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
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:
