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On the opposite ‘mainland’ shore, reception facilities were worse than inadequate. Diarists describe queuing for hours for soup, being unable to find anywhere to sleep, and fighting for places on the trains onwards through unoccupied Russia. Nor, when food was available, were measures initially taken to prevent the starving from killing themselves by overeating. A doctor ordered to set up a medical station at Zhikharevo discovered that evacuees were immediately eating all the dry rations — smoked sausage and bread — given them for the three-day train journey onward to Tikhvin, and bursting their stomachs. Having pleaded in vain with the chief of the evacuation centre to change his arrangements, he eventually managed to get a meeting with visiting representatives of Moscow’s State Defence Committee. Having described the results of his autopsies he persuaded them that evacuees should instead be fed in small quantities en route, with millet and semolina cooked in the train boilers.18

A typical account of the whole — resoundingly Soviet — evacuation experience comes from Vladimir Kulyabko, a widowed sixty-five-year-old refrigeration engineer. Having survived the first half of the winter on gifts from a neighbour who worked in a food shop, in February he was offered a place on one of the first convoys across the Ice Road. He accepted, hoping to reach his son, an army doctor stationed in Cherepovets, a town 400 kilometres east of Leningrad on the railway line to Vologda. Telling the manager of his apartment building that he was merely moving into another flat, he left the keys with a neighbour and paid another in kerosene, macaroni and nuts to help him get his luggage to Finland Station. Including stops to rest on sandboxes, the three-kilometre walk took two hours. Having been due to leave at 10.30 in the morning, the train did not appear until 6 p.m., at which point Kulyabko found his assigned carriage taken up by baggage-laden ‘businessmen’. He managed to squeeze himself and his suitcase, basket and pillow into the draughty section at the end of the carriage where in normal times smokers gathered. The train finally got under way at 1 a.m., and food was handed out. To get any, Kulyabko soon realised, he would have to pay a bribe. A note — ‘400g of bread for Kulyabko, money enclosed, no need for change’ — did the trick. ‘In ten minutes I had my bread. Having learned from experience, I did the same thing for the soup.’ On arrival at Osinovets six hours later he noticed fifteen corpses lying beside the tracks.

Getting on to a lorry to cross the lake, he took some time to work out, required more bribery:

I waited, hungry and unfed like everyone else (despite the fact that in Leningrad we had been promised three meals a day and given the appropriate coupons). At about 5 p.m. I found the man in charge but he fobbed me off with some meaningless nonsense or other, and I realised I wouldn’t be going anywhere soon. The lorries came and went, but the people in charge chose who to let on themselves, not following any sort of list or queue. . I approached the boss once again, telling him that I was ill and that I was going to join my son, a decorated soldier.

Shortly afterwards he was approached by an overseer, who settled on 500 grams of tobacco in exchange for a place on the first closed lorry to come along. Four hours later Kulyabko was aboard, having cannily refused to hand over the bribe until he was actually seated inside with his luggage. ‘The same system of bribery, but much pettier, pertained in the lorry itself. The driver constantly asked for cigarettes, which he was given. Otherwise the lorry went slowly, or things went wrong all the time. A cigarette given at just the right moment made all these problems disappear.’ Having spent three hours stuck in a jam with food trucks heading the other way, the lorry finally arrived on the ‘mainland’ at five the next morning.

Though Kulyabko had now escaped the siege ring, this was far from the end of his difficulties. First he had to queue three hours for kasha and soup, for which evacuees were expected to produce their own plate and spoon — he got round the problem by giving the waitress fifty roubles and his passport as security for a bowl. When a train arrived, it was mobbed by the frantic crowd. Paying thirty roubles to a soldier to carry his luggage, Kulyabko managed to climb into a goods wagon with some emaciated engineering students, who refused him space round its hay-stoked stove. Five sleepless nights and days later, punctuated by long queues for food, petty thefts and the death of one of the students, whose friends pushed his corpse out of the train window, he reached Cherepovets: