Many evacuees also faced a dreadful sort of triage — should one stay behind and try to save the life of a family member too weak to travel, or leave the weak and save the strong? What famine experts call ‘forced abandonment’ was very common. Dmitri Likhachev cites three examples from among his friends, the first that of the Dostoyevsky scholar Vasili Komarovich. The day before their planned departure his wife and daughter dragged him by sled to the Writers’ Union statsionar. On arrival they discovered that the clinic was not due to open for several days, but begged the doctor in charge to take him in. She refused but they left him there anyway, in a basement cloakroom. Fed by the doctor, Komarovich stayed alive just long enough to complete his doctoral thesis. Published after the war, it reads completely normally except that the footnotes are dated according to Church feast days. The second family Likhachev cites left behind a daughter who died in hospital, the third an elderly mother, who was abandoned, still tied to a sled, at Finland Station when she failed her medical.9
Yelena Skryabina was spared a similar choice by a timely death. ‘Rumours about a possible evacuation’, she wrote on 29 January, ‘are becoming more and more persistent. My uncle. . cannot stand these discussions. Even if he should be taken out of Leningrad, he wouldn’t survive the trip. Here, sustained by his wife’s care, he can still hang on.’ He died the following day:
My aunt, who always adored him, behaved as everyone does now — she didn’t even cry. At six in the evening Lyudmila came home from work. I let her in and told her the sad news of her father’s death. She wept bitterly and only then, somehow, did it really strike my aunt. She embraced her daughter and wept for a long time in her arms. It was easier to witness this outburst of grief than the terrible hardness one finds in everyone in Leningrad these days.10
One of the saddest siege stories is that of Yuri Ryabinkin, the fifteen-year-old who had been caught by the announcement of war on his way to a chess competition. A gauche, highly strung teenager cooped up with his family in terrifying circumstances, he is in many ways the Soviet equivalent of Anne Frank. His end, though, is far more ambiguous. Like his friends, he had initially greeted the war with childish excitement, using the unexpected time off school to play vingt-et-un and forfeits (‘Lopatin crawled up a whole flight of the spiral staircase on all fours, Finkelshtein had to give Bron a piggyback’) as well as standing fire duty on the roof of 34 Sadovaya Street, the sleek deco apartment building (today a bank) where he lived with his mother and younger sister.
In mid-October he began to ‘fall down the funnel’, first complaining of hunger (‘it gives you an itchy sensation in the pit of the stomach, and your mouth waters all the time’), then beginning to hate a better-fed family that moved into their communal apartment. (‘It’s humiliating seeing Mother drinking water to fill herself up while A.N. stands there talking about the theatre. . that Anfisa Nikolayevna is like a plump, well-fed cat. .’11) By the end of the month he found it difficult to climb the stairs, and had stopped bothering to change his clothes. Though he had only one candle to read by, he tried to escape into fiction — Dumas was ‘most entertaining’, Jack London’s ‘Love of Life’ ‘a wonderful piece’. A fortnight later his face had swollen from dropsy and he had begun to obsess about food (‘Every night in my sleep I see bread, butter, pirozhki and potatoes. And before I go to sleep the last thought in my head is always that in twelve hours time the night will be over and I can eat a piece of bread. .’). His mother left each morning for work, taking his younger sister with her; Yuri’s job was to queue for rations:
Mother and Ira come home hungry, frozen and tired. . they can hardly drag their feet along. No food at home, no firewood for the stove. . They start scolding and reproaching me because the neighbours downstairs have managed to get grains and meat, and I haven’t . . So it’s back to the queues for me, to no avail. . Oh if only I had a pair of felt boots!12
In December his entries become almost hysterical, a mixture of fantasising (‘Mama will get a job as librarian in some newly organised hospital; I will be her assistant’), self-hatred at having filched a few crumbs from the family food stock, and paranoia:
What’s this torture Mother and Ira arrange for me in the evenings? At table Ira eats deliberately slowly, so that she can feel that here she is, eating, while the rest of us, who have already eaten, sit watching her with hungry eyes. Mother eats hers first, then takes a little from each of us. When the bread’s being divided Ira bursts into tears.13
At the end of the month the diary peters out into loose, wild scribbles: ‘I want to live, but I can’t live like this! But how I want to live!’ and ‘Where’s Mama? Where is she?’ The last is dated 6 January:
I can hardly walk or do anything. I have almost no strength left. Mama, too, can barely walk — I can’t imagine how she manages it. Nowadays she hits me often, scolds and shouts. She has wild nervous fits because she can’t stand my wretched appearance — that of a weak, hungry, tormented person who can barely move from one spot to another, is always in the way and ‘pretends’ to be ill and helpless. But I’m not pretending. . Oh Lord, what’s happening to me?14
What did happen to him, as the siege historians Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin found out from his sister Ira forty years later, was that he was left behind. Having got evacuation slots for the whole family, traded belongings for food and warm clothing, and loaded a sled with necessaries and tradeable silver cutlery, Yuri’s mother found that she could not lift her son downstairs. Leaving him lying on the sofa, mother and daughter set off, towing the sled, for Finland Station. ‘Once we’d crossed the Neva’, Ira remembered, ‘Mother was desperate to go back for him. “Yura’s back there, all on his own!” I was crying of course. But almost as soon as we boarded the train it started moving, and off we went.’ What became of Yuri thereafter we do not know. He may have died in Leningrad or in evacuation, since the diary itself, handed in in response to a newspaper appeal in 1970, has been traced to Vologda province. He may even have survived the war but not wanted to re-establish contact with his family. Not much of it was left anyway. His father, who had been arrested during the 1936–7 Terror, perished somewhere in the Gulag. His mother died during the evacuation journey, on a bench at Vologda railway station. His sister Ira spent the rest of the war in a children’s home and was later brought up by an aunt.15
It is another comforting siege myth that, once embarked on the Ice Road, evacuees enjoyed good care and security. Even Dmitri Pavlov, the supply chief whose ‘Thaw’-era memoir is one of the more outspoken of the genre, claims that the evacuation was ‘carefully thought out and well organised’: