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Through the spring and summer of 1942, for those with the mental energy to follow them, Sovinform’s bulletins brought a torrent of bad news. The defeat of the Second Shock Army at Myasnoi Bor (inferred from the fact that it abruptly ceased to be mentioned) coincided with the encirclement and loss of 200,000 troops outside Kharkov, and with the abandonment of Crimea’s Kerch Peninsula, its defence hopelessly bungled by Lev Mekhlis, the ignorant hatchetman who had helped to bring Leningrad’s January offensive to disaster. The most cutting blow was the fall of Sevastopol, on 3 July. The naval base, historic home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, had been surrounded since the previous November, 106,000 Soviet troops holding out against 203,000 Germans and Romanians under Erich von Manstein. Its civilians, like Leningrad’s, had not been evacuated, but sheltered from intensive artillery bombardment in cellars, caves and catacombs, where they turned out clothing and munitions while feeding off cats and dogs.

Three days before Stalin finally ordered that Sevastopol be given up — the admiral in charge left by submarine — the press still boasted its invincibility: ‘We have seen the capitulation,’ thundered the Red Star, ‘of celebrated fortresses, of states. But Sevastopol is not surrendering. Our soldiers do not play at war. They fight a life and death struggle. They do not say “I surrender” when they see a couple of enemy men on the chessboard.’1

This was a fling at Tobruk, the Libyan port, vital to the British Eighth Army’s defence of Egypt, which Rommel had almost bloodlessly captured, together with 33,000 British and South African troops and large quantities of supplies, nine days earlier. Churchill got the news in the Oval Office, in the middle of a meeting with Roosevelt. ‘It was’, one of the generals present remembered, ‘a hideous and totally unexpected shock. For the first time in my life I saw the Prime Minister wince.’ In August Churchill flew, together with Roosevelt’s envoy Averell Harriman, to Moscow for his first summit with Stalin. He had to break the news that a promised landing in northern France was now put off indefinitely in favour of Operation Torch, aimed at attacking Rommel in the rear via Vichy-held Morocco and Algeria. Stalin’s reaction was so insulting that Churchill’s interpreter thought his Russian counterpart must be mistranslating. In fact, he had the dictator’s words perfectly — Stalin was telling his allies to their faces that they were frightened of the Germans.2

While the great powers wrangled, spring came to Leningrad. The ice rotted and broke on the canals, snow slid in water-heavy avalanches off roofs and balconies, and the straight-sided piles of fire-fighting sand, their retaining planks long gone for firewood, thawed and crumbled. At the Hermitage burst pipes flooded the cellar underneath the Hall of Athena, drowning a collection of eighteenth-century porcelain. Staff — by now nearly all women — waded into the murky water, awash with floating inventory labels, and delicately groped for Meissen goatherds and shepherdesses. Leaks sprang in the palace’s bomb-shaken roof, and army cadets who helped move antique furniture into the dry were thanked with a tour of the galleries by a museum guide, who talked them through the absent masterpieces empty frame by empty frame.3

As the hours of daylight lengthened and ration levels increased, Leningraders began to emerge from their ‘small radii’, reacquainting themselves with the outside world and with ordinary human feeling. Carrying basket and scissors, Olga Grechina combed the parks for the first dandelions and nettles — so many were doing the same that to find any she had to venture on to a firing range. When the trams started running again, on 15 April, people stumbled after them, laughing and crying.4 ‘In the dining room’, wrote Dmitri Likhachev of Pushkin House, ‘we met each other with the words “You’re alive! I’m so glad!” One learned with alarm that so-and-so was dead, that so-and-so had left town. People counted each other, counted up those who were left, as at roll-call in prison camp.’5

On May Day (to mark which food shops dressed their windows with artificial fruit and vegetables^*) the shipyard supervisor Vasili Chekrizov was pleased not only to see men going to work in ties and women in hats and lipstick, but also to see drunks. Normally they would have disgusted him, but this year they represented a welcome return to normality. A couple of weeks later he was amazed to wake up with an erection, and to hear, as he walked past a courtyard, a woman swearing and wailing. ‘I don’t know why she was weeping. All the same, tears are proof that the situation in Leningrad is improving. When every day hundreds of rag-wrapped corpses were being dragged along or thrown out onto the streets, there were no tears (or I didn’t see them).’6