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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.’)