An engineer to whom Vera Inber chatted on her way home from giving a talk at a factory told her that he had just been to see his family in Novaya Derevnya (the old working-class suburb, just north of Yelagin Island, where the Zhilinskys had lived). When he arrived his house had disappeared, nothing left of it except rubble and bits of broken furniture. Picking over the debris he found some family photographs. ‘Now’, he ruefully told Inber, ‘my whole home fits in my pocket. I can carry it about with me.’36 Olga Grechina, standing guard over a newly demolished house until a truck arrived, was timidly approached by an old woman who presented her with a small turnip and asked permission to drag away a plank. After an hour of standing watch Grechina had traded herself ‘a whole dinner — several turnips and carrots’.37 The demolition campaign, which continued all through the autumn, transformed the appearance of the city’s village-like northern and eastern outskirts — doing more damage, Leningraders observed, than all the Germans’ shelling and bombing.
The summer’s gardening, food requisitioning, anti-corruption and demolition drives were accompanied by another mass evacuation over Lake Ladoga. Designed to remove all non-working Leningraders from the city, it was theoretically obligatory, though many — like Boldyrev and the painter Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva — managed to evade it: Boldyrev because he calculated he was better off where he was, Ostroumova-Lebedeva (offered a flight out and lodgings with the sister of a friend) because she wanted to stay where she belonged:
To live and suffer in Leningrad for such a long time, and now, just before liberation, to leave!. . I pictured myself in Kazan, in a warm room, safe from bombs and hunger — and I pictured myself in the role — not of sponger, but also not of tenant: an old woman who nobody needs. And I made the decision not to go anywhere. Nowhere!38
The classicist Olga Fridenberg tried to leave with her blind, eighty-year-old mother, but gave up when their overcrowded train stopped without explanation for four days on the way to Osinovets. Bribing a guard with her last loaf of bread, she managed to disembark mother and luggage and get them back to their emptied, disordered flat, where they remained for the rest of the war.
Forced hastily to convert as many of their belongings as possible into cash or food, evacuees set up bric-a-brac tables on the pavements and inside the windows of ground-floor flats (it was astonishing, thought Grechina, how many old and beautiful things people had left to sell). Dmitri Likhachev, stripped of his residence permit and given three days’ notice to depart following interrogation at the Big House, watched a stream of prospective purchasers go over the contents of his family flat: ‘At bargain prices they bought chandeliers, carpets, the bronze writing set, malachite boxes, leather armchairs, the sofa, the standard lamp with the onyx base, books, postcards of town views — every single thing that my father and mother had gathered together before the Revolution.’ Altogether the sale raised only 10,000 roubles, 2,000 of which went on six sacks of potatoes.39
The departures reduced Leningrad’s civilian population to that of a small provincial city. Three and a half million before the war, it had fallen to about a million by April 1942, to 776,000 by the end of August and 637,000 by the end of the year.40 Air raids and shelling fell off over the summer, leaving the atmosphere quiet and domestic, almost rural. In the parks, women in headscarves hoed rows of floppy-leaved cabbages. Boys fished along the embankments, sailors bicycled wildly down the middle of the streets, upturned iron bedsteads fenced off bomb craters and allotments. At the Hermitage, staff carried silk-upholstered furniture outside into the sunshine, brushing it clean of furry layers of sulphur-green mildew. The portico of St Isaac’s, where Pavlovsk’s treasures were stored, looked ‘like a Naples backstreet’, tapestries and carpets hanging from washing lines slung between polished granite pillars. In the courtyard of the Yusupov Palace scurvy-blotched hospital patients sunbathed in their underwear, oblivious to sexuality or embarrassment. Some found the quiet comforting, a reminder of holidays in grandparents’ villages. Others, such as Vera Inber, newly returned from a trip to keyed-up Moscow, found it oppressive and desolate: ‘The city is quiet and deserted to an extent that is shattering. . How can one write in such a city! Even during the bombing it was easier.’41 For Olga Fridenberg, writing to her cousin Boris Pasternak, it was ‘cleaner than any city has ever been’ — ‘sterilised’, ‘holy’ — but also ‘without a germ of life in it. No pregnant women, no children’s voices. . A bell jar out of which all the air has been pumped.’42
