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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, and paintings and gramophone records.’ Interviewing Popkov, he was struck by the fact that he called himself Leningrad’s ‘mayor’ rather than chairman of its soviet, and, visiting an airbase, by the mottoes pinned up in the mess, which were drawn not from Lenin but from an etiquette manual of the pre-revolutionary Corps des Pages (‘Avoid gesticulating and raising your voice’, and ‘An officer’s strength lies not in impulsive acts, but in his imperturbable calm’). His elderly chambermaid at the Astoria, accepting a Lucky Strike, reminisced about the Egyptian Tanagras she had smoked when in service with a Princess Borghese, and of annual trips to Paris to buy lingerie at Paquin and Worth. On his final evening, Werth was taken to see a packed-out stage adaptation of Frank Capra’s comedy It Happened One Night, complete with show tunes, millionaire, detectives and gangsters — ‘all dressed like “real” Americans in the brightest light-blue and purple suits’. Everywhere, he noticed, pictures of Zhdanov outnumbered those of Lenin and Stalin. All in all, he came away with ‘the curious impression that Leningrad was a little different from the rest of the Soviet Union’, its traditional superiority complex heightened by awareness of having fought its ‘own show’, without Moscow’s help. There was even a rumour that it might become the capital again — if not of the whole Soviet Union, then of the Russian Republic.18

These hopes — for comfort, a degree of political pluralism, contact with the outside world and a special role for Leningrad — were almost entirely disappointed after the war. Living standards did — agonisingly slowly — improve, but for Leningraders, as for other Russians, the early Cold War years brought only renewed repression, reaching a climax in the late 1940s and early 1950s before falling sharply off with Stalin’s death in 1953.

With hindsight, that this would be so had always been obvious. No longer constrained by the war effort to pay heed to public opinion, and aware that soldiers returning victorious from Europe had a history of fomenting revolt, Stalin had no intention of loosening his grip. Though the Leningrad NKVD arrested fewer people than usual for political crimes in 1944 (373 in total), this was only because it was busy hunting down collaborators in the newly liberated towns round about. Arrests rose again in 1945.19 Censorship, having slackened slightly during the war, became stricter, especially in regard to 1941–2’s mass death. A handicapped twenty-year-old’s diary recorded, alongside her father’s death from starvation, the discovery of dismembered bodies in a musician neighbour’s flat. She read it aloud to friends; one of them informed on her and she was sent to the Gulag for six years. Violinists, in the official version, hadn’t spent the siege eating children, but playing Shostakovich in fingerless gloves.20 Inber criticised Berggolts for continuing to produce ‘sad, old-fashioned’ poetry, only to find that a Writers’ Union meeting damned her own work as ‘repulsive’, ‘clinical’ and ‘torture to read’.21 At the Radio House, staff were ordered to destroy wartime recordings of unscripted interviews with ordinary members of the public; instead, they took the reels home hidden under their coats, or filed them in boxes labelled ‘folk music’. Fridenberg, commissioned (by, she was appalled to discover, the NKVD) to collect accounts of ‘Leningrad heroines’, was steered towards ‘favourites and pets of the authorities. . Everything living, everything genuine was inadmissible. . Though much that was unbelievably tragic was conveyed to me orally, nobody dared write down the truth.’22

Remaining hopes for a ‘Leningrad Spring’ were dashed, very publicly and deliberately, in the summer of 1946, by a crackdown on the Leningrad intelligentsia. Initiated by Stalin, it was deputised to Zhdanov, by now back in Moscow and widely touted as Stalin’s successor. He chose as his victims Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, picking them out for their popularity (‘I knew I was doomed the moment a girl ran up to me and dropped on her knees’, Akhmatova said of a triumphant public poetry reading) and because they embodied the clever, sceptical, Europhile Leningrad spirit. As the writer Konstantin Simonov put it in his memoirs: