Leningrad

our idol Professor Gukovsky rousingly addressed a rally, urging us to enlist in the students’ voluntary battalion. Everyone expected Gukovsky himself to enlist too, especially since many of our teachers were applying to be either translators or political workers. Instead, Gukovsky started making his appearance wearing green house slippers and leaning on a cane. Some said he had acute rheumatism; others cautiously hinted that he found calling others to action much pleasanter than acting himself. I really don’t know if he was ill or not, but it was good that he was able to write his Gogol book.11

Though, if anything, anti-Bolshevik (her doctor father had been exiled to a tiny village clinic by the Revolution, and an uncle sent to the Gulag), Grechina employed no such stratagem, and in the third week of July found herself one of a group of female students waiting, amidst crowds of evacuees, at Moscow Station for a train to the Luga Line:

There were worrying reports of strafing and bombing coming from the trenches — and especially from around Luga. But we hadn’t been told where we were headed, and when we set off that evening we were cheerful, singing songs so as to distract ourselves from the anxiety inside. When we got off the train at Gatchina it was already dark. We were sent to spend the night in a park next to the Pavlovsk Palace, but never slept since the Germans started bombing a nearby airfield, and around us everything droned and shook. We were made to get up, and told to hide anything white and not to smoke. We started walking fast along a road already full of our units. The soldiers marched quickly and quietly; if one made a sound the others shushed him for being careless. None of us had any idea where we were going or why, which made it all the more frightening. We were all desperate for something to drink, so much so that when the road went through a wood we drank muddy water from the roadside ditches.

In the morning, having marched twenty kilometres, the students reached a village, where they were distributed among local residents, two or three to a house. That afternoon their task was explained to them:

It was to dig anti-tank ditches (1.2m deep) and breastworks (supposedly 1m high). Though our only tools were shovels, axes and stretchers [to carry soil], we set to work enthusiastically. The days were sunny and hot. We worked from 5 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m., with a two- or three-hour rest after lunch. We were well fed but there was no tea, except for what our landlady made us from lime flowers. Physically it was very tough, and after two weeks, trying to lift a stretcher, I suddenly found I couldn’t straighten up again.12

Grechina was lucky only to hurt her back. Yelena Kochina was one of many ditch-diggers strafed by German Stukas:

Our whole laboratory dug anti-tank trenches around Leningrad today. I dug the earth with pleasure (at least this was something practical!). . Almost all the people working in the trenches were women. Their coloured headscarves flashed brightly in the sun. It was as if a giant flowerbed girdled the city.

Suddenly the gleaming wings of an aeroplane blotted out the sky. A machine gun started firing and bullets plunged into the grass not far from me, rustling like small metallic lizards. I stood transfixed, forgetting completely the air-raid drill that I had learned not long before.

‘Run!’ someone shouted, tugging at my sleeve. I looked back. Everyone who had been working in the trenches had run somewhere. I ran too, though I didn’t know where to go or what to do. . Suddenly I saw a small bridge. I ran towards it. Under it was a deep puddle. For a whole hour we squatted in this puddle, and didn’t do any more work for the rest of the day.13

Yelena Skryabina, hearing of the strafings and worried that her son Dima might be conscripted to dig, thought the effort ‘senseless — a good way to kill people. . No one is excused — young girls in sundresses and sandals, boys in shorts and sports shirts. They aren’t even allowed home to change their clothes. How much use can they really be? City youths don’t even know how to use a shovel, much less the heavy crowbars that they will need to break up dry clay soil.’14

She was not wrong to be sceptical. Girls dug in bathing suits, with bits of paper stuck to their noses to prevent sunburn. They dropped their heavy shovels during the night-time marches or had to be sent home with hopelessly blistered hands and feet. The peasant women who cooked them kasha and spread out straw for them to sleep on tut-tutted over the ‘little ladies’ from the city; the men overseeing them shouted: ‘You think you’re actresses, that you’ve come to a resort? You’ve come to save the Motherland!’ Their initial enthusiasm quickly wore off: ‘What did he think we were doing — playing croquet?’ one burst out when her professor of Marxism-Leninism, out for a visit, asked if they were tired.15