The 900 Days (58 page)

And now on the twenty-first:

The water system was knocked out. The electricity was cut. The hospital was hit. The fifth raid of the day was just finishing at 10
P.M.
Tens of thousands of rounds had been fired by the antiaircraft guns. Five or six Nazi planes were claimed.
³
That night Vishnevsky put himself to sleep reading a cowboy-and-Indian story by Mayne Reid.

The Germans used 180 planes that day. Only five fighters were available to defend Kronstadt. Admiral Tributs angrily demanded better protection from the Leningrad Command. Nothing, they said, could be done.

Panteleyev was up most of the night of the 2ist-2 2nd. The attacks had badly damaged the port city. Repair crews were trying to put the naval factory in order. Everyone was deadly tired. There had been many casualties. One young commander returned from his ship to find his house in ruins, his wife dead and two babies lying wounded in the wreckage.

It grew colder toward dawn. Panteleyev could see the flicker of flames toward Peterhof and along the southern borders of Leningrad. The heavy fleet guns were still firing, slowly, methodically. At 5:15
A.M.
there was a new air alarm. The day dawned quiet and clear. Tributs ordered everyone alerted for air attacks—all the AA batteries and the tiny fighter force stationed on the Field of Bulls. At 8
A.M.
the battleship
Marat
and the cruiser
Kirov
opened up against the Germans on the northern mainland. The Germans replied. Great columns of water flew up from the German shells falling in the harbor beside Petrovsky Park. The water splashed down on the linden trees and over the bronze figure of Peter the Great. These were heavy German guns, and they were firing at the ships anchored off Kronstadt and at the naval factory. Some shells fell in the naval city.

At 2
P.M.
Vishnevsky went to lunch and then to the library. As usual he was poring over the history of past wars. This time it was the White General Yudenich and his unsuccessful attack on Petrograd. He had hardly sat down to read in the gloomy old reading room when the air alert sounded again. It was three o’clock. The AA guns opened on Nazi bombers attacking the naval factory and the warships in the Sea Canal. Bombs fell on one of the floating bases. When the all-clear sounded, a dangerous and difficult task began. Delayed-action bombs had fallen. They had to be found and deactivated. No bombs had yet hit fleet headquarters, but it was decided to move into the ARP underground headquarters on the edge of the town. The commanders were reluctant to leave the handsome white building with its magnificent view of the harbor and the shore—a building easily visible to the Germans at Peterhof. But the move was made. The next day the first shells fell on the staff headquarters.
⁴

Vice Admiral Drozd was wounded during the twenty-second but not seriously. That night Vishnevsky noted in his journal:

So it was that on the twenty-third the sun rose on a world which Pante-leyev somehow found fresh, remarkably quiet, sunny, the air bracing—a beautiful autumn day.

Vice Admiral Gren telephoned from Leningrad, as he did every morning, to report on the fleet batteries. He was in a good mood. The Germans had been firing heavily on the port area and on the cruiser
Maxim Gorky
. There had already been an air alert. It looked like a big day in the air. But the best news was that the front seemed to be stabilizing^ The Germans had learned to respect the heavy fleet batteries.

Panteleyev reported this to Tributs, who was concerned about the little fighter force at the Field of Bulls. He sent Panteleyev to see how they were making out. The road to the field was very poor. Some shells fell, and as Panteleyev neared the field he saw the fighters taking off, one after another, all six of them. Another air raid.

A moment later the Germans appeared, flying straight out of the sun. They began bombing immediately—attacking the naval hospital and the naval factory. There were forty planes in the attack, one group after another. Panteleyev hurried back to the naval city. The streets were empty except for AA crews, first-aid detachments and military trucks. Everything looked grim and businesslike. At 11
A.M.
when the guns began again, Panteleyev was in Petrovsky Park. It was the biggest raid yet. The guns fired crazily, and the ground shook under the explosions. He was standing near the Peter the Great statue under a large lime tree whose yellowed leaves shook with the explosions. To his amazement three or four youngsters were high in the tree watching the attack. He tried to get them down. They wouldn’t come. Too dangerous, they said. Panteleyev looked at the statue of Peter facing the sea, his bronze eyes steady. On the fundament was inscribed: “To defend the fleet and its base to the last of life and strength is the highest duty.”

Panteleyev could see a dozen JU-88’s circling lazily over the battleship
Marat
, which stood in the main channel not far off Kronstadt. The bombs burst one ofter another . . . explosion . . . explosion . . . burst of flame.

Suddenly the whole foremast of the ship with its crossbars, heavy equipment, crosswalks, filled with scurrying sailors in their white uniforms, slipped away from the body of the
Marat
and slowly, slowly, slithered sideways into the water, sinking with an enormous explosion. The lower mast then rose up lazily, and the forward gun tower with its three 12-inch guns broke off and fell into the sea. The whole nose of the battleship vanished, including its first funnel. Panteleyev saw hundreds of sailors in the water. He heard their cries, louder than the whine of the AA shells.

He ordered all ambulance squads and every available boat, cutter and sloop to the aid of the
Marat
. The remainder of the ship, as if cut through by a knife, minus the forward part as far as the second tower, remained afloat. The ship settled to the bottom, but three of its towers remained intact.

Panteleyev made his way by cutter to the stricken battleship. He found its deck cleared and equipment stowed away. Only when he came to the second tower did he suddenly discover himself at the edge of the boat. Beyond this the warship simply had vanished. More than two hundred sailors, including Captain Ivanov, had been killed or wounded. Among the dead was Johann Zeltser, editor of the
Marat
newspaper and a Leningrad writer. He commanded the A A battery on the forward deck. A few days earlier he had written his wife Clara in Leningrad: “Perhaps I won’t see you again. You can be sure I won’t give my life cheaply. While I am conscious, I’ll fight on. How I hate them! . . . I’ve sent you all the money I have. . . . You’ll need it to bring up our children. I kiss you strongly, strongly—you and the children. . . .”

Within a matter of days the second, third and fourth gun towers of the
Marat
had been put back into action. But the damage at Kronstadt was not easy to cope with. Enormous craters scarred the streets. There were hunks of metal and piping where the bombs had smashed the mains. Here and there torrents of water gushed up like fountains. Flame and smoke covered the naval hospital and the naval factory. The bombing went on. The work went on. All through the night. It was long after midnight when Admiral Tributs called in the Air Defense Command. He wanted to know why the Nazi bombers had appeared over the fleet almost immediately after the air alert. The explanation was simple but tragic. The Germans had taken off from old Soviet fields nearby. They had flown first to Peterhof, then swiftly reversed course and appeared over Kronstadt in a minute or two. There had been 272 planes over Kronstadt that day. The damage to the hospital and naval works was grave. The mine layer
Oka
had been sunk. So had the
Grozny
. Two 200-pound bombs hit the
Kirov
. The
Minsk
had been sunk on a shallow footing. A transport and a submarine in drydock had been wrecked.

But the naval guns had not been halted. They went on firing. Some time during the night Panteleyev talked with Gren in Leningrad.

“Why do I see the sky aglow over Leningrad again?” Panteleyev asked.

“This was a record day/’ Gren replied. “There were eleven air alerts. One of them lasted seven hours. The Gostiny Dvor has been destroyed. But the warships haven’t been damaged.”

It was, it seemed clear, the worst day of the German air attack on Leningrad and on Kronstadt.

Aleksandr Shtein thought it was the culminating day of the German assault. The last two days had been a scene from Dante. He found the notebook of a German corporal, Hermann Fuchs, who had been killed in the fighting around Ligovo. It was brought back by a Soviet scout. In it he read:

During the endless raids of the afternoon and evening of September 23 Vishnevsky wandered into the dining hall of the Political Administration. It was empty. There was a bowl of kasha untouched on the table and an unopened bottle. The waitress looked at him with glazed eyes and said, “I don’t want to die. I want to live. I have a daughter at home.”

As Vishnevsky lay, trying to sleep, he could hear the bombs still falling, the guns still firing. The Baltic Fleet was still in action. It had gone through the worst day of the war, but it had not been destroyed. Hitler’s orders to raze Kronstadt to the water had not been carried out. And the guns fired on.

Before he opened Mayne Reid and started to read once again, Vishnevsky noted in his diary: “There are some tendencies toward stabilizing the front.”

¹
To convert figures from the metric system: 1 kilometer = .62137 mile; 1 kilogram = 2.2046 pounds.

²
They held out there until October 22, when they were evacuated to the Hangö base in Finland. (Achkasov,
op. cit
., pp. 165
et seq.)
The date of October 19 is given by Admiral Kuznetsov for this move.
{Voprosy Istorii
, No. 8, August, 1965, p. 114). The Hangö garrison was gradually withdrawn to Kronstadt and Leningrad from late October to early December. The evacuation order was issued October 26, and the first 4,000 men arrived at Kronstadt November 4. In all, 16,000 men were removed, and the operation was completed by December 3. There were considerable losses of men and ships, due largely to magnetic mines. At the same time a small garrison of about 1,000 men was removed from the island of Hogland —an action which Admiral Panteleyev characterized as an “obvious mistake.” (Panteleyev,
op. cit
., pp. 266-272).

³
Vishnevsky,
op. cit
., Vol. 3, pp. 132
et seq
. Panteleyev claims 10
(op. cit
., p. 227).

⁴
Vice Admiral Smirnov is highly critical of Admiral Tributs for his failure to provide a secure bomb shelter for fleet headquarters before the outbreak of war. (Smirnov,
op. cit
., p. 64.)

ABOVE THE IRON GATES OF THE SHEREMETYEV PALACE ON the Fontanka embankment where Anna Akhmatova lived, the legend was inscribed on an old coat of arms: “
Deus Conservat Ornnia”
From her window she looked out upon the palace courtyard, guarded by a great maple whose branches reached toward her, rustling nervously through the long winters and gently stirring during the soft daylight of the white nights. Now the maple’s scarlet and golden leaves had fallen, spattering the pavement with pastels that gradually turned to mud in the autumn rains. Now it seemed to Anna Akhmatova that the naked black branches of the maple reached out to her more urgently, calling to her, telling her to stay, to stay in Petersburg.

Anna Akhmatova was the queen of Russian poetry. She was, perhaps, the queen of Leningrad. Surely no one had more of the city in her life, in her blood, in her experience—its fears, its hopes, its tragedies, its genius. She was not Petersburg-born. But her parents had brought her to the northern capital, to the gentle pleasure gardens of Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), when she was a child. Her first memories were of “the green damp magnificence of the parks, the meadows where my nurse used to take me for a walk, the hippodrome where little dappled horses galloped, the old railroad station.” There she grew up, breathing the air of poets—of Pushkin, of Lermontov, of Derzhavin, of Nekrasov, of Shelley. The princess, the queen-to-be—none so mad, none so gay, so feminine, so passionate, so lyric, so romantic, so urgent, so madcap—so Russian.

Before she was five she spoke French. She went to a girls’ school, studied law, studied literature, raced to Paris, fell in love with Modigliani (she didn’t know he was a genius, but she knew he had “a head like Antonius and eyes that flashed gold”). She saw the Imperial Ballet of Diaghilev in its Paris triumph. She saw Venice, Rome, Florence. She married a poet, the love of her schoolgirl days in Tsarskoye, Nikolai Gumilev, a dark, brilliant, difficult man. With him she founded a new school of poetry, a neoclassical movement which they called Acmeism. Everything was possible, everything experienced. Her life was a poem of mirrored images, of galloping sleighs in white snows, of warm summer evenings in leafy parks, of boudoirs, of boulevards, of Paris, of golden stars. Of love. Of tragedy. These were, she later understood, the luminous lighthearted days, the hour before dawn. She did not know that shadows soon would pass at her window, terrifying, hiding behind lamp posts, changing the gold to drossy brass.

But tragedy’s hand clutched early at her life. She saw it overhanging Petrograd in the war of the Kaiser and the Czar. She saw the “black cloud over mournful Russia.” She saw her Petrograd transformed from a northern Venice to a “granite city of glory and misfortune.” By the end of World War I Gumilev brought anguish and divorce to her. The tragedy deepened when he faced a Bolshevik firing squad in 1921 and was shot as a White Guard conspirator. The golden years of Tsarskoye Selo had ended. Now came the iron years of the Revolution’s mills, grinding ever more harshly until the terror of Stalin’s police closed in and swept away her son, Lev.

For seventeen months she stood with the other women in the prison lines of Leningrad, waiting tor word of her son’s fate, bringing him food, bringing him packages. Once a woman next in line, a woman whose lips were blue with cold or fear, asked her, “And this—can you write about it?”

“Yes,” Anna Akhmatova replied, “I can.”

The woman smiled a strange and secret smile.

Anna Akhmatova did, finally, write about those days:

By this time her son had been cast into exile, there to remain until Stalin’s death in 1953.

In this September of 1941 Anna Akhmatova’s life was taking another turn. She was leaving Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad. September was ending and she had to go, orders of the City Party. The plane—one of the few— was waiting. Already she had moved from the palace on the Fontanka to the building at No. 9 Griboyedov where so many writers had their home. Pavel Luknitsky dropped in to say good-bye. He found her ill and weak. She emerged from the dark little porter’s house wearing a heavy coat and they talked together on a bench. Anna Akhmatova told how she had been sitting in a slit trench outside the Sheremetyev Palace during a raid. She was holding a youngster in her arms when she heard the “dragon’s shriek” of falling bombs and then a “tremendous din, a crackle and a crunch.” Three times the walls of the trench quivered and then grew quiet. How right it was, she said, that in their ancient myths the earth was always the mother, always indestructible. Only the earth could shrug at the terrors of bombardment. The first of the bombs fell next door in the former Catherine Institute, now a hospital. It did not explode. But two exploded in the Sheremetyev gardens, one at the corner of Zhukovsky and Liteiny and one in the house where the writer Nikolai Chukovsky lived. Fortunately he was at the front.

Anna Akhmatova confessed that the explosions left her crushed and feeble. A feeling of terror came over her as she looked at the women with their children wearily waiting in the bomb shelter during the raids—terror for what might happen to them, for what fate held.

The terror for the children of Leningrad did not leave her. From the desert oasis of Tashkent, to which she was evacuated in early October, she wrote in memory of Valya Smirnov, a little boy whom she might have held in her arms, a little boy who was killed by a German bomb:

Deus Conservat Omnia
. . . .

It was a time for God to come to the aid of the city beside the gray waters of the Neva. But He did not seem to hear. He did not hear the crunch of the bombs, the bark of the guns, the cries of the children with golden hair.

A. M. Dreving was on the rooftop of Leningrad’s Public Library one late September day, a sunny day, a warm day. He stood with his fellow ARP workers when the guns began to go, scattering over the roof steel slivers of shrapnel. He watched a German plane sweeping up toward the library from the Summer Gardens. Bombs began to fall. One near the circus, another close to the Nevsky near Malaya Sadovaya. The plane headed straight for the library. He knew they usually carried four bombs. Would it hit the library? It did not. It fell a short distance away in the Catherine Gardens. Possibly it was one of the cluster which dropped about Anna Akhmatova as she sat in the slit trench with the little boy.

The big Erisman Hospital, of which Vera Inber’s husband was the director, was located in what Leningraders called the “deep rear,” Aptekarsky Island, one of the more remote parts of the city, lying on the north side of the Neva.

With the incendiaries the Germans dropped leaflets: “For the house-warning.” Vera Inber worried because the grenadiers’ barracks next to the hospital was used both by medical students as a dormitory and by the military as a storehouse for shells and ammunition. If these were touched off, there would be a dreadful tragedy. The shells were loaded and unloaded from freight trucks on the street outside or from barges in the Karpovka Creek. Beside the loading platform stood an AA battery. Unpleasant neighbors for a large hospital, overflowing with wounded, many of them critically hurt.

On a late September morning, just after ten o’clock, the air alert having just sounded, an enormous bomb fell beside the hospital’s poly clinic, next to a fountain filled with cast-iron sculpture. It did not explode.

All day a sappers’ detachment labored to defuse it. When the day ended, they had not yet succeeded. Streetcar traffic in the area was halted. The streets were cleared and the hospital surrounded by guards. The lying-in ward, adjacent to the bomb, was moved to other quarters.

It struck Vera Inber as curious that she had hardly felt the shock when the bomb struck the earth. It had seemed for a moment that someone had closed a heavy door at a distance. The building shook—nothing else.

The next day the sappers still worked on the bomb. Vera Inber sat with the wounded during a raid. She tried to read to them. No one was interested. The wounded were very nervous, helpless, trapped. They knew that if a bomb fell they could not save themselves.

On the third day the bomb still lay in the garden, sinking further into the earth. But the fuse had been taken off.

On the fifth day the bomb still lay there, and almost everyone in Leningrad had heard about it. Luknitsky knew it was only one of many delayed-action bombs which had been dropped and with which the demolition squads labored in sweat and danger. Yevgeniya Vasyutina heard a wild rumor that the great bomb had been filled with granulated sugar. It was said nine out of twelve bombs did not explode and that inside there were notes which read: “Save us if you can.” She thought this was nonsense, and later she heard the truth—that the Erisman bomb weighed more than a ton and had penetrated nearly fifteen feet into the earth. No sugar.

Not until October 4 was the bomb hoisted out of the ground. Vera Inber and her husband went to see it—a monstrous thing painted blue with yellow speckles, a spiky snout and a blunt end. The huge object was carted off to a display of German war trophies. For days Vera Inber could not get it out of her mind. Finally she wrote a few lines about it for her poem “Pul-kovo Meridian.”

The atmosphere in the city grew more grim. Private telephone service had been disconnected; only public phone booths still worked. When Vera Inber heard a young woman’s fresh voice say; “Until the end of the war the telephone is being disconnected,” she wanted to say something, to protest, but it was useless. When she picked up the phone, it was silent and dead. Till the end of the war. Who knew when that might be?

Rumors . . . rumors . . . rumors . . . They grew with the disconnecting of the telephones. The government had cut off the phones because it feared the people, or to keep the enemy from spreading more rumors—that was the rumor. And the others: that all the house registers had been burned for fear they might fall into the hands of the Germans; that the police had destroyed their own records lest they be used against them; that the police had hidden their civilian clothes in cupboards, ready to try a quick getaway if worse came to worst.

There were hopeful rumors: that the Finns were being pushed back at Beloostrov and Sestroretsk; that Mga and Pushkin had been recaptured; that the troops on the northern bank of the Neva had broken the circle and made contact with a shock group pushing out from Volkhov. Unfortunately, as Luknitsky knew, when his photographer friend, he of the massive food reserve, passed on this news, none of it was true.

He knew that efforts were being made to break the encirclement—or would be. But he knew of no successes. What he did know was that there were spies in the city who spread false reports. He knew there were residents who were potential collaborators, who were ready to welcome the Germans.

There was, for instance, the friend of Yelena Skryabina’s who announced he was confident that the Germans would break into the city—if not that day, then surely the next. “And,” he concluded, “in any case if my expectations are not fulfilled, I have this.” He drew a small revolver from his pocket. Madame Skryabina knew her friend was not alone, that there were many who awaited the Germans with impatience as “saviors.”

It was not only Leningrad and its fate, Leningrad and its trials and hardships, which affected people’s morale. It was the news from the other fronts. The fall of Kiev had been a terrible blow. Kiev was the mother of Russian cities, the founding capital.

The day that Kiev fell Vera Inber was sitting in a shelter with the correspondent, Anatoly Tarasenkov. He took from his pocket a letter he had just gotten from his wife in Moscow. She told how Marina Tsvetayeva, ill, suffering, evacuated to a miserable village in the Urals, separated from her son, had hanged herself, one more poet’s life sacrificed to the Russian god of tragedy. It told of the death of their friend Margerita Aliger’s husband. Outside, the noise of the guns and the bombs went on.

As the tempo of the German attack slackened at Leningrad, the storm rose around Moscow. Moscow fought for its life. Luknitsky felt that Moscow, like Leningrad, would hold out. He did not know why, but he felt it. Yet the news from Moscow was shocking. There had been panic. Probably not as frantic as Kochetov described it. As Kochetov told the story, thousands of little and middle-rank bureaucrats tried to flee the capital. They rushed out of Moscow along the highway toward the rear, toward Gorky. Workers detachments guarding the outskirts of the city intercepted them and pushed their automobiles into the canals. “This is hard to believe,” Kochetov piously added, “because we know of nothing like this happening here in Leningrad.” Vishnevsky heard there was panic among some artists in Moscow.

Luknitsky’s version was less splashy, more accurate. There had been panic, but it had fairly quickly been brought under control.
¹

In these days Luknitsky found people standing in lines for hours to get 300 grams (about % of a pound) of bread, which was the ration of those who were not production workers.