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.