Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  One of the cruelest ironies of the Red Army’s westward push was their treatment of Russian prisoners of war liberated from Nazi camps. These people were lucky to have survived. (Of the 5.8 million Soviet soldiers captured by the Nazis, roughly three million died.) Now, according to Stalin’s Order No. 270, which had forbidden surrender, they were considered traitors. Hundreds of thousands had survived the hell of German prison camps only to be shot or exiled to camps in Siberia.

  In April 1945, three Soviet army groups surrounded Berlin, capital of Nazi Germany. They numbered two and a half million men, with six thousand armed vehicles and more than seven thousand bombers and fighter planes. The Germans confronted them with armies of old men and young boys — the only males left who had not already died.

  On April 12, the German Philharmonic Orchestra held its last concert in Berlin — a counterpart to the performance of the Seventh Symphony in Leningrad. But the music they played was the end of a piece by Wagner depicting the twilight of the old German gods, and their sacred stronghold, Valhalla, burning.

  It was clear that the remaining Wehrmacht forces could not protect the city. Still, Hitler would not surrender, though at this point, there was no question he would lose. The Red Army attacked. The city burned.

  Hidden deep in an underground bunker like an overlord of hell, Hitler despaired. On April 29, in a ceremony held beneath the earth, the dictator and his lover, Eva Braun, were married. The next day, when the sky was full of Soviet flame, the newlyweds celebrated their union by committing suicide together. She took cyanide; he shot himself.

  Now Berlin was the city of the dead. “A ghost town of cave dwellers was all that was left of this world metropolis,” remembered a Red Cross worker. “The imperial palace, the splendid castles, the Royal Library . . . hardly anything was left.” The survivors lived, as another woman wrote, “without electric light or gas, without water. . . . We are living like ghosts in a field of ruins . . . a city where nothing works apart from the telephones that sometimes ring, glumly and pointlessly, beneath piles of fallen masonry.”

  On May 8, 1945, the Germans surrendered, and the war in Europe was over.

  In Moscow and Leningrad, the rejoicing began. The army fired blank tracer bullets into the night skies. People shouted hysterical slogans in the streets. Soldiers embraced.

  In Moscow’s Red Square, there was a grand parade to celebrate the victory. Representatives of all the armed forces marched in tight formations beneath the approving wave of Comrade Stalin. There were thunderous displays of unity and symmetry. The medieval walls of the Kremlin echoed with shouts of triumph. Captured battle standards from all of Germany’s defeated armies were hurled in a heap at Stalin’s feet, beside the black tomb of Comrade Lenin.

  People were overwhelmed by their joy. It rained that day, but no one cared: the Great Patriotic War was over.

  Poet Olga Berggolts wandered in the burned ruins of the Peterhof Palace, to the west of Leningrad. Before the war, it had been famous for its formal gardens; its terraced fountains had glittered with gold and spray.

  The Nazis left nothing but a blasted shell. They had stolen the statuary, blasted through the floors, delighted in desecrating Russia’s proud history.

  Berggolts, walking there after the war, felt a strange sense of hope.

  Again from the black dust, from the place

  Of death and ashes, will arise the garden as before.

  So it will be. I firmly believe in miracles.

  You gave me that belief, my Leningrad.

  The Soviet sense of triumph at the end of the war was so great because their sacrifices had been unimaginable. Historians now estimate that about 27 million Soviet citizens died during the conflict — more, in other words, than the dead of all other nations combined. (The total dead in World War II numbered roughly fifty million.) About 13.6 percent of the Soviet population had died.

  The Siege of Leningrad alone cost approximately one and a half million Russian lives — more than the combined World War II casualties of both the Americans and the British — a higher death toll, in fact, than the number of all Americans killed in battle in all wars fought since the United States’ first founding. As historian Max Hastings wrote, “Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.”

  The USSR was devastated by the conflict. Seventy thousand villages had been destroyed. Forty-one thousand electric power stations no longer operated; thirty-two thousand factories were in ruins. Forty thousand miles of railroad track would have to be repaired and relaid. The epic battles had destroyed forty thousand hospitals, eighty-four thousand schools, forty-three thousand libraries. The war’s wounds would take generations to heal.

  How were the Russians able to withstand this onslaught? It is one of the sick ironies of the war that they probably would not have been able to if they had not learned to absorb loss in the nightmare of Stalin’s purges. Peasants and workers, soldiers and the intelligentsia — all were used to clinging fiercely to life even when everything seemed lost. Stalin could demand things of his people few other regimes could imagine: he could plant NKVD gunners behind his soldiers and tell them to shoot if anyone showed signs of cowardice. He could send battalions of prisoners into battle, marching toward almost certain death. He could relocate millions of factory workers by command in the space of a few weeks. He could rely on the slave labor of millions in the gulag. As Sir Alan Brooke has written, “It was the Russians who provided the oceans of blood necessary to defeat Germany.”

  But how effective, truly, are dictatorships in times of war? Is ruthlessness a sound strategy? The truth is complicated. “The real reason why Hitler lost the Second World War,” wrote historian Andrew Roberts, “was exactly the same one that had caused him to unleash it in the first place: he was a Nazi.” His fanaticism worked well for him early in the war, surprising and shocking the world as he conquered nation after nation. The same delusional self-confidence, however, encouraged him to overextend his Wehrmacht forces, picking a fight on his Eastern Front, in Russia, while he still was fighting the British in the west. His military leaders warned him of the stupidity and risk of this move, but increasingly, he did not listen. Drunk on the idiotic belief in racial superiority, he couldn’t accurately assess the Russian threat or recognize that he would hold power more easily in lands liberated from the Soviet Union if he didn’t turn welcoming villages into burning charnel-houses.

  If Hitler lost the war for the same reason he had started it, Stalin won for the same reason he had initially lost so much so quickly — the delusional self-confidence he shared with the German Führer. They did not necessarily recognize the realities of the world around them. Stalin purged the military of dissenters and, at first, listened only to those who agreed with him. He ignored the intelligence of spies. He disdained the warnings of the capitalist Allies. The cost for the people of the Soviet Union was unimaginable.

  Yet, after he recovered from the shock of almost complete defeat, his ability to treat his own citizens like fodder, to ignore their sufferings when it was convenient, often led to victories, however costly. Could a western democracy have fared as well? It is unclear, though historian Robert Service is not alone when he contends, “The ultra-authoritarian features of the Soviet regime caused harm to its war effort.” Self-delusion and fanaticism allowed Hitler and Stalin to accomplish things no one would have thought possible — but just as often caused them to stumble and fall at the most obvious hurdles. Both caused inconceivable suffering to their own populations because of their shortsighted, almost delirious, egotism.

  At the end of the war, the Soviet Union and the other Allies turned on each other. Historians still argue about who was responsible. Regardless, Stalin’s
attitude toward the West hardened. He wanted to make sure the Soviet Union’s western border would forever be protected. As the countries of eastern Europe flailed in chaos, reduced to civic ruins, Stalin devoured them. Diplomatic relations between the USSR and the other Allies fell apart. The Iron Curtain slammed down, severing Europe in two. Stalin looked with both greed and anxiety at the Americans’ new invention, the atomic bomb. The United States and the USSR sized each other up with renewed suspicion. Remarkably swiftly, brothers-in-arms united by Germany’s attack became locked in a fifty-year-long stranglehold called the Cold War.

  Within the Soviet Union, anything that reminded the regime of the West was now dangerous. For the last years of the war, the NKVD had made it a crime to praise American technology. Now western movies, western novels, and western music were all forbidden again. Russian nationalism was on the rise. French bread was renamed “city bread.” The government began speaking out against “rootless cosmopolitans” with ties to other countries — by which, it became clear, they usually meant the Jews.

  Shostakovich had been eulogized in the West. He had appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Their article had celebrated the fact he was “bourgeois.” As Leningrad writers once again came under attack, the composer must have realized that his efforts on behalf of the war would not keep him safe.

  Another assault was coming.

  In February of 1948, Leningrad Communist Party boss Andrei Zhdanov called together prominent musicians, composers, and musicologists to discuss Soviet music and present them with a decree. He condemned “formalism” in modern music; he complained that the music of “anti-people” composers such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev sounded like “a piercing road drill, or a musical gas-chamber.”

  It was a return to the attacks of 1936 and “A Mess Instead of Music.”

  Zhdanov had already denounced Leningrad’s most famous writers, Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, both of them friends of Shostakovich’s. (Shostakovich supported Zoshchenko by slipping him money after the denunciation.) Stalin still resented the fame of the Leningrad elite and wanted to illustrate their powerlessness. He was quietly removing the heroes of Leningrad’s siege from office so they didn’t attract too much national celebrity. He had the director of the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad arrested for accumulating weaponry — that is to say, the exhibits of guns and tanks at the museum — and shot as if he were a traitor. Though Shostakovich now lived in Moscow, he still bore the stink of a Leningrad intellectual.

  The success of the Seventh Symphony did not protect him. People were eager to show that they were in total agreement with the Party’s new attack on him. They pointed out that Shostakovich’s music was catnip to the bourgeois, decadent West. Even worse, they pointed out that when Russia was losing the war, he wrote his triumphant Seventh, whereas when the tide of war shifted and Russia began to win, he wrote his gloomy, despairing Eighth.

  Their dangerous implication was clear: perhaps he didn’t want the Soviet government to be the victor.

  The composers gathered at this February meeting looked to Shostakovich to reply to Comrade Zhdanov’s historic decree on musical formalism. Shostakovich gave nothing away. He merely said, “A close study of this remarkable document ought to be of great help to us in our work.” His comment seemed to be a kind of doublespeak. The word remarkable could mean many things.

  On his way home from the meeting, Shostakovich stopped at the apartment of Mieczysław Weinberg (the young composer who had escaped from Warsaw) and his wife, Natalya Mikhoels. Natalya’s father, a famous Jewish actor and activist, had been murdered the night before, perhaps on Stalin’s orders. He had been lured to a friend’s house for a drink, injected with poison to stun him, and then run over by a truck to make it look like an accident.

  When Shostakovich heard about the death, he whispered, “I envy him.”

  A friend of Mikhoels and Weinberg’s who had a relative in the Politburo came by to talk to the couple. She led them into the bathroom. She turned on the water so no one could hear. She whispered to them that her uncle in the Politburo sent his greetings, “and he told me to tell you never to ask anyone about anything.”

  That was all the help they got.

  Around the same time as this murder and Zhdanov’s historic decree on musical formalism, composer Sergei Prokofiev’s ex-wife, Lena Prokofiev, was called downstairs to pick up a package, grabbed by a bunch of men, and thrown into a black car. She was tortured and disappeared. She would not reappear for fifteen years. Her sons turned to Shostakovich for help. They knew he would be of more use than their father.

  Shostakovich wrote letters to the authorities, but he was in no position to help anyone. Galina wrote, “My father is pacing from room to room in our apartment, chain smoking. Both Mother and he hardly say a word. Maxim and I are also quiet: it is not the right moment to be asking questions.”

  Zhdanov’s historic decree had been published. Newspapers that had praised Shostakovich for his Seventh Symphony now ran trumped-up letters from workers about how his music was incomprehensible. “I do not understand Shostakovich’s music,” wrote a naval artillery engineer. “It tires me out. It is an empty collection of sounds.”

  The Shostakoviches pulled Maxim out of the music school he attended. His class was going to be studying the historic decree on formalism. On tests and reports, he would have to denounce his own father. His sister, Galina, was jealous that he suddenly didn’t have to go to school.

  At the First Congress of the Composers’ Union in April, Shostakovich’s friend and poker partner Tikhon Khrennikov was appointed general secretary. If Shostakovich expected any help from him, he was sorely disappointed. Instead, Khrennikov stood up in front of the crowd and agreed with everything in Zhdanov’s historic decree. He attacked Shostakovich personally as a formalist whose symphonies were “a peculiar writing in code,” which “often reflected images and emotions alien to Soviet realistic art,” such as “tenseness, neuroticism, escape into a region of abnormal, repulsive, and pathological phenomena.” Shostakovich’s music was too modernistic, said Khrennikov. It was unintelligible to the people.

  In 1936, Shostakovich had avoided responding publicly to criticism — except in the form of his Fifth Symphony. At the Congress of the Composers’ Union, he was not allowed to remain silent. He could not avoid responding. He had to make a public confession.

  His name was called, and he got up to walk to the front of the room. He did not know what he was going to say when he got there. He thought, Well, I’ll muddle through somehow. As he ascended the steps to the podium, a Party official handed him a statement, hissing, “Take this, please.”

  Shostakovich looked at him in confusion.

  “It is all written down here, Dmitri Dmitrievich. Just read it out.”

  “And I got up on the tribune,” he later remembered, “and started to read out aloud this idiotic, disgusting nonsense concocted by some nobody.”

  He read out hearty thanks to those who had criticized him. He found himself admitting that he was wrong. “I know that the Party is right. . . . I know that the Party is showing concern for Soviet art and for me, a Soviet composer,” he found himself saying. “I shall work on the musical depiction of the heroic Soviet peoples, from the correct ideological standpoint. Equipped with the guidance of the Central Committee, I shall renew my efforts to create really good songs for collective singing.”

  He later told a friend, “I read like the most paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll on a string!” Then he shrieked the last phrase again and again “like a frenzied maniac”: “A paper doll on a string! A paper doll on a string!”

  In a recent interview with Tikhon Khrennikov, shortly before his death, a reporter asked him how he could have denounced his friend Shostakovich. Khrennikov replied, “What else could I have done? If I had refused, it could have been curtains . . . death. They made me do it.” In his defense, he also claimed that he shielded many other composers from ar
rest and execution. There is still a great deal of bitter argument about his role in Russia’s musical life, whether he was a champion or a traitor. “My word was law,” he remembered. “People knew I was appointed personally by Stalin and they were afraid of that. . . . I would go and tell Stalin about them. I was Stalin’s Commissar.” He shouted at his interviewer, “When I said No!, it meant No.”

  He pooh-poohed Shostakovich’s anxieties. “They say Shostakovich lived in fear. You know what? I think all of this has been terribly exaggerated. Shostakovich was such a cheerful man.”

  In 1948, Shostakovich’s music was banned. That fall, he was fired from his teaching positions at the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories. He ran low on funds. He made money by composing film scores for movies in praise of Stalin.

  Next to his family’s cottage, there was a rest home for retired secret police officers. The ex-officers threw their garbage over Shostakovich’s fence and yelled obscenities at him. They broke one of his windows. They called him a formalist, a traitor, and an American spy.

  Maxim sat up in a tree and defended his father’s honor by pelting rocks at them with a slingshot.

  It seemed as if Stalin was preparing for another purge, this time centered on the Jews. Composer Mieczysław Weinberg was arrested. Shostakovich and Nina wrote up the paperwork to act as guardians for Weinberg and Mikhoels’s daughter in case her parents were liquidated. Shostakovich wrote several works on Jewish themes, which he consigned “to the desk drawer.” They were only performed in secret, for friends.

  He also, in his silent fury, wrote a piece called Anti-Formalist Vaudeville, a crass parody of the historic Zhdanov decree. Idiots named Numbers One through Three — clearly based on Stalin and a few Party pawns — get up and babble about how formalist music is written by formalists, while Realist music is written by Realists. Zhdanov’s decree had demanded that Shostakovich use folk material, and he does in Anti-Formalist Vaudeville: a particularly moronic passage is set to Stalin’s favorite tune (“Suliko”), and the whole piece ends with a kick-line in traditional style.