Leningrad

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