A series of field messes was set up on the road for the evacuees. As soon as Leningraders crossed over the lake and reached land they were served hot cabbage soup, potatoes and meat, and other nourishment such as these exhausted people had dreamed of night after night. The fragrance of bread made from pure rye flour intoxicated the famished people. From their first step on land they were surrounded by loving care. Everyone felt in his heart the desire to help them in any way he could.16
Nothing could be further from the truth. The first endurance test evacuees faced was the train journey from Finland Station to Osinovets, which though only forty-five kilometres long could take several days. Having disembarked, they then had to bribe their way on to the lorries crossing the lake ice. Yelena Kochina only got through the violent, shouting crowds at the truck tailgates by slipping two litres of vodka to a driver; Igor Kruglaykov’s mother bargained with a fat, drunk driver who wore a fur coat over his peasant tunic, first handing him a packet of cigarettes, then money, and finally her father’s silver chiming pocket watch. The Ice Road itself resembled the North Pole, a blindingly white, featureless plain on fine days (‘The poppy-red flag of the traffic controller’, wrote Inber, ‘is visible a kilometre away’), a howling maelstrom in blizzards and a black void at night. A lucky few crossed in buses sent from Moscow, but most in open or canvas-topped trucks, in which it was easy to die of exposure. Too weak to hold on as the trucks bumped over the ice, many passengers were simply jolted out. A woman soldier assigned to the route picked up the corpses of half a dozen babies and toddlers each morning, flung from their mothers’ arms as the lorries raced to beat the dawn.17
On the opposite ‘mainland’ shore, reception facilities were worse than inadequate. Diarists describe queuing for hours for soup, being unable to find anywhere to sleep, and fighting for places on the trains onwards through unoccupied Russia. Nor, when food was available, were measures initially taken to prevent the starving from killing themselves by overeating. A doctor ordered to set up a medical station at Zhikharevo discovered that evacuees were immediately eating all the dry rations — smoked sausage and bread — given them for the three-day train journey onward to Tikhvin, and bursting their stomachs. Having pleaded in vain with the chief of the evacuation centre to change his arrangements, he eventually managed to get a meeting with visiting representatives of Moscow’s State Defence Committee. Having described the results of his autopsies he persuaded them that evacuees should instead be fed in small quantities en route, with millet and semolina cooked in the train boilers.18
A typical account of the whole — resoundingly Soviet — evacuation experience comes from Vladimir Kulyabko, a widowed sixty-five-year-old refrigeration engineer. Having survived the first half of the winter on gifts from a neighbour who worked in a food shop, in February he was offered a place on one of the first convoys across the Ice Road. He accepted, hoping to reach his son, an army doctor stationed in Cherepovets, a town 400 kilometres east of Leningrad on the railway line to Vologda. Telling the manager of his apartment building that he was merely moving into another flat, he left the keys with a neighbour and paid another in kerosene, macaroni and nuts to help him get his luggage to Finland Station. Including stops to rest on sandboxes, the three-kilometre walk took two hours. Having been due to leave at 10.30 in the morning, the train did not appear until 6 p.m., at which point Kulyabko found his assigned carriage taken up by baggage-laden ‘businessmen’. He managed to squeeze himself and his suitcase, basket and pillow into the draughty section at the end of the carriage where in normal times smokers gathered. The train finally got under way at 1 a.m., and food was handed out. To get any, Kulyabko soon realised, he would have to pay a bribe. A note — ‘400g of bread for Kulyabko, money enclosed, no need for change’ — did the trick. ‘In ten minutes I had my bread. Having learned from experience, I did the same thing for the soup.’ On arrival at Osinovets six hours later he noticed fifteen corpses lying beside the tracks.
Getting on to a lorry to cross the lake, he took some time to work out, required more bribery:
I waited, hungry and unfed like everyone else (despite the fact that in Leningrad we had been promised three meals a day and given the appropriate coupons). At about 5 p.m. I found the man in charge but he fobbed me off with some meaningless nonsense or other, and I realised I wouldn’t be going anywhere soon. The lorries came and went, but the people in charge chose who to let on themselves, not following any sort of list or queue. . I approached the boss once again, telling him that I was ill and that I was going to join my son, a decorated soldier.
Shortly afterwards he was approached by an overseer, who settled on 500 grams of tobacco in exchange for a place on the first closed lorry to come along. Four hours later Kulyabko was aboard, having cannily refused to hand over the bribe until he was actually seated inside with his luggage. ‘The same system of bribery, but much pettier, pertained in the lorry itself. The driver constantly asked for cigarettes, which he was given. Otherwise the lorry went slowly, or things went wrong all the time. A cigarette given at just the right moment made all these problems disappear.’ Having spent three hours stuck in a jam with food trucks heading the other way, the lorry finally arrived on the ‘mainland’ at five the next morning.
Though Kulyabko had now escaped the siege ring, this was far from the end of his difficulties. First he had to queue three hours for kasha and soup, for which evacuees were expected to produce their own plate and spoon — he got round the problem by giving the waitress fifty roubles and his passport as security for a bowl. When a train arrived, it was mobbed by the frantic crowd. Paying thirty roubles to a soldier to carry his luggage, Kulyabko managed to climb into a goods wagon with some emaciated engineering students, who refused him space round its hay-stoked stove. Five sleepless nights and days later, punctuated by long queues for food, petty thefts and the death of one of the students, whose friends pushed his corpse out of the train window, he reached Cherepovets:
I crawl out of the wagon, fall over of course, drag down my three bundles and call out, ‘Help me carry these to the station’. Nobody pays any attention. I try to drag them myself, but they are heavy and I fall over again. I stand there in despair. Finally I spot a street urchin and ask him to carry my things to the station. He says, ‘Will you give me a smoke?’ and I say that I will. . We get to the station; I see a policeman and ask him, ‘How do I get to this address?’ He replies that there are horse-drawn cabs on the square. Stupidly, I go to the square, give the boy a cigarette and stand looking for the cabs. But there aren’t any, and never have been. I appeal to this person and that for help, but nobody responds. So I start dragging my things to the left-luggage office, which thankfully isn’t far. I push the suitcase over the snow with my feet, and carry everything else. I go for a metre, a metre and a half, and stop to rest. I stand there on the brink of tears. How will I get to Borya?
His saviour was a young soldier, who, refusing all thanks, picked up his bags and walked him to Borya’s hospital, giving him an army ration rusk to eat on the way.19 Kulyabko travelled when the mass-evacuation programme had been in progress for little more than a week, but conditions remained chaotic all the way through to mid-April, when the spring thaw brought the lorries — by now swishing axle-deep through meltwater — to a halt.20