The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  2 Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1941-194$, Moscow, 1965, p. 58. Survey, June, 1967, mistakenly dates this discussion June 17, 1941, and makes the argument take place between Malenkov and Kuznetsov.

  3 Kravchenko concluded that the “cult of personality” adversely affected Soviet military preparations throughout the prewar period. There were great delays in putting new military items into production. For example, in 1940 Germany produced 10,250 planes of advanced design; England 15,000. The Soviet turned out only 64 YAK-i’s, 20 MIG-3’s and 2 PE-2’s. In 1940 only 2,794 tanks were produced, mostly old model T-26’s and BT’s. Only 243 60-ton KV’s and 115 T-34’s were built. The production of the 45-mm antitank gun was phased out, but the 57-mm gun had not yet been put into production. Only 2,760 antiaircraft guns were manufactured. (G. Kravchenko, Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 4, April, 1965, p. 37.) In the first half of 1941 production of T-34’s rose to 1,110, according to I. Krapchenko. (Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 10, November, 1966, p. 48.) In the first half of 1941, 1,946 MIG-3’s, YAK-i’s and LAGG-3’s were produced, as well as 458 PE-2’s and 249 IL-2 Stormoviks. (A. Yakovlev, Tsel Zhizni, Moscow, 1966, p. 239.)

  4 Aleksandr Rozen’s novel, Fosledniye Dve Nedely, Moscow, 1963, treats this subject extensively. The Soviet critic A. Plotkin finds Rozen’s account fully justified by the historical data. (A. Plotkin, Literatura i Voina, Moscow-Leningrad, 1967.)

  5 On June 13 General M. I. Kazakov, flying from Tashkent to Moscow, saw below him on the Trans-Siberian railroad, train after train, headed west. He recognized the trains as troop convoys. He knew they did not come from Central Asia (his own command) and deduced that a large-scale movement from Eastern Siberia or Trans-Baikalia was in progress. The next day his guess was confirmed when he met General Lukin, the Trans-Baikal commander, in the Defense Commissariat. (M. I. Kazakov, op. cit., p. 68.)

  6 The date of transmission is given as June 17 by M. Kolesnikov. (Takim Byl Rikhard Sorge, Moscow, 1965, p. 171.) Sorge’s information was transmitted to Stalin. (P. N. Pospelov, Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1941–1945, Moscow, 1965, p. 58.)

  7 The Soviet Defense Ministry’s study of the Communist Party’s role in World War II flatly says that Stalin had ample and excellent intelligence data on the date when he could expect war. He ignored it, and so, asserts the ministry, did Marshal Zhukov and the responsible Defense Chiefs. (I. M. Shlyapin, M. A. Shvarev, I. Ya. Fomi-chenko, Kommunisticheskaya Partiya v Period Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny, Moscow, 1958, p. 42.)

  8 General Bagramyan was in command of the headquarters detachment which left Kiev for Ternopol on the morning of June 21. He had been too busy to read the papers, and en route he looked at Red Star, the army paper. Nothing alarming struck his eye, but he was seriously disturbed by the intelligence reports from the frontier. About 5 A.M. the morning of the twenty-second his column passed through Brody, just as the fighter field was bombed by Nazi planes. The headquarters detachment arrived at Ternopol between 6 and 7 A.M. after going through two Nazi air attacks. (Bagramyan Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 3, March, 1967, p. 61.)

  9 Vice Admiral V. N. Yeroshenko recalls that the Black Sea Commander, Admiral F. S. Oktyabrsky, visited the refitting yards at Nikolayev in mid-June to warn his commanders of the imminence and possibility of a Nazi attack. (V. N. Yeroshenko, Lider Tashkent, Moscow, 1966, p. 22.)

  10 However, General Kazakov was astonished to find Defense Commissar Timo-shenko and General Zhukov spending Wednesday night, June 18, watching a long—and poor—German documentary film rather than coping with urgent defense problems. Two days later, June 20, General P. I. Batov was received by Timoshenko and given a new command—the land defenses of the Crimea. Batov had heard much talk and rumor of German preparations for attack, but Timoshenko assured him there was nothing dangerous in the frontier situation and that Batov’s apprehensions were groundless. Batov received no special instructions, no contingency orders in the event of war, no plans for cooperation with the Black Sea Fleet nor for preparing the Crimea for military operations. “This was the twentieth of June, 1941,” Batov wryly recalls. (P. I. Batov, V Fokhodakh i Boyakh, Moscow, 1966, p. 7.) On the other hand, on June 19 General S. I. Kabanov, in chargé of the Soviet base at Hangö on leased Finnish territory, learned that the Soviet military attaché in Helsinki and the Soviet political representative had suddenly removed their families from a country villa near Hangö. He guessed correctly that they acted in the belief that war was imminent. (Vice Admiral N. K. Smirnov, Matrosy Zashchishchayut Rodinu, Moscow, 1968, p. 16.) Admiral N. G. Kuznetsov claims S. I. Zotov, the Soviet emissary in Finland, warned Kabanov June 19 of the impending Nazi attack. {Oktyabr, No. 8, August, 1968, p. 164.)

  11 The strategic deployment of troops to cover the Soviet frontiers was carried out according to plans which had been worked out by the General Staff in autumn 1940. However, the very extensive movements up to the western Dvina and Dnieper river lines were not designed to be completed before the latter part of July. By that time the Red Army was fighting for its life around Smolensk. (General V. Ivanov, Voyenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 6, June, 1965, p. 80; P. Korodinov, Voyenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, No. 10, October, 1965, p. 30.) General S. M. Shtemenko reports that five armies had been ordered to move from the interior to western areas: the Twenty-second under General F. A. Yermakov, the Twentieth under General F. N. Remizov, the Twenty-first under General G. F. Gerasimenko, the Nineteenth under Konev and the Sixteenth under Lukin. (S. M. Shtemenko, Generalnyi Shtab v Gody Voiny, Moscow, 1968, p. 26.) V. Kvostov and A. Grylev (op. cit.) contend the Trans-Baikal and Far East commands were ordered April 26 to prepare to send a mechanized corps and two infantry corps west.

  12 I. F. Filippov, Tass correspondent, heard these rumors from Schneider, editor of the National Zeitung, in the latter part of May. (Filippov, op. cit., p. 194.)

  13 Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky noted that the more the evidence of German preparations for war mounted, the more firmly Stalin denied its authenticity. (M. Bragin, Novy Mir, No. 9, September, 1961, p. 268.)

  14 A. Yakovlev, one of the Soviets’ leading military aircraft builders and Deputy Commissar of Aviation Construction at the moment of the outbreak of war, writes: “It is perfectly incomprehensible why our troops were forbidden (in Timoshenko’s 7:15 A.M. directive) to cross the frontier without special permission.” He called the directive “more than cautious, even confusing.” “Why was the air force forbidden to attack at a depth of greater than 100-150 kilometers into German territory? War had already started, but the command didn’t know what it was: An isolated incident? A German mistake? A provocation? Not to mention that the Commissar’s directive was extremely tardy and didn’t reflect knowledge of what was happening at the front.” (A. Yakovlev, Tsel Zhizni, Moscow, 1966, pp. 240–240.)

  15 Dr. Gebhardt von Walther, now German Ambassador to Moscow and then a secretary in the German Embassy, regards it as inconceivable that Stalin could have supposed the attack to have been made by Nazi generals, acting without Hitler’s orders. He regards it as equally impossible that the Russians should have made an effort to contact Berlin through the Japanese. At the same time he feels certain Stalin believed until the last that Hitler was trying to blackmail him and that war could be averted. (Walther, personal conversation, June 16, 1967.)

  16 The question of Stalin’s leadership and the precise assessment of responsibility for the terrible failures of policy and intelligence in the months before the Nazi attack is one of the most sensitive topics in Soviet historiography—so sensitive as to reveal clearly the role Stalin and his conduct still play in Kremlin politics. For example, Maisky spoke freely of his doubts about Stalin and his alienation from Stalin’s policies in the version of his memoirs published in NovyMir (No. 12, December, 1964). But when the book version of the memoirs appeared six months later, Maisky’s expressions of doubt regarding Stalin’s leadership had vanished. And Maisky’s description of Stalin’s difficult, labored broadcast
of July 3, 1941, was sharply censored. (I. M. Maisky, Vospominaniya Sovet-skogo Posla, Moscow, 1965, pp. 140-147.) Also compare Admiral N. G. Kuznetsov’s account of 1965 and that of 1968, in which Stalin’s collapse vanishes! (Oktyabr, No. 11, November, 1965, and Oktyabr, No. 8, August, 1968.)

  Even more striking is the controversy over the work of one of the ablest Soviet historians, A. M. Nekrich. Nekrich published in 1966 an intensive study of the pre-June 22, 1941, events, called 1941, 22 lyunya. Nekrich presents an account of the warnings, intelligence reports and growing concerns of the front commanders over the mounting evidence that Hitler was preparing to attack. He concludes that Stalin consistently discounted this evidence and continued to assume that no attack was likely before autumn 1941 or spring 1942. Nekrich’s work was reviewed favorably in Novy Mir (No. 1, January, 1966, p. 260), which called it “clear, intelligent and interesting” and highly recommended the book to the general public. Nekrich’s work was published under the auspices of the Marxism-Leninism Institute, the highest Marxist scholarly institution in the country. It was translated in other Eastern European countries, where it was reviewed in glowing terms. Then, after an acrimonious discussion under the auspices of the Institute of History in Moscow, Nekrich was expelled from the Communist Party in June, 1967, and his work was severely censured. It was plain that twenty-five years after the events the moves and countermoves of the period 1940–41 still possessed major significance in Soviet contemporary politics.

  8 ♦ Cloudless Skies

  EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, JUNE 22, FYODOR TROFIMOV, A veteran Leningrad Harbor pilot, rose to carry out a routine assignment. He was to pilot the Estonian passenger-freight steamer Ruhno out of Leningrad Harbor. The Ruhno was sailing that morning for Tallinn. Trofimov emerged from the bunkhouse of the pilot station to find the sun not yet as high as the tall banks of the nearby Leningrad grain elevators. There was only a breath of wind off the gulf, but the air was clean and smelled of the morning. In the quiet harbor oil slicks lay on the water without a ripple.

  A launch was waiting for Trofimov. He shook hands with the boatman and directed him to Pier 21, where the Ruhno waited. There were few ships in the Barochny anchorage. They passed the northern breakwater and then slowed to permit a big excursion boat to enter the Sea Canal. Early though it was, a band was playing on the boat’s deck and pretty girls waved and shouted. Trofimov lifted his cap and waved back. The launch passed under the bow of a high Danish refrigerator ship, and ahead loomed the Ruhno, its name neatly painted in white letters; below that, in gold, was lettered its home port, Tallinn. The Ruhno was a beautiful small ship, more like a yacht than a commercial vessel. It was rich with mahogany and bright with gleaming white work. It was on the regular Tallinn-Leningrad passenger run.

  Trofimov boarded the Ruhno, introduced himself to the young captain and soon headed the ship into the Gutuyevsky basin. The sun was rising over the city now, burnishing the cupolas with gold. High above gleamed the great dome of St. Isaac’s and the needle spire of the Admiralty.

  Hundreds of times Trofimov had taken the familiar route from the port to the lee of Kronstadt, where he would be dropped and the Ruhno would head into the open gulf. His task was to guide the ship into the Sea Canal which traversed the shallow Neva estuary, a distance of fifteen miles, taking the ship out the invisible sea gates of Leningrad and setting it on course. As the Ruhno entered the Neva inlet, an overladen barge with sand from the London banks in the Gulf of Finland appeared. Trofimov had to slow the Rukhno to keep from swamping the barge. He shouted a curse at the barge captain, then picked up speed.

  The harbor was unusually beautiful on this Sunday morning. Dozens of white sailboats dotted the horizon. As the sun rose higher, it grew warmer. The green forests of Strelna came into view and the Ruhno passed the first Sergyevsky buoy. No ships appeared. Trofimov loosened his collar. He was beginning to feel drowsy and he cushioned his chin in his hand. As he did so, he smelled the meerschaum and resin imbedded in his palm. He was about to tell the Ruhno’s captain how he loved the smells of the sea when the world exploded before his eyes. He lost consciousness. Gradually, he regained his senses to find himself covered with blood. His head hurt. What had happened he could not guess.1 The sun still shone brightly and the green woods of Strelna lay off to the north. From somewhere in the distance he heard the shout: “All hands abandon ship!” There was a roar of escaping steam. The ship was beginning to sink. Suddenly Trofimov noted the position. The center of the channel! Should the Ruhno sink there, Leningrad’s port would be completely blocked. He pulled himself up to the bridge. If only the steering chain still worked. He yanked it. At first no result. Then, as he watched, the nose of the ship swung slowly and the Ruhno headed for the channel side. Slowly, slowly the ship inched forward. Slowly, it lost speed. Slowly, it sank lower. A moment before it went under, Trofimov leaped. He was pulled into a lifeboat as the Ruhno nosed down on the very edge of the canal.

  The hour was still well before noon, and the sun stood high in a blue and cloudless sky.

  Summer had hardly begun when Ilya Glazunov went with his mother, as they did each year, from the big apartment in the gloomy Petrograd Quarter to their country cottage, a few miles beyond Detskoye Selo, in the forest south of Leningrad. The little boy loved the Russian countryside. Here he had drawn his first conscious breath. Here he had heard his first rooster crow, seen his first pine trees, first watched white clouds lazily float across blue skies.

  Sunday, June 22, brought the kind of morning country boys like best— warm, sunny, lazy. It was sheer joy to get up, to stretch, to run down the dirt road and feel the soft dust under tender bare feet.

  Ilya and some friends had found a quiet corner—an old courtyard, strewn with lumber and broken bricks. Clotheslines stretched across it, and bulky chemises and purple undershirts fluttered in the breeze. Along the blind wall at the back of the court a tethered goat was nibbling the new grass.

  The youngsters were playing soldier—White Russians against Red Russians. Finally they paused to catch a breath. One boy looked out through a chink in the wall to the street. A crowd was gathering at the corner—the biggest crowd he had ever seen. The boys raced through the courtyard and into the street just as a voice began to speak from the radio loudspeaker, set up on the telephone pole.

  Vladimir Gankevich was up early on Sunday morning. This was an important day for Vladimir—the day of the track and field meet between teams representing Leningrad and the Baltic republics. Vladimir was a star of the Leningrad team, second only to the champion, Dmitri Ionov. The two were a dual entry in the running broad jump, and Vladimir was determined to make a fine showing.

  He ate a light breakfast of bread and cheese, washed down with tea, and, putting his sweatshirt and shorts in a canvas bag, left the house about eleven o’clock. There were only a few people at the stop where he got on the bus, but Vladimir paid little attention. He was thinking about the meet. It was going to be a warm day. Already the sun felt hot. He hoped there might be a breeze off the gulf before the competition started.

  He got off near the stadium and hurried toward the dressing rooms. Gradually, he became aware of something strange. There was no one in sight! Certainly he hadn’t got the date wrong. He was looking around in some confusion when he heard the sound of running steps. It was his younger brother, Kostya.

  “Vladimir!” the boy shouted. “Vladimir! There’s news.”

  Yelena Skryabina planned to visit nearby Pushkin that Sunday with her neighbor, Irina Klyuyeva, to see a sick child. Her older boy, Dima, and his inseparable friend, Sergei, were going to Peterhof, the palace which Peter and Catherine built to rival Versailles. This was the day that the Peterhof fountains, the famous golden Samson, and the long cascade down to the Baltic seashore was to open. Madame Skryabina was hurrying to finish her work on the typewriter when the telephone rang. It was her husband calling from his office. He had only a moment—no time to explain. He told her not to go out and to keep Dima at home. Then
he hung up. But Dima had already left. What had happened? Madame Skryabina turned on the radio to see if there was any news.

  The youngsters in Gryady, a little railroad town eighty miles southeast of Leningrad, stayed up most of Saturday night, singing and dancing at their high school graduation party, and most of them decided to gather on Sunday for a picnic at the lake. Ivan Kanashin said he’d meet his chum Andrei Piven at noon. The friends soon would separate, for Andrei planned to spend the summer working with a geological expedition surveying peat deposits around Gryady. Ivan was entering the engineering institute. It was almost breakfast time before Ivan went to bed, and when he felt his mother shaking his shoulder, he closed his eyes firmly and turned his head to the wall. His mother shook him again and said, “Wake up, Ivan. Wake up.” There was a strange note, something like terror, in her voice. Suddenly Ivan found himself wide-awake. The sun was streaming into the room and his mother was speaking to him.

  Ivan Krutikov, a lathe operator, loved Leningrad’s white nights—the scent of the cherry blossoms, the heavy fragrance of the lilacs, the strolling all through the night. He and his friend Vasya Tyulyagin worked on the Saturday night shift, and Sunday morning they didn’t feel like going home. They went to the park at Pushkin and, toward noon, rented a boat and rowed about the idyllic little lake in the warm sun. They felt relaxed, tired and drowsy. Suddenly they noticed people running toward the great Cameron Gallery, the loveliest wing of the Catherine Palace.

  The two young men pulled at the oars. Something had happened! As they drew near the shore, they could hear a voice talking over the radio loudspeaker.

  It was quiet in Dmitri Konstantinov’s apartment. His relatives had gone to the country. In two weeks he would finish his studies at the institute and take a vacation. This morning he occupied himself with household chores. He and a neighbor had tickets for the performance at the Maly Opera Theater where The Gypsy Baron was playing—one of the season’s successes.