EPILOGUE
Oh, stones,
Be as firm as people!
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, amassive 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 emerge. 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.
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, Born 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.
But one thing was finally achieved. The blue and white signs reappeared on the Nevsky Prospekt in 1957. Once again the pedestrian was warned: “Citizens: In case of shelling this side of the street is the most dangerous.” The signs are carefully touched up each spring. The Leningraders are very fond of them, very fond of their memories. They have etched on the wall beside the eternal flame at Piskarevsky the words of Olga Berggolts:
Here lie the people of Leningrad,
Here are the citizens—men, women and children—
And beside them the soldiers of the Red Army
Who gave their lives
Defending you, Leningrad,
Cradle of Revolution.
We cannot number the noble
Ones who lie beneath the eternal granite,
But of those honored by this stone
Let no one forget, let nothing be forgotten.
Stalin is dead. So are Zhdanov, Kuznetsov, Popkov, Govorov. So are Akhmatova, Zoshchenko, Shvarts, Chukovsky. A new generation has been born which does not know the names of Malenkov, Kulik, Mekhlis.
But the memory of the nine hundred days will always live.
1 In 1946 the exhibition was transformed into a permanent Museum of the Defense of Leningrad under Director Major L. Rakov. Here were collected thousands of personal archives and trophies of the blockade—pictures, maps, models, photographs, panoramas outlining each stage of the siege, letters, diaries, personal materials on the commanders, the ordinary civilians, the soldiers and the political leaders who participated in the epic. One painting depicted the Izhorsk workers halting German tanks almost singlehanded at Kolpino. There was a list of twenty-two different dishes prepared in the winter of 1941–1942 out of pig skin. More than 150,000 visitors, including Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin, visited the museum in its first three months.
2 The volume presented comparisons of Leningrad with Washington and Paris and said that in planning the new city center of Leningrad the architects had incorporated the best features of the two capitals. The existing Leningrad center (Palace Square) was “far too small” in the opinion of the architects for the new role of the future city. (Baranov et al., Leningrad, Leningrad-Moscow, 1943.)
3 Completed in 1950. (Karasev, Istoriya SSSR, No. 3, 1961, p. 126.)
4 Susloparov had been the Soviet military attaché in Paris at the outbreak of war and had sent many intelligence reports back to Moscow in the spring of 1941 warning of Nazi preparations for attack.
5 Zoshchenko was much impressed by the partisans of the Leningrad area. He wrote a cycle of thirty-two stories about their wartime achievements. The first ten were published by Novy Mir under the title “Never Let Us Forget.” Their publication was suspended as a result of the Zhdanov attack, and the full cycle was not published until 1962. The topic of partisans was politically extremely sensitive because of behind-the-scenes quarrels between Beria and other Politburo members, including Zhdanov, over the direction of underground activities behind the Nazi lines. This may have been a factor in the suppression of the Zoshchenko stories. (Istoriya Russkoi Sovetskoi Literatury, Vol. II, Moscow, 1967, pp. 378–379.)
6 Lozovsky vanished almost immediately after offering this opinion. He probably was arrested in late 1948 and was executed August 12, 1952, along with a number of Jewish intellectuals, presumably on the concocted chargé that they were planning to set up a separate Jewish republic in the Crimea and detach it from the Soviet Union. The Crimea had been virtually cleansed of population by Stalin at the end of the war. He deported all the Crimean Tatars to Siberia on grounds that they collaborated with the Nazis. Whether the “affair” in which Lozovsky was caught up was connected with the others put forward in Stalin’s last years, such as the Leningrad Affair and the so-called Doctors’ Plot, is not known.
7 The blame actually lay with Stalin himself and with his police chief, Beria. It is probable that Beria and Malenkov persuaded Stalin that the fault lay with Zhdanov.
8 The possibility that Zhdanov was poisoned or died of medical malpractice cannot be excluded. This chargé was made in the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” of January 13, 1953. Other supposed victims included his brother-in-law, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, who died in 1945, and General Govorov, the Leningrad commander, who was then still alive. There is reason to believe that in certain other cases where medical “murder” was chargéd by Stalin (specifically in the death of Maxim Gorky and Gorky’s son) the deaths actually were criminally caused, but the instigator was not necessarily the person named in Stalin’s indictment. Thus it cannot be excluded that a combination of Stalin, Malenkov and Beria or all three had a hand in Zhdanov’s death. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, points out that Zhdanov was known to be suffering from a bad heart condition. However, Stalin’s chef de cabinet, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, confirmed before his death that “we” (presumably meaning Stalin) did in fact employ poison in purges after 1940.
9 After Stalin’s death Major Rakov was released from concentration camp and began a new career as a playwright. He collaborated with I. Alem in writing a comedy called The Most Dangerous Enemy. (Shtein, Znamya, No. 4, April, 1964, p. 68.) Some manuscripts taken from the museum in 1949 were deposited in the archives of the Ministry of Defense, where presumably they repose as classified materials. But many items have never been found. (Karasev, op. cit., p. 15.)
10 Asked why no Soviet historian prior to himself had mentioned the existence of the Leningrad Council of Defense, D. V. Pavlov replied that “very few persons were aware of the facts.” (Pavlov, personal communication, April 30, 1968.)
11 There have long been vague rumors that part of the “plot” involved a project to conduct an international exposition or World Trade Fair at Leningrad.
12 The volume contains a self-serving memoir by General Popov, the Leningrad commander at the outbreak of war, in which he obscures the fact that he did not return to Leningrad in time to participate in the initial military decisions. He reveals, however, that a prompt start on fortifications was hindered because no one would take responsibility for the politically sensitive action of mobilizing the civilian population. Only after a “painful” telephone conversation between Zhdanov and Stalin were the necessary orders issued. Popov’s memoir makes clear that the Malenkov-Molotov mission to Leningrad in August-September, 1941, was in direct consequence of Zhdanov’s setting up the ill-fated Council for the Defense of Leningrad (V. M. Kovalchuk, editor, Oborona Leningrada, Leningrad, 1968, p. 29).