her old room next to Nikolai Punin’s in an annexe to the Sheremetyev Palace. Its windows were repaired thanks to Olga Berggolts, who begged help from a conservator at the Public Library. When she stressed Akhmatova’s importance, the man told her not to insult his intelligence — ‘I am literate!’ — and removed the necessary glass — ‘I think they will forgive us’ — from some framed prints of great nineteenth-century writers.
Churkin, both of his sons having died at the front and his wife of starvation, had nobody to come home to at all. Put up by friends, it was three days before he could bring himself to visit his own flat. It had been broken into:
An awful mess; the thieves had turned everything upside down. All the clothes — suits and coats — and valuables gone. Everything that didn’t interest them strewn about the floor. . All I took was our photo album. Here they are, my darlings, looking silently up at me. I’ll never see them again. I felt such pain that I burst into tears.10
Out in Yaroslavl, Irina Bogdanova was luckier. Though she too had lost her whole immediate family, she remembered the address of some family friends — four spinster sisters, of aristocratic Polish background, in whose tar-paper cottage in a dacha village east of Leningrad she had once stayed for the summer. On receiving Irina’s letter — written in a childish hand, with polite enquiries as to the health of their cat and dog — the two surviving sisters (the others had died of starvation) immediately made the journey to Yaroslavl and took Irina home, subsequently bringing her up as their own. As they saved her so she now preserves the memory of them — a clutch of turn-of-the-century studio photographs, printed on gilt-edged board, of handsome young women with tiny waists and thick, upswept hair. Their hats, wide and white, are topped with doves’ wings.
Leningrad also, of course, needed physical repair. Though nothing like flattened Kharkov, Minsk or Stalingrad — or even, according to people who saw both, London — it had been hit by over 150,000 heavy artillery shells and over 10,000 bombs and incendiaries during the siege.11 Few were the unbroken windows, uncracked walls, roofs that did not leak. The Hermitage, miraculously only directly hit twice during the siege, put in a bill for sixty-five tonnes of plaster, a hundred tonnes of cement, six thousand square metres of glass, eighty tonnes of alabaster and six kilos of gold leaf.
As the city refilled, demand for undamaged housing increased, sharpening disputes between returnees and the new occupants, legal or otherwise, of their vacated flats. Ex-servicemen, and civilians who had been evacuated individually (the political and cultural elite), in theory got back their pre-war accommodation automatically, but civilians who had been evacuated with their workplaces (the rank and file) did not. In practice, even for the first two categories restitution often required bribery and pull. A law forcing the return of valuables bartered away at knockdown prices was not properly enforced either, and it was a common post-war experience to see a familiar picture hanging on the wall of a hard-currency shop, or a mother’s brooch on the lapel of a stranger.12
The worst architectural losses were the imperial summer palaces. One of the first to see Pavlovsk, eight days after its liberation, was Anna Zelenova. Given permission, but no transport, to go and find out what had become of it, she set out on foot. It wasn’t a lonely walk, she gleefully wrote to a colleague in evacuation, because she was kept company by flocks of crows, circling above all the unburied German corpses. One had been propped up against a fence and a note attached: ‘Wanted to get to Leningrad. Didn’t make it’. At the entrance to Pavlovsk park she saw that the central pillar of its double gates had been demolished to make way for tanks. The park itself was cut about with shell craters, tree stumps, dugouts and firing points. In one bunker she found tapestries with swastikas cut out of them, in another oil paintings and a grand piano. Inlaid doors had been used to make footbridges across ditches, mahogany wardrobes turned into latrines. The palace itself — torched, like Peterhof, by the Germans on departure — had been burning for ten days:
The dome has gone, and the clock towers, and the Rossi library has burned to the ground, including its walls. There’s no right wing or throne room, no trellised gallery above the colonnades. The picture gallery has gone, the chapel, the whole Palace. . Looking in through the ground-floor windows you can see the sky, and the only way you can tell which room is which is by the remaining fragments of plasterwork on the walls.
Inside, Zelenova found graffiti, remnants of parquet flooring like half-done puzzles, and piles of empty wine bottles. Charred beams still smoked and molten lead dripped from what was left of the roof on to her camera. The statue of Tsar Paul in front of the main entrance had been turned into a telegraph pole, his bicorne hat draped with cables. (‘I’m so glad that Pavel stands with his back to the palace.’)
In flattened Pushkin, the Catherine and Alexander Palaces stood equally in ruins, the Catherine in part because the Red Army had failed to defuse two sets of delayed action bombs, the second of which exploded on 3 February, more than a week after liberation: ‘A shameful disgrace — people should have been at their posts in the first few hours’, Zelenova’s colleague wrote back when she told him the news.13 For years after the war his own job would be to scour the roads to Berlin for looted imperial treasures. Among those never found were the delicately carved panels of the Catherine Palace’s fabled Amber Room, given to Peter the Great by Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Hidden behind fake walls, they had quickly been discovered by the occupying Nazis, who packed them into crates and sent them to Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) in Eastern Prussia. Last seen in Konigsberg’s castle, what happened to them next is a mystery. Treasure-hunters notwithstanding, today’s best guess is that they were destroyed by a fire which swept through the building a few days after it fell to the Red Army in April 1945.14
The palaces’ deliberate destruction, according to the journalist Alexander Werth, ‘aroused among the Russians as great a fury as the worst German atrocities against human beings’. Like most, he initially assumed them to be unrestorable. Standing at the top of Peterhof’s grand cascade, soviet chairman Petr Popkov is said to have waved a hand at the blackened shell in front of him and declared ‘This will all be razed!’15 Others thought the ruins should be left as a monument to Nazi brutality, or replaced by workers’ housing.
The decision to rebuild, taken by Stalin himself, was in tune with a new public mood that swept over the whole Soviet Union at the end of the war. First, everyone simply yearned for an easier, pleasanter, ‘normal’ life. Olga Grechina, scratching around for a respectable wardrobe for her new start at university, acquired new boots by taking the blades off a pair of skates. Marina Yerukhmanova, sacked from the Yevropa, adopted a stray St Bernard — the same breed her grandparents had owned — which she fed Eskimo ice creams and hoisted on to pavement weighing machines. (It had been rescued, she liked to think, by victorious
Second, people realised that Communism was here to stay. Before the war, it had been possible to regard the regime as something temporary. The conversational code for tsarism had been ‘the peaceful time’, implying the possibility of return to a natural order. Now the phrase fell out of use: Leningrad had permanently replaced Petersburg. But third, people wanted this Communism to be of a different sort. Having fought, worked and suffered for their country for four years, they felt that they had earned the right to be trusted by its government. They longed for the ordinary decencies of civilised life — security, comfort, entertainment — but also for freedom to express their opinions, explore the outside world, and genuinely to participate in public life. In the first post-war elections to the Supreme Soviet Leningraders defaced their ballots, scribbling ‘When are you going to abolish Communist serfdom?’ ‘Give us bread and then hold elections’; ‘Down with hard labour in the factories and collective farms’, or even crossing out the candidate’s name and writing ‘For Adolf Hitler’. ‘It’s humiliating’, an actor at the Aleksandrinka was overheard to exclaim. ‘You feel like a machine, a pawn. How can you vote when there’s only one name on the list?’17
Alexander Werth, allowed briefly to report from Leningrad in September 1943, had sensed the yearning for change. A banquet in his honour at the Writers’ Union featured the usual toasts to Churchill and Eden, but he detected behind them ‘more even than in Moscow. . a real thirst for close future contacts with the West. They thought in terms of harbours and ships — ships carrying passengers to and fro, and goods, and books and music,
