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:
But that would mean getting drawn into the war. No, I’m not going. It’s better to tilt at windmills while one still can. The lamp burns, it is quiet. Lord, comfort the souls ascending to heaven.
Not long ago I said to someone ‘Now, there are two frightening things: war and evacuation. But of the two, evacuation is worse.’ This is just a quip, it’s true. But why didn’t they evacuate us during the Yezhovshchina [the Terror]? It was just as frightening then.22
The background noise to agonised personal decision-making was strong popular and semi-official disapproval of those who were quick to leave the city. Evacuees were dubbed ‘rats’, or bezhentsy — ‘refugees’, but literally translated as ‘runners-away’. Olga Grechina had an awkward parting with a pair of brothers, fellow students at the university, whose mother had wangled them places on an archaeological dig in Central Asia. ‘I couldn’t understand how healthy young people could agree to be evacuated when everyone else was trying to get to the front. . Conversation was difficult. I didn’t blame them for leaving; I was just terribly surprised that they had agreed.’23 As perniciously and less inevitably, some district soviets paraded their faith in the leadership by actually discouraging civilian evacuation in their areas. As Dmitri Pavlov, wartime head of the national food supply agency, puts it in the best Soviet account of the siege, they ‘viewed citizens’ refusal to evacuate as a patriotic act and were proud of it, thus involuntarily encouraging people to remain’. The number of Leningraders evacuated through July and August, he thought, could and should have been two or three times higher.24 Refusal to evacuate could, ironically, also be regarded as suspicious. A diarist noted the following rumour: