I crawl out of the wagon, fall over of course, drag down my three bundles and call out, ‘Help me carry these to the station’. Nobody pays any attention. I try to drag them myself, but they are heavy and I fall over again. I stand there in despair. Finally I spot a street urchin and ask him to carry my things to the station. He says, ‘Will you give me a smoke?’ and I say that I will. . We get to the station; I see a policeman and ask him, ‘How do I get to this address?’ He replies that there are horse-drawn cabs on the square. Stupidly, I go to the square, give the boy a cigarette and stand looking for the cabs. But there aren’t any, and never have been. I appeal to this person and that for help, but nobody responds. So I start dragging my things to the left-luggage office, which thankfully isn’t far. I push the suitcase over the snow with my feet, and carry everything else. I go for a metre, a metre and a half, and stop to rest. I stand there on the brink of tears. How will I get to Borya?
His saviour was a young soldier, who, refusing all thanks, picked up his bags and walked him to Borya’s hospital, giving him an army ration rusk to eat on the way.19 Kulyabko travelled when the mass-evacuation programme had been in progress for little more than a week, but conditions remained chaotic all the way through to mid-April, when the spring thaw brought the lorries — by now swishing axle-deep through meltwater — to a halt.20
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
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 personal: ‘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
