Leningrad

In a crisis, these men’s first instinct was to make arrests. At one o’clock on the morning of the Friday following the invasion, Yelena Skryabina and her husband were woken by the doorbell: ‘Anyone who lives in the Soviet Union knows what the purpose of such an especially long night-time ring is. It is the sound that means a search warrant or an order for arrest. But this time it turned out to be a summons from the draft board.’ Four days later she heard that a colleague had been less lucky: ‘They came at night, searched, found nothing, confiscated nothing, but took her away anyway. All I know is that the head of the institute where we both work is very hostile to her. It could be that the charge is “foreign ties”.’ Having spent longer than she meant to visiting the woman’s family, Skryabina returned home to find her own family convinced that she had been arrested too.12

The most predictable victims of the new wave of terror that broke over Leningrad on the outbreak of war were the city’s ethnic Germans. Descendants of German-speaking Balts, of the peasant settlers invited to plough the southern steppe by Catherine the Great, or of the numerous Germans who later came to make professional or service careers under the tsars, most had lived in Russia for generations and were indistinguishable from ordinary Russians save for their surnames. (Some tried to evade deportation by changing their names, others by pretending to be Jewish.13) In a procedure already well honed in the Baltics and eastern Poland, they were given twenty-four hours in which to prepare for departure, in overcrowded goods wagons, into what was euphemistically called ‘compulsory evacuation’ to the Arctic, Central Asia, Siberia and the Far East. About 23,000 ethnic Germans and Finns were thus deported in the summer of 1941, and another 35,162 in March 1942, across the ice of Lake Ladoga.14 Among them were the Tribergs, who lived on the Nevsky above what had once been the family business, the well-known ‘Aleksandr’ shoe shop. ‘They were just a family’, a neighbour remembered sixty years later:

They lived across the landing from us, on the same staircase of number 11 Nevsky Prospekt. .

There were three children, two boys and a three-year-old girl. The two older ones, twelve and sixteen years old, sometimes used to come round. I took German lessons from their mother and aunt, such beautiful, elegant, intelligent women. The boys’ mother was especially kind, as well as highly intellectual. The elder son seemed to have inherited all his mother’s talents, and those of his father too, an engineer who spoke several European languages. I can say with certainty that the country lost a future scholar when it lost this young man.

More precisely, it lost them all. This is how it happened:

In 1938 they arrested the father

In 1941 they likewise arrested the mother

In 1944 she was shot.

The sons were left orphans with nothing whatsoever: all their possessions were confiscated. As a consequence, the older son died from starvation, since they had nothing to trade for bread. The younger son remained with his aunt and her little daughter. They were living shadows: a woman dying from starvation and two dystrophic [emaciated] children. In this condition they were deported from Leningrad — over the ice of Lake Ladoga.

During the journey the aunt died and the two surviving children were separated, never to meet again. Thus perished a family, as the neighbour drily noted ‘during the last war with the Germans, but not, strictly speaking, at the hands of the Germans’.15

Also deported or arrested in large numbers (71,112 up to October 1942, according to security service documents) were ‘socially alien’ and ‘criminal-felonious’ elements among the general population. In practice this meant the same sorts of people targeted during the 1936–8 purges: members of the old bourgeoisie (‘de-classed elements’), peasants (‘former kulaks’), ethnic minorities (‘nationalists’), churchgoers (‘sectarians’), the wives and children of earlier repression victims (‘relatives of enemies of the people’), and anyone with foreign connections or knowledge of a foreign language (‘spy-traitors’). As usual it could be fatal simply to air a grumble or state the obvious — the Soviet Union’s first execution for ‘spreading defeatist rumours’ was recorded in Leningrad at the beginning of July. Hundreds of ordinary people were arrested for complaining about their working hours, predicting a bad harvest, or passing on news of the bombing of Kiev and Smolensk.16