Leningrad

by Anna Reid

  The district soviets, he added defensively, were said to do themselves no less well, ‘and several organisations have recuperation clinics with which ours pale in comparison’.34 From the end of February district soviets also fed NKVD staff, on whose shoulders much of the ordinary administration of the city had fallen once the bulk of Party and Komsomol members departed for the front.35

  At the bottom of Leningrad’s food hierarchy came people who weren’t Leningraders at all – refugees from the countryside. In September 1941, as peasant families streamed into the city in front of the advancing German and Finnish armies, the Military Council handed responsibility for them to outlying district soviets, who were instructed to check their identities, prevent them from boarding suburban trains into the centre, and house them in empty flats, schools and hostels.36 ‘Leningrad was encircled by a ring of peasant carts’, wrote Likhachev, ‘which weren’t allowed into the city. The peasants lived in camps with their cattle and weeping children, who began to freeze to death on cold nights. To start with people went out to them to trade for milk and meat – they started slaughtering their cattle. But by the end of 1941 all these groups of peasants had frozen to death, as had the refugee women who had been packed into schools and other public buildings.’37

  Likhachev exaggerated, but not by much. That the Leningrad authorities cruelly neglected refugees is confirmed by the NKVD, whose multifarious functions included inspecting the work of other government agencies. The living conditions of the 64,552 Karelian peasants (over a third of them children) housed in the city’s north-eastern suburbs, a report of late November complained, were ‘extremely unsatisfactory’. Their quarters were dark, dirty, unheated and lacked running water, and most had to sleep on the floor for lack of bedding. In the village of Toskovo, where eight hundred people had been put up in an unheated, broken-windowed school, they had started felling trees and demolishing farm buildings for fuel, despite which ten children had died of pneumonia in the past five days. The Toskovo peasants were also even worse fed than others, since the evacuation point’s head of supply (since arrested) had been holding back their ration cards, using ‘swindling combinations to obtain food for his own use’. No measures were being taken to prevent the spread of infectious disease: in one overflowing village a single doctor served five thousand people, and everywhere medical services were ‘weak’. ‘District organisations’, the report summed up, ‘ignore conditions at the evacuation points, and try to duck their responsibility to support the evacuee population. We consider it necessary to order district Party committees and soviet executive committees to sort out the evacuation points in their areas, and to improve evacuees’ cultural and living standards.’38

  By the time the NKVD reported again, two months later, refugees were dying in large numbers. In Vsevolozhsk, an evacuation point on the city’s north-eastern perimeter, 130 corpses had been collected from homes and hostels. Another 170 had been found in the hospital, about a hundred lying unburied in the cemetery, and six on the streets. The NKVD’s own contribution to improving ‘cultural and living standards’ was characteristic. Eleven peasants had been arrested for displaying ‘anti-soviet attitudes’, and a twelfth for having slaughtered cats and dogs to eat. Others were accused of ‘attempting an organised uprising’. What they had actually tried to do was call a meeting to elect representatives to go to Moscow and ask Stalin for help.39

  14

  ‘Robinson Crusoe was a Lucky Man’

  On 22 January 1942 Moscow’s State Defence Committee did what it should have done six months earlier, and ordered the mass evacuation of Leningrad. The Ice Road having frozen to the requisite thickness several weeks earlier, it was to take place by lorry, across Lake Ladoga. Aleksei Kosygin, deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (and later Brezhnev’s number two), was sent to oversee the programme, which was to cover 500,000 civilians, prioritising women, children and the elderly.

  Though the evacuation programme was compulsory, a substantial minority of Leningraders tried to evade it, fearing that they would not survive the journey, being loath to abandon relatives, or suspecting (often rightly) that once they left their flats they would never get them back again. One such was Aleksandr Boldyrev, pressured by his bosses into leaving with surviving Hermitage staff for Kislovodsk in the Caucasus: ‘To go with dystrophy, in the cold . . . leaving the flat, Mama and everything, when here, maybe, we are on the eve of success. I can’t do it . . . Apparently the Shtakelberg mother, sister and brother all died before they even set off, as did the bookkeeper Ponamarev. Their bodies were thrown off the evacuation train on to the platform of Finland Station.’1 Vera Inber, unconsciously echoing Britain’s Queen Elizabeth during London’s Blitz, declared that her husband was staying with his students and she was staying with her husband.2 Olga Grechina simply felt that to go would have been ‘like abandoning the front’. A student friend of Georgi Knyazev’s wanted to stay because she had only three more exams to go to complete her degree, and because she did not want to abandon her mother and aunts.3

  With no choice whether to stay or go were thousands of ethnic German and Finnish peasants from the besieged villages around Leningrad, whose deportation had been ordered too late by Beria the previous summer. It was carried out, with customary brutality, by the military, under the direction of ‘troikas’ of local Party, soviet and NKVD bosses. Quotas were set for each district, deportees given only a few hours to pack, and their livestock and food stores confiscated amidst arson and looting.4 The net effect was to strip the countryside around Leningrad of its farmworkers, with predictable effects on summer 1942’s food production. In the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’, for example, the deportation of 4,775 peasants completely emptied twelve collective farms, and left another eight with only a handful of families.5 Though some deportees feared they would be killed – ‘taken across the bay and pushed under the ice’ as a rumour went – in other cases ethnic Russians actually begged to be included. The Oranienbaum report also cites several instances of Red Army officers attempting to save Finns from deportation – taken as worrying proof that ‘some military comrades have become so much part of the local population that they identify themselves with local interests, forgetting those of the state’. In total, from the start of the war to 1 October 1942, 128,748 people were forcibly deported out of the blockade ring, of whom slightly under half were ethnic Germans or Finns, and the rest ‘criminals’ or ‘socially alien elements’.6

  Within the city, however, the large majority of Leningraders were desperate to get out, forming frantic crowds outside evacuation offices and fiercely resenting superiors who jumped the queue. ‘Why are they sending away all the factories, the institutes and the best cadres?’ one man was overheard to complain. ‘Apparently they’re not so sure that the Germans aren’t going to take Leningrad.’ The Germans, said another, were preparing a big attack for the spring: ‘The bosses take care of themselves and get out first, but we can be left behind.’7 Even for those included in the programme, the practicalities involved were daunting. As well as being passed strong enough to travel and free from infectious disease, evacuees had to walk from office to office in search of stamps and paperwork, sell belongings so as to buy food for the journey, pack the permitted sixty pounds per person of luggage and drag it over the Liteiniy Bridge to Finland Station – all crippling tasks for the exhausted and emaciated. That the effort finished off many is demonstrated by the fatality figures for Finland Station’s medical checkpoint: of the 2,564 people it processed from the beginning of February to 13 April, 230 died on the spot.8

  Many evacuees also faced a dreadful sort of triage – should one stay behind and try to save the life of a family member too weak to travel, or leave the weak and save the strong? What famine experts call ‘forced abandonment’ was very common. Dmitri Likhachev cites three examples from among his friends, the first that of the Dostoyevsky scholar Vasili Komarovich. The day before their planned departure his wife and daughter dragged him by sled
to the Writers’ Union statsionar. On arrival they discovered that the clinic was not due to open for several days, but begged the doctor in charge to take him in. She refused but they left him there anyway, in a basement cloakroom. Fed by the doctor, Komarovich stayed alive just long enough to complete his doctoral thesis. Published after the war, it reads completely normally except that the footnotes are dated according to Church feast days. The second family Likhachev cites left behind a daughter who died in hospital, the third an elderly mother, who was abandoned, still tied to a sled, at Finland Station when she failed her medical.9

  Yelena Skryabina was spared a similar choice by a timely death. ‘Rumours about a possible evacuation’, she wrote on 29 January, ‘are becoming more and more persistent. My uncle . . . cannot stand these discussions. Even if he should be taken out of Leningrad, he wouldn’t survive the trip. Here, sustained by his wife’s care, he can still hang on.’ He died the following day:

  My aunt, who always adored him, behaved as everyone does now – she didn’t even cry. At six in the evening Lyudmila came home from work. I let her in and told her the sad news of her father’s death. She wept bitterly and only then, somehow, did it really strike my aunt. She embraced her daughter and wept for a long time in her arms. It was easier to witness this outburst of grief than the terrible hardness one finds in everyone in Leningrad these days.10

  One of the saddest siege stories is that of Yuri Ryabinkin, the fifteen-year-old who had been caught by the announcement of war on his way to a chess competition. A gauche, highly strung teenager cooped up with his family in terrifying circumstances, he is in many ways the Soviet equivalent of Anne Frank. His end, though, is far more ambiguous. Like his friends, he had initially greeted the war with childish excitement, using the unexpected time off school to play vingt-et-un and forfeits (‘Lopatin crawled up a whole flight of the spiral staircase on all fours, Finkelshtein had to give Bron a piggyback’) as well as standing fire duty on the roof of 34 Sadovaya Street, the sleek deco apartment building (today a bank) where he lived with his mother and younger sister.

  In mid-October he began to ‘fall down the funnel’, first complaining of hunger (‘it gives you an itchy sensation in the pit of the stomach, and your mouth waters all the time’), then beginning to hate a better-fed family that moved into their communal apartment. (‘It’s humiliating seeing Mother drinking water to fill herself up while A.N. stands there talking about the theatre . . . that Anfisa Nikolayevna is like a plump, well-fed cat . . .’11) By the end of the month he found it difficult to climb the stairs, and had stopped bothering to change his clothes. Though he had only one candle to read by, he tried to escape into fiction – Dumas was ‘most entertaining’, Jack London’s ‘Love of Life’ ‘a wonderful piece’. A fortnight later his face had swollen from dropsy and he had begun to obsess about food (‘Every night in my sleep I see bread, butter, pirozhki and potatoes. And before I go to sleep the last thought in my head is always that in twelve hours time the night will be over and I can eat a piece of bread . . .’). His mother left each morning for work, taking his younger sister with her; Yuri’s job was to queue for rations:

  Mother and Ira come home hungry, frozen and tired . . . they can hardly drag their feet along. No food at home, no firewood for the stove . . . They start scolding and reproaching me because the neighbours downstairs have managed to get grains and meat, and I haven’t . . . So it’s back to the queues for me, to no avail . . . Oh if only I had a pair of felt boots!12

  In December his entries become almost hysterical, a mixture of fantasising (‘Mama will get a job as librarian in some newly organised hospital; I will be her assistant’), self-hatred at having filched a few crumbs from the family food stock, and paranoia:

  What’s this torture Mother and Ira arrange for me in the evenings? At table Ira eats deliberately slowly, so that she can feel that here she is, eating, while the rest of us, who have already eaten, sit watching her with hungry eyes. Mother eats hers first, then takes a little from each of us. When the bread’s being divided Ira bursts into tears.13

  At the end of the month the diary peters out into loose, wild scribbles: ‘I want to live, but I can’t live like this! But how I want to live!’ and ‘Where’s Mama? Where is she?’ The last is dated 6 January:

  I can hardly walk or do anything. I have almost no strength left. Mama, too, can barely walk – I can’t imagine how she manages it. Nowadays she hits me often, scolds and shouts. She has wild nervous fits because she can’t stand my wretched appearance – that of a weak, hungry, tormented person who can barely move from one spot to another, is always in the way and ‘pretends’ to be ill and helpless. But I’m not pretending . . . Oh Lord, what’s happening to me?14

  What did happen to him, as the siege historians Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin found out from his sister Ira forty years later, was that he was left behind. Having got evacuation slots for the whole family, traded belongings for food and warm clothing, and loaded a sled with necessaries and tradeable silver cutlery, Yuri’s mother found that she could not lift her son downstairs. Leaving him lying on the sofa, mother and daughter set off, towing the sled, for Finland Station. ‘Once we’d crossed the Neva’, Ira remembered, ‘Mother was desperate to go back for him. “Yura’s back there, all on his own!” I was crying of course. But almost as soon as we boarded the train it started moving, and off we went.’ What became of Yuri thereafter we do not know. He may have died in Leningrad or in evacuation, since the diary itself, handed in in response to a newspaper appeal in 1970, has been traced to Vologda province. He may even have survived the war but not wanted to re-establish contact with his family. Not much of it was left anyway. His father, who had been arrested during the 1936–7 Terror, perished somewhere in the Gulag. His mother died during the evacuation journey, on a bench at Vologda railway station. His sister Ira spent the rest of the war in a children’s home and was later brought up by an aunt.15

  It is another comforting siege myth that, once embarked on the Ice Road, evacuees enjoyed good care and security. Even Dmitri Pavlov, the supply chief whose ‘Thaw’-era memoir is one of the more outspoken of the genre, claims that the evacuation was ‘carefully thought out and well organised’:

  A series of field messes was set up on the road for the evacuees. As soon as Leningraders crossed over the lake and reached land they were served hot cabbage soup, potatoes and meat, and other nourishment such as these exhausted people had dreamed of night after night. The fragrance of bread made from pure rye flour intoxicated the famished people. From their first step on land they were surrounded by loving care. Everyone felt in his heart the desire to help them in any way he could.16

  Nothing could be further from the truth. The first endurance test evacuees faced was the train journey from Finland Station to Osinovets, which though only forty-five kilometres long could take several days. Having disembarked, they then had to bribe their way on to the lorries crossing the lake ice. Yelena Kochina only got through the violent, shouting crowds at the truck tailgates by slipping two litres of vodka to a driver; Igor Kruglaykov’s mother bargained with a fat, drunk driver who wore a fur coat over his peasant tunic, first handing him a packet of cigarettes, then money, and finally her father’s silver chiming pocket watch. The Ice Road itself resembled the North Pole, a blindingly white, featureless plain on fine days (‘The poppy-red flag of the traffic controller’, wrote Inber, ‘is visible a kilometre away’), a howling maelstrom in blizzards and a black void at night. A lucky few crossed in buses sent from Moscow, but most in open or canvas-topped trucks, in which it was easy to die of exposure. Too weak to hold on as the trucks bumped over the ice, many passengers were simply jolted out. A woman soldier assigned to the route picked up the corpses of half a dozen babies and toddlers each morning, flung from their mothers’ arms as the lorries raced to beat the dawn.17

  On the opposite ‘mainland’ shore, reception facilities were worse than inadequate. Diarists describe queuing for hours for soup, b
eing unable to find anywhere to sleep, and fighting for places on the trains onwards through unoccupied Russia. Nor, when food was available, were measures initially taken to prevent the starving from killing themselves by overeating. A doctor ordered to set up a medical station at Zhikharevo discovered that evacuees were immediately eating all the dry rations – smoked sausage and bread – given them for the three-day train journey onward to Tikhvin, and bursting their stomachs. Having pleaded in vain with the chief of the evacuation centre to change his arrangements, he eventually managed to get a meeting with visiting representatives of Moscow’s State Defence Committee. Having described the results of his autopsies he persuaded them that evacuees should instead be fed in small quantities en route, with millet and semolina cooked in the train boilers.18

  A typical account of the whole – resoundingly Soviet – evacuation experience comes from Vladimir Kulyabko, a widowed sixty-five-year-old refrigeration engineer. Having survived the first half of the winter on gifts from a neighbour who worked in a food shop, in February he was offered a place on one of the first convoys across the Ice Road. He accepted, hoping to reach his son, an army doctor stationed in Cherepovets, a town 400 kilometres east of Leningrad on the railway line to Vologda. Telling the manager of his apartment building that he was merely moving into another flat, he left the keys with a neighbour and paid another in kerosene, macaroni and nuts to help him get his luggage to Finland Station. Including stops to rest on sandboxes, the three-kilometre walk took two hours. Having been due to leave at 10.30 in the morning, the train did not appear until 6 p.m., at which point Kulyabko found his assigned carriage taken up by baggage-laden ‘businessmen’. He managed to squeeze himself and his suitcase, basket and pillow into the draughty section at the end of the carriage where in normal times smokers gathered. The train finally got under way at 1 a.m., and food was handed out. To get any, Kulyabko soon realised, he would have to pay a bribe. A note – ‘400g of bread for Kulyabko, money enclosed, no need for change’ – did the trick. ‘In ten minutes I had my bread. Having learned from experience, I did the same thing for the soup.’ On arrival at Osinovets six hours later he noticed fifteen corpses lying beside the tracks.