For Zoya Densky, still unaware of her mother’s death and of the death of so many others at the hands of the Field Police, the night had at first seemed a triumph.
As the 29th Field Provost Battalion had been taking up their positions on the Nevsky Prospekt she had been heading with a group of fellow students for the area of the Baltic Station on the far side of the city. Their object was twofold, first, to demonstrate that the nonviolent wing of the student movement could achieve more popular support with open defiance of the authorities than the Rodinists could with the morning’s carnage at Pulkovo Airport. And second, to create a diversion which would occupy substantial numbers of militia while the workers were marching to the center of the city for the mass demonstration Zoya’s father had called for.
Untroubled by the militia in the quiet outer area of the city, over a thousand students now converged on an anonymous gray building near the Baltic Station. The assault was well prepared. A student was detailed to hammer on the chipped green door. When it was finally opened on a chain, six students carrying eight feet of telephone pole hurled themselves up the steps. As the battering ram burst the mounting of the door chain, dozens of students, hidden in the shadows, poured through the gaping door.
I had heard [Zoya wrote] about the existence of such places, but of course as a worker’s daughter I had never seen the inside of one.
It was a Western fairyland. Within that dingy exterior with the blacked-out windows, were stacked on floor after floor, color television sets, crates of German leather shoes, rack after rack of jeans and T-shirts, furniture, light bulbs, windshield wipers, cheeses, Italian sausage, Western rock records — the vlastis’ rewards for loyal and silent service to the almighty robber state.
Students, pouring up the staircase, running from room to room, would stop in wonder at racks of sweaters or crates of Japanese recording equipment. The guards, overwhelmed by the flood of young people, were bundled into small office rooms.
We worked quickly. The boys had already burst the windows long before the first militia sirens were heard in the distance. A crowd was already beginning to gather from the apartment buildings nearby as the first items began to rain down. Careless of the damage, we hurled television sets and smoked hams, crates of amplifiers and bundles of dresses down onto the pavement below. Then we drove the guards downstairs and fired the building.
By the time the first militia units arrived Zoya and her friends had slipped away into the side streets. So indeed had much of the crowd, carrying with it armfuls of Western dresses, crates of shoes or canned tuna fish, whole hams or frozen sides of beef. And the once anonymous building on Balskaya Street now blazed as proof that the students of Leningrad could expose the system without the loss of a single life. Before she knew the toll throughout the city, and learned that her mother was among the dead, this was the measure of Zoya’s triumph.
The next morning Carole Yates walked the length of a battered Nevsky Prospekt. Windows were smashed, ripped-up paving stones made the street impassable to traffic, militia patrolled everywhere and a line of burned-out cars spread the reek of rubber over the whole area. But eighty workers had been killed or badly injured and an unknown number were under arrest.
In the West the riot flared briefly as a front-page news story and died away. The next day every official factory committee in Leningrad issued a statement condemning the march.
Somehow, from prison, Joseph Densky smuggled out a brief message:
Workers, we must learn our lesson. Our only weapon is the General Strike. Leningrad or Moscow or Odessa or Minsk cannot demonstrate alone! We all suffer the same oppressions. United in bitterness, unity is strength.
So November 7th passed in Leningrad and the immediate sum of its events was death, bitterness and defeat. Yet concealed in this calculation was an item of overwhelming importance for the future. At a secret meeting of the younger Soviet generals in Riga that month it was decided that only in the most exceptional circumstances and only after the fullest investigation should the Soviet Army allow itself to be called upon for internal security duties of the kind the Field Police Units had undertaken in Leningrad. The unpopularity of the system (and many of the younger senior officers were prepared to recognize this as a fact) must never be allowed to engulf the Soviet Army. Marshals of the Soviet Union whose view of the uncertain future was colored by the Stalinist past must be persuaded that the Army’s first duty was to itself.
In Moscow itself, to those who could interpret the tortuous hieroglyphics of Soviet power, new, more explosive events were presaged. A visit by the Soviet leadership to Bulgaria was abruptly canceled on December 1st. The reception of the American Presidential envoy on disarmament was attended by no one more elevated (at that time) than Deputy Premier Ustinov, General Kuba and Natalya Roginova.
President Romanovsky, it was recalled by every Western newspaper, had not been seen in public since the November 7th celebration of the anniversary of the Revolution. Photographs were again studied in detail. Some Western doctors read the grainy prints and yet again proclaimed that he was a dying man.
The announcement of President Romanovsky’s death was made to the foreign press from the Kalasty Hospital at 7:25 A.M. on December 3rd. Within an hour, radio and television stations were informing the world.
The peoples of the Soviet Empire — Russians, Ukrainians, Balts, Kazaks, Tatars, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanians — were left in ignorance until midday central Soviet time when a brief Tass announcement was carried on television. It concluded:
The death of the General Secretary of the Party cannot, in the nature of the system, indicate a change in policy.
The Collective Leadership appeals confidently to Soviet citizens to recognize that at this great juncture in Soviet history, the principles of Marxist-Leninist-Brezhnevist Socialism must be pursued relentlessly.
The efforts of Western imperialists to sow discord in the collective leadership are doomed to failure by the Socialist awareness of the Soviet people.
With no more reassurance than this, Soviet citizens listened to somber tributes to Mikhail Romanovsky and to funereal music broadcast from blank television screens; and waited, on the eve.
THE FUNERAL
Chapter Ten
The day of the funeral brought the third fall of snow. To Muscovites this is the real beginning of winter. The first snows, they say, melt and turn to slush within days. Only the third fall can be relied upon.
Yet as dawn broke the street sweepers watched the sky with contempt. Thin, icy droplets whirled through the city, circling the domes of the Kremlin and driving across the open spaces of the University. The dead grayness of the Moskva River absorbed the meager flakes and the cracked timbers of the benches in Sverdlov Square were veined with white. Down Gogolesky Boulevard and the Kalinina Prospekt the powdery snow rolled like gunsmoke before the gusts of wind. In the old wooden lanes of the city it rattled icily against the makeshift plastic double-glazing nailed across the window frames of the single-story izbas.