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The death freed Marina and her younger sister Varvara to take jobs. They signed up as druzhinnitsy — unpaid auxiliaries, mostly teenage girls, who took on a wide variety of often dangerous wartime tasks under the direction of the police — at their mother’s workplace, the Hôtel de l’Europe, now requisitioned for use as a military hospital. Standing halfway down Nevsky Prospekt, the hotel — affectionately known as the ‘Yevropa’, or ‘Europe’ — was Leningrad’s oldest and grandest, founded in the 1830s and rebuilt, complete with lifts, air bells and central heating, in the 1870s. To the Yerukhmanov girls it seemed an ‘Elysium. . Everything was expensive and of good quality — furniture, carpets, curtains, crockery. . The showers still had hot water, and the laundry still functioned, where a languid, superior sort of woman handed us out our tunics. Everywhere order and cleanliness reigned.’ To start with they worked downstairs in the kitchens, under a giant, red-haired ‘tsar’ of a head chef, who was ceremoniously robed in full whites each morning and whose stomach wobbled as he walked. Upstairs, slender Tartar waiters with pomaded hair and ‘theatrical’ manners served the lightly wounded in the ground-floor ‘Big Restaurant’. ‘They taught us how to lay the tables, greet our “guests”. . God preserve you if you served food on cold plates.’ The head waiter gave the girls ‘scoldings, which he loved to pepper with the most shocking swear words. The first few times we didn’t know where to look. Mama said firmly, “Children, pretend you haven’t heard.”’ Though officially forbidden to sleep on the premises they quietly moved in, camping on a balcony above the riotously eclectic ‘Eastern’ dining room, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling, vaguely Egyptian plasterwork and great stained-glass window showing Viking longboats sailing down a river under the walls of an ancient Rus kremlin. Though she worked fifteen-hour days without pay, Marina remembered the hotel with gratitude: ‘Our Yevropa hid us and protected us, gave us time to catch our breath.’1

Marina’s mother’s first reaction, on hearing Molotov’s announcement of war, had been to send her daughters out to buy soap, and to light the stove, so that she could start making sukhari, the dried rusks that are a traditional Russian standby in times of food shortage. Others did the same: by the time the siege ring closed, Marina remembered, the only goods available for purchase were dried fruits and blanched almonds at the market, prohibitively expensive caviar in the shops and useless toys and sports equipment in the Passazh department store.

In 1941 a fifty-year-old Russian had lived through three major famines — the first of 1891–2, when drought hit the Volga steppe; the second of 1921–2, caused by grain requisitioning and the post-revolutionary Civil War, and the third of 1932–3, when the Bolsheviks violently collectivised peasant farms, condemning to death perhaps seven million people. Though privileged in normal times, Leningrad was particularly vulnerable, having always been dependent on food imports from the more fertile south. The bog-bound village of Myasnoi Bor, or ‘Meat Wood’ (just north of Novgorod and the site of a disastrous wartime encirclement in the spring of 1942), was named for the quantities of cattle which foundered there on their trek north to market in the capital. Though the collectivisation famine largely passed the city by, during the Civil War grass grew in the streets, so many were the Leningraders who fled to the villages in search of something to eat.