To The Tashkent Station by rebecca manley

Author:rebecca manley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

The journey to Tashkent was long and arduous. Moreover, as Georgii Efron noted in his diary en route, the “routes that lead there are numerous.” 159 Those traveling from the north tended to take the route through Chkalov, formerly Orenburg. The Orenburg-Tashkent line had been built in the early twentieth century, connecting the central Asian colony to the metropole. 160 Before the war, the journey usually took under a week. For those traveling east in 1941, however, the journey was almost always longer. Whereas Kornei Chukovskii traveled the distance in just over a week, Maria Belkina’s train took eleven days, Zinaida Stepanishcheva’s fifteen days, and Georgii Efron’s over three weeks. Elena Dobychina, setting out from Leningrad, journeyed for twenty days, and Victor Zhirmunskii one month. 161 The railway lines were overburdened in both directions. On some lines in the region, trains were moving on average no faster than 200 kilometers per day. 162 Georgii Efron’s diary contains a running chronicle of his echelon’s progress: on the fourth day of the journey, he noted that “our train advances by 100 to 200 meters, then stops for a good half-dozen hours. It would be truly comical if it weren’t so sad.” 163

Although the train route through Chkalov was undoubtedly the most direct route to Tashkent, it was not the only one. Evacuees from Moscow and Leningrad often traveled the more roundabout northern route, setting out along the Trans-Siberian railway and then cutting south at Novosibirsk along the Turksib railway, built in the 1930s, through Alma-Ata and on to Tashkent. This was the route taken by Anna Akhmatova and Lydia Chuk ovskaia, who joined a writer’s echelon headed for Tashkent in Kazan. 164 Polish citizens recently released from confinement in northern Kazakhstan likewise approached Tashkent from the north.

Most common among the “disorganized” population, however, was the far more arduous southern route. Former inhabitants of southern Russia and the Ukraine, as well as people who had been evacuated to these regions in the first several months of the war, frequently came via the Caspian Sea and the Turkmen desert. Tatiana Okunevskaia recounts how her mother-in-law, who lived in the town of Zaporozhe, in southern Ukraine, found her in Tashkent: “when the Germans entered the city, her son remained at work, but she ran from her house to the railway station and got on some kind of departing platform…. Finding out somehow that I was in Tashkent, she began making her way toward me. Her route was terrible: south across the Caspian Sea, across Turkmenistan, two months she was hungry, unwashed, lice-ridden.” 165

This was an improvised route, a route that was nowhere to be found in the fairly intricate plans of the Evacuation Council, which charted how many trains would leave which destination for where. Throughout the fall of 1941, and again during the Germans’ spring and summer offensives of 1942, hundreds of thousands of people descended, unplanned and often by foot, upon the city of Makhachkala, on the shores of the Caspian Sea. 166

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