Authors: Harrison Salisbury
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 pleasant, 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 drafted: 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.
General Govorov carried out a detailed inspection of the Oranienbaum position in mid-October. It would be necessary to move large quantities of troops and guns into the area, and Govorov wanted to be certain that nothing went wrong. He then met at Smolny with Admiral Tributs, the top naval command, and Party Secretaries Zhdanov and Kuznetsov. The Baltic Fleet had a major assignment—to shift secretly the Second Shock Army from Leningrad to Oranienbaum before ice hindered movement in the Neva River. It was no small task, involving 2 rifle corps, a tank brigade, 600 guns, mountains of shells and equipment. Beginning November 5, each night blacked-out caravans put out from the wharves at the Leningrad factory, Kanat, and from the naval base at Lisy Nos and landed on the Oranienbaum side without loss 30,000 troops, 47 tanks, 400 guns, 1,400 trucks, 3,000 horses and 10,000 tons of ammunition and supplies. After the ice froze, another 22,000 troops, 800 machines, 140 tanks and 380 guns were sent over.