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This first major raid was of incendiaries — narrow, flanged cylinders which began to smoulder on impact unless doused with sand by the civil defence teams standing guard on the city’s roofs.3 A second raid, at 10.34 on the same evening, nobody could mistake for a drill: it was of forty-eight high-explosive bombs, ranging from 250 to 500 kilograms in weight, and killed twenty-four people, mostly around the Smolniy and Finland railway station. Also hit was the city zoo, next to the Peter and Paul Fortress. A staff member, a child and seventy animals were killed, including the zoo’s famous elephant, Betty, who had come to Petersburg from Hamburg six years before the Revolution. The monkeys were so traumatised, a zoologist noted, that ‘for a few days afterwards they sat silently, in a sort of stupor, not even reacting to the shells falling all around’.4

Olga Berggolts sat out the raid in the hallway of her flat. ‘For two whole hours my legs shook and my heart thumped, though outwardly I remained calm. I wasn’t consciously frightened, but how my legs trembled — ugh!’ As soon as it was over she ran to the Radio House to meet her colleague and lover Yuri Makogonenko. She loved her invalid husband, she confided to her diary, and knew that her affair with Yuri was ‘a whim’, but wanted ‘one more triumph. . Let me see him thirsty, frenzied, happy. . before the whistling death.’ She also wanted, despite the endless tension between loving her country and hating its government, to keep on working: ‘Tomorrow I have to write a good editorial. I have to write it from the heart, with what remains of my faith. . Nowadays I find it hard to put pen to paper, yet my pen moves, though my thoughts knock about in my head.’5

The blitz on Leningrad lasted off and on for the whole of the siege. It was at its most severe in the siege’s first weeks, then fell off first with the diversion of the Eighth Air Corps to Moscow, and again with the onset of deep, aircraft-grounding winter cold, before resuming in the spring of 1942. Altogether, according to Soviet sources, about 69,000 incendiary and 4,250 high-explosive bombs hit the city during the war. Though their total tonnage was not nearly as heavy as that which landed on London, Leningrad was geographically a much smaller city, and not only bombed but also increasingly heavily shelled, the pattern of bombing by night and gunfire by day taking a relentless toll on nerves, sleep and lives. In all 16,747 civilians were killed by enemy fire in Leningrad during the war, and more than 33,000 wounded.6

For the young, the raids were initially rather exciting. Igor Kruglyakov, the eight-year-old who had had his photograph taken with his father and uncles on the first day of the war, enjoyed watching incendiaries slide down the mansard roof of the Suvorov Museum, sneaked into the local cinema for free by mingling with the crowd after all-clears, competed with his friends to collect shell fragments (the rule was ‘finders keepers’, even if the fragment was too hot to pick up), and was delighted when his family moved to a safer ground-floor flat in another building, because it meant that he could pet the pigs and calves which peasant refugees had penned up in its courtyard. Teenagers, firewatching through the lovely, frightening nights, had adolescent love affairs. ‘Once, during a game of flirt [a parlour game]’, Klara Rakhman wrote after a shift standing guard at her school, ‘Vova write me a note — “What if I told you that I loved you?” I thought it was nothing but he carried on writing to me. I do realise that at a time like this it’s silly to start anything, but it was his initiative. . This evening he walked me home. I asked him whether what he wrote to me was true. He said it was.’7

Professor Vladimir Garshin, chief pathologist at Inber’s Erisman Hospital (and Anna Akhmatova’s lover), had no such compensations. For him, the raids meant a new sort of cadaver:

Shapeless lumps of human flesh, mixed with bits of clothing and brick dust, all smeared with gut contents. Relatives flooded in, some with faces motionless as masks, others screaming and shouting. It was hard to calm them down and make them answer questions, but we had to because there were death certificates to be filled out, and instructions to be taken on how to bury the dead. Those hours and days in the mortuary after raids I can never forget. Not the corpses — I saw lots in my decades of work — but the relatives. . To a certain extent I was accustomed to taking on part of the burden of grief and horror, but there it went beyond all limits. By evening your soul was paralysed; I would catch myself wearing the same sympathetic expression and using the same formulaic words. You were left feeling completely empty.8