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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 Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in Eastern Prussia. Last seen in Königsberg’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 tankisti from some abandoned German Schloss.) Nikolai Ribkovsky, the apparatchik who dined off ham and turkey at a Party rest-house in the middle of the mass death, looked forward to the day when he could afford to take a girl to the Mariinsky and treat her to coffee and cake in the interval. Botanists at the Botanical Gardens drew up a wish list of sunny countries to which they wanted to launch new plant-collecting expeditions — India, Madagascar, Java, Australia and Ceylon.16

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