(These two pieces were published in The Wire on 9 and 10 August 2018.)

Part I

For us Indians, August 9, 1942, will forever remain a date to look back to with awe and pride. On that day, with the launch of the Quit India movement, India’s colonial masters were served their final notice: get out or get shoved out.

August 9 was supposed to have been a very important date in the Third Reich’s calendar as well, perhaps the most important date. In the end, it may well have been that, but in not quite the manner Adolf Hitler would have liked. Indeed, in some sense, the day proved to be the tipping point for the Nazi campaign for world domination. Hereafter, it would only be a journey downhill, to disaster (though it did not necessarily look like that at the time).

This may sound somewhat far-fetched – after all, the Stalingrad offensive did not even start before August 22 that year, while the epic tank battle in the Kursk salient was nearly a year away yet – and so the story of that day bears retelling.

Shadows lengthen across the Soviet Union

When Operation Barbarossa burst upon the Soviet Union like a screaming tornado in June 1941, the city of St Petersburg featured very prominently on Hitler’s list of most prized targets. One reason, of course, was that it was Russia’s second largest city, arguably still her most important city in many ways, though it had ceded to Moscow as the country’s capital in 1918.

But what mattered even more to Hitler was its name – Leningrad (as it was known then, after the man who had led the October Revolution) – as well as the fact that Leningrad, and not Moscow, had been the cradle of the Revolution. In Hitler’s eye, Bolshevism/Leninism (together with Jews everywhere) were the worst scourge of the great ‘Aryan’ civilisation, and his visceral hatred of Vladimir Lenin (who had been dead for 17 years in 1941) prompted him to make a dash for Leningrad even before he grasped at Moscow.

And his blitzkrieg of June, 1941 nearly threw the Soviet behemoth over the precipice. It did look as though the Wehrmacht was about to overrun the Soviet Union quite like it had done with France, Belgium and the Netherlands the previous summer. A nearly four million-strong Axis force swarmed over a 2,900-km front in a breathtakingly swift, multi-pronged manoeuvre that had no precedent in military history. The initial Soviet losses were crippling: over 3,000 aircraft were wiped out in the first three days alone; Lvov, Kiev, Smolensk, Riga and Minsk – all strategically important industrial centres – surrendered in no time as whole armies got wiped out; General Eric von Manstein’s Panzer Corps raced to the river Dvina to the north, more than halfway to Leningrad, in a mere five days.

Hitler’s boast to his army that if one were to “smash in the door… the whole rotten structure (of Russia) will come crashing down” seemed decidedly prophetic. The first few days, Stalin appeared petrified in indecision. He had been hoping against hope that the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression treaty of August 1939 would continue to enjoy its charmed life for some more months, while he himself figured out how to get the Red Army – emaciated, indeed devastated, by the monstrous purges of 1936-38 that Stalin himself had engineered – combat-ready again. By the time he pulled himself together and plunged into action, the Germans were virtually at Leningrad’s door.

A desperate Stalin was obliged to get rid overnight of the inept Kliment Voroshilov, commander of the Leningrad Front, and task Georgi Zhukhov, the Red Army’s most brilliant tactician and an outstanding leader of men, with the defence of the city. Hundreds of thousands of Leningrad civilians, including many scarred by mindless state terror previously, also rallied to the city’s defence, surprising even the country’s leadership. Leningrad was saved – but only just, till the next blow came.

In the process though, one deadline that Hitler had set himself was missed. The Fuehrer had settled on August 9 for hosting a grand celebratory dinner in Leningrad’s famed Astoria Hotel in honour of the Nazis’ victory at Leningrad. He had given himself all of six months to bring the USSR to her knees. Invites are known to have been printed but had to be stowed away.

The dark night descends on Leningrad

Thwarted, Hitler’s way of having his back upon his worst enemy turned out to be one of the worst war crimes in history. If he could not take Leningrad, he would strangulate her to death, and “wipe her out from the face of the earth”. Incredibly, his army also went along with his argument that winning Leningrad outright was the worse option, because that would saddle the Nazi establishment with the liability to feed a city of nearly three million inhabitants.

On September 8, 1941, began the longest, cruellest siege in recorded history (longer, and incomparably more brutal, than even the Madrid blockade of 1936-39) of any urban settlement. Leningrad’s road, rail and waterway links with the world outside were severed with clinical efficiency even as an army over 700,000-strong stood by to make sure that the siege held. Relentless Luftwaffe bombings continued to strafe the city, knocking out its utilities, food stores and hospitals one after another.

Leningrad was to starve and bleed to death in the long, freezing winter which was just round the corner. Hitler’s orders were for any offer of surrender to be rebuffed. Civilians seeking to escape were to be pushed back into the siege ring with fire.

Before the siege was finally broken by the Red Army on January 27, 1944, a staggering 750,000 Leningraders had died – an overwhelming majority of them from starvation, exposure and disease. Death was in the air. Death was everywhere. People dropped dead suddenly, without a warning, as often on the slushy roads as in their battered apartments or workplaces. At the siege’s worst point, in the very depths of a brutally cold winter – temperatures often fell to -30 degrees Celsius, and there was no heating, fuel stocks having run dry by then – the average daily adult ration added up to all of 125gm in bread, and virtually nothing else. And there was no electricity, no running water, no city transport and little by way of medical help. Well over 100,000 died of starvation in December-January 1941-42 alone.

The dead lay on the open snow for days on end, for the living had hardly the strength or the wherewithal to bury them. Numerous eyewitness accounts, people’s private diaries and letters to friends capture the unimaginable horror of the time. Twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva, who fitfully wrote her diary through the 872-day-long siege, scribbled a chilling roll-call of death:

28 December 1941 at 12.10 pm – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 pm –Granny died. 17 March at 5 am – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 am – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 pm – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 am – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone dead. Only Tanya is left.

Tanya did somehow survive the siege, though she died soon thereafter of ‘progressive dystrophy’, a polite euphemism for utter, irreversible emaciation.

But the city of Leningrad survived the apocalypse. And that it did so is a tribute to the incredible courage, resilience and capacity for self-sacrifice of her common citizen. There exists a mind-bogglingly large number of stories, most true, about the utter destruction of the human spirit during that time of hunger, hopelessness and terror. People filched others’ ration cards, knowing full well that this meant a death sentence for those robbed; a mother would loudly wish for her son to be dead – because she suspected him of stealing from the family’s measly food stock; dead bodies lying around in open spaces would be stripped bare of all their clothes, so that those still living could get a little extra warmth.

Equally, however, there are many deeply moving accounts of men and women unhesitatingly giving up their rations for the sake of a friend, sometimes even a stranger, who was in direr need; of humble Leningraders refusing to leave their posts even when death stared them in their face.

A young mother, Yelena Kochina, writes of how an elderly woman, far gone herself in starvation and exhaustion, yielded her own place on a cruelly long food queue to Yelena when she realised that Yelena had a child to feed at home. Alexander Werth, BBC’s Moscow correspondent, met Tamara Turanova, “a little girl of fifteen, very pale, thin and delicate, obviously run down”, who had lost both her parents to starvation and now worked at the famous Kirov (formerly Putilov) factory, very close to the front. “’Doesn’t it frighten you to work there? ….Wouldn’t you like to change over to another factory?’, Werth asked her. ‘No’, she said, shaking her head. ‘I am a Kirov girl, and my father was a Putilov man, and really the worst is over now, so we may as well stick it to the end’. And one could feel that she meant it, though it was only too clear what terrible nervous strain that frail little body of hers had suffered.”

Twenty-eight-year-old Anna Zelenova, director at the Pavlovsk Palace museum, refused to evacuate even after the Germans had overrun Pavlovsk, a Leningrad neighbourhood, and every Russian had fled from there. She made sure that all the museum’s remaining possessions (she had commandeered vehicles over several days previously to despatch the main art objects to safer locations) had been securely packed and boarded up before she started out alone on a long and weary walk towards the city . “It took her all night to reach there, stumbling in heeled shoes through fields and allotments, and crouching in ditches at the thump of artillery fire”. At 10 next morning, “she finally reached St. Isaac’s Cathedral, in whose ‘dim, grim, cold and damp’ vastness she was to live, together with the staff and the rescued contents of all the other abandoned summer palaces, for the whole of the siege”.

“Why did Leningrad ‘take it’?”, Alexander Werth, who wrote one of the first few authoritative histories of Germany’s war with the Soviet Union, recalls many people from outside the USSR asking him at the time. He did not find it easy to answer that question, nor did anybody else.

“What is remarkable, once the city was surrounded”, Werth notes, however, “was not the fact that the people ‘took it’, but the way they took it”. Werth is right: the question about history’s worst blockade should not revolve around why the besieged citizenry suffered what they did – for they had precious few options about it – but how they measured up to the terrible demands that it made upon their capacity for endurance and hope – indeed upon their essential humanity. And if we were to think of one episode, one day from that terrible ordeal that encapsulates the spirit of Leningrad’s resistance, we could do no better than remind ourselves of August 9, 1942, the day – or rather, the night – on which a piece of great music lit up the dark, long night of the siege.

But that is a story for another day.

Part II

A characteristic feature of Soviet-era memorials and monuments is the invariably grand scale of their conceptualisation and execution. Whether it is the obelisk at the Park Pobedy memorial complex in Moscow commemorating the routing of Nazi Germany, the statue of St George slaying the dragon located at the obelisk’s feet, or the giant sailor charging at the enemy whom you come across in Budapest’s Memento Park – every single memorial of that period is enormous, massive.

So, upon arriving at the Museum of the Defence and Siege of Leningrad one day in June 2017, we were struck by the museum’s somewhat unprepossessing exterior. Everything about the place looked modest, the exhibits as much as the cramped galleries, and nothing quite matched our mental picture of the heroic resistance that Leningraders had put up to the German killing machine.

Then one realised that this was not the original siege museum set up soon after the lifting of the blockade (which was nearly 30 times as large as the one we visited); that Stalin had had that establishment destroyed in course of the macabre Leningrad Purges of 1948-50 when most of the leaders of the Leningrad Soviet along with the museum director were executed after summary ‘trials’; and that the new museum collection was put together largely by non-governmental effort only in the late 1980s.

Yet, the museum is definitely worth a visit, if only because, for the enormity of the Leningrad famine of 1941-42 to sink in, one needs to stand before the chilling November 20, 1941, directive of the city council, notifying daily food rations. It set the quota for civilians not classed as manual workers at 125 grams of bread a day, and little else, yielding a calorific value of about 450. Historians have suggested that the real number of calories was closer to 300. Little wonder then that Leningraders died in their thousands every single day of the blockade. And yet, the city was not given up. Even more incredibly, Leningrad managed to organise occasional music recitals even in the worst days of the siege. It was at this museum that we first learnt of the Leningrad premiere of the great Shostakovich symphony No. 7 – the ‘Leningrad Symphony’ as it has come to be known – staged on August 9, 1942.

Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-75) was a Leningrader. Trained at the Leningrad (then Petrograd) Conservatoire, he was recognised as a child prodigy, and his First Symphony was premiered when he was only 19. Like many of his contemporary artists, however, he had had his share of run-ins with Joseph Stalin’s regime, and as late as 1936, one of his compositions was denounced by the party newspaper Pravda as “muddle, not music”.

After the German invasion though, he was ‘mainstreamed’ again together with many other well-known personalities. Shostakovich started work on his Seventh Symphony soon after the war began, but it was well after he and his family had been evacuated from blockaded Leningrad to Moscow that he could complete, in December 1941, this monumental composition, requiring as it did nearly 100 orchestra hands, ran for over an hour-and-a-quarter, and touched high, repeated crescendos. Its theme – war and the pity of war – resonated powerfully over Europe. It was premiered in Kuibyshev, near Moscow, and later in the capital itself in March 1942 to thunderous ovations. “The Seventh Symphony”, a reassured Pravda now exulted, “is the creation of the conscience of the Russian people”.

The journalist/historian Alexander Werth, present at the Moscow premiere, was moved to tears by the Symphony’s evocation of ‘naked evil, in all its stupendous, arrogant, inhumanly terrifying power” sweeping over Russia. The London and New York premieres, in June and July that year respectively, were both sensations. Time magazine celebrated the New York premiere by noting that, “amid bombs bursting in Leningrad, he (Shostakovich) heard the chords of victory”.

There were 62 performances of the Seventh Symphony in the US in the 1942-43 season, with “many of the concerts turning into public demonstrations of support for a second front”, as one historian remarks, referring to the Soviet Union’s repeated requests to her western allies to open a second, European front in the War so that the Nazis were obliged to divert a part of their gargantuan resources away from the Russian front.

Early in April, the Leningrad city arts department also started planning for the Seventh Symphony’s Leningrad premiere. Clearly, the odds against the project were quite overwhelming. The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra had already been evacuated, and the only other ensemble of any worth left in the city equipped was the Leningrad Radio Orchestra under conductor Karl Eliasberg, a friend of Shostakovich’s from their Conservatoire days.

That orchestra was already in a shambles, a starving city at war having exacted a severe toll on its members. It had stopped performing in December 1941 and, of the Orchestra’s original 40-odd members, only 15 were still alive, the others having succumbed either to starvation or to enemy fire at the front. The survivors were all at varying stages of ‘alimentary dystrophy’, as emaciation from acute hunger was referred to in current officialise, and were either in hospital or sunk in deep despair in their gloomy homes.

Eliasberg himself barely hobbled around with a walking stick, dropping in on his comrades and trying to rouse them to what really looked like an impossible mission. He had thinned so much that the slightest strain exhausted him completely, and he had to be provided with a bicycle so that he could move around. Appeals were broadcast over the radio and through posters requesting additional musical hands to help out with the performance, and the services of both civilian volunteers and members of army bands were enlisted. The overwrought city administration, fighting crippling food shortages, managed to somehow squeeze out a few extra grams of rations for the performers.

And yet, things were so desperate that, even as the rehearsals began, three performers died one after another. An official note recorded how “the first violin is dying, the drum died on the way to work, the French horn is at death’s door…”

The symphony’s 252-page conductor’s score was flown into the besieged city under cover of darkness, and the performers were required to laboriously copy out their individual portions of the score. The first rehearsal, held in the Radio Orchestra’s icy studio that had no electricity yet, lasted barely 15 minutes, because the 30-or-so musicians present could not cope with it any longer. One trumpeter, unable to produce a single note, wept as he apologised to Eliasberg. Fresh appeals went out for replacements. The commander of the Leningrad Front, General Leonid Govorov, permitted the recall of some potential performers from the front lines as substitutes. The makeshift orchestra initially rehearsed some smaller pieces by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korasov, offered some recitals in April and May, and then moved on to take up the Seventh Symphony.

Scratchy as they were, the Shostakovich rehearsals continued, gathering pace as July arrived, but only one full-length rehearsal of the entire symphony could be attempted before the premiere. Eliasberg was as a man possessed, pushing his colleagues relentlessly to do better, giving no one any quarters, whatever their personal circumstances. His arms shook as he raised them to conduct, but he carried on nonetheless. Others looked at him and did their best, too.

Finally, the day of the concert arrived, and the Grand Philharmonia Hall was chock-full of listeners so scrawny that their clothes looked like hanging on coat-hangers. It was the evening of August 9. Was the date a deliberate choice made keeping Hitler’s ‘Astoria banquet’ in mind? Every existing account of the day suggests so, though no official record is available to bear this out. (In any case, most such records were meticulously destroyed.)

But there remained the obvious question of a possible German bombardment of the concert, and General Govorov needed to address that question. His answer was Operation Squall, a violent spell of bombing of the German artillery positions, identified with pin-point accuracy through weeks-long intelligence operations. A little before the concert was to open, 3,000 high-calibre artillery shells were spattered over enemy guns in a vicious torrent of fire, lulling the Germans into inactivity for the evening. Then, the first notes of the Seventh Symphony rang out even as the lights came on inside the concert hall.

To make sure that the music could be heard across the city, loudspeakers were placed at street-corners, city squares and parks. Govorov’s masterstroke was to strategically place speakers near the German lines as well, so that the enemy also listened as the symphony played out. The General is known to have told the conductor after the concert: “We played our instruments in the symphony, too, you know”. He was not exaggerating, surely.

The quality of the performance was somewhat ragged, as could have been expected, but the atmosphere was simply electric. “Some wept”, the historian Anna Reid quotes a woman in the audience recounting later, “because that was the only way they could express their excitement, others because they had lived through what the music was now expressing with such force, many because they were grieving for those they had lost, others because they were overcome with the mere fact of their being present here in the Philharmonia.”

During the final movement, everyone stood up, because they found it impossible to listen sitting down. They kept standing as the concert ended, as wave after wave of ovation swept over the artists, who could not hold back their tears themselves. A little girl went on stage, presenting to Eliasberg a little bouquet of fresh flowers, a miracle in a city ravaged by war and death. The Seventh Symphony, henceforth called the Leningrad Symphony, had breathed new life into weary souls like nothing else could perhaps have done. It became a defiant moment in Leningrad’s ultimate survival, “an extraordinary story of triumph of the human spirit over unspeakable terror”.

“(T)he whole city had found its humanity… in that moment, we had triumphed over the soulless Nazi war machine”, as Eliasberg himself was to reminisce later. If his was a partisan view, every memoir of the evening sees the concert as a moral victory, a prelude to the actual victory over Nazism. “The besieging Germans”, Anna Reid writes, “hearing the music ring out from loudspeakers across no-man’s-land, are said to have realised at that moment that the war in the East would never be won…” Years later, after Germany had been partitioned, a group of East German tourists to Leningrad sought Eliasberg out in his retirement. A few of them, who had fought at the Leningrad Front and remembered the concert, told Eliasberg how some of them had wept as they listened. They had been reminded of home. They also realised the futility of their own efforts.

Much as we would like to remember August 9 for the Leningrad Symphony and the Quit India movement, both emblematic of humankind’s capacity for defying brute force and even death, we also need to not forget August 9, 1945.

Whether Nagasaki was really necessary is a debate that will continue to swirl around seminar-rooms and lecture-halls everywhere for many more years. But if we can set aside for a moment questions of military strategy and political expediency, we will still have to contend with the chilling fact of a bustling, throbbing human community simply vaporising in the blink of an eye, leaving behind it mountains of rubble and ash alone. August 9, 1945, has in fact burnt into our collective memory and it will continue to haunt mankind in the future. It is only the simple, unselfconscious courage and common human decency that ordinary people bring to their everyday lives that can act as a counterpoise to such memory.

Indeed, if we are to keep our faith with the continuity of man’s life on earth, we need to keep looking back to episodes such as that of the dark August night in Leningrad which lit up with music even as death rained down from the sky. That will hopefully teach us how not to allow a repeat of Nagasaki.

(Anjan Basu freelances as literary critic, commentator and translator of poetry. Courtesy: The Wire.)