In peacetime Krymov had once spent a day there with a group of foreign comrades. The museum staff had done what they could to create the illusion that this was a house where people still went about their daily lives. There were fresh flowers everywhere and the dining-room table was neatly laid. And yet, the moment they all went inside, the moment Krymov put on the obligatory cloth overshoes and heard the pious voice of the guide, it became only too obvious that the master and mistress of the house were dead. This was not a house but a museum, a sepulchre.
But when he went inside this second time, Krymov felt that this was a Russian house like any other. The storm that had flung open every door in Russia, that had driven people out of their warm homes and onto black autumn roads, sparing neither peaceful city apartments, nor village huts, nor hamlets deep in the forest, had treated Leo Tolstoy’s home no less harshly. It too was preparing to leave, in rain and snow, along with the entire country, the entire people. Yasnaya Polyana was a living, suffering Russian home—one of thousand upon thousand of such homes. With absolute clarity, Krymov saw in his mind Bald Hills and the old, sick prince.124 The present merged with the past; today’s events were one with what Tolstoy described with such truth and power that it had become the supreme reality of a war that ran its course 130 years ago.
Tolstoy, no doubt, had found it painful to describe the long and bitter retreat of the first months of that distant war; he might well have wept as he described how the old prince, close to death, had muttered, “My soul aches”—and had been understood only by his daughter Maria.
And then Tolstoy’s granddaughter Sofya Andreyevna came out of the house, calm, downcast, shivering a little in spite of the coat thrown over her shoulders. Once again Krymov did not know whether this was Princess Maria, going out for a last walk around the garden before the French arrived, or whether it was Lev Tolstoy’s elderly granddaughter scrupulously fulfilling the demands of her fate: applying all her heart and soul, as she prepared to leave, to checking the accuracy of her grandfather’s account of the princess’s earlier departure from this same house.
Krymov went to Tolstoy’s grave. Damp, sticky earth; damp, unkind air; the rustle of autumn leaves underfoot. A strange sense of heaviness. The loneliness of this little mound of earth covered in dry maple leaves—and the living, throbbing connection between Tolstoy and all that was happening today. It was agonizing to think that in a few days German officers might come to this grave, laughing, smoking, talking in loud voices.125
Suddenly the air above him was shattered. Junkers, with an escort of Messerschmitts, were passing overhead, about to bomb Tula. A minute later, from a few miles to the north, came the dull roar of dozens of anti-aircraft guns. Then the earth trembled too, shaken by the explosions of bombs.
To Krymov it seemed as if Tolstoy’s dead body must have felt this trembling.
•
By evening Krymov had reached Tula, which was in panic. On the outskirts, beside the red-brick buildings of the distillery, soldiers and workers were digging trenches and ditches, constructing barricades, positioning long-barrelled anti-aircraft guns along the Oryol road, evidently expecting to be using these guns not against aircraft but against the tanks that might soon approach from Yasnaya Polyana and Kosaya Gora.
Thick, damp snow was falling, changing suddenly to icy rain. One moment the streets were white; then they were black—just mud and dark puddles.
Krymov went into the army canteen. Three or four men were standing by each table, silently observing those who were seated.
A larger group of men was standing around the canteen manager, demanding meal coupons for lunch. The manager was insisting that they first bring him a note from the commandant. A captain was saying, “But don’t you understand? It’s impossible even to get to speak to the commandant. I haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours. Give me a bowl of soup!”
The captain looked about for support. A major standing beside him said, “Comrade Captain, there are a lot of us—and only one canteen manager. If we’re not careful, we’ll drive the poor man round the bend.” Smiling ingratiatingly, he then turned to the manager. “Isn’t that so, comrade manager?”
“Absolutely!” said the manager. And he gave the major a meal coupon.
There was borsch all over the tables, along with burnt crusts of bread, saucers with traces of dried mustard, and empty salt cellars and pepper pots.
An elderly lieutenant colonel was saying to a waitress, “But why did you bring me my soup in a shallow bowl and my kasha in a deep bowl? That’s the wrong way round.”
Someone standing behind him said, “Never mind, comrade Colonel, better simply to eat the food as it comes. People are waiting.”
There were pretty white curtains beside the windows. The paintings on the walls had been decorated with paper roses. One section of the large room—“For Generals”—was partitioned off by yet more curtains. Two very young junior quartermasters entered this section.
A senior political instructor standing next to Krymov said aloud to himself, “White curtains, paper flowers—and they complain that we’re not being orderly enough. They haven’t yet grasped that we’re at war. And war’s about more than paper roses.”
Commanders waiting their turn were exchanging quiet words.
Krymov learned that the 50th Army had been smashed and that General Petrov and Brigade Commissar Shlyapin had been killed in hand-to-hand fighting with German sub-machine-gunners.
He heard that the German advance on Mtsensk had been halted by Colonel Katukov’s tank unit, recently brought forward from the reserves.126
The following morning, while it was still dark, he went to the garrison commander to find out the location of Southwestern Front HQ. An elderly major replied in a tired voice, “Comrade Battalion Commissar, you’re in Tula. No one here knows anything about the Southwestern Front. Ask in Moscow.”
51
KRYMOV arrived in Moscow at night. No sooner had he walked out of the Kursk station than the extreme tension of the last two months fell away: he was physically exhausted and, once again, he felt lonely. There would be no one waiting for him at home.
The square was deserted. The snow was damp and heavy. Krymov wanted to lift up his head and howl—like a wolf alone in the steppe.
The thought of his empty home—of listening to his own footsteps as he walked from room to room—was terrifying. He returned to the station building. Amid tobacco smoke and the hum of quiet conversation he felt more comfortable.
In the morning he went round to call on Viktor Shtrum, but the yardwoman told him that the Shtrums were now in Kazan.
“Do you happen to know if Ludmila Nikolaevna’s sister is with them there? Or is she in Stalingrad with her mother?”
“That I don’t know,” said the yardwoman. “Even my own son hardly tells me anything—all I know is that he’s at the front.”
Few months in Moscow’s 800 years can have been as difficult as October 1941. Day and night, the fighting around Mozhaisk and Maloyaroslavets was unremitting.127
In the Main Political Administration Krymov was questioned at length about the situation near Tula. He was told he could be taken back to the Southwestern Front on a transport plane carrying newspapers and information leaflets. But he would have to wait; these planes flew only once every three or four days.
On his second morning in Moscow, Krymov saw large crowds making their way through dense snow, heading for the nearest railway station.
Breathing heavily, a man put down his suitcase, took a crumpled copy of Pravda from his pocket and said to Krymov, “Have you read this, comrade? It’s the worst so far.” And he read aloud, “During the night of 14/15 October, the position on the Western front deteriorated. The German fascists hurled motor infantry and large numbers of tanks against our forces and, in one sector, broke through our defences.”
His fingers trembling, the man rolled a cigarette, took a drag, threw the cigarette away, grabbed his case and said, “Zagorsk—I’
ll walk to Zagorsk.”
On Mayakovsky Square Krymov came across an editor he knew. From him he learned that many government institutions had already been evacuated to Kuibyshev, that there were huge crowds waiting on Kalanchovskaya Square,128 hoping to board trains, that the metro was no longer running and that an hour ago someone just back from the front had told him that there was now fighting on the outskirts of Moscow.
Krymov wandered about the city. His face was burning and from time to time he felt his head spin. He had to lean against a wall in order not to fall over. Somehow he did not realize that he was ill.
He phoned a colonel he knew, who taught in the Lenin Military-Political Academy; he was told that the colonel had left for the front, with all his students. He phoned the Main Political Administration and asked to speak to the section head who had promised to get him onto a transport plane. The duty officer replied, “He and his entire section were evacuated this morning.”
When Krymov asked if the section head had left any message for him, the duty officer asked him to wait and then disappeared for a long time. Listening to the crackling line, Krymov decided that the section head—probably overwhelmed by the chaos of the evacuation—had evidently left no message at all. The best thing he could do now was to go either to the Moscow Party committee or to the head of the Moscow garrison. He could ask to be posted to one of the units defending the city; transport planes were clearly out of the question. But then the duty officer returned to the phone and informed Krymov that he was to collect his personal belongings and go to the People’s Commissariat of Defence.
It was dark by the time Krymov reached the commissariat. By then, instead of feeling hot, he was shivering. His teeth were chattering. He asked if there was a first-aid station in the building. A duty officer took him by the hand and led him down the dark, empty corridor.
The nurse looked troubled, shaking her head after one look at Krymov. The thermometer seemed icy, and he realized he must have a very high fever indeed. The nurse said down the phone, “Send a car. He has a temperature of 40.2.”
Krymov was in hospital for three weeks with acute pneumonia. During the first days, apparently, he had cried out in delirium, “Moscow! Don’t make me leave Moscow! Where am I? . . . I want to go to Moscow. . .” He had tried to leap out of bed and the nurses had had to restrain him, pinning him down by the arms as they tried to convince him that he was already in Moscow.
Krymov left the hospital at the beginning of November.
He understood at once that Moscow had changed. There was a grim severity about the wartime city. Gone were the anxiety and fears of October; gone the feverish bustle and the troubled voices. People were no longer jostling one another in shops and trams, no longer dragging heavily laden carts and sledges to railway stations.
In this hour of looming disaster, when the rumble of guns forged in the Ruhr could be heard from the city’s outskirts, when black Krupp tanks were smashing through aspen and pine groves near Maloyaroslavets, when German rocket engineers illuminated the winter sky over the Kremlin with ominous aniline lights from the BASF chemical factory, when German words of command echoed in forest clearings and Prussian, Bavarian, Saxon or Brandenburg voices could be heard on short-wave radio, saying “Folgen . . . freiweg . . . richt, Feuer . . . direkt richt”129—in this hour Moscow was calm, severe and formidable. She was the military leader of Russian cities, towns and villages, of all the Russian lands.
There were few ordinary people on the streets, only patrols. Shop windows were packed with sandbags. There were trucks carrying troops, and tanks and armoured cars now painted snow-white. The streets were covered with barricades built from thick red pine logs and yet more sandbags. Anti-tank hedgehogs wreathed in barbed wire blocked the approaches to the city’s main gates. Military traffic controllers with rifles stood at all the junctions and crossroads. Wherever Krymov went, he saw more defences under construction. Moscow was preparing for battle.
This was a scowling city, a soldier city, a militiaman city. “The new face of Moscow,” Krymov said to himself, “the face of our capital.”
On the dark foggy morning of 7 November Krymov was on Red Square—the Moscow Party committee had given him a pass for the celebrations.130
Had the world ever seen so austere and majestic a picture? Somehow both massive and slender, the strong, stone-patterned breast of the Spassky Tower took up much of the sky to the west. The cupolas of St. Basil’s were veiled in mist; it was as if they were not of this earth but had been born from something light and celestial. New and surprising, no matter how long you looked, these forms could have been anything—doves, clouds, human dreams turned to stone, or stone transformed into the living thoughts and dreams of a human being.
The fir trees around the Lenin Mausoleum were motionless. The very faintest hint of living blue shone through the stony sadness of their heavy branches, while up above them rose the Kremlin wall, its starkly chiselled crenellations softened by white hoar frost. Every now and then the snow stopped; then it tumbled down again in soft flakes, hiding the merciless stone of Lobnoye Mesto and causing Minin and Pozharsky to disappear into a murky gloom.131
Red Square itself was like a living and breathing breast, the broad breast of Russia, with warm mist rising up from it. And the sky now hanging low over the Kremlin was the same broad sky that Krymov had seen over the Bryansk forest—imbued with both the cold of the war and the cold of autumn.
The soldiers wore greatcoats, large kirza boots132 and crumpled fur hats with earflaps. They had come to Red Square not after long months of training in barracks but straight from gun emplacements, combat units or combat reserves.
These were the troops of a people’s war. Now and again, furtively, they brushed the melting snow from their faces—with a wet tarpaulin mitten, with a handkerchief, with the palm of a hand. Krymov wondered if those to the rear might be discreetly taking a piece of dried bread from their pockets and slipping it into their mouths.
Crowded together on the tribunes were men in greatcoats and leather jackets, women in quilted jackets and headscarves and senior commissars with diamonds on their collar tabs. The collar tabs of the front-line commanders now bore green bars.133
“Perfect weather!” said a woman standing near Krymov. “We won’t see any German bombers today.” And, with a handkerchief, she wiped the rain and snow from her forehead.
Still weak from his illness, Krymov sat down on a barrier.
Words of command echoed over the square. Marshal Budyonny began reviewing and greeting the troops.134 After completing his review, he climbed quickly up onto the mausoleum.
Stalin went up to the microphone. In the murk Krymov was unable to make out his face. But his words were entirely clear. Towards the end of his speech, he wiped the snow from his face just as the rank-and-file soldiers had done, looked around the square and said, “Can anyone doubt that we can and must defeat the German invaders?”
Krymov had heard Stalin speak before, but he now understood more clearly than ever why he spoke so very simply, without rhetorical flourishes. “His calm,” Krymov said to himself, “springs from his confidence in the good sense of the millions he is addressing.”
“The war you are fighting is a just war, a war of liberation,” Stalin concluded. “Death to the German invaders!” And then, raising one hand: “Forward to victory!”
On a day when Hitler’s hordes were almost at the gates of Moscow, the combat troops of a people’s army began to march sternly and solemnly past the Lenin Mausoleum.
52
ON 12 NOVEMBER 1941 Krymov managed to rejoin Southwestern Front HQ and was appointed commissar of a motor infantry regiment. Soon afterwards, when his regiment took part in the liberation of Yelets, he experienced the sweetness of victory. He saw piles of pink and blue papers—from what had once been the HQ of General Sixt von Armin—being blown across a snowy field. He saw prisoners with sacks tied around their legs and wadded blankets thrown over their shoulders, their h
eads bandaged with towels and women’s head-scarves. The white shroud of the Voronezh winter fields was dotted with smashed trucks and cars, black Krupp cannon, and the dead bodies of Germans clothed only in thin grey sweaters and overcoats.
The news of the German defeat outside Moscow was like the peal of a joyful, celebratory bell, heard all the way from the Southern Front to the Karelian Front.
The night Krymov heard the news, he felt a joy he had never known before. He left the dugout where he and the regimental commander were quartered; the harsh January cold chilled his nostrils and burnt his cheekbones. Beneath the clear, starry sky, the snow-covered valley, with its little mounds and hillocks, shone with an unearthly light. The twinkling of the stars created a sense of swift motion in every direction at once. The news was being passed from star to star; the whole sky, it seemed, was gripped by a joyful excitement. Krymov took off his hat and stood there, no longer feeling the cold.
Again and again he reread the radio operator’s transcript: forces under the command of Generals Lelyushenko, Kuznetsov, Rokossovsky, Govorov, Boldin and Golikov had smashed the German flanks. Abandoning weapons and equipment, German armies were now in flight.
The names of the liberated towns—Rogachov, Klin, Yakhroma, Solnechnogorsk, Istra, Venyov, Stalinogorsk, Mikhailov and Epifan—had a joyful, springlike ring to them. It was as if they had been resurrected, reborn, wrested from beneath a cloak of darkness.
Again and again during the retreat Krymov had dreamed of the hour of vengeance—and now it had come.
He pictured the forests near Moscow that he knew so well. Now they must be full of abandoned German bunkers, heaps of rifles and mangled machine guns. Tanks, seven-ton trucks and heavy guns on massive wheels would now be in the hands of the Red Army.
Krymov, who had always enjoyed talking with the soldiers, spent long hours in infantry units and with mortar and gun crews. He quickly realized that everyone already understood the immense importance of the victory outside Moscow. Every Red Army soldier had felt personally involved in the fate of Moscow. During the German advance their pain and anxiety had grown sharper and more bitter. When they learned of the German defeat, there was a sigh of relief from millions of breasts.
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