At the bottom of Leningrad’s food hierarchy came people who weren’t Leningraders at all — refugees from the countryside. In September 1941, as peasant families streamed into the city in front of the advancing German and Finnish armies, the Military Council handed responsibility for them to outlying district soviets, who were instructed to check their identities, prevent them from boarding suburban trains into the centre, and house them in empty flats, schools and hostels.36 ‘Leningrad was encircled by a ring of peasant carts’, wrote Likhachev, ‘which weren’t allowed into the city. The peasants lived in camps with their cattle and weeping children, who began to freeze to death on cold nights. To start with people went out to them to trade for milk and meat — they started slaughtering their cattle. But by the end of 1941 all these groups of peasants had frozen to death, as had the refugee women who had been packed into schools and other public buildings.’37

Likhachev exaggerated, but not by much. That the Leningrad authorities cruelly neglected refugees is confirmed by the NKVD, whose multifarious functions included inspecting the work of other government agencies. The living conditions of the 64,552 Karelian peasants (over a third of them children) housed in the city’s north-eastern suburbs, a report of late November complained, were ‘extremely unsatisfactory’. Their quarters were dark, dirty, unheated and lacked running water, and most had to sleep on the floor for lack of bedding. In the village of Toskovo, where eight hundred people had been put up in an unheated, broken-windowed school, they had started felling trees and demolishing farm buildings for fuel, despite which ten children had died of pneumonia in the past five days. The Toskovo peasants were also even worse fed than others, since the evacuation point’s head of supply (since arrested) had been holding back their ration cards, using ‘swindling combinations to obtain food for his own use’. No measures were being taken to prevent the spread of infectious disease: in one overflowing village a single doctor served five thousand people, and everywhere medical services were ‘weak’. ‘District organisations’, the report summed up, ‘ignore conditions at the evacuation points, and try to duck their responsibility to support the evacuee population. We consider it necessary to order district Party committees and soviet executive committees to sort out the evacuation points in their areas, and to improve evacuees’ cultural and living standards.’38

By the time the NKVD reported again, two months later, refugees were dying in large numbers. In Vsevolozhsk, an evacuation point on the city’s north-eastern perimeter, 130 corpses had been collected from homes and hostels. Another 170 had been found in the hospital, about a hundred lying unburied in the cemetery, and six on the streets. The NKVD’s own contribution to improving ‘cultural and living standards’ was characteristic. Eleven peasants had been arrested for displaying ‘anti-soviet attitudes’, and a twelfth for having slaughtered cats and dogs to eat. Others were accused of ‘attempting an organised uprising’. What they had actually tried to do was call a meeting to elect representatives to go to Moscow and ask Stalin for help.39

14. ‘Robinson Crusoe was a Lucky Man’

On 22 January 1942 Moscow’s State Defence Committee did what it should have done six months earlier, and ordered the mass evacuation of Leningrad. The Ice Road having frozen to the requisite thickness several weeks earlier, it was to take place by lorry, across Lake Ladoga. Aleksei Kosygin, deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (and later Brezhnev’s number two), was sent to oversee the programme, which was to cover 500,000 civilians, prioritising women, children and the elderly.