The 900 Days Read Online Free
Author: Harrison Salisbury
Juliet , the Prokofyev ballet in which Galina Ulanova was dancing at the Mariinsky Theater the next day. Other posters read: “Anton Ivanovich is Angry . . . Anton Ivanovich is Angry.” Not all the delegates recognized this as a teaser for a new movie which was to open soon at the leading houses. They shook their heads in puzzlement and wandered on to peer into the bright shop windows of Nevsky Prospekt.
The top personnel at the meeting did no strolling. They went straight to their offices and waited beside telephones in case of a call. Just before they left Smolny the word had quietly been passed: “Don’t get too far away. There may be something coming up tonight.”
They had been offered no clue as to what might be happening. Disciplined to carry out Party orders meticulously and without question, they now sat by their telephones, smoking cigarettes, poring over the mountains of paper that perpetually overwhelmed them and wondering what was in the air. Not all went to their offices. Mikhail Kozin, Party organizer for the great Kirov steel works, drove to his summer cottage at Mill Stream, a few miles outside Leningrad, to spend the night with his family. He had no telephone in the country, but his chauffeur went back to the factory, ready to alert him if anything happened.
In the suburb of Pushkin, the old imperial village of Tsarskoye Selo, the soft air and pale light attracted scores of young couples to the linden alleys and stately parks surrounding Rastrelli’s exquisite Catherine Palace. Here where the poets Alexander Pushkin and Aleksandr Blok once lived, a new generation of Russian youngsters, many of them fresh from graduation exercises, strolled through the long night. As they passed the squat buildings known as the Half-Moon near the gates of the palace they paused. From the open windows of the Half-Moon came the haunting sounds of a Skrya-bin sonata. It was the composer Gavriil Popov and his wife, playing two grand pianos in adjoining rooms, separated only by curtains. Popov’s opera, Alexander Nevsky , was at that moment on the rehearsal schedule of the Mariinsky Theater, being prepared for an autumn premiere.
The Catherine Park was a nest of creative artists. Nearby the composer, Boris Asafyev, was at work, instrumentalizing his opera The Slav Beauty , commissioned by the Baku Opera Theater for the forthcoming Nizami festival. In an adjacent apartment the novelist Vyacheslav Shishkov, back a day or two from a vacation in the Crimea, sat at his desk, correcting proofs of a long historical novel.
All winter the young writer Pavel Luknitsky had worked in the same house with Shishkov—it was Alexei Tolstoy’s old villa, now a writers’ rest home. On June 16 Luknitsky, thin, dark, handsome, intense and as yet unmarried, finished his novel and sent it off to the publisher. Now he was in Leningrad, wondering what to do with his summer. Possibly he would go to the new writers’ resort in Karelia. There were lovely grounds there and a beach. In any event he thought he would accept an invitation he had received in the mail the day before. The writers’ organization was sponsoring a tour of the old Mannerheim fortified line across Karelia which had lain in Soviet hands since the winter war. Special buses would leave promptly at 7:30 A.M. , June 24.
In a big house at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal, not far from the Nevsky Prospekt, the poet Vissarion Sayanov talked through Saturday night with an old friend, a factory worker whom he had met during the winter war with Finland. Sayanov had been a war correspondent, his friend a political officer with a reconnaissance unit. Over a bottle of vodka they recalled the bitter cold in the Finnish forests, comrades who had survived and some who hadn’t. It was a leisurely, reminiscent evening, and they did not separate until long past midnight.
Sayanov, a middle-aged poet with a round face and gold-rimmed spectacles, walked a bit with his friend before turning back to go
The top personnel at the meeting did no strolling. They went straight to their offices and waited beside telephones in case of a call. Just before they left Smolny the word had quietly been passed: “Don’t get too far away. There may be something coming up tonight.”
They had been offered no clue as to what might be happening. Disciplined to carry out Party orders meticulously and without question, they now sat by their telephones, smoking cigarettes, poring over the mountains of paper that perpetually overwhelmed them and wondering what was in the air. Not all went to their offices. Mikhail Kozin, Party organizer for the great Kirov steel works, drove to his summer cottage at Mill Stream, a few miles outside Leningrad, to spend the night with his family. He had no telephone in the country, but his chauffeur went back to the factory, ready to alert him if anything happened.
In the suburb of Pushkin, the old imperial village of Tsarskoye Selo, the soft air and pale light attracted scores of young couples to the linden alleys and stately parks surrounding Rastrelli’s exquisite Catherine Palace. Here where the poets Alexander Pushkin and Aleksandr Blok once lived, a new generation of Russian youngsters, many of them fresh from graduation exercises, strolled through the long night. As they passed the squat buildings known as the Half-Moon near the gates of the palace they paused. From the open windows of the Half-Moon came the haunting sounds of a Skrya-bin sonata. It was the composer Gavriil Popov and his wife, playing two grand pianos in adjoining rooms, separated only by curtains. Popov’s opera, Alexander Nevsky , was at that moment on the rehearsal schedule of the Mariinsky Theater, being prepared for an autumn premiere.
The Catherine Park was a nest of creative artists. Nearby the composer, Boris Asafyev, was at work, instrumentalizing his opera The Slav Beauty , commissioned by the Baku Opera Theater for the forthcoming Nizami festival. In an adjacent apartment the novelist Vyacheslav Shishkov, back a day or two from a vacation in the Crimea, sat at his desk, correcting proofs of a long historical novel.
All winter the young writer Pavel Luknitsky had worked in the same house with Shishkov—it was Alexei Tolstoy’s old villa, now a writers’ rest home. On June 16 Luknitsky, thin, dark, handsome, intense and as yet unmarried, finished his novel and sent it off to the publisher. Now he was in Leningrad, wondering what to do with his summer. Possibly he would go to the new writers’ resort in Karelia. There were lovely grounds there and a beach. In any event he thought he would accept an invitation he had received in the mail the day before. The writers’ organization was sponsoring a tour of the old Mannerheim fortified line across Karelia which had lain in Soviet hands since the winter war. Special buses would leave promptly at 7:30 A.M. , June 24.
In a big house at No. 9 Griboyedov Canal, not far from the Nevsky Prospekt, the poet Vissarion Sayanov talked through Saturday night with an old friend, a factory worker whom he had met during the winter war with Finland. Sayanov had been a war correspondent, his friend a political officer with a reconnaissance unit. Over a bottle of vodka they recalled the bitter cold in the Finnish forests, comrades who had survived and some who hadn’t. It was a leisurely, reminiscent evening, and they did not separate until long past midnight.
Sayanov, a middle-aged poet with a round face and gold-rimmed spectacles, walked a bit with his friend before turning back to go
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