Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  SOURCES

  1 The acronym stands for the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. This agency was the predecessor of the KGB.

  For years, as Stalin rose and waged war upon his own citizens, to the west of him, in Germany, Adolf Hitler, also rising to power, watched him carefully, planning future invasion.

  Hitler believed in the absolute biological superiority of the German people, the brightest and boldest descendants of the ancient Aryan race. In his writing and in the speeches he bellowed out to crowds of thousands, he demanded that the Germans seize their birthright back from “weaker” races such as the Jews and the Slavs. (Recent DNA tests suggest that he probably was not pure Aryan himself and likely had Jewish blood in his ancestry.) He made no secret of the fact that one day he planned to invade the Slavic nations — central and eastern Europe as well as Russia. These regions would be cleared of their supposedly subhuman peoples, after which the Germans could seize upon their fields and forests for Lebensraum —“room to live.” Hitler declared: “We National Socialists [Nazis] must hold unflinchingly to our aim in foreign policy, namely, to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled on this earth.”

  Despite the fact that Hitler and Stalin both called themselves socialists, Hitler’s Nazi Fascism and Stalin’s Soviet Communism were, in many ways, natural political enemies. Communism was an extreme left-wing ideology; Fascism was an extreme right-wing ideology. In the late 1930s, as Stalin’s secret police hunted down and murdered supposed Fascist spies for crimes they didn’t commit, Hitler’s secret police executed Communists he claimed were trying to overthrow his regime in Germany.

  The citizens of the USSR were trained to hate the Nazis. During the show trials of the Great Terror, broken prisoners testified that monstrous conspiracies of German sympathizers were striving to undermine the Russian state. Soviet cartoons depicted Germans as brutes in horned helmets. As Nazi policy toward the Jews became ever more destructive, the Soviet intelligentsia looked toward Germany in growing horror.

  There was one important exception, however: after Hitler secretly sent death squads to assassinate all his rivals in the Nazi Party — a bloodbath known as the Night of Long Knives — Stalin couldn’t help but admire his enemy’s ingenuity. “Did you hear what happened in Germany?” he gushed to an adviser. “Some fellow, that Hitler! Splendid! That’s a deed of some skill!”

  Despite their ideological differences, after all, Hitler and Stalin had one thing in common: despotic totalitarianism. As fellow dictator Benito Mussolini defined it, totalitarianism meant “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” This attitude was something these very different governments shared. In this way, Communism, moving to the left, and Fascism, on the other hand, moving to the right, met like fists behind the back and clutched each other there, where none could see.

  In spite of Stalin’s boyish enthusiasm for Hitler’s gift at massacre, he was afraid of German imperial intentions. Hitler was on the move. The Soviets — like the western Europeans — watched with fear as Hitler calmly and ruthlessly seized Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in early 1939. Stalin could not ignore the fact that Germany was eating away at the nations that lay between Hitler’s new Reich and the Soviet Union. Soon, the two sworn enemies would stand face-to-face. There would be no fat to cushion the scraping of bone against bone.

  In March of 1939, as the Great Terror began to grind to a halt, Stalin and his advisers started to ask how they would protect the USSR in the case of a German attack. They had decimated their own army. They had gutted their own economy.

  They looked to western Europe. Cautiously, Stalin suggested to the French and the English that perhaps the three nations should form a triple alliance against Germany in case of further Nazi aggression. The English and French held back. Though few outside the USSR understood the full brutality of Stalin’s regime, they did not trust him. He waited, exasperated, while weeks went by with no reply. When a reply did come, the English merely said that perhaps they would think about an alliance, in due time.

  Behind closed doors, Stalin and his Politburo began to consider the unthinkable: making an alliance with Germany instead.

  The Russian public was worried. Shostakovich’s Leningrad neighbor Lyubov Shaporina wrote in her diary about her dread of “little Hitler striding across Europe like Gulliver over the Lilliputians.” She wrote in awed horror,

  He doesn’t even do battle, he just strides along, driven along by the sheer force of his iron will, before which everyone gives way. Like the waves of the Red Sea before Moses. What next? . . . If you follow it to its logical conclusion, the moment of the most monstrous treachery in the world is at hand.

  The stage is set.

  And how terrible that it has befallen our poor generation to bear witness to it all.

  In the summer of 1939, Stalin met with representatives from both Germany and England to decide whom to support. His patience with England and France was wearing thin. They had delayed giving him a firm answer for months. When England finally sent a representative to Moscow, they sent the man by ship rather than plane: they were clearly in no hurry to begin talks. As if to underline the fact that they did not take the meeting with Stalin seriously, they delivered a representative with no power to actually negotiate a treaty and no important role in the British government: an obscure military nobleman by the unpromising name of Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax.1

  Stalin, looking at the credentials of the English admiral and the French representative, General Joseph Doumenc, growled, “They’re not being serious. These people can’t have the proper authority. London and Paris are playing poker again.”

  Molotov, the minister of foreign affairs, cautioned him, “Still the talks should go ahead.”

  “Well, if they must, they must.”

  There was a frosty meeting between the murderous Politburo and the hapless Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax. The admiral drawled through the list of his titles and honors. Though he had no power to negotiate, he was, he explained, a Knight of the Order of the Bath. The Russian translator, bewildered, reported that the Englishman had apparently just said he was of the Order of the Bathtub.

  Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who had sat by while Tukhachevsky was killed, interrupted. Incredulous, he said, “Bathtub?”

  While the ice-eyed Communists stared him down, Admiral Plunkett gabbled a cute fairy tale about how in days of old, English knights had slain dragons and rescued maidens in distress and had then gone back to the royal palace for a soothing bath. This, he said, was the origin of the title.

  It was not, perhaps, the right fable to impress a group of men who had ordered their own monarch and his family to be dragged into a basement and shot, stabbed, incinerated with acid, and thrown into a mine shaft.

  The talks ended inconclusively.

  About a week later, the Germans sent their own representative to woo Stalin. They did not send some obscure functionary but one of Hitler’s right-hand men, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. He and his thirty-two assistants landed in two gleaming Fw 200 Condors. He strode from his plane in a leather coat, flanked by swastika banners while an orchestra played “Deutschland Über Alles” (“Germany Above All”). This was to be a very different visit.

  Stalin probably did not believe that a treaty with Hitler would last forever. He believed, however, that if war did break out, he might be able to buy himself a few years to prepare his armies while Germany exhausted itself in battle with England, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and France. While sitting at a banquet, he explained to his advisers, “Of course it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me but actually it’s I who tricked him.”

  And so, astonishingly, a day after Ribbentrop landed in his silver plane, sworn enemies Nazi Germany and the USSR signed a nonaggression treaty known as the Molotov-Ribbent
rop Pact, after the two foreign ministers who negotiated it.

  In the portions of the treaty that they made public, the two governments agreed not to go to war with each other and to increase trade with each other. Germany would sell equipment to Russia, and Russia would sell Germany coal, oil, and grain.

  As historians have pointed out, there was some irony to this agreement. Hitler wanted to attack and subdue Russia as well as Europe. He knew that Germany could not wage war on a global scale with its small reserves of raw materials such as oil, rubber, and grain. Hitler arranged for the Russians to furnish him with everything he would need to invade Russia. Stalin essentially agreed to supply the attack on his own country.

  There was a secret portion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, too. In it, the two foreign ministers carved up Poland and the Baltic nations into two “spheres of influence.” They each had the right to invade certain territories without the other interfering.

  So, to the shock of the world, on August 23, 1939, Communism and Fascism shook hands. As one astonished English politician observed, “All the isms have become wasms.”

  Nine days later, free now to attack, Hitler invaded Poland.

  This obliged Britain and France to take up arms in Poland’s cause.

  The Second World War had begun.

  The citizens of the Soviet Union were shocked at the new alliance with Germany. Suddenly, the Soviet government, which had put citizens to death for collaboration with the Nazis, was warning people not to criticize the Nazis on pain of imprisonment.

  To use one example from Shostakovich’s own circle: The film director Sergei Eisenstein and the composer Sergei Prokofiev had just created their masterpiece Alexander Nevsky, a movie about a medieval Russian hero destroying an army of barbarian German knights in an epic battle on the ice of a frozen lake. It had been filmed at great expense the previous summer. Red Army soldiers had been hired as extras, dressed up in armor, and had assaulted one another in an icy wasteland that was in fact made of crumbled asphalt and white sand, sizzling with heat in the sun. Stalin had loved the movie when it came out in the last days of 1938 — applauding its pro-Russian, anti-German sentiments — and it quickly became a Soviet favorite. Schoolchildren sang its choruses.

  That was 1938, however. In 1939, the Germans became allies — and the movie, with its invading hordes of horned Teutonic Knights, was withdrawn from circulation.

  It would reappear later, and for good reason.

  Over the next year, the world watched in horror as Hitler swept across Europe. Pleas for peace did nothing to stop the invasions, the slaughters, the destruction of cities. The German army struck so rapidly and mercilessly that its assault tactics came to be called Blitzkrieg (“Lightning War”). The republics that surrounded Germany were astonished at the combination of mechanized accuracy and homicidal fury. One by one, with terrible swiftness and at terrible cost, nations fell: Poland, Denmark, Holland, Norway, and Belgium.

  In June of 1940, France collapsed. The Nazis paraded in victory through Paris. “The war machine rolled down the Champs Elysées: gleaming horses, tanks, machinery, guns and thousands upon thousands of soldiers,” wrote an eyewitness. “The procession was immaculate, shining and seemingly endless . . . like a gigantic green snake that wound itself around the heart of the broken city, which waited pathetically to be swallowed up.”

  The news of France’s fall hit the Russian leadership hard. Stalin had hoped that the French and the Germans would exhaust each other through years of warfare. Instead, France had fallen in little more than a month.

  Statesman Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, “Stalin was in a great agitation, very nervous. I had seldom seen him in such a state. As a rule he seldom sat in a chair during meetings, usually he kept walking. On this occasion he was literally running around the room, swearing terribly. He cursed the French. . . . ‘How come they allowed Hitler to thrash them?’”

  But at the same time, Stalin, like an eager pupil, had used the Soviet-German nonaggression pact to invade several of his smaller neighbors — eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Finland — and enforce his will over them. The citizens of the USSR were apparently somewhat bewildered by this. On the streets, they were asking, “Are we at war; with whom and why?” “What has gone wrong with the neutrality pact signed with the express purpose of keeping us from war?” Of course, Stalin had a different idea of the pact.

  Stalin justified his invasion of Finland with the claim that he needed to keep Leningrad safe. (Leningrad was just across the border from Finland.) This brief “Winter War” proved to be a disaster. Though the Russians technically won, the world watched as the Red Army suffered losses in the snowy woods at the hands of a few proud Finns on skis, their artillery pulled by reindeer. The incompetence of the Russian military was visible to everyone. They had, after all, lost most of their best officers in the Great Terror.

  Hitler watched this episode with particular interest. He decided that it was time to start planning his invasion of Russia.

  His plan for invasion was called Operation Barbarossa. It was named after a medieval German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, who, according to legend, would rise from an aeon-long sleep beneath a mountain to reclaim his empire.

  “The Führer estimates the operation will take four months,” wrote Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. “I reckon fewer. Bolshevism will collapse like a pack of cards.”

  Invasions of Russia had failed in the past due to the harshness of the northern Russian winter. Hitler therefore decided that he would launch his attack in early summer 1941. By the winter months, he calculated, the USSR would have fallen. Moscow would be flooded and turned into a reservoir. Germans would settle Ukraine and farm there. The Slavs would be slaves.2

  At dinners, he boasted about his future conquests over the Russian “subhumans.” He spoke warmly of the way the United States government had exterminated so many of the Native Americans in the nineteenth century, seizing and settling their land. He hoped to do the same in Russia. He called the coming assault on the Soviet Union a Vernichtungskrieg — a war of total annihilation. Whole races of people (as he understood them) were about to be wiped out entirely. Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler told friends at a weekend party, “The purpose of the Russian campaign is to decimate the Slavic population by thirty millions.” (In the end, they would not fall far short of this goal: the war would claim twenty-seven million Soviet lives.) German newspapers began to run sections of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, which talked about the country’s need for Lebensraum in the Slavic lands to the east.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1940, Hitler sent a friendly holiday greeting to Stalin. He mentioned in passing that some funny rumors were circulating that Germany was going to invade the USSR. Of course, he said, these rumors were all started by the English, whose cities Hitler was bombing, and they were just designed to stir up trouble between Russia and Germany. “On the basis of information in my possession,” he wrote, “I predict that as our invasion of the [British] Isles draws closer, the intensity of such rumors will increase and fabricated documents will perhaps be added to them.” Thus he soothed Stalin and said the Russians should pay no attention to any of these misleading documents, these concocted rumors.

  No need to worry at all.

  Happy New Year.

  Secret reports from pro-Soviet spies all over the globe began to pour into Moscow suggesting Hitler was preparing to break the truce and strike at the Soviet Union.

  “Zeus” in Bulgaria warned of German motorized divisions gathering at the Soviet border. “Dora” in Zurich and “Extern” in Helsinki wrote to tell Stalin that invasion plans had been finalized. “ABC” in Bucharest predicted the attack would come in June. “Mars” in Budapest and “Ramzai” in Tokyo both pinned down the date of attack: June 15, 1941.

  Stalin didn’t believe any of them.

  Ramzai wrote again from Tokyo to correct the date of the coming invasion: Operation Barbarossa would be launched on June
22. Stalin scoffed, “There’s this bastard who’s set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June. Are you suggesting I should believe him too?”

  Ramzai’s information — all of which was excellent — was stuffed into the “folder of dubious and misleading reports.”

  Stalin ignored the warnings; instead, eager to please Hitler, he stepped up the shipment of raw materials to Germany. Express trains rumbled across the Russian borders carrying record deliveries of copper, tin, rubber, oil, cotton, and grain to the Nazis.

  Several loosely connected circles of spies in Germany — the so-called Red Orchestra — had infiltrated Nazi high command. They warned Moscow that the German air force was readying reconnaissance flights over the USSR. They sent concrete evidence that Hitler was ready to discard the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Full plans had already been drawn up for the occupation of the USSR, complete with high-speed roads to link Berlin with fortified garrison cities and new German imperial palaces throughout the former Soviet republics.

  People risked their lives to broadcast these reports to the Soviet government. In the end, most members of the Red Orchestra were caught and killed.

  Stalin didn’t believe a word of their reports. “This is not a ‘source’ but a disinformer,” he wrote on one communiqué, and followed it up with a rude comment about what the spy could do to his own mother.

  Winston Churchill, England’s prime minister, sent more information on the German plan of attack. It was ignored. The Red Orchestra spies feared their messages were not getting through to Stalin. They got word of the coming invasion to the Americans, who passed it on to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, D.C. The Soviet ambassador immediately picked up the phone and called the Germans to warn them about the awful rumors the Americans were spreading about them.

  German minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels gloated in his diary, “Stalin and his people remain inactive, like a rabbit confronted with a snake.”