World War: Peter’s Window, Lenin’s City

The enemy is attempting to penetrate into Leningrad. . . .

This shall not be. . . .

These were brave words. But the very fact of their utterance, by Russia’s northern commander, Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, not to his troops but to the people of Leningrad—a military commander exhorting the unmilitary horde to action—indicated a sense of strategic desperation. The words seemed a prologue to their own disproving.

At the moment the words were uttered, the enemy’s hobnailed foot was on the city’s threshold. The Germans had passed Kingissep, only 70 miles to the southwest, and Novgorod, no miles southeast. The city’s railroad lines to Moscow were threatened. From the north Finns and Germans pressed down the Karelian Isthmus to within 50 miles of the city.

With our own hands we built the powerful factories and workshops of Leningrad and the remarkable buildings and gardens, and they will not fall into the hands of German robbers.

This will never be. . . .

The threatened factories were indeed powerful, and the buildings remarkable. This was the museum city of revolution. It had built, for the people, 60 institutions of higher learning, 103 technical schools, 187 elementary and secondary schools, 21 stadiums, 25 theaters, 42 cinemas, 89 hospitals, 240 nurseries. In 1938 the city spent $72,800,000 on construction alone.

It was the biggest industrial center—where Russia gave birth to its first tractor, first dynamo, first blooming mill; which annually produced nearly $2,000,000,000 worth of finished goods all the way from ships to binoculars, locomotives to electric light filaments.

He will never set foot in our beautiful city.

Leningrad was much more than the city of the Bolsheviks. It was old Russia. It was Peter’s cherished window to the sea. It was the place where Tchaikovsky and Dostoevski and Mussorgsky lived and were buried. It was the home of the divine Kshesinskaya, the ballerina whom Nicholas II loved. It was the city of grey and pink granite, of Rastrelli’s baroque Winter Palace, Catherine the Great’s classicism, Alexander I’s low-lying “architectural landscapes.” At its Imperial Opera, Prince Igor had its première. Rembrandt’s Polish Nobleman hung in its Hermitage. It was the town where skylarks sang, in whose parks birches crowded, and under the birches melting little Russian mushrooms grew.

We will form new detachments of the national militia to help the Red Army.

. . . We will choose for these new detachments the bravest and most gallant comrades, the workers and the intellectuals.

Thus, in extremity, did Klimenti Voroshilov ring in the old, beloved duty: manning the barricades. The Neva’s left bank, scene of bloodshed in two Russian revolutions, was changed to a training ground, where men and boys hurriedly boned up on grenade-throwing and bayonet-thrusting. On the Neva’s right bank, across from the Winter Palace, shipyard and metal workers, some of whom had stormed the Winter Palace in 1917, staged a mock battle. Every street got its barrier. In the factories men worked with guns beside them.

All this was very Russian, very melancholy, very brave. But daily the Germans came closer to the penetration which Klimenti Voroshilov had, Canute-like, ordered back with words. At week’s end he wrote:

A terrible danger now is hanging over Leningrad.