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.
Getting on to a lorry to cross the lake, he took some time to work out, required more bribery:
I waited, hungry and unfed like everyone else (despite the fact that in Leningrad we had been promised three meals a day and given the appropriate coupons). At about 5 p.m. I found the man in charge but he fobbed me off with some meaningless nonsense or other, and I realised I wouldn’t be going anywhere soon. The lorries came and went, but the people in charge chose who to let on themselves, not following any sort of list or queue. . I approached the boss once again, telling him that I was ill and that I was going to join my son, a decorated soldier.
Shortly afterwards he was approached by an overseer, who settled on 500 grams of tobacco in exchange for a place on the first closed lorry to come along. Four hours later Kulyabko was aboard, having cannily refused to hand over the bribe until he was actually seated inside with his luggage. ‘The same system of bribery, but much pettier, pertained in the lorry itself. The driver constantly asked for cigarettes, which he was given. Otherwise the lorry went slowly, or things went wrong all the time. A cigarette given at just the right moment made all these problems disappear.’ Having spent three hours stuck in a jam with food trucks heading the other way, the lorry finally arrived on the ‘mainland’ at five the next morning.
Though Kulyabko had now escaped the siege ring, this was far from the end of his difficulties. First he had to queue three hours for
I crawl out of the wagon, fall over of course, drag down my three bundles and call out, ‘Help me carry these to the station’. Nobody pays any attention. I try to drag them myself, but they are heavy and I fall over again. I stand there in despair. Finally I spot a street urchin and ask him to carry my things to the station. He says, ‘Will you give me a smoke?’ and I say that I will. . We get to the station; I see a policeman and ask him, ‘How do I get to this address?’ He replies that there are horse-drawn cabs on the square. Stupidly, I go to the square, give the boy a cigarette and stand looking for the cabs. But there aren’t any, and never have been. I appeal to this person and that for help, but nobody responds. So I start dragging my things to the left-luggage office, which thankfully isn’t far. I push the suitcase over the snow with my feet, and carry everything else. I go for a metre, a metre and a half, and stop to rest. I stand there on the brink of tears. How will I get to Borya?
His saviour was a young soldier, who, refusing all thanks, picked up his bags and walked him to Borya’s hospital, giving him an army ration rusk to eat on the way.19 Kulyabko travelled when the mass-evacuation programme had been in progress for little more than a week, but conditions remained chaotic all the way through to mid-April, when the spring thaw brought the lorries — by now swishing axle-deep through meltwater — to a halt.20
How many people did the Ice Road save altogether? Officially 11,296 evacuees made it across in January 1942, 117,434 in February, 221,947 in March and 163,392 in April, making an impressive, plan-beating total of 514,069 in less than four months.21 This takes no account, however, of those who died on the way, either during the crossing itself or in the trains that took evacuees onwards into unoccupied Russia. In the crowded, toiletless freight cars, as experienced by Kochina, stomach disorders raged:
Whenever someone ‘feels a need’ the whole ‘public’ of the car usually takes part in its realisation. It works as follows: the door is opened by common effort and the cause of the commotion drops his trousers and sticks his rear into the wind. Several people hold him by the hands and under the arms. [During halts] we all crawl out of the train and squat next to the wagons, side by side — men, women and children. The locals crowd around, staring at us with horror. . But we’re indifferent to all that. We don’t experience shame or any other feelings. . The sick ride with us until they die. Then we simply throw them out of the moving train.22
That evacuees received inadequate care even after they had reached the ‘mainland’ is confirmed by an NKVD report of 5 March, which complains of ‘irresponsible and heartless’ treatment of evacuees by staff at a reception point, and ‘inhuman’ conditions on the trains. From one, seventeen corpses had been removed at Volkhov station, twenty at Babayevo, seven at Cherepovets and seven more at Vologda. From another, twenty-six had been removed at Volkhov, thirty-two at Tikhvin, four at Babayevo and six at Vologda.23 A wartime mass grave at Vologda, filled mostly with fleeing Leningraders, is estimated to contain 20,000 dead.
For those who survived the initial evacuation journey there remained the problem, if not attached to an institution or within reach of relatives, of finding a local authority prepared to supply ration cards and accommodation. Since there were displaced people and chronic food shortages everywhere (even in Moscow, beggars died on the streets in the winter of 1941–2), this was extremely difficult. Skryabina, who crossed the Ice Road in February, first watched her mother die in a chaotic so-called hospital in Cherepovets, then spent weeks journeying with her emaciated sons from one railway town to another in search of a sympathetic official. When she eventually found one it was thanks to
His name worked like magic. . The clerk pushed the people standing ahead of me aside and amiably invited us to follow him. He led us straight to the office of the Gorky Party Committee. . In ten minutes I was out again with three documents in my hands — two for extra rations and one for a special transport headed for the Caucasus.
The rejections Skryabina had endured up to that point were predictable, as much a product of general wartime shortage and upheaval as of bureaucratic negligence. But she experienced them as malign and personal: ‘I think’, she wrote, ‘that Robinson Crusoe was a lucky man. He knew quite well that he was on an uninhabited island and had to fend for himself. But I am among human beings.’24
15. Corpse-Eating and Person-Eating
Another aspect of the siege that has no place in the traditional Soviet story is crime. Leningraders, claims supply commissar Dmitri Pavlov, were too ‘high-minded’ to grab loaves that spilled from a bread truck hit by a shell, and ‘jealously protected’ the trees in the public parks from being cut down for firewood. Their example refuted the ‘foreign writers who assert that man loses his morals and becomes a predatory beast when hunger affects him powerfully. If this were true, anarchy should have reigned in Leningrad.’1
Anarchy did not reign in Leningrad during the siege, but the city did suffer a crime wave, especially of theft and murder for food and food cards, and, most notoriously, of cannibalism. The commonest of violent crimes was
