The Russian Century

by George Pahomov

  At night people would come out to stand watch. Two or three figures with gas masks tied to their waists would stand before every house. But nothing was occurring in the city, and standing watch was as useless as the sand-bag barricades thrown up on all the streets. The summer rain fell on the tough fibers, the hot Ukrainian sun withered them, the sand bags rotted, ruptured, and golden streams of sand flowed to the pavement for children to carry to their yards. At night silver stars would arc across the velvet sky and heat lightning would blaze in the distance. These were stifling and moonless nights in which the rumble of distant artillery would fuse with the dull roll of thunder. In the gardens linden blossoms, tobacco, and petunias gave off their heady aroma. These were nights for singing, loving, laughing, slipping in a boat along the wide ribbon of the Dnieper, and for dreaming till dawn on St. Vladimir’s hill. But instead, quite close, there was fighting. The Germans had occupied the Goloseev forest and buses with large red crosses painted on them constantly raced along the streets of Kiev. Sometimes they drove very slowly and then people looked at them with anguish because only the mortally wounded were transported so slowly.

  But, more frequently, other vehicles would race by. One-and-a-half and three-ton trucks packed with all sorts of bag and baggage. Occasionally amidst bedsprings, mirrored chiffoniers, and rolled-up carpets there would be nestled rubber tree plants and palms—the VIP’s of the city were prudently sending their families out of harm’s way. But not everyone was able to leave the besieged city in such comfort. People being evacuated with their institutions and offices would sit for days at junctions and railroad yards vainly expecting departure. And those who did manage to get on the treasured trains sent desperate messages to their loved ones describing chaos, disorder, congestion and filth at the evacuation centers and the panic which had engulfed the rear.

  Troops retreated through the city. First from the districts of Western Ukraine—Lvov and Tarnopol—and later from familiar, near-by places where

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  Kievans would go on vacation, buy strawberries and drink frothy, whole milk straight from the dairy. Unshaven, hungry, and sullen Red Army soldiers would march by, brusquely answering questions and sometimes caustically cursing their officers and political commissars who had taken off in their staff cars leaving the troops behind.

  In contrast to the soldiers, the “warriors” of the newly-formed defensive battalions would proudly posture in their brand-new uniforms. They were given the noble task of fighting mighty German tanks with bottles of combustible fluid. Of course, it never came to that. Having strutted in their uniforms, the youths in a timely fashion changed into civvies and dispersed to their homes. Many of them later, under German occupation, filled the ranks of the collaborationist police, which was largely made up of the more unprincipled and brutal elements, thoroughly despised by the populace. Or else they became black marketeers who would scour villages for flour and cooking oil for resale to starving city-dwellers at incredible prices.

  But in the meantime these “warriors” did not foresee the pitiful end of their military careers and did their utmost to fan the flames of spy-phobia sweeping the city. Every fair-haired and blue-eyed person, every young woman who “suspiciously” asked for directions in an unfamiliar part of the city was taken for a spy. All the police precincts were overflowing with such “fascist agents” who spent anguished hours in filthy cells, finally returning home only after establishing their identity.

  The Germans were coming closer and closer. Once in the evening a dented and dirty automobile pulled up to our house. It was “uncle Andy,” as the young folks called him in jest, a calm and handsome forty-five-year-old major, a family friend. He had long worn the glistening medal denoting twenty years service in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army [1921–1946], but that evening this man who had fought in all the battles of the Soviet Union hardly resembled a sober and disciplined officer. He was drunk and his eyes revealed alarm and despair. His jokes were flat, and his lips were distorted in a forced smile. He looked at the old linden tree, the growth of jasmine by the window, and our small, cozy house with a glance of farewell. Then, tightening his fancy, yellow Sam Browne belt, he said simply, “Things are bad, things are very bad with us.” The motor snorted, and his car shot out of our narrow yard. One friend less . . .

  And friends were what we lacked most in those increasingly troubled days. After my father’s arrest I was to lose mother, as well. Formerly friendly and happy, she became unrecognizable after that grim day when papa was led from the room where just two weeks before they had celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary. She was now apathetic and immobile, and had lost in-

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  terest in all things. My attempts to console her were rebuffed with “Leave me alone. . . . Don’t bother me.”

  Our tightly-knit and amicable family had disintegrated. Gone were friends, gone was my beloved profession. The useless books and notes were gathering dust. Something horrific and implacable was coming. It had shattered the habitual patterns of being, had taken thousands of lives and one did not know whether it was bringing agony to the nation or an “unprecedented flowering” as Shura kept insisting.

  Andrei and I stood watch in the evenings, patrolled the yard, stood by the gate and then for a long time would sit on the steps of the porch, covered in wild grapes, listening to the distant grunting of heavy artillery. Golden stars, falling, traced the sky. It was their time [the August meteorite showers]. But even more frequently crimson and emerald-green signal flares soared upward, saying something to some unseen presence in an anxious and incomprehensible tongue.

  It was stifling in the garden, even at night, and breathing was becoming increasingly difficult for Andrei. He complained of being choked by cobwebs, of a weight in his chest. And then, all of a sudden, there was a frightening, inexplicable seizure. The experienced doctor at the clinic immediately diagnosed it as severe bronchial asthma. While writing the prescription he said that it might be the after-effect of a bad cold, but could have a psychosomatic basis. The symptoms should dissipate after an injection. The prescribed regimen was bed rest.

  In fact, Andrei did feel better, but not for long. He lay in bed for several days, but then leapt up. It wracked his nerves to stay in bed. He became pale to the point of transparency. He would walk around very slowly, biting his lips, trying to suppress his garroted breathing. Could this be Andrei, the tennis player, swimmer, tireless dancer, mad party-goer?

  There was a rumor that army headquarters, to which my dear university friend, Lenia, was attached, was retreating through Kiev. I had not heard from him, and then suddenly there he was: a skinny man in uniform, dusty and sunburned, squeezing my hand and calling me by name.

  It was a piece of luck, he said hurriedly. Headquarters was on the left [eastern] bank, but he was sent into the city. He had half an hour and was determined to see us, but the trolleys were not running, and he was about to give up. We just stood there amidst the crowd, holding each other by the hands, rushing to say all we could in the time we had, interrupting each other, sharing our news.

  A day later Lenia was sitting on our porch, anxiously talking about what disturbed him. Honest, shy, and idealistic, he was indignant at the deception

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  in which he had to take part while working in the political section at headquarters. He told us that his family’s apartment had been abandoned, that his parents left in a great hurry, leaving everything, and asked whether we could keep his notes and dissertation drafts. Should he live, he said, then he would resume his work where he had left off. We managed to do all that, and as a memento I received Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat with a personal inscription.

  Dear friend, never again shall the three of us go for a boat ride as we used to, you and Andrei at the oars, myself at the tiller. Your notes have been left lying next to m
ine on the lower shelf of a bookcase in a house abandoned.

  Lenia came by two more times and we expected him a third. But we never saw him again. The iron horseshoe of the German advance threatened to become an iron ring, and headquarters hurriedly retreated deeper into the rear.

  Sinister conflagrations increasingly filled the sky as the retreating Red Army burned everything in its wake. And finally, the inevitable came.

  An anti-tank gun thudded heavily at a nearby intersection. The staccato crack of machine guns burst through the still gardens. People instinctively inhaled deeply and whispered, “Here it comes.” The sky blazed all night; all night artillery thundered; all night people huddled against each other in slits in the raw earth. At dawn everything suddenly became quiet. Only below, along the river the snap of rifle fire continued and a German mortar stubbornly fired on the retreating troops. Then the whole earth shuddered from a powerful explosion—the gorgeous Dnieper bridges settled into the water. They had been dynamited while the last troops still crossed them. And again there was silence, full of anxiety and bewilderment.

  We went out. Trolley cars, dispersed from the depots, were scattered everywhere along the streets. The water works and power plants had already been blown up, and the trolleys, empty and useless, seemed to have lost their way in the huge city. But there were many pedestrians—people with baby carriages filled with sacks of flour. We recalled how the day before the locals were hauling off bright blue beds with cheerful nickel-plated ornaments. Somewhere warehouses were being plundered, freight cars broken into. The “lumpen proletariat” were joyously dragging easy wartime booty to their lairs.

  But the Germans were slow to appear. Rumor had it that they were already in the city. Wide-eyed, street-smart kids would announce that some guy named Joe had seen the hugest tank at the Haymarket. But in our district the Germans appeared only toward five in the evening. People poured into the street, examining the newcomers from the west with fear and curiosity. They marched handsome and huge in their strange grayish-green uniforms. Tired, covered with dust, but clean shaven, they smiled at the populace. They would

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  pick up children, fearlessly enter yards and houses to wash themselves. They washed themselves with pleasure, pouring cold water over their taut, muscular backs.

  But our own, our cherished army was marching eastward into a huge trap where it was to lose some 660,000 men.

  The first evening star appeared in the sky, timid and small. The nineteenth day of the month of September of the year 1941 was nearing its end. Mother shut the gate, looked around our quiet green garden with its dahlias and nasturtiums and said with relief: “Well, the war is over for us.”

  Poor mother, she had no way of knowing that the war had only just begun.

  NOTES

  1. Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890–1986), foreign minister of the Soviet Union 1939–1949 and 1953–1956; negotiated the Soviet-German non-aggression pact in 1939.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Elena I. Kochina, Blockade Diary

  For 900 days during World War II German armies blockaded Leningrad. At least one-and-a-half million residents of the city died from starvation, the elements, and disease. Not realizing what war would bring, E.I. Kochina, a Leningrad schoolteacher, started a diary a few days before war commenced. The diary ends in 1942 when she and her family were evacuated while the siege was still in progress. She writes sparingly but with lucid insight and observation of the horror, brutality, dehumanization, and death in its many forms. Life in its very essence deteriorated around her. She wrote with no hope that her diary would ever be published. This is an intense document of human survival and of the human spirit, which also speaks for all the mute and dead who did not survive the siege. The original, Blokadnyi dnevnik [Blockade Diary] was published in the collection Pamiat’. Paris: YMCA Press, 1981.

  16 June 1941. Dima [Dimitrii] is on leave. He spends all day with our daughter: bathing, dressing, and feeding her. His well-groomed, sensitive hands of a designer tenderly manage these things. His fair hair blazes red in the sun, lighting up his happy face. “You gave birth to a daughter, but can’t understand what a joy this is!” says Dima with reproach. I laugh to myself. Let him amuse himself. Lena and I know each other well. We have our own world, where we allow no one, not even Dima.

  22 June 1941. Morning. Together with her multi-colored rattles I brought Lena out into the garden. The sun was busy at its work. Suddenly: cries, the sound of broken dishes. The landlady ran past the dacha. “Elena Iosifovna, it’s war with the Germans! They just broadcast it over the radio!” she exclaimed, crying. War! I am 34 years old. This is the fourth war in my lifetime.

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  June 1941, Midnight. How quickly everything changes! Just this morning I was admiring the sunrise, and the Germans were already bombing our airports. Belorussian airfields have been hit especially hard.

  June 1941. The tornado of war storms over our land with frightening speed, scattering people along the way, like eggshells in all directions. In this commotion it isn’t possible to understand anything. The trains, stuffed with human flesh, head for Leningrad and leave equally stuffed.

  June 1941. Infected with a general panic, we rushed to the city. Everything seemed ominous and alarming in the countryside. It seemed that a comforting tranquility awaited us in Leningrad.

  June 1941. The Germans have penetrated the region of Dubno and Rovno. There are desperate battles. All of this isn’t sinking in.

  June 1941. Hitler threw the “immorality” philosophy, reeking of human degeneration, at the Germans as if they were starved dogs. In addition they received weapons, handsome full-dress uniforms and boastful slogans. This was all the German “boys” needed: every cretin and mongrel thinks he’s a crusader, bringing renewal to a “decayed humanity.”

  June 1941. Many employees of our institute have joined the people’s militia and are leaving for the front. All day today we sewed knapsacks and got them ready for the trip leading to “nowhere.”

  June 1941. We come earlier than usual to the institute, but work isn’t going too well. We can’t work at our daily tasks, braiding the thin strand of rational thought which no one needs now. We all have one wish—to work for the front.

  June 1941. The whole earth, from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathians, is gripped by this monstrous war!

  29 June 1941. Each day the Germans swallow 30–40 kilometer chunks of our territory. Let them get indigestion from such portions.

  —June 1941. Spy mania, like an infectious disease, has struck everyone without exception. Yesterday near the market, an old woman resembling a flounder wearing a rain slicker seized hold of me: “Did you see? Certainly a spy!” she cried, waving her short arm toward some man.

  “What?”

  “He has pants and a jacket of a different color.”

  I began to laugh, despite myself.

  “And a mustache, as if pasted on.” She angrily drove her eyes into mine, sitting nearby.

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  “Excuse me . . .” I jerked away. Before slipping off, she trailed me along the pavement for a few steps. But even to me, many people seem suspicious, who should be under surveillance.

  —June 1941. An order was issued calling all Leningraders from the ages of 16 to 50 (and women up to 45) to defend the city.

  —June 1941. Today our whole laboratory dug anti-tank trenches around Leningrad. I dug with pleasure (it was something so practical) and straightened up only when I felt a sharp pain in the small of my back. Only women worked on the trenches. Their scarves blazed in the sun like so many little flames. It was as if a giant colorful flowerbed surrounded the city.

  And suddenly the wings of a plane, gleaming, crossed the sky. A burst of machine-gun fire rattled past and the bullets, like small lizards, crackled and darted into the grass
not far from me. Startled, I stood still, having forgotten all of the civil defense rules that I learned not so long ago.

  “Run!” cried someone, grabbing me by the sleeve. I looked around. All of us diggers ran somewhere. I also ran, even though I didn’t know where to run or what to do. No one else knew either. Unexpectedly, I saw a small bridge. I ran for it. There was a deep puddle of water under the bridge. For a whole hour, we squatted in it. That day we didn’t work anymore.

  June 1941. The evacuation of all institutions and of the population has begun.

  June 1941. We continue to dig trenches. The airplanes no longer appear.

  2July 1941. They’re evacuating the children now! Like frightened animals

  they filled all the streets, moving toward the train station. This was the de

  marcation line of their childhood: beyond it their life without parents began.

  They took the small children in trucks. Their little heads stuck out of the trucks like the heads of small mushrooms layered in baskets. Panic-stricken parents ran behind the vehicles.

  Having blended in with the crowd, I howled together with the rest of the passers-by, feeling how both fear and anxiety had crept so close to our hearts.