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,
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, being 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
