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At 60° north, Leningrad is on the same latitude as the Shetland Islands, and only a couple of degrees short of Anchorage. In midwinter, the sun rises at nine, hanging blindingly low in the sky until it sets again at three. Today, winter temperatures usually average around -10 °C, but in January 1942 they dipped into the -30s. Head-high snowdrifts blocked the streets, metre-long glassy spears hung off the tram wires and the women turning rocket-casings at the Bolshevik plant were able to score a length of metal piping, tap it with a hammer, and break it clean through. During the short, bright days, for those with the energy to notice, the city looked extraordinarily beautiful — the air, free of the usual coal smoke, dazzlingly clear; the snow, unsullied by vehicles, a chemical blue-white. During the eighteen hours of silent, blacked-out darkness (the cold had grounded the German bombers), one felt one was living at the bottom of a well, or in the depths of the ocean.

Leningraders saw in the New Year as best they could. Vera Inber spent the first part of the evening at a poetry reading held in the red drawing room of the Writers’ Union building on Shpalernaya, the long, rather dull boulevard, lined with government buildings, that runs from the centre of town to the Smolniy. A few small logs burned in the fireplace, and a single candle on the podium table. ‘It was very cold. My turn came. I moved closer to the candle and started on the first stanza of my new poem (I haven’t decided on a title yet). It was the first time I had read it in public. When I got to the part where I curse Germany I could hardly breathe — I had to stop and start again three times.’ At midnight, back at the Erisman Hospital, she and her husband went downstairs to the medical superintendent’s consulting room:

We took with us our last bottle of Riesling. We poured the wine into glasses, but then the telephone rang. It was the doctor on duty in Casualty, reporting that he had forty dead bodies lying in the corridors and some even in the bathroom. He didn’t know what to do. So the Medical Superintendent went down to Casualty, and we went back up to our room and bed.1

Vasili Chekrizov, returned from erecting pillboxes at the front, spent New Year’s Eve at the Sudomekh shipyard. For a month it had had no electricity: ‘We’re doing damn all, and this hurts morale. People should at least be allowed to go home, but the management keeps them here all day. . I’m told that in Workshop no. 3 they’re making eight to ten coffins daily — and that’s just in our one factory.’ Leningraders no longer, he noted, took any notice of shelling: he had seen passers-by fight for bits of a broken wooden fence in the midst of a bombardment; a colleague had seen a crowd tear to pieces a newly killed horse. ‘In an hour’, he wrote as midnight neared,

1942 will be with us. I’m sitting in our common room, lit only by the stove. In this respect at least, we’re well off — we’ve got almost unlimited firewood. I’m sitting re-warming the coffee in my cup. Radio reception is good for once — New Year’s Eve speeches. . It’s a hard way to meet the New Year — hunger and cold; people dying every day. But the speeches are full of optimism. The dark, difficult times are behind us. Though there’s no improvement in food supply you can almost smell the enemy’s destruction and retreat.

Like thousands of others, he thought of his wife and son: ‘How are Dina and Gelik? Did they get the money? If they did then they’re all right. What luck that they aren’t here. How could I have faced Gelik, seeing him hungry and not being able to do anything to help?’2

Yelena Kochina got up at four o’clock in the morning to queue for one of the bottles of wine distributed to mark the holiday:

The hours ran silently after one another like grey rats, disappearing into the darkness. But I kept on standing and standing, repeating to myself the chant — ‘Everything comes to an end, everything comes to an end. .’ The moon dimmed; the sky turned grey, then white, then blue. . The night had passed. At three o’clock in the afternoon I got the bottle with its pretty little shiny cap.

She took the bottle straight to a street market, where she was lucky to trade it (with a sailor) for a large piece of bread. Back at home, she and her husband passed the evening together in grim, apathetic silence:

Dima doesn’t steal bread any more. For days at a time now he lies with his face to the wall. . His face is covered with soot — even his fine pale eyelashes have become thick and black. I can’t imagine him clean, smart and neat like he used to be. But of course I’m not much better. Lice torment us both. We sleep together — we’ve only got one bed — but even through padded coats it’s unpleasant feeling the other’s touch.3