Thunderous shelling. I looked at the clock to check the intervals [between hits]. Another crash, but this time no explosion — a dud must have hit a neighbouring building. Yet another crash, and the world reeled. We were hit. I looked up to see all the windowpanes fly out at once. And in flew the freezing January air.

Superhuman powers were born within me. I seized a winter coat, wrapped Mama up in it, and dragged her heavy bed out into the corridor, then into my own room. One of my windows was miraculously intact, and I stuffed the other with rags.26

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva spent the whole of the 18th and 19th in her bathroom, braced against the whistling and crashing outdoors. ‘I have to admit that the shelling throws my thoughts completely off track. In my head everything is twisted into a tight knot. Nobody can get used to this. Uncontrollable shaking overtakes me; my heart contracts. Every second you expect the shell that will end your life.’ That evening’s news bulletin made her weep for joy: Peterhof, Krasnoye Selo, Ropsha and eighty villages along the Volkhov had been freed.

Vera Inber, trying as usual to work in her room at the Erisman (‘Dear God, what a din!’), watched Red Cross buses driving back and forth from the railway stations, collecting wounded soldiers. How many, she wondered, were there in all the city hospitals put together? Surely, surely, their sacrifice could not be in vain? On the Sunday morning of 22 January — the day after Mga was liberated and von Küchler flew to the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ to demand permission to abandon Pushkin — she got a telephone call from the Writers’ Union telling her to be ready in an hour for a press tour of newly liberated Peterhof. The drive there took her through the recent battlefields. To the sides of the road, banks of rubble marked what had been villages; the fields, churned by artillery fire, were as brown as if new-ploughed. Sappers worked along a ditch with their dogs, and defused shells lay, finned and silvery, in rows on the verges, like displays of newly caught fish. Peterhof town itself was unrecognisable, a ‘strange, white, lunar’ landscape punctuated by a few fantastically shaped fragments of brick wall and a single ruined church. Rastrelli’s great baroque palace had been completely gutted by fire — it would ‘beyond human effort’, Inber immediately assumed, to restore it. On the drive home in the dark, by the light of a burning house, she saw a column of POWs. Dirty and unshaven, they were the first Germans she had seen for the whole of the war.

At eight o’clock on the evening of 27 January 1944 — four days after the last German shell fell on Leningrad — Inber made it from a Party meeting to the old riverside parade ground known as the Field of Mars just in time for the official victory salute. Parks, bridges and embankments were packed with people, mixed up with tanks and military motorbikes. From the dockyards in the west to the Smolniy in the east 324 guns fired twenty-four salvoes, flames shooting from their muzzles ‘like hellfire in old pictures’. Flares arched above the Neva, their crimson, green, blue and white reflected on the ice and on a sea of upturned faces. A searchlight picked out the gilded angel on top of the Peter and Paul spire, the beam so sharp that it seemed solid, a bridge up which one could walk to heaven. ‘The greatest event in the life of Leningrad’, Inber wrote in her diary later that night. ‘Complete liberation from the Blockade. And here, though I’m a professional writer, words fail me. I simply state that Leningrad is free.’27

Part 5. Aftermath

And it always surprises me.

When I descend with a lamp to the cellar,

It seems to me that a landslide

Rumbles again on the narrow stairs.

The lamp smokes, I can’t turn back

And I know that I am advancing on the enemy.

Anna Akhmatova, 1940

Sketch for a proposed memorial to the liberation of Leningrad (Aleksandr Vasilyev, February 1943)

22. Coming Home

The end, like the end of all great conflicts, left a vast silence — the silence of hushed sirens and guns, of the never-to-return missing and dead, and in Leningrad’s case, of grief and horror unexpressed, of facts falsified or left unsaid. It also meant new beginnings — militarily, of the great Soviet push to Berlin; privately, of facing up to loss and rebuilding lives; publicly, of repopulating and repairing an emptied and damaged city; politically, of new rounds of repression.