The 900 Days (21 page)

The reasons for the doubts, the torment, the hesitations, the mixed mood of so many Leningraders were deeply rooted and profoundly tragic.

From the moment of its founding by Peter on May 16, 1703, Leningrad, or Petrograd, or St. Petersburg—whatever name it had borne—had been a special city and its people a special people. The character of the northern capital was fully formed long before the 1917 Revolution, and it was this character which gave to that Revolution its essential spirit.

In St. Petersburg for a hundred years before 1917 the Revolution had been in gestation. The tragic failure of the noble young officers who in 1825 sought to bring the government enlightenment within the framework of czarism by converting it to European parliamentarianism—the ill-fated Decembrist movement—had been the initial effort by the northern capital to propel the Romanovs out of medieval tyranny.

When the Decembrists failed (and were executed or exiled with their young wives to the most remote and harsh lands of the Empire, east of Irkutsk to the dismal mines of Petrovsky Zavod), their example lived on as an inspiration for generation after generation of Petersburg youth.

To this was joined the legend of Pushkin, the poet whose Byronesque image became the ideal of Russian youth. Pushkin was a martyr in the same cause. There was hardly a youngster in “Piter” (as they called their northern capital) who did not believe that Czar Nicholas I had a hand in provoking the quarrel which led to Pushkin’s fatal duel and death.

Decade succeeded decade through the nineteenth century. Each brought to St. Petersburg new martyrs, new revolutionaries, new idols. The roll grew too long to recite—Alexander Herzen, Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Cherny-shevsky, the young men and women of the Narodnya Volya—the People’s Will. The anarchists, Bakunin, the assassins, young Aleksandr Ulyanov, Lenin’s older brother, the writers, the Dostoyevskys, the Turgenevs, the Chekhovs, the Tolstoys. Not all lived or worked in “Piter.” But they contributed to its spirit.

The city grew great. It was Russia’s window on the West—the center of the most advanced, the richest, the most cultured, the most revolutionary society of the land and a burgeoning industrial center. Here the new Russian industrial aristocracy had its birth. Here rose the smoky chimneys of the Putilov steel works. Here became established the big foreign entrepreneurs, Siemens and Hals, Thornton, Langesippen, Laferme, Grapp, James Beck, Stieglitz, Maxwell, Frank, Singer Sewing Machine, International Harvester, McCormick.

On the Nevsky Prospekt, great billboards proclaimed the virtues of the Singer Sewing Machine. The Equitable Life Insurance Company occupied handsome quarters, and nearby were the stores of the Bessels and the brothers Mory.

It was here that the Academy of Sciences had been founded by Peter and developed by Catherine. Here the flower of Russian science and scholarship —Lomonosov, Mendeleyev, Sechenov and the great Pavlov—had lived and worked.

St. Petersburg was an imperial city,
the
Imperial City. It had been created in imperial scope. Its architecture, its buildings echoed this theme. Peter and Catherine and their successors consciously and devotedly sought to erect on the Neva a capital grander than any in the world. In this they in large measure succeeded. The great ensembles, the long promenade of palaces along the Neva embankments, the network of canals and small streams—the Fontanka, the Moika, the Catherine Canal, Nevsky Prospekt and the palaces of the Stroganovs, the Anichkovs, the Engineers Castle, the Tauride Palace, the Champs de Mars, the Summer Gardens, the more distant grandeurs of Peter-hof, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo—all this made “Piter” a magical and remarkable metropolis.

Yet the capital not only was built on a dismal marsh which had claimed the lives of thousands of the laborers whom Peter assigned to it; it was erected upon the ramshackle, shoddy, cruel foundations of czarist despotism combined with the worst oppressions of the early industrial era. Poverty, starvation, beggary, prostitution, all the diseases of malnutrition and the afflictions of illiteracy marked the slums and the workers’ quarters of the Petrograd side and the Vyborg quarter.

Out of this breeding ground and the incredible decadence of the court of Nicholas II in its last phases of Rasputin and World War I the Russian Revolution had been born.

It was born as every Leningrader knew (and took pride in) in Petrograd. It was born of Petrograd suffering, Petrograd spirit, the Petrograd milieu. And it was born, as it were, spontaneously. No one organized it. No one plotted it (although generations of young Russians had plotted revolution for years, they had no hand in this). It took its origin from the despair and rebellion of women, standing in queues at the bread shops, day after day, only to receive no bread. Finally, in March of 1917 (February 26 by the old Russian calendar) these feelings boiled over.

Within three days the structure of the Russian imperial rule collapsed like a punctured puffball. All that remained was a little dirty powder in the palm of the hand.

Petrograd was the site and scene of the second revolution—the Bolshevik Revolution. It was to Petrograd that Lenin returned, to the Finland Station, on that April day of 1917 to proclaim his Maximalist demands—revolution, no quarter to the provisional government, all power to the Soviets—the demands which so disturbed, frightened and surprised his home-grown followers like Stalin and Molotov, the young men of the Bolshevik movement who really did not know what Bolshevism was until Lenin had defined it with his quick, dark brush strokes.

Here Lenin brewed his
coup d’état
and rode to power over the backs of Kerensky and his provisional moderates, who fell almost as easily as had imperial czardom.

It was a Petrograd tragedy, still deeply felt by its citizens, that in the hour of desperate German threat in March of 1918 Lenin “temporarily” removed the seat of Soviet Government to Moscow.

More than twenty years had now passed on this June 22, 1941, and the Soviet capital was still in Moscow. The years had not been easy for Leningrad. Even before Lenin’s death in 1924 the change had begun. With Moscow as the center, the Revolution took on a different tone, a different content. Perhaps this was inevitable. Perhaps it would have happened even if the capital had not been moved to Moscow. But no one in “Piter” felt quite sure of this.

For the fact was that for two hundred years a struggle for the soul of Russia, for the leadership of the great Slav land, had been in progress.

On the one side were the Muscovites, dowdy, greedy, rude, vigorous, led by the conservative Orthodox clergy and the grasping Moscow merchant class, the “
meshchanstvo
_y
“
the tough, heavy-handed, vodka-drinking families which had risen from the peasantry over the backs of their own kind, conservative, set against change, isolationist, fearing and hating Europe, fearing and hating St. Petersburg, which symbolized for them all that was new, progressive, stylish—and dangerous.

And on the other side was St. Petersburg, its eyes on the brilliance of Paris and Rome (although its heart might still be on the Volga), its style set by the West, ecumenical, industrial, heavily foreign (French, not Russian, was the language of society), looking down on backward, muddy, dusty Moscow as the back country from which it had sprung, regarding Moscow as the symbol of red ta|>e, backwardness, crudeness, vulgarity, provinciality.

With the transfer of the capital back to Moscow, Leningrad began to feel the change—and to fear it a little. For two hundred years “Piter” had lorded it over Moscow. Now it was Moscow’s turn.

And so it proved to be—with a vengeance, the vengeance of a paranoid and dictatorial ruler whose like Russia had not seen since Ivan the Terrible.

The first signs became evident within a year or two of Lenin’s death—in the sharpening struggle between Stalin and the Old Guard Bolsheviks, among whom was numbered Grigori Zinovyev, the Party boss of Leningrad, one of Lenin’s closest associates, the second or third most influential man in Russia.

Zinovyev fell in 1927, and Leningrad saw that its fears of Moscow were not without foundation. Still, at first the change was not too great. Stalin was involved in launching the first Five-Year Plan and embarking on the tragic and bloody collectivization of the peasants. Leningrad stood aside from these massive conflicts. Moreover, she had developed a new and brilliant leader, Sergei Kirov, an adherent of Stalin’s but an attractive, able man who was winning the heart of Leningrad and the support of members of the Central Committee who had been frightened and appalled by Stalin’s heavy-handed ruthlessness. Indeed, it was rumored that at the great “Congress of Victors,” the Party Congress in January, 1934, at which the worst troubles of both industrialization and collectivization seemed over, Kirov had gotten more votes than Stalin in the elections to the Central Committee.

Then on December 1, 1934, occurred an event which was to mutilate life in Leningrad for years to come. On that day a young man named Leonid V. Nikolayev walked into Kirov’s office in Smolny and shot him dead.

That act unleashed upon Leningrad such terror as the world had not seen since the Paris Commune, and not even then. Thousands were arrested. They were shot or sent to concentration camps, labor camps and so-called “isolator prisons.” They were so numerous that they came in later years to be nicknamed “Kirov’s assassins.” Swept into the net with these Leningraders (the arrests heavily concentrated among young people, intellectuals, anyone who might by remote classification have indicated in the past any lack of sympathy for the regime), of course, was Zinovyev and with him most of the Old Bolshevik opposition to Stalin.

In fact, the Kirov assassination was the keystone to the terror of the 1930’s. It was on the day of Kirov’s assassination that the secret police were given special powers, never before granted, under which they could sentence and execute by administrative process anyone in the Soviet Union.

From this assassination flowed the whole regime of terror which bloodied Russia from one end to the other in the ensuing years, continuing up to the start of World War II (although beginning in 1939 a damper was placed on word of arrests—the formality of trial long since had been dispensed with —and many persons, even in Russia, were not quite aware that the purges were continuing).

Nowhere did the terror strike more harshly than in Leningrad.

In Leningrad occurred the worst repressions of 1937–38. Hundreds of leading Party members and important officials were wiped out—among them four secretaries of the city and regional Party committees, four chairmen of the city executive, the head of the young Komsomols and dozens of other top Party figures.

The story of the purge in just one Leningrad factory—the great Red Putilov steel works—has been painstakingly pieced together. The first blows fell on all who had in any manner been connected with the old Zinovyev group. The plant had hardly been rechristened in Kirov’s name before the deputy director, the chief of the Party committee and the foremen of a dozen shops were summarily thrown out of the Party and out of their jobs. In January, 1935, more than 140 persons were dischargéd—and then arrested—on grounds they had some past connection with the czarist regime, with former industrialists, businessmen, shopkeepers or well-to-do farmers. In short order another 700 persons were rounded up under the category of “class enemies.”

Production declined. Every failure to meet a quota and every mistake was blamed on “enemies of the state,” either already unmasked or about to be unmasked.

The plant director, Karl Martovich Ots, an honorable man, one of the outstanding industrial executives in the Soviet Union, attempted to maintain some order, to protect his personnel from the waves of arrest and vilification. But it was hopeless. One day a T-28 tank was being checked out for delivery to the army when a bolt was found missing. Demands were made to bring the “enemy saboteurs” to light. Ots knew that the fault lay with a mechanic who had simply forgotten to screw in the bolt. At personal risk, Ots refused to permit a witch hunt. But it was like attempting to hold back the tide with a sand pail. A purge of Party members in the factory was carried out, in which more hundreds vanished.

The pace of arrests slackened a bit in 1936, then resumed with a rush in 1937. Into the maw vanished Ots, who had just been named to head the great Izhorsk factory and for whom a gleaming tablet of honor had been erected in the reception room of the Kirov plant. Along with him went his successor at the Kirov works, M. Ye. Ter-Asaturov, the heads of the bookkeeping department, the tank production units, the personnel department, the machine-tool shop and dozens of others. Not to mention former Kirov plant workers who had risen to high government and Party posts—the Mayor of Leningrad, Aleksei Petrovsky; the secretary of the Neva Party region and the Novosibirsk Party secretary, Ivan Alekseyev.

Most of the chiefs of big industrial organizations were shot, among them Ots, Ter-Asaturov, and I. F. Antyukhin, head of the Power Trust. Almost every Leningrad industry lost its director and most of its top personnel. The Leningrad military command was wiped out with the execution of the District Commander, General P. Ye. Dybenko, and the commander of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral A. K. Sivkov.

A new Party leadership was installed and Zhdanov was brought in from Nizhni-Novgorod (now Gorky) for that purpose. Zhdanov, a powerful, ambitious man, never won the love of Leningrad, but by the outbreak of World War II he had stamped his mark on the city and was to impress it even more indelibly as the war went on.

Not only did the purges start in Leningrad. It was in Leningrad that they were given their characteristic leitmotiv of macabre paranoia. For, as was obvious even at the time, long suspected by Leningraders, and confirmed after Stalin’s death, the assassination of Kirov was not the act of a single disgruntled, deranged individual. There was something very, very peculiar about the murder. It was, in fact, inspired or contrived by Stalin himself. The murder was arranged by Stalin’s own police, and among the first victims of the post-assassination purge were the police officers who had a hand in setting up the situation which made Kirov’s killing possible.