180
LILLIAN HELLMAN
of a great work. It is true that within one lifetime it would not
be
possible to see
all
that
is
of it or
all
that
is
on it. It
is
not a large
church, but it has no lonely half inch. Maybe the architect-church–
men omitted the sculptured eye of a toad or a mandrake root, but
you cannot be sure that
if
you looked again they wouldn't tum up.
The cathedral rises to violate all rules, and maybe it reflects the na–
ture of the people who move past it today as truly as it reflected the
sixteenth-century men who built it for Ivan the Terrible.
The Germans never came closer to Moscow than the airport,
which, of course, was close enough, but the city was spared the hor–
rors of Stalingrad and Leningrad. But now, December, 1944, the
people here look tired, cold, shabby and exhausted-sick in this, the
easiest,
l
winter of the war.
Russians are so accustomed to cold that they seldom speak about
it, but when they describe the first winter of the war they speak
about it even before they tell you of the evacuation of women, chil–
dren and Jews, the resettlement in the Urals when families were
lost to each other for months, the strange diets in places forced to
feed refugees - a friend of mine, her mother and child ate nothing
but caviar and
milk
for seven weeks - the arrival of the Siberian
army that
is
credited with saving Moscow, and the young student
army that fought the Germans at and near the airport. The stu–
dents had been in classes the day before, they had no training, many
of them had no guns, there was no air cover, no large artillery.
They were volunteers and most of them were killed in the first week.
When they tell you about the students somebody, maybe two peo–
ple, start to cry, and the others are silent. Almost everybody by this
year of 1944 has lost a husband, a father, a son, and usually more
than one man in a family has been killed. But it is for the students
that they cry or start to cough until the crying stops. I think they
cry, in part, for their own endurance during these last awful three
and a half years, in pride for that endurance.
Russians have always had a deep love of their country, but now
1 This was the word used in 1944. In 1966, three Muscovites told me it
had been the hardest winter of the war. I think this conflict of memory came
about because in 1944 they knew they were on the way to victory and an end.
In 1966 they remember only the deprivation and the misery.
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..
