Leningrad

The awful rumours about the children’s evacuation were not the only reason surplus civilians chose not to leave Leningrad. Many were tied to the city by relatives, or feared that a son or husband missing in action might come home to an empty flat. The siege survivor Irina Bogdanova describes how her grandmother sabotaged her family’s evacuation with the Geology Institute, where Irina’s mother worked. Though Irina, her mother and grandmother had been given permission to leave, Irina’s aunt Nina, a defence worker, had not. As they drove to the railway station in the Institute’s truck, her grandmother suddenly recalled that she had forgotten a trunk, and insisted on returning home to collect it. She then also insisted that there was no longer enough room for her in the lorry, and that she and Irina would go to the station by tram. This resulted in the whole family missing their train. Back home, Irina recounts, ‘we sat on the sofa; Mama hugged me and said, “All right then, we’ll all die together”’. So it was. Grandmother, mother and aunt all died of starvation in February and March 1942. Eight-year-old Irina survived alone with two corpses for ten days, before being picked up by a civil defence brigade, which transferred her to an orphanage. Interviewed seventy years later, sitting dressed in her best at a table covered end to end with beautifully presented snacks, Irina admits she has ‘been living with this feeling of blame towards my grandmother for my whole life. I think that she wanted to stay with Nina, and forgot the trunk and refused to sit in the back of the truck on purpose.’19

For the unemployed, individual evacuation was theoretically possible, but the bureaucracy involved was daunting, and unless put up by relatives in unoccupied territory, they had no guarantee of finding housing. In practice, people without jobs often managed to inscribe themselves on to the staff of evacuating institutions, but this required contacts and pull. A friend of Skryabina’s, the wife of a factory director, offered her a post as ‘governess’ to the factory kindergarten, which was leaving for the Moscow region. A day later she telephoned again, and ‘between sobs, informed me that all our plans had fallen through. When the workers learned that the factory planned to send its so to speak “intelligentsia” off with the kindergarten, they revolted and nearly tore the factory committee apart.’ Skryabina was actually relieved: ‘My agonizing problem has been resolved by circumstances. It no longer depends on me. I no longer have to worry about abandoning Mama and Nana; there will be no parting.’20

Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, the now forgotten composer of Pilots and Ballad of the Men of the Baltic Fleet, decided to stay because he didn’t want to leave his mother, but also because he had just been appointed chairman of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, the previous incumbent having failed to return from his summer holiday. Others privately doubted whether German occupation would really be as bad as the propaganda made out. ‘Can it really be’, wondered Skryabina incredulously, ‘that they kill people just for being Jews?’ In mid-August she turned down a second chance to evacuate in expectation, subtly implied in her diary, that Leningrad was about to be given up. ‘If the war really is progressing at such breakneck speed then probably it will end soon. Why leave somewhere we are settled? Perhaps it would be wiser to stay in the flat. What should I do?’ She nonetheless suspected provocation when an old schoolfriend sat down beside her on a bench and ‘without any introduction, began talking about how happy he is that the Germans are just outside the city; that they are immeasurably powerful, and that if the city doesn’t surrender today, then it will tomorrow. . “And this”, he said, showing me a small revolver, “is in case my hopes deceive me.”’ At Pushkin House a Jewish colleague of Likhachev’s — the same Professor Gukovsky who Olga Grechina criticised for hypocrisy — appeared in the canteen rakishly attired in ‘a peaked cap (worn somewhat to one side), and a shirt belted in the Caucasian style. He greeted us with a salute. Confidentially he told us that when the Germans came, he would pass himself off as an Armenian.’21