Leningrad полностью

28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. — Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. — Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. — Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. — Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. — Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. — Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.

From January onwards teams of civil defence workers, mostly young women in their late teens or twenties, did the rounds of ‘dead’ flats picking up children like Tanya. They were handed in to police-run reception centres, similar to those opened five years earlier to process the offspring of purge victims. From the centres younger children, aged three to thirteen, were transferred to 130 new children’s homes (ninety-eight in the city, thirty-two in surrounding towns and villages) which opened from January to March. By the end of the year 26,250 children had been taken in, 54 per cent of them orphaned, 30 per cent with a single parent serving in the forces.17

Older children were enrolled with civil defence teams or factories, either directly or via trade schools. Fourteen-year-old Galina Vishnevskaya, abandoned in Kronshtadt by her father and stepmother, joined an all-women civil defence brigade. She lived in barracks, wore a boiler suit and learned how to shoulder planks, dig up broken pipes, drink vodka, smoke makhorka and sing jazz to sailors. ‘It was’, as she put it in her memoirs, ‘no institute for aristocratic young ladies. . I came to know life as it really is — life as I would never have known it under other conditions.’18

Another sole survivor child, aged eight at the time, was Irina Bogdanova. Her family had already been half-destroyed by the Terror, during which her paternal grandparents were exiled to Archangel and her father, a journalist on Leningradskaya Pravda, committed suicide. Irina — a plump, pretty girl in white socks with blonde pigtails — was brought up by her mother (a frequently absent geologist), aunt and grandmother in a flat on Barmaleyev Street, on the Petrograd Side. Come February 1942, the adults succumbed one by one to dysentery, leaving Irina alone with the corpses of her mother and grandmother. She was picked up ten days later by a twenty-one-year-old civil defence worker, who handed her in to the police together with her clothes, shoes and unused ration card (‘Just think, in those conditions, how honest she was not to take it!’ Irina exclaims now). On her registration form someone first wrote ‘boy’ and then corrected it to ‘girl’. The days Irina spent alone are a blank: the first thing she remembers is waking in a large, light room and realising that the girl with whom she was sharing a bed was dead. This was not unusual: of the 4,508 children received into ten suburban orphanages, 682 died, mostly within a few days of admission.19

Through the spring and summer of 1942 the orphanages — 38,080 children in total — were evacuated to the ‘mainland’.20 Shuffled between overburdened local administrations, they often travelled for weeks, ending up in deep countryside far from medical services or communications. An extreme case was Children’s Home no. 82, whose 135 orphans ended up quartered in two small, unlit huts in a tiny settlement in western Siberia, twenty-five kilometres from the nearest telegraph and 800 kilometres from a railway line.21 Irina was evacuated with her Children’s Home no. 57 to a village in Yaroslavl province. Life there she remembers as ‘hard but good’. The children slept on hay-filled mattresses, were put to serious work collecting mushrooms and berries — none could be eaten until one had fulfilled one’s norm — and ostracised if caught filching food. Irina had to apologise in front of the whole school after she was caught digging the crumb out of a loaf on the way home from the village bakery, squishing it together with buds pulled off overhanging lime trees: ‘They were sweet and sticky, and so good with the bread — I remember the taste even now.’22