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The girls now learned to put the names of foreign countries to his absences; they learned where their presents were coming from. The Russo-Fi
There were six of them now sharing two communal rooms in the house of composers. Liza’s widowed dad from Odessa was living with them, snoring in the living room where the girls slept. Dedushka Yankel was obliging and doleful. A retired old Jewish communist shock-worker (pre-Stakhanovite uberlaborer), he hated the Talmud and detested the Bible. Mom liked to tug at the wispy clumps of hair on his temples as he sat in the kitchen copying The Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party into his notebook over and over and over. He knew it by heart, Stalin’s Party catechism.
Sashka, their new baby brother, was noisier. Liza had him in May while Naum was in Sweden, and her heart nearly broke in the maternity ward when she saw the nurse carry a huge bouquet of pink roses to some other lucky new mamochka. “For you,” said the nurse, smiling. “Look out the window.” Below, Naum waved and gri
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 a
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 a
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 a
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, ru
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.