How many people did the Ice Road save altogether? Officially 11,296 evacuees made it across in January 1942, 117,434 in February, 221,947 in March and 163,392 in April, making an impressive, plan-beating total of 514,069 in less than four months.21 This takes no account, however, of those who died on the way, either during the crossing itself or in the trains that took evacuees onwards into unoccupied Russia. In the crowded, toiletless freight cars, as experienced by Kochina, stomach disorders raged:
Whenever someone ‘feels a need’ the whole ‘public’ of the car usually takes part in its realisation. It works as follows: the door is opened by common effort and the cause of the commotion drops his trousers and sticks his rear into the wind. Several people hold him by the hands and under the arms. [During halts] we all crawl out of the train and squat next to the wagons, side by side — men, women and children. The locals crowd around, staring at us with horror. . But we’re indifferent to all that. We don’t experience shame or any other feelings. . The sick ride with us until they die. Then we simply throw them out of the moving train.22
That evacuees received inadequate care even after they had reached the ‘mainland’ is confirmed by an NKVD report of 5 March, which complains of ‘irresponsible and heartless’ treatment of evacuees by staff at a reception point, and ‘inhuman’ conditions on the trains. From one, seventeen corpses had been removed at Volkhov station, twenty at Babayevo, seven at Cherepovets and seven more at Vologda. From another, twenty-six had been removed at Volkhov, thirty-two at Tikhvin, four at Babayevo and six at Vologda.23 A wartime mass grave at Vologda, filled mostly with fleeing Leningraders, is estimated to contain 20,000 dead.
For those who survived the initial evacuation journey there remained the problem, if not attached to an institution or within reach of relatives, of finding a local authority prepared to supply ration cards and accommodation. Since there were displaced people and chronic food shortages everywhere (even in Moscow, beggars died on the streets in the winter of 1941–2), this was extremely difficult. Skryabina, who crossed the Ice Road in February, first watched her mother die in a chaotic so-called hospital in Cherepovets, then spent weeks journeying with her emaciated sons from one railway town to another in search of a sympathetic official. When she eventually found one it was thanks to svyazi: her old family doctor had become a senior Party official in Gorky (now Nizhni Novgorod).
His name worked like magic. . The clerk pushed the people standing ahead of me aside and amiably invited us to follow him. He led us straight to the office of the Gorky Party Committee. . In ten minutes I was out again with three documents in my hands — two for extra rations and one for a special transport headed for the Caucasus.
The rejections Skryabina had endured up to that point were predictable, as much a product of general wartime shortage and upheaval as of bureaucratic negligence. But she experienced them as malign and personaclass="underline" ‘I think’, she wrote, ‘that Robinson Crusoe was a lucky man. He knew quite well that he was on an uninhabited island and had to fend for himself. But I am among human beings.’24
15. Corpse-Eating and Person-Eating
Another aspect of the siege that has no place in the traditional Soviet story is crime. Leningraders, claims supply commissar Dmitri Pavlov, were too ‘high-minded’ to grab loaves that spilled from a bread truck hit by a shell, and ‘jealously protected’ the trees in the public parks from being cut down for firewood. Their example refuted the ‘foreign writers who assert that man loses his morals and becomes a predatory beast when hunger affects him powerfully. If this were true, anarchy should have reigned in Leningrad.’1
Anarchy did not reign in Leningrad during the siege, but the city did suffer a crime wave, especially of theft and murder for food and food cards, and, most notoriously, of cannibalism. The commonest of violent crimes was simple mugging. Yelena Kochina, returning home from a bread shop in mid-December 1941, saw a teenage boy dressed in the uniform of one of the city’s trade schools running towards her. She stood aside but he grabbed her bread and ran on, leaving her staring in horror at her empty hands. Back at home, a neighbour scolded her for not hiding the bread under her coat. Four days later Yelena’s husband got in a fight with another trade-school boy over a spilled crust:
Today [Dima] ran into some sleds loaded with bread. An armed guard of five men accompanied them, and a crowd followed behind, staring spellbound at the loaves. Dima followed along with everyone else. Near the bread shop the sleds were unloaded, and the crowd fell on the empty boxes, picking out the crumbs. Dima found a large crust trampled in the snow. But a boy tore the crust out of his hands. He chewed it, this horrendous brat, smacking his lips and drooling saliva. Dima went mad. He grabbed the boy by his collar and began to shake him, not realizing what he was doing. The boy’s head wobbled on his thin neck like a rag doll’s. But he kept on hurriedly chewing with his eyes closed. ‘It’s gone, it’s gone! Look!’ he shouted suddenly and opened his mouth wide.2
Cited as thieves in dozens of similar accounts,3 these trade-school boys, like the peasant refugees in the suburbs, were one of Leningrad’s most vulnerable social groups. Greatly expanded just before the war, the trade schools — remeslennye uchilishchya — were low-prestige boarding institutions, designed to train up teenagers from the villages as factory hands. When the siege ring closed their pupils found themselves cut off from their families and at the mercy of often negligent or unscrupulous school managers. The commissar sent from Moscow to oversee mass evacuation over the Ice Road, Aleksei Kosygin, noticed their worse than average emaciation and was prompted personally to inspect Trade School no. 33. The boys, he discovered, were lice-ridden and sleeping two or three to a bed, without sheets or pillowcases or any isolation of sick from healthy. Even more shamefully, kitchen staff were systematically pilfering their food, leaving them with half or less of their proper ration. A pupils’ representative, he wrote furiously to Zhdanov, should be allowed directly to oversee the kitchens, and managers and staff should be arrested and put on trial. The overall mortality rate in the trade schools is unknown, but has been estimated at a staggering 95 per cent.4
Theft by Leningrad’s thousands of other abandoned children was reduced by the opening and subsequent evacuation of ninety-eight new orphanages, but these usually only took in children aged up to thirteen. ‘The position of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds left without parents’, a report to Zhdanov noted, ‘is especially difficult. They are not accepted into children’s homes, and crowd near shops and bakeries, snatching bread and food from buyers’ hands.’ City education department staff, it went on, refused even to send younger children to orphanages unless they were clean, free of infection and in possession of all the correct papers.5
Of more concern to police was the threat that angry bread-shop crowds would get out of control, or descend into outright looting. Though food distribution was never seriously disrupted there were some near-riots, especially in January and February 1942, when Leningraders were queuing from the small hours, often to receive no bread at all. Late one January evening Dmitri Lazarev went to look for his wife, who had gone out to queue at seven that morning. He found her standing in line outside a bread shop on Bolshoi Prospekt:
People were being allowed into the shop ten at a time. At one point, when the next ten were being allowed in, everyone behind rushed forward and started trying to break down the doors. A pair of policemen tried to hold back the crowd. Finally they began telling lies, promising that people would be let in as soon as the crowd took a few steps back. When the crowd did so they locked the doors and announced that the shop was closed and everyone could go home. There were shouts, complaints — some had not eaten for two days, others had starving children.