Many guests of the capital (and quite a few Muscovites), passing by the Theater. They do not even suspect that this representative building is nothing more than a real monument to the tragic events of the Great Patriotic War. Especially in those first months, when victory was still so far away. We now know that the war ended in 1945, and then the Muscovites mobilized to the front hoped for an early end to the fighting, saying goodbye to their loved ones, hugging them and promising to return in the fall. But many did not return either in autumn or winter. Never… Years will pass, and Konstantin Vanshenkin, a participant in the war, will write the poem “The First Raid”:
Do you remember that time, Grandpa,
Or should we believe the rumor?..
July twenty-second
The first raid on Moscow.
It’s like an alley is open
The chosen path is not difficult.
They seem to have an anniversary. –
It’s been a whole month.
Against Tverskaya and Arbat,
Full of boorish arrogance,
Pearl the night armada,
The wave followed the wave.
How will I conduct my speech,
If it hurts so much!
Dear Zamoskvorechye
It burns too brightly.
Yes, the war soon came to the capital. The bombing of Moscow began a month after the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union, on July 22, 1941. Luftwaffe planes rushed to the very center of the capital, trying to reach the Kremlin. But not everyone succeeded thanks to the professional work of the Moscow Air Defense and the valiant aces of the Soviet Air Force. And therefore, almost all the ammunition of the German bombers was used up where they were caught by the lights of our anti-aircraft guns. In that first bombing, many Moscow buildings were seriously damaged. The Theater building was also destroyed by a direct hit from a German aerial bomb. Vakhtangov Street on the Arbat. Vasily Kuza, one of the best actors of the first, Vakhtangov generation, who was on duty at the theater at the time of the bombing, died. His stage colleague Nikolai Chistyakov also died with him. The explosion was so devastating that the decorations were scattered all over the Arbat and adjacent alleys.
“The alarm is back. And the third night – searchlights and anti-aircraft guns. And in the morning we entered Moscow with trepidation – there would be something else there. We’re going to the Arbat – nothing new. But on the Arbat, he shuddered. The Vakhtangov Theater. Half of it was demolished by a bomb. Visible through the huge hole of the collapse is the auditorium… Then I found out that Kuza was killed there. The raid was smaller – only five or six planes, but there are still traces. On the [oschad] Mayakovsky large house, where the cinema “Moscow”, a bomb fell inside. They say the shelter was crushed. Escape from Moscow. People’s distorted faces. Hurry, hurry, somewhere. They leave cars at train stations and get into trucks and drive happy that they won’t hear any more bombs…” – from the diary of playwright Alexander Afinogenov dated July 24, 1941. He himself would die later – during the bombing on October 29 of the same year, when the building of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) on the Old Square was hit. Afinogenov was the head of the literary department of the Soviet Information Bureau, and one of his plays, Faraway, was staged at the Vakhtangov Theater in 1935.
Yura Kazakov, a 13-year-old Arbat boy, witnessed the explosion and fire. Having matured and become a writer, he will colorfully tell about this in the story “Two Nights”: “If someone had looked at the Vakhtangov Theater at that second, he would have seen a tight thick column of something dense and black rising to the sky in the most delicate radiance of dawn. It was as if this dense black had been in a compressed, cramped state until now, but now, having been released, it was constantly expanding, swelling, growing upward and sideways, more and more twisted clubs and balls were constantly escaping from it, and these balls were no longer as black as the core, but grayer.”.
Bombs also landed in the All-Union Book Chamber on Novinsky Boulevard, in the area of the Belorussky railway station, and the zoo. During the five hours that the night raid lasted, almost 40 buildings in Moscow were completely destroyed and more than 1,000 caught fire. But most importantly, the human losses were also significant: 130 people were killed and almost 700 wounded. For most, the incident came as a shock.
The most serious damage was caused by German incendiary bombs, “lighters”, and fires started from them. Bolshoi Ballet dancer Assaf Messerer lived then on Nemirovich-Danchenko Street (now Glinishchevsky Lane). It was a famous house of Moscow’s creative intelligentsia, where Vera Maretskaya and Sergey Obraztsov, Sergey Yutkevich and Nikolai Khmelev lived side by side. And when the bombing began, all the men at home, regardless of rank, came to his defense. Messerer recalled: “During the raids, the male population did not hide in the bomb shelter, but was on duty in the courtyard and on the roofs. We were divided into units of five or six people each. The link was headed by Joseph Mikhailovich Tumanov. If in his recent peaceful life he had directed opera performances perfectly, now he had to “build a mise en scene” in the attic, placing the characters between long boxes of sand and fire hoses.”
Assaf Messerer clearly remembered the first bombing. The residents of the house were standing on the roof, and suddenly German planes flew very low over their heads, so that the black crosses on the wings were visible. It was obvious that they were dropping something. At first Messerer thought they were flyers, but they turned out to be incendiary bombs. They fell with a whoosh onto the roof of a huge house. From surprise, Messerer did not even feel fear when he saw the first “lighter” in his life almost at his feet, and immediately rushed to extinguish it. And in the autumn of 1941, he testified, Dmitry Shostakovich, who was evacuated from besieged Leningrad and settled in this house for a short time, joined their link.
Old and young, working people, and creative intelligentsia took part in extinguishing the German “lighters”. The soloist of the Bolshoi Theater, singer Mark Reisen and conductor Nikolai Golovanov climbed nightly to the roof of their large house in Bryusov Lane. They were given tongs, special canvas gloves and shovels so that they could quickly extinguish lighters in barrels and buckets of water and boxes of sand. Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites have now learned a new profession – firefighters, since it was not so difficult for people with higher musical education to master the use of a foam fire extinguisher. And the famous house in Bryusov Lane was saved from fire. However, the nearest and well-known pub burned down, which caused laughter and great excitement among the residents.
According to archival sources, in 1941-1942, almost 6,000 buildings, including residential buildings and dormitories, hospitals and hospitals, schools and kindergartens, theaters and cultural centers, were damaged in one form or another by German bombing in Moscow. Is it a lot or a little? If we consider that the number of fire brigades from the city’s residents reached 13 thousand, it turns out that German bombs hit almost every second Moscow house. And more than 2.5 thousand Muscovites died from the bombing, and almost 8 thousand were injured.
Nevertheless, the city did not give up, did not lose heart or despair, bravely fighting for its life and its future. It’s not for nothing that Moscow bears the title of a hero city. Even before the war, the legend of the “house under the skirt” was born – the huge house No. 17 on Gorky Street. At its very corner, at the top, on a special tower with columns, a statue of a ballerina hovered over the capital. Muscovites decided that this was a statue of Olga Lepeshinskaya, the most famous soloist of the Bolshoi Theater in the whole country. And that’s why, often after the German raids, the townspeople found out from each other: “Is Lepeshinskaya still alive?” The statue of the ballerina has become a kind of symbol of Moscow’s resilience. So she stood for the whole war. And the building of the Vakhtangov Theater was rebuilt by 1947.
