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Though the evacuation programme was compulsory, a substantial minority of Leningraders tried to evade it, fearing that they would not survive the journey, being loath to abandon relatives, or suspecting (often rightly) that once they left their flats they would never get them back again. One such was Aleksandr Boldyrev, pressured by his bosses into leaving with surviving Hermitage staff for Kislovodsk in the Caucasus: ‘To go with dystrophy, in the cold. . leaving the flat, Mama and everything, when here, maybe, we are on the eve of success. I can’t do it. . Apparently the Shtakelberg mother, sister and brother all died before they even set off, as did the bookkeeper Ponamarev. Their bodies were thrown off the evacuation train on to the platform of Finland Station.’1 Vera Inber, unconsciously echoing Britain’s Queen Elizabeth during London’s Blitz, declared that her husband was staying with his students and she was staying with her husband.2 Olga Grechina simply felt that to go would have been ‘like abandoning the front’. A student friend of Georgi Knyazev’s wanted to stay because she had only three more exams to go to complete her degree, and because she did not want to abandon her mother and aunts.3

With no choice whether to stay or go were thousands of ethnic German and Finnish peasants from the besieged villages around Leningrad, whose deportation had been ordered too late by Beria the previous summer. It was carried out, with customary brutality, by the military, under the direction of ‘troikas’ of local Party, soviet and NKVD bosses. Quotas were set for each district, deportees given only a few hours to pack, and their livestock and food stores confiscated amidst arson and looting.4 The net effect was to strip the countryside around Leningrad of its farmworkers, with predictable effects on summer 1942’s food production. In the ‘Oranienbaum pocket’, for example, the deportation of 4,775 peasants completely emptied twelve collective farms, and left another eight with only a handful of families.5 Though some deportees feared they would be killed — ‘taken across the bay and pushed under the ice’ as a rumour went — in other cases ethnic Russians actually begged to be included. The Oranienbaum report also cites several instances of Red Army officers attempting to save Finns from deportation — taken as worrying proof that ‘some military comrades have become so much part of the local population that they identify themselves with local interests, forgetting those of the state’. In total, from the start of the war to 1 October 1942, 128,748 people were forcibly deported out of the blockade ring, of whom slightly under half were ethnic Germans or Finns, and the rest ‘criminals’ or ‘socially alien elements’.6

Within the city, however, the large majority of Leningraders were desperate to get out, forming frantic crowds outside evacuation offices and fiercely resenting superiors who jumped the queue. ‘Why are they sending away all the factories, the institutes and the best cadres?’ one man was overheard to complain. ‘Apparently they’re not so sure that the Germans aren’t going to take Leningrad.’ The Germans, said another, were preparing a big attack for the spring: ‘The bosses take care of themselves and get out first, but we can be left behind.’7 Even for those included in the programme, the practicalities involved were daunting. As well as being passed strong enough to travel and free from infectious disease, evacuees had to walk from office to office in search of stamps and paperwork, sell belongings so as to buy food for the journey, pack the permitted sixty pounds per person of luggage and drag it over the Liteiniy Bridge to Finland Station — all crippling tasks for the exhausted and emaciated. That the effort finished off many is demonstrated by the fatality figures for Finland Station’s medical checkpoint: of the 2,564 people it processed from the beginning of February to 13 April, 230 died on the spot.8