Leningrad Read online

  During alerts I go out on the balcony. Pesochnaya Street, always quiet, empties completely. Only the air-raid wardens in their tin helmets stand looking up at the sky. Occasionally a factory-school boy runs by – they have a hostel in one of the buildings in the Botanical Gardens. The woman tram driver had this to say about them: ‘They carry on as if they owned the tram; hang on to the step, push their way on to the platform. But I don’t mind any more – after all, they’ll soon be off to the front to dig trenches.’3

  Across the Neva on Sadovaya Street, Yuri Ryabinkin spent the radiant late summer days playing chess, sketching out study plans with his friend Finkelstein in case their school closed, and doing more chores around the flat now that his mother had dismissed the maid. Nobody took much notice of his sixteenth birthday, but as a treat he bought himself a chess book and five roubles’ worth of supper at his mother’s office canteen. Poring over books of military strategy, he came up with a plan to save his city. The whole population would be ‘sent out into the forest’ and the Red Army would feint a retreat, luring the Germans into a trap:

  Immediately, like lightning (even more so than the Germans on 22 June), our tank units will go over to a general offensive and push the Germans into a knot. Then all the might of our artillery – which in the course of the retreat will have occupied the most advantageous positions – will be hurled at that knot. After half an hour of firing our guns will move off a few kilometres, and the places they shelled be occupied by our troops. All the aircraft massed above them will bomb the remnants of the enemy. And as soon as the enemy falters he will be pursued by land, air and sea . . .

  Ryabinkin knew, though, that this was a wish-fulfilment fantasy. ‘But all this is impossible’, he confided to his diary,

  There is no one to undertake such an offensive. And we have too few tanks . . . Every editorial shouts ‘We shall not surrender Leningrad!’ . . . But for some reason our army is not victorious; probably it doesn’t have enough weapons. The policemen on the streets, and even some of the opolcheniye volunteers and regular soldiers, are armed with Mausers of goodness knows what vintage. The Germans are lumbering forward with their tanks and we are taught to fight them not with tanks but with bundles of grenades or bottles of petrol. That’s how it is!’4

  The elderly artist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva walked the city centre, making a mental record (sketching was forbidden) of the boarding up of Leningrad’s public monuments. On the Anichkov Bridge, Klodt’s plunging horses had already been rolled away for burial in the gardens in front of the Aleksandrinka theatre. Opposite St Isaac’s, the outline of the equestrian statue of Nicholas I was still visible under layers of sandbags, which seemed to pour endlessly downwards in a fat, globular flow. The Alexander Column in Palace Square was covered in wooden scaffolding, but the poles did not reach its triumphant angel, who continued to brandish his cross against the blue sky. There had been debate about how to protect Falconet’s famous statue of Peter the Great, the ‘Bronze Horseman’. Some had suggested sinking it in the Neva, but now it too was being boarded up. Watching volunteers unload sand from a barge moored nearby, Ostroumova-Lebedeva wished she could join in: ‘It was hot, the sun was burning. I stood there and watched, and felt ashamed that I wasn’t working myself.’ Though her sister and nieces had left Leningrad, she had decided to stay, partly out of reluctance to abandon familiar surroundings, but mostly out of a sense of solidarity with her city and sheer curiosity as to what would happen next. ‘Everyone’s worrying about the same question’, she wrote on 16 August. ‘Should we leave, and if so where for, and how? What does the future hold? How does one start all over again somewhere strange, having abandoned the comforting refuge of one’s flat? Poor Leningraders! I want to stay. I definitely want to stay and witness all the frightening events ahead.’5

  Failing to empty Leningrad of its surplus population before the siege ring closed was one of the Soviet regime’s worst blunders of the war, leading to more civilian deaths than any other save the failure to anticipate Barbarossa itself. By the time the last train left, on 29 August, 636,283 people, according to official sources, had been evacuated from Leningrad. (This compares with 660,000 civilians evacuated from London in only a few days on Britain’s declaration of war two years earlier.) Excluding refugees from the Baltics and elsewhere who passed through the city, the number falls to 400,000 at best. Just over two and a half million civilians were left behind in the city, plus another 343,000 in the surrounding towns and villages within the siege ring. Over 400,000 of them were children, and over 700,000 other non-working dependants.6

  Why did more people unnecessary to Leningrad’s defence not get away in time? To blame was a mixture of deliberate government policy, muddle and Leningraders’ own faulty decision-making, exacerbated by an all-pervading culture of fear. Policy, from the outset of the war, was to prioritise industrial and institutional evacuation over that of the non-working population. On 3 July Moscow’s new five-man State Defence Committee (headed by Stalin, and the supreme decision-making body of the war) decided to move twenty-six defence plants east, from Leningrad, Moscow and Tula. Leningrad’s programme was accelerated at the end of the month, when the Wehrmacht reached the Luga Line. By the end of August ninety-two Leningrad defence manufacturies had been moved, together with 164,320 of their workers. Most went to the industrial cities of the Urals, where they resumed production, in hastily improvised new premises, with remarkable speed. It was a great achievement, but not as completely successful as Soviet accounts make out. The railway network, not surprisingly, became chaotically overloaded. Identical raw materials were simultaneously shipped in and out of the city, and some factories were dismantled when it was already too late for them to leave. More than two thousand carloads of machinery still awaited removal when the last railway line out of the city was cut, and sat idle in the freight yards through the first winter of the siege and beyond.7

  The other, disastrous, evacuation programme of the first weeks of the war was that of children. On 26 June the Leningrad soviet announced the evacuation of 392,000 children to rural districts in the Leningrad, Kalinin and Yaroslavl provinces, with their schools, nurseries or children’s homes but without their mothers. It was extremely unpopular. ‘My heart thumped and my thoughts became confused’, wrote Yelena Skyrabina on hearing the news. ‘I didn’t know what to do. The idea of separating from [five-year-old] Yura is so horrible that I am ready to do anything to keep him. I have decided to defy the order. I won’t give up my son for anything.’8 Many parents successfully evaded the order, but others put their children on to trains for Luga, Gatchina, Staraya Russa and other traditional summer-camp destinations to Leningrad’s south and west. The first 15,192 children left on ten trains on 29 June. Yelena Kochina watched them being taken to the railway stations:

  Like frightened animals they filled the streets, moving towards the railway station, the demarcation line of their childhood: on the other side life without parents would begin. The smallest children were transported in trucks, their little heads sticking out like layers of golden mushrooms. Crazed mothers ran after them.9

  Three weeks later the Wehrmacht had reached the Luga Line, and parents realised that, far from sending their children to safety, the authorities had actually put them in the path of the German advance. ‘When we arrived in the village they put us in a cottage’, fifteen-year-old Klara Rakhman wrote from near Staraya Russa. ‘Oh yes, I quite forgot, while we were in the truck a German plane flew right overhead. That’s evacuation for you!’10 Retrieving a child was not easy, not least because the imposition of martial law had made it an offence to take unauthorised leave from one’s job. (The archivist Georgi Knyazev defied the ban, giving one of his typists permission to go to Borovichi to fetch her daughters, aged twelve and nine.11) Lidiya Okhapkina, hampered by a new baby, could not fetch her young son herself, but managed to persuade a chance bread-queue acquaintance, a ‘bespectacled, intellectual-looking woman in her early sixties’, to do it for her. �
��She told me that [her grandson] had been evacuated with Nursery School no. 21 (I remember the exact number), which meant that he had gone precisely to the place where we had sent Tolya . . . She asked how old my little boy was. I said he’d soon be six. I was lying, but he was sturdy and could walk a long way if he had to.’ Applying to the district soviet for the necessary papers the following day, Okhapkina found herself one of a crowd of angry mothers. ‘They were all agitated, making a lot of noise. Some were even shouting “Bring back our children! Better to have them die here together with us than to have them killed God knows where!”’ Having got the right paperwork and handed it over to her new friend, together with as much bread as she could buy, Okhapkina settled down to wait. After a fortnight with no news she suddenly saw the woman standing in the courtyard with two small boys. Hugging her Tolya, she heard that their train had been bombed and that they had had to walk a long way, getting only a few lifts on lorries and carts.12

  Incredibly, the city authorities actually tried to prevent such rescue missions. District Party Committee secretaries were instructed to forbid enterprise directors from giving staff time off to go and fetch children home, to reassure parents that their children were safe, and to ‘liquidate all provocative rumours’ to the contrary.13

  A second round of evacuations, of mothers and children under fourteen, was announced in early August. Unsurprisingly, families now often preferred to take their chances at home. ‘This time’, wrote Skryabina,

  they are letting mothers go with their children. However, people have been so frightened by these first disastrously unsuccessful attempts that they use illness as an excuse to get a postponement . . . There is still another fear – epidemics of typhoid, cholera and other stomach disorders are raging along the railways. That, plus the fact that evacuation trains are exposed to bombardment. The family of the director of the factory where my husband worked left, and soon after came the news that their fourteen-year-old son had died of typhoid fever.14

  Okhapkina, by contrast, desperately wanted to leave, but was delayed when Tolya got lost during an air-raid warning. By the time she found him at a police station the following day they had missed their train. ‘I couldn’t start petitioning all over again for evacuation papers. That incident decided everything – I remained in Leningrad.’

  She may have been lucky to miss her slot, because the evacuation trains, instead of going east to Vologda province, were still being sent south, directly into the path of Busch’s Sixteenth Army. Bombers preceded the panzers, hitting roads, railways and telegraph lines. The worst of the resulting tragedies occurred at Lychkovo, a small town just south of Lake Ilmen. A convoy of nursery-age children was going through the welcoming ceremonies at a collective farm forty kilometres away when news arrived that German parachutists had landed nearby. ‘We were just being offered tea’, recounts a survivor, ‘when the farm director rushed up. I still remember his words – “There are Nazi paratroopers ahead!”’15 The children were put in lorries and driven back to Lychkovo railway station, where several thousand more evacuees were already boarding a train. As they waited their turn a Stuka appeared overhead. ‘He was flying so low’, remembered a teacher. ‘He’d take a look, press a button, and – bang! Later they claimed they hadn’t known. What rubbish! It was a fine day and the children were dressed in their best, most colourful clothes. He could see exactly what he was hitting.’16 The plane flew the length of the platform, bombing with methodical precision. Then there was a huge explosion, and when the smoke cleared the train’s carriages lay scattered ‘as if by a giant hand’.

  There are accounts (strenuously denied) of the adults in charge of children’s evacuation groups fleeing amidst the chaos, or getting their own children back to Leningrad but abandoning the rest. ‘The station was on fire. We couldn’t find anybody, it was absolutely horrible!’ remembered a mother of her passage through Mga. ‘The man in charge of our train sat on a stump with his head in his hands. He had lost his own family, and had no idea who was where.’ Wandering infants were unable to give their names, and thus lost their families for good.17 Returning to Leningrad, evacuation trains were met by mobs of enraged parents who behaved so threateningly that district soviet representatives were warned not to get off.

  Other evacuation groups were spared air attack, but endured epic, circuitous journeys punctuated by long, hungry halts. A train that left for the Siberian city of Omsk towards the end of August carried 2,700 children between the ages of seven and sixteen. In peacetime the journey would have taken three days; now it took seven weeks. Most of the children, a doctor accompanying them remembered, carried food for the trip, but after a few days it started to go bad and had to be thrown out. Evacuation bases along the way only supplied flour and water, which she took outside during halts and cooked up into a sort of bread. ‘Sometimes they got a little milk, but not regularly. They often went hungry. Occasionally we could pick things out of a field – tomatoes or carrots – but we couldn’t wash them properly.’ Measles as well as lice spread in the overcrowded carriages, killing five children en route.18

  The awful rumours about the children’s evacuation were not the only reason surplus civilians chose not to leave Leningrad. Many were tied to the city by relatives, or feared that a son or husband missing in action might come home to an empty flat. The siege survivor Irina Bogdanova describes how her grandmother sabotaged her family’s evacuation with the Geology Institute, where Irina’s mother worked. Though Irina, her mother and grandmother had been given permission to leave, Irina’s aunt Nina, a defence worker, had not. As they drove to the railway station in the Institute’s truck, her grandmother suddenly recalled that she had forgotten a trunk, and insisted on returning home to collect it. She then also insisted that there was no longer enough room for her in the lorry, and that she and Irina would go to the station by tram. This resulted in the whole family missing their train. Back home, Irina recounts, ‘we sat on the sofa; Mama hugged me and said, “All right then, we’ll all die together”’. So it was. Grandmother, mother and aunt all died of starvation in February and March 1942. Eight-year-old Irina survived alone with two corpses for ten days, before being picked up by a civil defence brigade, which transferred her to an orphanage. Interviewed seventy years later, sitting dressed in her best at a table covered end to end with beautifully presented snacks, Irina admits she has ‘been living with this feeling of blame towards my grandmother for my whole life. I think that she wanted to stay with Nina, and forgot the trunk and refused to sit in the back of the truck on purpose.’19

  For the unemployed, individual evacuation was theoretically possible, but the bureaucracy involved was daunting, and unless put up by relatives in unoccupied territory, they had no guarantee of finding housing. In practice, people without jobs often managed to inscribe themselves on to the staff of evacuating institutions, but this required contacts and pull. A friend of Skryabina’s, the wife of a factory director, offered her a post as ‘governess’ to the factory kindergarten, which was leaving for the Moscow region. A day later she telephoned again, and ‘between sobs, informed me that all our plans had fallen through. When the workers learned that the factory planned to send its so to speak “intelligentsia” off with the kindergarten, they revolted and nearly tore the factory committee apart.’ Skryabina was actually relieved: ‘My agonizing problem has been resolved by circumstances. It no longer depends on me. I no longer have to worry about abandoning Mama and Nana; there will be no parting.’20

  Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, the now forgotten composer of Pilots and Ballad of the Men of the Baltic Fleet, decided to stay because he didn’t want to leave his mother, but also because he had just been appointed chairman of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, the previous incumbent having failed to return from his summer holiday. Others privately doubted whether German occupation would really be as bad as the propaganda made out. ‘Can it really be’, wondered Skryabina incredulously, ‘that they kill people just for being Jews?
’ In mid-August she turned down a second chance to evacuate in expectation, subtly implied in her diary, that Leningrad was about to be given up. ‘If the war really is progressing at such breakneck speed then probably it will end soon. Why leave somewhere we are settled? Perhaps it would be wiser to stay in the flat. What should I do?’ She nonetheless suspected provocation when an old schoolfriend sat down beside her on a bench and ‘without any introduction, began talking about how happy he is that the Germans are just outside the city; that they are immeasurably powerful, and that if the city doesn’t surrender today, then it will tomorrow . . . “And this”, he said, showing me a small revolver, “is in case my hopes deceive me.”’ At Pushkin House a Jewish colleague of Likhachev’s – the same Professor Gukovsky who Olga Grechina criticised for hypocrisy – appeared in the canteen rakishly attired in ‘a peaked cap (worn somewhat to one side), and a shirt belted in the Caucasian style. He greeted us with a salute. Confidentially he told us that when the Germans came, he would pass himself off as an Armenian.’21

  The art historian Nikolai Punin succumbed to simple fatalism. In the blacked-out, post-curfew silence of the evening of 26 August, the same day that permission finally came through for the Baltic Fleet to leave Tallinn, he sat at his desk restarting his diary, after a gap of five years, by the light of a lamp whose shade was made of blue wallpaper. For people of his generation, he wrote, death had never seemed far away. ‘In reality they’ve been inviting us to die quickly these past twenty-five years. Many have died, death draws near, as near as it can. Why should we think of it, since it thinks of us so earnestly?’ The sense of impending doom reminded him of the 1937 Terror, when he and all his friends went to bed each evening expecting a small-hours knock on the door and waiting Black Maria. Visiting the Academy of Sciences (‘confusion and chaos’) earlier in the day, colleagues had tried to persuade him to leave with them for Samarkand: