Symphony for the City of the Dead

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by M. T. Anderson


  There were as many different responses to the patriotic call as there were citizens. But for most, they wanted to protect their homeland. This meant, at least for the short term, that they had to fight for Stalin’s regime.

  Shostakovich and his pupil Fleishman made their way through the chaotic streets. In the gastronomi, or grocery stores, people were buying sacks of nonperishable foods, grabbing canned goods, and lugging boxes of them home. The lines stretched out into the streets.

  The branches of the State Savings Bank were also mobbed by people clamoring to withdraw all their cash. By three o’clock, the banks were out of money — they had to close. Police detachments ushered out angry patrons shouting for service.

  When Shostakovich and Fleishman got to one of the military recruitment centers, they must have found it mobbed. The lines trailed through the hallways, through the doors, and out onto the streets. It took hours, and for some, even days, to get to the desks at the front. “People were writing out applications as they stood in the corridors, on the staircases, by the windows, resting their papers on the sills.”

  When they got up to the front of the line, Fleishman was accepted. He had written most of an opera (Rothschild’s Violin) under Shostakovich’s tutelage. In the first days of July, he and thirty-one thousand other militia volunteers were called up as part of a new quasi-military force called the People’s Volunteers. He put his opera aside unfinished, left his family, and went off to the front. He would never return.

  Shostakovich was turned down by the People’s Volunteers. An official told him, “You will be called when required.” His poor eyesight may have been the reason they gave. It is likely, however, that his application was rejected because of his celebrity. The government wanted to make sure he remained safe.

  There was a use for composers in wartime. The Communist regime believed deeply in the power of music — particularly singing — to stir people up and to raise morale. Song inspires bravery almost as well as vodka (which the government was also liberal in handing out). As one composer said, a song is “a mighty weapon which could strike the enemy.”

  On the first day of Operation Barbarossa, shortly after Molotov’s announcement, some of the leading members of the Composers’ Union were sitting in their Moscow headquarters, discussing what to do. They wanted to contribute somehow to the war effort — even those who were far too old to fight. They decided they would begin to write mass songs. They needed words, however. So they filed out of their club and headed for the Writers’ Union.

  If we are to believe the story, halfway there, in the middle of the street, they met the writers heading in the opposite direction. The members of the Writers’ Union had been pondering lyrics and were looking for someone to set them to music. They had just been marching over to talk to the composers.

  Thus began a national campaign to create rousing songs for the fighting masses (and to filter out the less successful songs, as hundreds were being written). Shostakovich would quickly become involved with this effort.

  In this war — the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians still call it — everything and everyone, from farmers to watchmakers to cobblers to composers, would have to contribute to the life-or-death fight against the Nazi invader. As the slogan ran, “Vse dlya fronta, vse dlya pobedi.”

  “Everything for the front, everything for victory.”

  SOURCES

  In those first days of the invasion, the German army advanced on three fronts. Army Group South roared toward Ukraine, a fertile southern state where a lot of the USSR’s natural resources were extracted. Army Group Center rolled directly east, toward Minsk, Smolensk, and — their final destination — Moscow itself. Army Group North was headed for Leningrad.

  The Russian defensive forces scattered before them. The Soviets were simply not prepared. It didn’t matter how valiantly Red Army soldiers stood up against the invaders: many infantrymen had been issued antique rifles from the First World War, and quite a lot of them hadn’t been issued any ammunition. Many, therefore, had absolutely no way to return Nazi fire.

  The Russian fighter planes and bombers that hadn’t been destroyed sitting on their airfields in the first few hours of the war were generally terrible in battle. They were slow. They were easy targets. Most of the planes didn’t have two-way radios, so they couldn’t communicate with one another to coordinate attack, reconnaissance, or even just to stay in formation. Pilots could receive messages — through a crackling thicket of static — but they couldn’t relay messages. This made recon difficult: in order to deliver a report, a plane had to fly all the way back to base. In any case, there was rarely enough fuel to keep them as active as they needed to be.

  The Red Army’s tanks were in no better situation. The Soviets had one excellent tank model: the T-34, which was strong, sturdy, and simply built. They didn’t have many T-34s, however, and most of the rest of their tank fleet was antiquated. (They had about fourteen thousand tanks in all, but only about two thousand of them were modern and up-to-date.) They, like the planes, were perpetually short of fuel and ammunition. Moreover, as Tukhachevsky had complained, the Red Army’s understanding of tank strategy was poor. Stalin and his ex-cavalry marshals did not trust tanks. Within the first few weeks of the war, the Red Army suffered the loss of roughly 90 percent of their tank strength.

  The first days of this Great Patriotic War were a massacre. Cities were in flame. German bombers arrived in waves, releasing clutches of explosives and incendiaries. Terrified citizens waited for the Soviet air force to arrive, but no one came. People fled their homes forever. Tens of thousands of refugees clogged the roads. German fighters strafed them with machine-gun fire.

  The whole of the Soviet Tenth Army simply disappeared somewhere near Bialystok. No one could reach them or find any trace.

  German Army Group North was making sickening progress. On June 25, they took Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania (which had become a satellite state of the USSR only a year before). The Nazi SS arrived to “cleanse” the city. They ordered all the Jews to be rounded up. People were arrested in broad daylight. On June 26, a thousand Jews were beaten to death in a garage. The SS arranged for locals to perform the massacre. They thought it might look distasteful if they carried it out themselves.

  Since the deed was performed by conscripted citizens of Kaunas, the Nazis could report it neatly as a “spontaneous self-cleansing action.”

  Even German Wehrmacht officers were appalled. The war machine, however, could not be stopped.

  Their Panzer divisions were already a hundred miles deeper in Soviet territory, rumbling swiftly along the Kaunas-Leningrad highway. To proceed, they had to cross the Dvina River. For this, they had to capture the bridges at the town of Dvinsk. As the tanks approached Dvinsk, they slowed, and out of their midst drove four Soviet trucks. They had been captured and were now being driven by Russian-speaking Germans.

  The trucks pulled ahead of the tank column. It was their job to make sure that the bridges in town were not blown up by the Russians as the tanks approached.

  The four decoy trucks approached the Soviet checkpoints. The sentries gabbed with them: “Where are the Germans?”

  “Oh — a long way back!”

  The sentries waved the Nazi impostors through.

  The trucks accelerated toward the Dvinsk Bridge. Soldiers ran out to stop them. The Germans in the trucks were ready and mowed them down. Within a few minutes, the impostors controlled the bridges.

  Out beyond the sentry stations, the tank division heaved into view.

  The Nazis had taken Dvinsk. Their Fourth Panzer Group rolled on past, over the rushing river Dvina, and headed toward Leningrad.

  The ease with which they defeated Soviet forces initially gave the Germans a false sense of superiority. In a letter, a tank gunner crowed, “The war against these subhuman beings is almost over. . . . We really let them have it! They are scoundrels, the mere scum of the earth — and they are no match for the German soldier.” He was
to find that the war was hardly begun — and that the Slavs were made of sterner stuff.

  Hitler issued an order that his soldiers did not need to worry about the usual rules of civilized warfare when fighting the Russian “subhumans”: “The troops must be aware that in this battle, mercy or considerations of international law with regard to [the Slavs] are false. They are a danger to our own safety and to the rapid pacification of the conquered territories.” His excuse was that the USSR had never ratified the Geneva Convention articles. The troops were allowed to treat prisoners of war and enemy combatants however they pleased.

  As the Fourth Panzer Group made its way northeast, the commander explained to his men:

  This war with Russia is a vital part of the German people’s fight for existence. It is the old fight of German against Slav, the defense of European culture . . . and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. This war must have as its goal the destruction of today’s Russia — and for that reason it must be conducted with unheard-of harshness. Every clash, from its conception to its execution, must be guided by an iron determination to annihilate the enemy completely and utterly. There is to be no mercy for the carriers of the current Russian-Bolshevik system.

  They roared on toward Leningrad.

  As the chaos bled east, Shostakovich, strangely, found himself spending several days wrapping up the school semester as he always did. He graded exams and made the arrangements for Conservatory students to graduate.

  On June 27, Leningrad’s city council announced that all able-bodied men and women had to contribute to the defense of the city. Factories, schools, and businesses had to register their workers and their students. Those with full-time jobs reported for three hours’ civil defense work after hours. Others were sent out into the field for whole days, digging trenches and erecting barriers.

  Shostakovich and his Conservatory colleagues were no exception. They did not make particularly effective ditchdiggers, Shostakovich remembered in his putative memoirs:

  I thought of Tukhachevsky when I dug trenches outside Leningrad in July ’41. They sent us beyond the Forelli Hospital, divided us into groups, and handed each of us a shovel. We were the Conservatory group. The musicians looked pathetic and worked, I might add, very badly. It was a hot July. One pianist came in a new suit. He delicately rolled up his trousers to his knees, revealing his spindly legs, which were soon covered with mud to the thigh. Another one — a highly respected music historian — kept setting aside his shovel every minute. He had arrived with a briefcase stuffed with books. Heading for a shady bush, he would pull out a thick volume from his briefcase.

  Of course, everyone tried hard. So did I. But what kind of ditchdiggers were we? All this should have been done before. Much earlier and more professionally. It would have had more effect. The little that had been done earlier in terms of defense had been done under Tukhachevsky.

  When Tukhachevsky insisted on increasing the number of planes and tanks, Stalin called him a harebrained schemer. But during the war, after the first crushing defeats, Stalin caught on. It was the same with rockets. Tukhachevsky began rocketry while in Leningrad. Stalin later had all the Leningrad rocketry experts shot, and then [during the war] they had to start from scratch.

  When Shostakovich was not knee-deep in mud, hacking out a defensive fosse with a grim-faced task force of Chopin scholars, he was performing lighter war work: the creation of music for the troops. He wrote simple arrangements of songs and Classical pieces that could be performed by one of the small ensembles that drove between platoons, raising morale. He directed the music for satirical skits put on by the People’s Volunteers and even wrote them a march tune, “The Fearless Regiments Are on the Move.” Another song he wrote, the “Oath to the People’s Commissar,” became one of the most popular tunes of the war.

  These musical efforts were important. The Soviets were fighting an enemy who considered Slavic culture to be inferior, even subhuman. The Nazis taunted the Russians by specifically defacing cultural monuments as if the nation’s great thinkers, poets, and musicians had never mattered. They ransacked the house of writer Anton Chekhov and used Leo Tolstoy’s manuscripts to light fires. They looted museums. When the Nazis captured the town where the great Russian composer Tchaikovsky had lived, they turned his house into a motorbike garage.

  Shostakovich wrote in anger: “The Nazi barbarians seek to destroy the whole of Slavonic culture,” but, he said defiantly, “Russian culture is immortal and never will the Nazis succeed in destroying it.”

  One of the purposes of the music troupes that played for the Red Army soldiers, the navy, the air force, and the Home Guard was to remind them of the power and legitimacy of their own culture, so slandered by the invading horde. In pursuit of this goal, Leningrad’s musical corps staged an average of 160 concerts per month for citizens and soldiers.

  Shostakovich did not just write music for these ensembles. On a couple of occasions, he went out to perform for the troops and raise morale himself. “I visited front-line units on two occasions and witnessed numerous instances of the courage that is typical of our people. Simple people, men you meet every day, turned out to be real heroes.”

  Elsewhere, however, those heroes, despite their sacrifices, were suffering terrible defeat.

  On June 28, the Kremlin received word that Minsk, the capital of the western USSR, had fallen to the Germans. The Luftwaffe had bombed it from the air the first morning of Barbarossa. They had returned to bomb it again. Eighty percent of the buildings in the city had been reduced to rubble. By the time a Soviet relief force arrived, Minsk was an inferno. The air was thick with smoke, and, as one historian writes, “Even the parks were in flames.”

  For a few days, the Red Army held up against the city’s invaders. The Nazis offered them generous terms for surrender, as long as the Soviet officers would murder the Communist Party members and Jews — the “commissars and kikes”— in their ranks themselves before they raised the white flag.

  The Red Army stood strong for a few days. Eventually, they were overrun. The Nazis took four hundred thousand prisoners. They now controlled the capital of Belorussia, the westernmost of the Soviet states.

  Stalin and his Politburo received this news heavily. Stalin looked hunted and angry at the same time. He demanded a solution from General Zhukov.

  Zhukov proposed that the Red Army concentrate its forces in two concentric arcs in the middle of the country — to protect Moscow regardless of what happened. The only problem with the plan was that it would pull troops away from the north and south. Leningrad would be exposed.

  Stalin was desperate. He agreed. Then, for the first time, he demanded the truth from his generals: How was the defense going overall?

  They told him the truth at risk to their lives. His armies were hiding out in the woods. Teeming herds of refugees wandered the roads. Already, after only a few days of war, the German army had penetrated 350 miles into Soviet territory in the north, 150 miles in the south. Twenty million Soviet citizens were living in occupied territory, at the mercy of the Nazi Wehrmacht and the SS. This might be a war Stalin could not win. Finally, he understood that he had led his country into disaster.

  Slowly, he walked out of the conference room. He left the building and went to his car. As he got in, he looked bleakly at the fortress towers of the Kremlin and muttered, “Everything’s lost. I give up. Lenin founded our state and we crapped all over it.”

  He closed the door, and his driver pulled out.

  It was at this point in the Great Patriotic War that Stalin disappeared. He would not answer the phone. He hid at his house and did not respond to questions.

  The Soviet Union had no leader. No one knew what to do. And the Nazi terror drove onward.

  SOURCES

  At about the time that Stalin retreated to his country house in despair, Shostakovich decided that he needed to take a more active part in the defense of the city. On July 2, he went again to try to enlist in the People’s Volunteers. Once a
gain, he was turned down.

  His ditchdigging lasted for about a week; then he was reassigned to the Conservatory’s rooftop fire-fighting squad. His family was still off at a cottage in the country, so Shostakovich moved into a barracks in the Conservatory so that he wouldn’t have to cross the city each day to carry out his duties.

  The Leningrad City Council had created about ten thousand special firefighting units posted on the roofs of apartments, factories, office buildings, warehouses, and theaters. Shostakovich’s job as a rooftop firefighter was to watch for incendiary bombs during Luftwaffe air raids and to extinguish any that landed on the Conservatory before the blazing thermite could set the building on fire. He would have had to dive into the black smoke, drench the searing fragments with water, shovel sand furiously onto the bomb — or, if possible, lift the bomb with his spade and dump it into a tub of sand, which would boil with the heat.

  As it happened, however, there were no Luftwaffe air raids during the month of July. Unlike cities to the south, Leningrad was not yet under attack from the sky. The Germans had destroyed all the Soviet runways to the west on the first day of the war. Now they had to pause and fix them so that they themselves could use them to launch attacks further into the Russian interior.

  There were already air-raid drills, however, during which sirens would wail and a recorded voice would scream through the streets and the antiaircraft guns would begin their test-firing. Occasionally, a German plane flew over — but these were merely reconnaissance missions. Antiaircraft guns would blaze for a minute, and the enemy would disappear into the distance.

  The rest of the time, Shostakovich stood on the hot metal roof, looking out at the trees of the parks, the dome of Saint Isaac’s, the great gray arms of columned Kazan Cathedral, the spire of the Admiralty, and the blue onion-turrets of the Church of Saint Nicholas. From this height, the city must have looked serene.

 

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