Free The 900 Days by Harrison Salisbury Page A

watch. The time was 3:15. It had started. He had no doubt. The war had begun. 3
    He took up the phone again and asked for Stalin’s office. A duty officer answered: “Comrade Stalin is not here, and I don’t know where he is.”
    “I have a report of exceptional importance which I must give immediately to Comrade Stalin personally,” Kuznetsov said.
    “I cannot help you,” the officer replied, hanging up quietly.
    Without replacing the receiver Kuznetsov called Defense Commissar Timoshenko. He repeated precisely what Oktyabrsky had told him.
    “Do you hear me?” Kuznetsov asked.
    “Yes, I hear you,” Timoshenko replied calmly.
    Kuznetsov hung up. A few minutes later he tried another number in an effort to get to Stalin. No answer. He called back the duty officer at the Kremlin and told him: “Please advise Comrade Stalin that German planes are bombing Sevastopol. It’s war.”
    “I’ll do what I can,” the officer replied.
    A few minutes later Kuznetsov’s telephone rang.
    “Do you understand what you have reported?” The voice was that of Georgi M. Malenkov, member of the Politburo and one of Stalin’s closest associates. Kuznetsov thought Malenkov sounded displeased and irritated.
    “I understand,” Kuznetsov said, “and I report on my own responsibility. War has started.”
    Malenkov did not believe Kuznetsov. He rang up Sevastopol himself and got through to Admiral Oktyabrsky just as Azarov entered the commander’s office. Azarov heard Oktyabrsky’s end of the conversation.
    “Yes, yes,” Oktyabrsky was saying. “We are being bombed. . . .”
    As he spoke, there was a resounding explosion. The windows rattled.
    “Just now,” Oktyabrsky shouted excitedly, “a bomb exploded quite close to staff headquarters.”
    Azarov and a friend exchanged glances.
    “In Moscow they don’t believe that Sevastopol is being bombed,” the friend said. He was right. 4
    Within an hour Timoshenko telephoned General Boldin, Deputy Commander of the Special Western Military District, four times. Each time he warned against acting against German provocations, even when Boldin told him his troops were being attacked, towns were burning and people dying.
    Marshal Nikolai Voronov, Chief of Antiaircraft Defense, had stayed at his desk, on orders, all evening long. About 4 A.M. he received the first word of the bombing of Sevastopol and of attacks on Ventspils and Libau. He hurried to Timoshenko and found L. Z. Mekhlis, Chief of the Army Political Administration and a close colleague of Police Chief Lavrenti P. Beria, with him. Voronov reported on the bombings. Timoshenko then gave him a big notebook and told him to write down what he had just said. Mekhlis stood behind Voronov, checking the statement word by word, and ordered him to sign it. Voronov was excused without any instructions, any orders, at a moment when, as he observed, every second, every minute counted.
    “I left the office with a stone in my heart,” Voronov recalled. “I realized that they did not believe that war actually had started. My brain worked feverishly. It was clear that the war had begun whether the Defense Commissariat admitted it or not.”
    He got back to his own office to find his desk heaped with telegrams reporting Nazi air attacks from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea. A young woman duty officer, wearing a beret, a revolver at her belt, dashed in from the next-door headquarters of the Armored Forces Administration. In the “secret safe” of the administration, she said excitedly, there was a big packet with many seals on which was written: “Open in Case of Mobilization.” Mobilization hadn’t been announced, but the war had begun—what should they do? Voronov said, “Open the packet and get to work.” He turned to his own officers and began to issue orders.
    War had indeed begun, but when General Zhukov, Chief of Staff, reported to Stalin that the Germans were bombing Kovno, Rovno, Odessa and Sevastopol, Stalin still