Trying to capitalize on the idea that the country owed Leningrad an enormous debt, the city’s Party leaders, especially the young Alexei Kuznetsov, proposed a highly ambitious plan for the city’s restoration and expansion. Leningrad claimed once again the role it had played before the revolution: window into Europe.3 The Party leaders even spoke incautiously of the possibility of returning the capital to Leningrad from Moscow.
This idea was picked up by some of the foreign correspondents in the Soviet Union. One was the young American Harrison Salisbury, who later published a best-selling book on the Leningrad blockade,
Such vague dreams were part of a general mood in Soviet society at the end of the war. Though it took tens of millions of lives, World War II had ended victoriously for the Soviet Union. Its authority in the world was at its peak, and the Soviet government seemed to many to be one of “national unity.” Millions of Russian soldiers had marched through Europe, where they had been hailed as liberators from the Nazi yoke; they had seen how much better people lived in the West. Now they wanted more consumer goods and an end to mass repression. The not very bold hopes of the artistic intelligentsia included communication with Western colleagues and correspondents, a greater access to travel abroad, and even—the ultimate dream!—the latest films from America.
“The people have gotten much smarter, that’s for sure,” Marshal Govorov, the commander of the Leningrad front during the war, said to Ehrenburg. The writer later described Govorov as a quintessential Petersburger—educated, a lover of poetry, able to hide deep passion behind a mask of restraint; a man of precise calculation, of clear and sober thought. It had been the troops of Govorov, one of the youngest Soviet marshals, that had repelled the Germans from Leningrad in 1944.
In 1946 Govorov, discussing the future of Leningrad and the country with Ehrenburg, suddenly began declaiming Pushkin’s
Govorov was typical of a large group of new Soviet military leaders, men who had marched victoriously through Europe, who were decisive and full of initiative, reminiscent somehow of the young Russian generals who had routed Napoleon in 1812-1813. Many of those officers had joined the Decembrist uprising in Petersburg in 1825. Knowing Russian history, Stalin must have seen this dangerous parallel. He decided to strike a warning blow. As he had with the Great Terror, he chose Leningrad as his first target.
Akhmatova often said that she considered August her unluckiest month. Her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, had been shot by the Bolsheviks in August 1921; another husband, Nikolai Punin, had been arrested for the last time in August 1949 (he died in 1953 in a concentration camp in Siberia, presumably also in August). Finally, in August 1946, a quarter century after Gumilyov’s execution, the infamous resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was passed, aimed primarily against Akhmatova, Leningrad’s leading poet, and Zoshchenko, Leningrad’s leading prose writer. To this day the resolution is attributed to Zhdanov, since at that period Andrei Zhdanov, the former Party boss of Leningrad, was the national Party ideologue and “specialist” on arts questions.
In fact, the initiative for this and subsequent cultural threats during the period called Zhdanovshchina came from Stalin himself. He had summoned to the Kremlin a group of party and literary administrators from Leningrad and then had unleashed on them a series of crude, often profane attacks centering on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. These attacks set the tone for the dramatic events that followed.
