Sashka wasn’t crying and Dedushka wasn’t snoring late on Saturday, June 21. Still, Mom couldn’t sleep. Perhaps she was overexcited at the prospect of seeing the famous chimp Mickey at the Moscow Circus the next day. Or maybe it was the thunderstorm that broke the still, airless sky after ten. Waking up often from her uneasy slumber, Mom noticed Naum in the room, crouched by his Latvian VEF shortwave radio. The radio’s flashing green light and the non-Russian voices—Hello… Bee Bee See—finally lulled my mother to sleep.
Naum had his ear to the radio, fists clenched. Damn VEF! Were it not for the sleeping girls he’d have smashed it to pieces. It was shortly after dawn on Sunday. A static-crackly foreign voice had announced what he and his superiors had been warning about for months with desperate near certainty. His small suitcase had been packed for a week. Why wasn’t headquarters calling? Why did he have to crouch by the whining, buzzing radio for information when intelligence had been so overwhelming, when he himself had reported menacing activity at the new Soviet-Baltic border for more than a year? Top-level defense professionals had been aghast at the TASS news agency statement of June 14, which dismissed as base rumor the possibility of attack by Russia’s Non-Aggression Treaty cosigner—Nazi Germany. But the directive for the TASS pronouncement had come from the Vozhd (Leader) himself. Certain top commanders left for vacations; others went to the opera.
Meanwhile, early the previous evening, a small, somber group had gathered nervously in Stalin’s Kremlin office. Among those present was Naum’s uberboss, naval commissar Admiral Kuznetsov. He’d brought along Captain Mikhail Vorontsov, a longtime acquaintance of Granddad’s (and his direct boss some months later). Vorontsov had just landed from Berlin, where he was Soviet naval attaché. Hitler would invade at any hour, he warned. Stalin had been hearing these kinds of detailed alarms for months. He rejected them with contempt, even fury. Tellingly, the meeting started without his new chief of military staff, General Georgy Zhukov.
The signs, however, were too ominous to dismiss. The Dictator was noticeably agitated. General Zhukov rang at around eight p.m. from the defense commissariat: a German defector had crossed the border to warn that the attack would start at dawn. After midnight he rang again: another defector said likewise. Stalin grudgingly allowed a High Alert to be issued—with the bewildering caution not to respond to German “provocations.” He also ordered the latest defector shot as a disinformer.
At his dacha the Leader, an insomniac usually, must have slept deeply that night. Because Zhukov was kept waiting on the line for a full three minutes when he telephoned just after dawn.
“The Germans are bombing our cities!” Zhukov announced.
Heavy breathing on the other end of the line.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” asked Zhukov.
Upon returning to the Kremlin, Stalin appeared subdued, even depressed, his pockmarked face haggard. Refusing to address the nation himself, he delegated it to Molotov, who was then foreign commissar and stuttered badly. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in the history of warfare, comprising more than three million German troops augmented by Axis forces, and ranging from the Baltic to the Black Sea, had been allowed to commence in effective surprise.
In the early light of June 22, lying in bed with her eyes half closed, Larisa saw her father pull her mother to his chest with a force she’d never witnessed before. The embrace—desperate, carnal—told her that the circus was off even before Naum’s one-word announcement: war.
At midday they all stood among panicked crowds under the black, saucer-shaped public loudspeakers.
“Citizens of the Soviet Union!… Today, at four a.m…. German troops… have attacked our, um um, country… despite… a treaty of non-aggression…”
Mercifully, Comrade Molotov didn’t stutter as much as usual. But his halting speech was that of a clerk struggling through an arcane document. “Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten,” concluded the world’s worst public speaker.
“What does perfidious mean?” asked children all over Moscow. What happened to Stalin? wondered their parents, joining the stampedes for salt and matches at stores.
At two p.m. that afternoon, amid the wrenching chaos of departures at the Leningradsky railway station, Mother couldn’t help but admire Naum’s spiffy gray civilian suit.
“Please, please, take off that hat!” Liza yelled, running after his train. “It makes you look Jewish—the Germans will kill you.”
The Father of all Nations finally spoke on July 3.
“Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! I am addressing you, my friends!”
It was a moving speech. The brothers and sisters line went down in history as possibly the only time Stalin called out to Russians in such an un-godlike familial fashion. Stalin had been even less godlike in private, though that was not known until years after his death.
“Lenin left us a great legacy and we shitted it away,” the Vozhd had blurted dismally a few days before his speech, after a frantic session at the defense commissariat where the ruthless General Zhukov had fled the room sobbing.
Indeed. By the time Stalin spoke to the nation, the Germans had swept some four hundred miles into Soviet territory along three fronts. By late October they counted three million Russian POWs. The tidal roar of the Wehrmacht with its onrushing Panzer tanks, Luftwaffe overhead, and SS rear guard would not begin to be turned until Stalingrad, a year and a half away.
After Naum’s departure, though, life in Moscow seemed to Mom almost normal. Except that it wasn’t. People carried home masks resembling sinister elephant trunks. Women with red swollen eyes clutched the hands of their husbands and sons all the way to conscription points. Dedushka Yankel glued X-shaped strips of tape on the windows and covered them with dark curtains, as officially required. The wails of the air raid sirens awoke in Mom the familiar sensations of alarm and toska, but now with an edge of adrenaline. Strakh (fear) was more tolerable somehow than toska. Falling asleep fully clothed, a rucksack packed with water and food by her bed for the frantic run to the bomb shelter—it was terrifying and just a little bit thrilling.
In the dark, freshly plastered shelter beneath the house of composers, familiar faces were fewer with each air raid. Loudspeakers urged remaining Muscovites to evacuate. “Nonsense,” Liza kept murmuring. “Haven’t they said the war’s almost over? Why go?” Following one particularly long mid-August night on the concrete shelter floor, they came back to the house. Liza opened the curtains. Her hollow scream still rings in Mother’s ears after seventy years.
The entire panorama of shingled Moscow roofs Mom so loved stood in flames in the gray morning light.
The telephone call came at seven a.m. The evacuation riverboat was leaving that day. Someone from Naum’s headquarters could collect them in a couple of hours.
Liza stood in the living room, lost. Scattered around her were the cotton parcels and pillowcases she’d been distractedly stuffing. She was five feet tall, as thin as a teenager at thirty-one years of age, still exhausted from childbirth, fragile and indecisive by nature.
Sergei’s baritone jolted her out of her stupor. He was their driver. Everything ready? One glance at Liza’s flimsy parcels sent him into a tornado of packing.
“Your winter coats. Where are they?”