “wide front” along the Gulf of Finland, for expansion of the city limits to incorporate broad areas to the south and to the east. Kuznetsov and Popkov proposed that the Renaissance be carried out over a ten-year period, presumably during the fourth and fifth Five-Year Plans.

  More than fifteen years passed before another word was publicly expressed concerning the Leningrad Renaissance. This was no accident.

  Sometime (the exact date cannot be fixed) after the Leningrad Party plenary in April, 1944, Zhdanov left Leningrad permanently to resume his career in the Kremlin. Not for one moment during-the war, during the nine hundred days, had there been a moratorium in the secret political struggle within the Kremlin. Indeed, every event in the Leningrad epic had a twofold significance: one in relation to the outer world of survival and another in the morbid inner sphere of Stalinist politics. Every decision that preceded the war and every event of the war itself played a role in the inner Kremlin struggle. Zhdanov’s fortunes suffered a precipitous decline at the outset of the war (because of his culpability in the policies which led to the Nazi attack) and in the early months when Leningrad’s fate hung in the balance. In the worst moments of August, September and October, 1941, Zhdanov’s fate as well as that of Leningrad was at stake in the critical battles. Had the city fallen, Zhdanov’s life would have been forfeit. Hardly a day passed in which someone in the Kremlin, some high official, was not threatened with execution or actually executed. This was the special quality of the epoch, the flavor of the Stalinist-Leninist system, the medieval concentration of power, the Florentine nature of Stalin’s “court,” the paranoid aura of Kremlin life. Marshal Bulganin was not talking idly when he said once to Nikita Khrushchev, “A man doesn’t know when he is called to the Kremlin whether he will emerge alive or not.”

  It was typical that even on Victory Day, May 7, 1945, Marshal Voronov received a telephone call from Stalin. Artillery General Ivan Susloparov4 had been present at the German capitulation at Rheims and in the presence of General Eisenhower had signed the protocol on behalf of the Soviet Union. What did Marshal Voronov mean by permitting his subordinate to sign a document of profound international significance without direct orders from Stalin? What kind of men did Voronov have in his artillery corps? (Stalin’s call was the first news Voronov had of the Rheims ceremony and Susloparov’s participation in it.) Stalin announced that he was ordering Susloparov immediately to Moscow “for strict punishment,” which, in Stalin’s words, meant the firing squad. Voronov hung up the telephone shaken. In the hour of victory one of his best men was going to the wall. For all he knew, he would be the next.

  So it went. Murderous, suicidal politics came first, before everything. In this atmosphere the death of a man was nothing, the death of a million men little more than a problem in the mechanics of propaganda, the destruction of a great city a complicated but conceivable gambit in the unceasing game of power.

  When Leningrad survived, when the Nazis failed to break through to the city, a new round opened in this deadly game. Slowly Zhdahov won back his position. His departure for Moscow in 1944 meant that the advantage was now passing to him. Quickly he moved ahead, profiting by the murderous hatreds which the war had generated within the Kremlin. From January 15 to 17, 1945, a Leningrad Party plenary was held. Zhdanov was “released” as Leningrad secretary in order to concentrate on his duties in the Central Committee in Moscow (and his chairmanship of the Finnish Control Commission). Party Secretary Kuznetsov was named Leningrad leader in Zhdanov’s place. Within a few months Kuznetsov joined Zhdanov in Moscow in the Party Secretariat (supervising State Security organs—that is, Beria), and Mayor Popkov became the Leningrad Party chief. The year 1946 was a high-water mark for Zhdanov. His power was second only to Stalin’s. His man Kuznetsov could boss, oversee and outplot Beria, and by mid-year Zhdanov had even driven Malenkov out of the Party Secretariat, possibly on a chargé of collaboration with the traitor general, Vlasov, possibly by playing on other World War II intrigues. But the weapons Zhdanov employed cut two ways. He had inaugurated an era still known as the Zhdanovshchina, an era of mugwumpism in art and culture. The targets which had been selected almost certainly by Stalin were Anna Akhmatova, the classic purist of Russian poetry, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, the satirist, Leningraders both, true inheritors of the Leningrad tradition, the Petersburg spirit.5

  The blow fell in August, 1946. The writers of Leningrad were summoned to cast out of their circle the most brilliant of their number. Akhmatova, it was said, was a whore, Zoshchenko a pimp. The dream of a European ecumenical Leningrad went glimmering. Aleksandr Shtein met Yevgeny Shvarts on the day the Leningrad Union of Writers expelled Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. Neither Akhmatova nor Zoshchenko had been permitted to be present to defend themselves. No one had defended them. Shvarts, in ill health, shaken more profoundly than by any incident of the blockade, could not speak. There was nothing Shtein or Shvarts or anyone could say. Leningrad had survived the Nazis. Whether it would survive the Kremlin was not so clear.

  As always in Russia, the writers and artists were the first victims of the savage political warfare.

  One of Vera Ketlinskaya’s best and oldest friends was Solomon Lozovsky, a salty old Bolshevik who acted as Soviet press spokesman early in the war. When she completed The Blockade, the novel on which she worked with cold-stiffened fingers as her mother’s frozen body lay next door, she gave it to Lozovsky to read. Lozovsky was, in her view, “one of the most crystal-honest, ideologically sound, warmest and democratic of Communists.” He was enthusiastic over her picture of Leningrad. Not so her editors. It was nearly three years before The Blockade was published. Lozovsky didn’t recognize it. He asked, “Is this the same manuscript I read or another?”6 Her novel, Ketlinskaya said, had been gone over with “cold steel and a hot iron.” Everything “gloomy” or “terrible” or “negative” or “frightening” or “demoralizing” or “disquieting” had been taken out. Everything was left in the book—except the spirit of Leningrad.

  The difficulties of Vera Ketlinskaya differed only in detail from those encountered by everyone who sought to write on the Leningrad theme. Olga Berggolts’ Leningrad apartment became with the passage of the years a minor archive of the blockade. Here were collected her own manuscripts from the earliest days of the war, file after file marked simply “N.O.” (ne opublikovano—not published). Among them was the manuscript of her play, Bo
rn in Leningrad, which no producer dared touch, fearful of the sharpness of her recollections, the genuineness of the human pain she portrayed.

  The roll of Leningrad writers and novelists unable to publish or to complete works on the Leningrad blockade included the novelist, Sergei Khmelnitsky (who Ketlinskaya thought might have produced the best novel of all had he lived), the playwright Leonid Rakhmanov, the novelist Yevgeny Ryss, and the novelist Nikolai Chukovsky (whose Baltic Skies suffered as severely in the hands of the censors as did Ketlinskaya’s The Blockade).

  Events acquired a momentum all their own. It is impossible to trace the moves and countermoves that so swiftly followed within the shadows of the Kremlin walls. Zhdanov did not succeed in destroying Malenkov. The latter beat his way back. By early summer 1948 it was Zhdanov who was losing ground. Stalin put the blame on Zhdanov for the breaking away of Marshal Tito from the Soviet bloc, the first crack in the monolith Russia had erected in postwar Eastern Europe.7 In July and August, 1948, Malenkov’s ascendancy was apparent. He it was who now signed the orders for Stalin’s secretariat. On August 31, 1948, Zhdanov’s death was announced.8

  Now history swiftly began to run backward. One by one the figures of the Leningrad epic vanished: Secretary Kuznetsov, Mayor Popkov, all the other Party secretaries, the chiefs of the big Leningrad industries, and almost everyone who had been clÖsely associated with Zhdanov, including N. A. Voznesensky, chief of the State Planning Commission; his brother, A. A. Voznesensky, rector of Leningrad University; M. I. Rodionov, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federated Republic; Colonel General I. V. Shikin, head of the Red Army Political Directorate; and many, many more—possibly as many as two thousand in Leningrad alone.

  Nor did the purge halt there. The career of Aleksei Kosygin, later to become Premier of the Soviet Union, hung in the balance. For several years no one, including himself, could say whether he would survive. Marshal Zhukov was banished to a minor command post in Odessa.

  Nonpolitical people went down by the hundreds. Akhmatova came near to destruction. She was not arrested (although her son was), but she was deprived of a livelihood. She survived on the charity of her friends and her own iron courage.

  In 1949, without notice or public announcement, the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad was closed. The director, Major Rakov, was arrested. The two guidebooks to the museum which he wrote were confiscated. The exhibits vanished into the maws of the secret police, whence many never emerged.9 A new museum was opened in 1957. Here were collected some of the exhibits which once graced the earlier institution, but far from all. “It only to a minor degree reflects that heroic epoch which is so memorable to all people,” in the view of Dmitri V. Pavlov, the food dictator of the blockade days.

  The museum was not the only thing that vanished in 1949. The white-and-blue warnings which had graced the Nevsky and the Sadovaya, the ones which said, “Citizens: In case of shelling this side of the street is the most dangerous,” had been preserved as a memento of the Nazi bombardment. One day in 1949 citizens walking on the Nevsky saw painters, brushes in hand, carefully painting over each warning notice. To some it seemed that not only were the notices 4^eing painted out but the memory of the nine hundred days.

  All of this was done in the name of the Leningrad Affair. To this day no official explanation of the case has been made public, although its existence has been known since Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of February 24–25, 1956.

  The Leningrad Affair was a complex mechanism devised by Malenkov and Beria, with the close collaboration of Stalin himself and his chef de cabinet, General Poskrebyshev, to destroy the Leningrad Party organization and all officials of consequence who had been associated with Zhdanov. It took the same general form as the great purges of the 1930’s, that is, it associated a large number of prominent Party figures and accused them of a bizarre series of chargés involving conspiracy and treason.

  The various purge scenarios of the Stalin epoch, beginning in the 1930’s and continuing up to the time of Stalin’s death, March 5, 1953, differed little in their general ingredients. The differences lay in the individuals. The plot or allegation was merely reconstructed to fit a particular historical epoch. The major difference between the early purges and those of the 1940’s and early 1950’s lay in the fact that Stalin publicized those of the 1930’s very heavily. Those of the 1940’s and early 1950’s, except for the so-called “Doctors’ Plot,” which had only begun to be presented at the time of the dictator’s death, were carried out in secret. The general public did not know their nature, although often there was widespread knowledge that some kind of purge was under way.

  The Leningrad case was unusual in that not only was there no public mention of the “plot” in which so many high officials were exterminated, but fantastic efforts were made to destroy the historical record of events in Leningrad so that future generations would be unable to ascertain what really had happened, particularly during the days of the war and especially during the nine hundred days.

  Not only was the Museum of Leningrad’s Defense closed, its archives seized and its director sent to Siberia. Not only were works of fiction suppressed or bowdlerized. The official records were concealed or sequestered. All the documents of the Council for the Defense of Leningrad, for example, were placed in the archives of the Ministry of Defense. No Soviet historian has had access to them, and they are still held under a high-security classification.10 As early as December, 1941, commissions in the Kirov and other regions of Leningrad were set up to collect facts about the blockade, and in April, 1943, a special Party bureau began to prepare a chronicle of the blockade. It was never published. In January, 1944, Party Secretary Zhdanov ordered a collection of materials on the blockade published, including articles by himself, Secretary Kuznetsov, Secretary Y. F. Kapustin and Mayor Popkov. They were never published. The two-volume collection which appeared (and which is a bibliographic rarity today) contained little beyond newspaper clippings. Professor Orbeli was directed January 18, 1944, to prepare a work on the achievements of Leningrad science during the blockade. The volume listed 1,000 scientific discoveries and contained contributions by 480 authors. It was never published. Two proofs have been preserved, possibly by accident, one in the Academy of Science archives and one in the personal papers of the geologist, I. V. Danilovsky, in the Leningrad Public Library. A comprehensive work on the role of artists and intelligentsia in the war was prepared (printers’ proofs still exist). Dmitri Shostakovich, the composers O. A. Yevlakhov and N. P. Budashkin, Ballerina Galina Ulanova and many others contributed articles. None of this material ever appeared in print.

  The Leningrad epic was wiped out of public memory insofar as this was physically possible, and, as in Orwell’s “memory hole,” the building blocks of history, the public records, the statistics, the memoirs of what had happened, were destroyed or suppressed. Zhdanov’s papers have never been published. No volume of his speeches exists. His personal archives (if they still exist) are unavailable, probably under security classification. Even the wartime files of the Leningrad newspapers are not publicly accessible, and references to blockade issues are rarely found in Soviet publications. The elaborate stenographic records which are a routine of official Soviet life are seldom cited, apparently having been suppressed or destroyed.

  What were the chargés in the Leningrad Affair? They may be deduced from the nature of the suppressions. The chargés turned the heroism of Leningrad inside out, presenting tht Council for the Defense of Leningrad as part of a plot to deliver the city to the Germans. The Leningrad leadership was chargéd with planning to blow up the city and scuttle the Baltic Fleet. Treachery was alleged at many levels. In some way even the valiant stand of the Izhorsk workers at Kolpino became involved. It may have been contended that Zhdanov and the Leningrad group deliberately sought to involve Russia in war, hoping to procure her defeat and to set up a new non-Communist regime with the aid of the Nazis. At the end of the war, the conspirators
were alleged to have taken steps looking to the seizure of power, the transfer of the capital from Moscow to Leningrad and the setting up of a new regime with the aid of foreign powers, specifically, in all probability, with British assistance.11

  The fact that there was not one word of truth in the bizarre allegations made no difference. The chargés were used to exterminate all Zhdanov’s lieutenants and thousands of minor officials. They were shot or sent to prison camps.

  Nothing in the chamber of Stalin’s horrors equaled the Leningrad blockade and its epilogue, the Leningrad Affair. The blockade may have cost the lives of a million and a half people. The “affair” destroyed thousands of people who survived the most terrible days any modern city had ever known.

  A quarter of a century later the great city on the Neva had not recovered from the wounds of war. The scars, physical and spiritual, could still be found. The deadly sequence of Stalinist events, beginning with the murder of Kirov, December i, 1934, through the savage purges of the 1930’s, the outbreak of war, the nine hundred days, the Leningrad Affair, left a mark nothing could erase. The dreams of a new gateway to Europe were not realized. Leningrad was the last great Russian city to be restored after World War II, far behind Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Minsk and, of course, Stalingrad.

  The passage of time did not diminish the political struggle over the Leningrad events. A volume of Leningrad memoirs, including some reminiscences originally set down in wartime and the years before 1948, was turned over to the printer in the summer of 1965. It was not cleared by the censorship for three years and when it finally reached the bookstores late in 1968 bore painful evidences of omission, revision and occasional falsification.12 The time had not yet come when the people of Leningrad could freely tell their story in Russia.