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}