At the end of the month the diary peters out into loose, wild scribbles: ‘I want to live, but I can’t live like this! But how I want to live!’ and ‘Where’s Mama? Where is she?’ The last is dated 6 January:
I can hardly walk or do anything. I have almost no strength left. Mama, too, can barely walk — I can’t imagine how she manages it. Nowadays she hits me often, scolds and shouts. She has wild nervous fits because she can’t stand my wretched appearance — that of a weak, hungry, tormented person who can barely move from one spot to another, is always in the way and ‘pretends’ to be ill and helpless. But I’m not pretending. . Oh Lord, what’s happening to me?14
What did happen to him, as the siege historians Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin found out from his sister Ira forty years later, was that he was left behind. Having got evacuation slots for the whole family, traded belongings for food and warm clothing, and loaded a sled with necessaries and tradeable silver cutlery, Yuri’s mother found that she could not lift her son downstairs. Leaving him lying on the sofa, mother and daughter set off, towing the sled, for Finland Station. ‘Once we’d crossed the Neva’, Ira remembered, ‘Mother was desperate to go back for him. “Yura’s back there, all on his own!” I was crying of course. But almost as soon as we boarded the train it started moving, and off we went.’ What became of Yuri thereafter we do not know. He may have died in Leningrad or in evacuation, since the diary itself, handed in in response to a newspaper appeal in 1970, has been traced to Vologda province. He may even have survived the war but not wanted to re-establish contact with his family. Not much of it was left anyway. His father, who had been arrested during the 1936–7 Terror, perished somewhere in the Gulag. His mother died during the evacuation journey, on a bench at Vologda railway station. His sister Ira spent the rest of the war in a children’s home and was later brought up by an aunt.15
It is another comforting siege myth that, once embarked on the Ice Road, evacuees enjoyed good care and security. Even Dmitri Pavlov, the supply chief whose ‘Thaw’-era memoir is one of the more outspoken of the genre, claims that the evacuation was ‘carefully thought out and well organised’:
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
