From 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944 – some 900 days – Leningrad was under siege from Hitler’s forces. It is almost incredible that any city could withstand the technology of twentieth-century warfare for so long a period. One third of the population died, more than half of them from hunger, but the city survived. Then Stalin completed the tragedy that Hitler had begun by arresting and executing the Party workers who led the struggle for survival. Hundreds of minor officials, writers and artists, were also arrested.

The museum’s magnificent architectural complex was hit by thirty-two shells and two bombs, but it remained standing with all its windows, some five acres of glass, shattered and boarded up with plywood. The cream of the collection spent the war years at Sverdlovsk in the Urals, better known by its pre-revolutionary name of Ekaterinburg. It was there that Nicholas II and his family had been held by the Bolsheviks in 1918, and then executed and secretly buried. The house where the imperial family had lived spent World War II as one of the Hermitage storerooms.

The great museum on the Neva came back to life on 8 November 1944 with an exhibition of art works that had not been evacuated. And on 4 November 1945, the first sixty-eight rooms of the museum, restored to their former glory and filled with their former collections, were opened to the public. Despite the dangers associated with packing over a million objects and sending them 1,500 miles by train in wartime, despite the bombs, shells, ice and floods that threatened the works of art that were left behind, very little of the collection was lost. And the building was patched and painted until it looked like new. No one today could guess at the ordeal it went through. In bad weather, however, the building still springs leaks where the shells hit it, according to the present director, like an old soldier troubled by his war wounds.

It is impossible to write about Leningrad during World War II except in terms of heroism. Those who lived through it and, indeed, those who died, may not have chosen the hero or heroine’s role but it was thrust upon them. The first winter, from October 1941 to March 1942, was the period of fiercest suffering. The food ration would not sustain life; people ate dogs and cats and any food substitute that came to hand. Many died of hunger in the street. The survivors did not have the strength to break the frozen earth and bury them; on the outskirts of the city, piles of corpses lined the roadway. After March 1942 the rail link to the rest of Russia was secure enough for a mass evacuation of the city and there was more food for those who remained. However, the links were tenuous and the Germans continued to pound the city with shells and bombs until January 1944. Contemplating the stories of the siege, as recorded by its poets and intelligentsia, one is filled with awe at the resilience of the human spirit. Lidiya Ginzburg’s Blockade Diary conveys something of the feel of it:

Whoever had energy enough to read, used to read War and Peace avidly in besieged Leningrad. Tolstoy had said the last word as regards courage, about people doing their bit in a people’s war. He also spoke of how those caught up in this common round continued playing their part involuntarily, while ostensibly busy solving problems affecting their own lives. The people of besieged Leningrad worked (while they could) and saved (if they could) both themselves and their loved ones from dying of hunger. And in the final reckoning, that was also essential to the war effort, because a living city barred the path of an enemy who wanted to kill it.

It all began in the early hours of the morning of 22 June 1941 when Hitler’s forces invaded Russia simultaneously from the north, the west and the south. Most people only discovered this at midday when Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister, broadcast over the radio. There were loudspeakers mounted in all city streets in Soviet times and people gathered round them to hear Molotov speak:

Stalin had obstinately refused to see the war coming, despite intelligence reports and the massing of German troops on the frontier. He is reputed to have suffered a nervous breakdown after the invasion, which put him out of action for many weeks. Preparations for war had been generally forbidden in case the Germans interpreted them as aggression, but Iosif Orbeli had been secretly stockpiling the packing materials that would be needed to evacuate the Hermitage collection.

At 11 a.m. on Sunday 22 June, the Hermitage doors had opened as usual and a large crowd poured in to admire the collection; guided tours had begun their slow progress around the galleries. After the noon announcement the museum emptied. Orbeli ordered that the forty most important paintings be taken down and stored in the special, steel-clad, windowless galleries on the ground floor which housed the jewellery and Scythian gold – where they would be most likely to survive a bombing raid. At this time, Russians expected something like the London Blitz to be repeated in Leningrad.

In faraway Armenia, Boris Piotrovsky had just begun his summer excavations of the Urartian fortress at Karmir-Blur. Since the excavations were within sight of the Turkish border, he was ordered to continue his work there for several days after the invasion so that the enemy should see that Russia was unperturbed by Hitler’s challenge. He travelled back to Leningrad in the early days of July in a train that was already observing the blackout – the guard had only candles and lamps in the corridors. Piotrovsky was to live in the Hermitage through the cruel winter of 1941–2 and became its principal chronicler.

On 23 June, the day after the invasion, Orbeli ordered the preparation of the Hermitage treasures for evacuation, a fantastic packing marathon which continued without pause for six days and nights. Nature was on their side. During the famous ‘white nights’ of St Petersburg the sun never completely sets. The longest day, 21 June, had only just passed and the packers could see what they were doing throughout the night.

‘It was as if we had all been confined to barracks,’ the Byzantinist Alisa Bank wrote.

The work went on twenty-four hours a day. In the pre-war years, there was no artificial light in the exhibition rooms but the ‘white nights’ meant that we didn’t have to stop packing even for an hour. The box in which we placed the objects stood on the floor and we had to work bent over all the time. Soon many of us developed a kind of professional illness – nose bleeds. In a nearby room there were some folding beds. You would lie down and rock your head until the bleeding stopped and then rush back to the boxes. We didn’t stop for days. But how many days can you go without sleep? You’re finally exhausted and just before morning you collapse for half an hour wherever you can – on the same folding bed or on a sofa, on the box you’ve just packed or on chairs placed in a row in the chancellery. You lose consciousness immediately. You fall into emptiness and half an hour or an hour later some inner spring, some nervous impulse, switches on your consciousness once more. You jump up, shake yourself off and back to work.

The head of the picture gallery, Vladimir Levinson-Lessing, was more interested in the technicalities:

With thousands of paintings to pack, the staff of the Hermitage was not sufficient to get the work done in time. Art historians and artists poured in to help from all over the city, including a team of students from the Academy of Arts who had copied paintings in the Hermitage before the war. Only one painting got a crate to itself, Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son, which was considered too fragile to roll up, but there was great anxiety over whether the crate that Orbeli had ordered for it was too large to get into a railway truck. Throughout the six days, scholars and restorers debated whether it was better to risk damaging the surface of Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross by rolling it up or to leave it in Leningrad at Hitler’s mercy. It was eventually decided to roll it.

Only the two Leonardos, Raphael’s Connestabile Madonna and the Italian primitives, painted on panel, were packed with their frames. Under Orbeli’s instructions the rest of the frames were left hanging in their original positions on the walls. This, he thought, would facilitate the laborious process of matching each picture with its frame when they returned and speed up the reopening of the museum.

Each different material posed different packing problems. Experts from the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory came in to help pack the porcelain. The large, silver wine ewer of the fourth century BC, embossed with ornamental birds and scenes from Scythian life, which had been found in the Chertomlyk burial mound, was so fragile that it was decided to fill it with crumbled cork. However, the wine strainer soldered across its neck prevented access and two devoted ladies spent days feeding cork into the vase with teaspoons through a crack in its lip.

Carlo Rastrelli’s waxwork figure of Peter the Great had to be dismantled. First his clothes were removed – blue caftan, waistcoat, shirt of fine holland and the actual breeches Peter had worn at his wife Catherine’s coronation. Then the figure was taken to pieces and the wooden body, arms and legs packed separately from the wax head, feet and hands. Houdon’s marble statue of the seated Voltaire was the last to leave. The naval ratings who had been called in to help pack the lorries for the journey to the station placed runners under Voltaire’s chair and rolled the statue up to the top of the New Hermitage’s ceremonial staircase. Having covered all three flights of marble steps with planks, they used a system of ropes and pulleys to allow the statue to roll slowly down them and into the massive crate which awaited him in the vestibule.

Igor Diakonoff, a young Orientalist, stood beside the Atlantes at the main entrance with a list of the boxes and their numbers. He had to check which boxes went into a lorry and get the driver to sign for them. ‘I stood there for more than 24 hours, repeating the same formula, lorry after lorry. After that I would wake up in the night muttering “the accompanying personnel to sign for the contents”. There were more than a thousand boxes.’ After it was finished, he went upstairs with some friends to the galleries where the pictures used to hang: ‘We saw only shavings and empty frames and we wept.’

The train which pulled out of the Leningrad goods yard at dawn on 1 July had been intended for the evacuation of the Kirov armaments factory. It was Orbeli’s luck that the factory’s move was delayed. First a pilot locomotive went ahead to clear the tracks. Then came the train: two engines, an armoured car carrying the most valuable items, four linked Pullmans for other special treasures, a flat car with an anti-aircraft battery, twenty-two freight cars filled with art, a passenger car filled with Hermitage staff, a passenger car containing a military guard and, finally, a second flat car with a second anti-aircraft battery. Orbeli was at the station to watch it leave. Even those on board did not know where they were going.

The first train contained most of the works of art generally on display in the museum, some half a million items. A second train left on 20 July containing the next echelon of art owned by the Hermitage – just short of a million pieces packed into twenty-three freight cars. By this time able-bodied staff were being recruited for the People’s Volunteers, the scratch army that the city threw against the Germans with savage losses. They were trained on Palace Square, outside the Hermitage windows, as a motley team of architects, professors and students replaced them as packers. Other members of the Hermitage staff spent their days helping to dig the circle of trenches around the city which finally stopped the German tanks.

At this point the packing materials that Orbeli had secretly ordered before the war ran out. Militsa Matthieu, a noted scholarly expert on ancient Egypt, was made deputy director and given the responsibility of finding packaging material. Indefatigably, she rang shops and warehouses around the city, begging for anything from carpenters to egg boxes, and a third trainload was packed and made ready. But with too great a delay. On 30 August the Germans cut off Leningrad’s railway connections with the rest of the Soviet Union and the evacuation of treasures was cancelled. The 351 crates that Matthieu had prepared were never moved from the long pillared corridor of the Rastrelli Gallery on the ground floor of the Winter Palace.

The cream of the Hermitage collections thus spent the war at Sverdlovsk with the much-loved director of the Western European Department, Vladimir Levinson-Lessing, in charge of them. The small, spectacled expert on Rembrandt and the Netherlandish school, a passionate collector of antiquarian books, was faced with the problem of storing securely one and a half million art treasures in a town of half a million residents, to which a series of armaments factories were also being evacuated – he had to fight for buildings, transport lorries, fuel.

The first trainload filled the local museum, whose own displays were packed away into the cellar. Voltaire, as usual, caused problems. His crate would not go through the door and had to be swung into the gallery through a first-floor window. The crate containing Alexander Nevsky’s silver sarcophagus would not even go through the window. It had to be unpacked, the sarcophagus carried in on its own and the crate reassembled inside. The treasures were hardly installed before the second train arrived under the care of Mikhail Gryaznov, the keeper of Siberian antiquities who had helped open the famous tombs of Pazyryk. It was pouring with rain the night the train reached Sverdlovsk and the police guards summoned Levinson-Lessing to meet a soaked professor who was beating suspiciously on the door.

There was now no more room in the museum and they had to search the town for other buildings, eventually obtaining the use of the single-storey Anti-Religious Museum and a church. The former had tiled stoves which would keep the exhibits too hot while the church had no heating at all. After a careful assessment, the Hermitage treasures were divided up into those which could best survive cold or heat and distributed accordingly. They were also assigned the house where Nicholas II’s family had died, though this particular storeroom is not mentioned in any of the Soviet histories of the Hermitage on account of its imperial associations. Boris Yeltsin had the house pulled down when he was Party Secretary for the Sverdlovsk region so that it could not become a monarchist shrine.

Levinson-Lessing’s team was desperately anxious about fire risks. The museum was surrounded by wooden sheds and warehouses which would inevitably cause a great conflagration if bombed. They managed to have the nearest warehouse taken down and the staff themselves painted the museum’s beams with fire-resistant fluid. They all participated in guarding the buildings twenty-four hours a day, one staff member per building by day and two by night.

The fire hazard was also in the forefront of the minds of those who stayed in Leningrad. A barge containing hundreds of tons of sand was moored outside the back entrance of the Winter Canal, and an army of young people – students from the Conservatoire and the Academy of Art, and enthusiastic members of the Komsomol – carried it to every gallery in the Hermitage and Winter Palace. In drawings and photographs of the Hermitage interior during the war the pile of sand with a spade stuck in it is a recurring feature. A particularly important sand castle was created in the cellar below the Athena gallery where the porcelain figures, vases and dinner services which had not been sent to Sverdlovsk were half buried in sand – the top half of each piece was allowed to protrude. On the night of 18 September an artillery shell burst outside the museum entrance, chipping the Atlantes and blasting the windows of the Athena gallery to smithereens – but the Meissen shepherds and shepherdesses and the rest of the elegant company in the cellar were unmoved.

Everyone who was not already in the People’s Volunteers was conscripted to the fire-fighters. Boris Piotrovsky, who had started training with the Volunteers, was one of a group of Hermitage researchers sent back to the museum – they turned out to be hopeless riflemen. Piotrovsky now became Orbeli’s assistant and deputy head of the fire team. Two lookout posts were established on the roof to watch for fires, one above the Armorial Hall of the Winter Palace and the other beside the great skylight of the Italian picture gallery. Igor Diakonoff recalls sharing his duty watch with Antonina Izergina, the beautiful expert on modern painting who was to become Orbeli’s last wife and the mother of his only son. A keen mountain climber, she suggested they should have a rope with them for escape. ‘I told her it would be no use to us. If a bomb hit, we’d go down with it. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t need a rope.’

The huge cellars lying below the Winter Palace and the Hermitage buildings were converted into bomb shelters in which the remaining museum staff, their families and other people involved in the arts from all over the city lived through the first winter of the war – there were some 2,000 of them in all. ‘The bomb shelters during the siege looked most peculiar,’ Piotrovsky wrote. ‘The low basement windows were filled with bricks and iron doors were put in. Next to the crudely made plank beds was gilded furniture from the museum. Whenever electricity was cut off, candles and oil lamps would be lit on the tables. I remember that there were even wedding candles. Before the war many women employees had them hidden behind icons at home. They were thick with golden bands. But what was most important, they burned for a long time.’

One of the city’s young architects, Alexander Nikolsky, was living in Bomb Shelter No. 3 and made sketches of the scene – he actually held an exhibition of the drawings in the shelter in December 1941. His drawings have assumed particular importance for posterity since all private cameras were confiscated at the beginning of the war and official photographers seldom visited the Hermitage.

Nikolsky’s diary describes the difficulty of finding your way to the shelter. ‘At night this route, from the doors of the Hermitage through its halls and passageways to the shelter itself, was fantastic to the point of terror. The enormous museum windows were not blacked out and of course no lamps could be lit, except for the tiny guide bulbs on the floor at each end of the Hall of Twenty Columns that were fed by the storage batteries standing there. Everything around was as black as soot.’ Piotrovsky also wrote of the museum at night:

During the autumn and winter of 1941-2 there used to be as many as ten to twelve air-raid alerts sounded daily. At night we were obliged to run to our posts through the pitch-dark rooms and halls of the Hermitage and Winter Palace. However, we grew so used to these routes, which at times were as much as three-quarters of a kilometre long, that we could have done it blindfolded…. It was extremely cold in the halls and rooms. On my tours of inspection I used to bring to my colleagues, manning the posts, mugs of what we called tea, but which was actually no more than tepid water.

An unexpected visit from a submarine commander and ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’, A. V. Tripolsky, restored a measure of electricity to the museum. Orbeli took him through the pitch-black Hall of Twenty Columns to the wartime office he had established beside Bomb Shelter No. 3, where he fitted a candle in a medieval silver candlestick. The battle with darkness reminded Tripolsky that the Polar Star, former pleasure yacht of the imperial family which was now an auxiliary vessel for the submarine squadron he commanded, was anchored in the frozen Neva outside the museum. He arranged that an electricity cable should be strung across the road to the Hermitage. ‘The ship fed electricity to several of the Hermitage rooms,’ Nikolsky wrote in his diary. ‘It was light now where it had been dark before and this was of priceless value.’

The greatest struggle in the Hermitage, and throughout Leningrad, was with hunger. The inadequacy of the city’s food reserves began to be realised at the end of August and bread rations were cut on 2 September to 600 grams a day for workers, 400 grams for office workers and 300 grams for dependants and children. But on 8 September the Germans bombed the city’s largest food store; the stench of burning meat, sugar, oil and flour blew over the city. After that, the ration was cut over and over again. From 20 November to Christmas it was 250 grams for factory workers and 125 grams (two slices) for everyone else; front-line troops got 500 grams and rear echelons 300 grams. That was the lowest point. Afterwards the ration began to creep up again but many people were already so debilitated that it made little difference.

Bread was the staple diet – there was very little of anything else. The whole population of the city turned to a search for food and the invention of substitutes. Mothers would trudge into the country with what treasures they could muster to barter for vegetables, meat or eggs. The exchange rate between jewels, clothes or furniture and food was at an all-time low. Pets and pigeons disappeared. A stock of cottonseed cake, designed as fuel for shipping, was commandeered by the city government and, after the poisons were extracted, used for baking the daily bread. People remembered that wallpaper was attached by using flour paste. The paste was eaten — and also the paper. Shoes and leather bags were boiled for soup.

There was no distinction in the size of the ration between men and women or between young children and teenagers. This meant that it was men and teenagers who tended to die first. In November 1941 11,085 people died of hunger, in December 52,881 and in January and February 1942 combined – only 60 days – 199,187. Lidiya Ginzburg’s Blockade Diary describes what was happening to them:

During the period of greatest exhaustion everything became clear: the mind was hauling the body along with it. The automatism of movement, its reflex nature, its age-old correlation with the mental impulse – all that was gone. It turned out, for example, that the vertical posture was by no means inherent in the body; the conscious will had to hold the body under control, otherwise it would slither away as if it were falling down a cliff. The will had to lift it up and sit it down or lead it from object to object. On the worst days it was not only difficult climbing stairs, it was very hard to walk on level ground.

Or again:

Genuine hunger, as is well known, is not like the desire to eat. It has its masks. It used to display the face of misery, indifference, an insane urgency, cruelty. It most resembled a chronic disease, and as with any disease, the mind played a most important role. The doomed were not those with the blackest features, or those most emaciated or distended. They were the ones with the strange expressions, looks of weird concentration, the ones who started trembling in front of a plate of soup.

Boris Piotrovsky records having a birthday feast on 14 February 1942. His brother came back from the front bringing with him a slice of bread which had turned to crumbs in the frost. Orbeli gave him a small bottle of eau de cologne (100 per cent proof) with which to wash it down and allowed him a ration of furniture glue which the Hermitage staff had learned to serve up as jelly – the large stock of glue laid in by the restorers just before the war was one of the principal reasons why any of the Hermitage staff survived. The restorers’ drying oil was also used for frying appetizing morsels like potato peelings.

The snow had come early that year. The first flakes fell on 14 October and by 31 October the city was blanketed in snow at least four inches deep. ‘There was no running water, no electricity and no heat,’ wrote Piotrovsky. ‘People were using furniture and parquet floors for firewood. The situation in the Hermitage was a little better, because the supplies of wood in the carpenter’s shop from before the war and old display screens were used for heating.’ Their water supply came from the Neva – the staff made a hole in the ice which froze again every night and had to be rebroken.

The busy life of the museum, however, continued. ‘The Hermitage employees were working and living according to the regulations of military discipline, although when not engaged in their defence duties they would continue with their research work,’ Piotrovsky wrote. ‘There were orders pertaining to the defence of the Hermitage, sending employees to build fortifications or to fight at the front, promoting or demoting them, messages of appreciation, and even reprimands for being overly late for work (a few minutes did not count, of course). The only thing that testifies to the tragic situation are the long lists of employees “missing due to death”.’

In the pre-war years Orbeli had loved to celebrate jubilees and anniversaries at the Hermitage and he was determined to continue this tradition despite the dangers and difficulties introduced by the German blockade. Plans were already afoot for the celebration of the 800th anniversary of the birth of the Azerbaijani poet Nizami Gandzhevi on 19 October 1941 before the German invasion. Orbeli applied to the Party administration in the Smolny for permission to go ahead, and it was reluctantly granted. The meeting started at two in the afternoon and closed just minutes before the first air raid.

With even madder courage, Orbeli insisted on celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Uzbek poet Alisher Navoi on 10 December, when the siege had moved into its harshest period. Piotrovsky has left a description of the occasion:

The introductory speeches were read by our director, Iosif Orbeli, Prof. Alexander Boldyrev and myself. The poet Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, who had come back from the front, and Nikolay Lebedev, an employee of the Hermitage, recited translations of Navoi’s poetry. In the showcases porcelain, glasses and boxes painted with subjects from Navoi’s poems were displayed.

The next day the jubilee meeting was continued with Lebedev’s recital. He was so weak that he had to recite while seated. A few days later he died. There he was lying on the bed in the shelter covered with a coloured Turkmenian rug, and it seemed that he was still whispering his poems.

The city which Hitler had pronounced dead was celebrating the birth of a poet and enlightener from the fifteenth century. It did not matter that among the audience there was not a single person who had an Azerbaijani or Uzbek background. It was a challenge to the enemy. Light was fighting darkness.

In fact, the Hermitage was the only institution in the Soviet Union that celebrated Nizami’s birth, though major exhibitions and meetings had originally been planned in Moscow and Baku. Piotrovsky’s account of the Hermitage during the siege continues with a moving description of how the staff handled the mental challenge that accompanied their physical suffering:

Caring for the physical condition of the collection also remained a challenge. The Stieglitz Museum in Solyanoi Lane was named an outstation of the Hermitage after the Revolution and, though most of the collection had been removed in the mid-1920s, material was stored there on behalf of the ‘History of Everyday Life’ Department of the Russian Museum, responsibility for which was transferred to the Hermitage in 1941 when its Russian Department was opened. The Stieglitz building was bombed in the early autumn. The glass dome of the central hall was smashed to smithereens and porcelain and furniture were blown to pieces, but no lives were lost. It was decided to remove what remained of the collections stored there to the Hermitage, but this was no easy matter since no lorries or cars were available for so frivolous an undertaking. The Hermitage staff began to move the collection with handcarts. After the snow fell they used sledges, harnessing themselves to them to pull the larger objects across town. Smaller, more easily transportable pieces came in rucksacks. Exposed to rain and snow, some of the items were already mouldy or corroded before they could be removed from the half-demolished building.

On 24 January the city administration announced that a small convalescent centre was to be established at the Hermitage. It was set up in the ground-floor rooms of the Small Hermitage overlooking the Neva – where the director, Dmitry Tolstoy, had his private apartment before the Revolution – and was to serve staff from the Hermitage and four other city museums. There were one hundred beds and it had a throughput of 400 patients before closing down again in May – many of them were so emaciated that neither increased rations nor intravenous shots of glucose could save them from death. The cellar under the library at the Millionaya Street end of the Small Hermitage was turned into a mortuary. When the burial squad reached the Hermitage in early April 1942, forty-six frozen corpses were lifted into its lorry.

There were almost no air raids in the early months of 1942, though the Germans continued to shell the city. However, the water and sewage pipes froze. In these circumstances those who had been living in the Hermitage cellars chose to move home again. By February the air raid shelters were empty. Moreover, the ‘road of life’ across the frozen Lake Ladoga, which had brought food into the city from November onwards, was greatly improved by the laying of a new road connecting Leningrad with the south-east bank of the lake. The lorries that now brought food into the city carried out evacuees. The whole of the university was evacuated and the history faculty, which was most closely linked to the Hermitage, reopened in Saratov. On a visit to Leningrad Alexey Kosygin, deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom, inspected the Hermitage and having seen its condition ordered that it should be reduced to the status of a ‘conserved’ institution – which meant merely keeping the building intact – and that the staff should be evacuated. Curiously enough, despite their sufferings, few of them wanted to leave.

Orbeli himself had been appointed director of the Academy of Science of Armenia and left for Yerevan on 30 March – where he spent the rest of the war. He took a motley collection of associates with him: his former wife, Mariya, his new wife, Elizaveta, Elizaveta’s mother, Vladimir Vasiliev – secretary of the museum’s Party organisation, the Hermitage Chief Architect – Andrey Sivkov, and Boris Piotrovsky – who had developed an inflammation of the lung in January and had been faithfully nursed by his old teacher, the Egyptologist Nataliya Flittner. Piotrovsky records that when the lorry that took them out of the city reached the railway line he was given a bowl of soup and was immediately sick. His body could not digest such rich food.

The journey south was enlivened by a stop in Stalingrad where the city administration and a delegation of doctors turned out to greet Academician Orbeli. Unfortunately the advance warning they had received of Orbeli’s arrival had not indicated which Academician Orbeli was on the train. The Stalingraders had turned out under the impression that they were honouring Levon Orbeli, Iosifs brother and a great physiologist who had inherited the mantle of Ivan Pavlov, the Nobel Prize winner famous the world over for his work on the conditioned reflexes of dogs. The delegation retired in confusion when the bearded Orientalist alighted from the train.

Orbeli and his retinue did not allow the war to hinder their enjoyment of the south, according to Piotrovsky’s account. Having travelled to Yerevan with two of his wives, Orbeli was soon trying to persuade his devoted mistress, Camilla Trever, to join them from Tashkent where she was then at work. The whole party travelled from Yerevan to Tashkent to visit her. It was Trever who ended up typesetting the history of Urartu that Piotrovsky had written in the Hermitage air-raid shelter, omitting the inscriptions on the margin of the manuscript which read ‘terribly cold’, ‘it’s hard to write, it’s so cold’ and so on. Orbeli had run the publishing house at the Academy of the History of Material Culture after the Revolution and set great store by his own ability to typeset. He had persuaded many of his associates to learn in the pre-war years. It was the only way to ensure that quotations from Oriental languages, using script unfamiliar to an ordinary typesetter, were correctly reproduced.

The history of Urartu was published in Yerevan in 1944. Since Karmir-Blur, the Urartian fortress which Piotrovsky had begun to excavate before the war, was only a few miles from Yerevan, he was able to continue his work – with the aid of a young Armenian archaeologist, Ripsime Mikhailovna Janpolodyan, to whom he became engaged in 1943 and whom he married in February 1944. In April 1944 Piotrovsky paid a return visit to Leningrad to pick up some books but caught typhoid and got stuck there for several months. His memoirs record that Orbeli was a frequent visitor to Leningrad at this time, his romance with Antonina Izergina, the Hermitage expert on modern paintings, having just begun.

When Orbeli left for the south in March 1942, he appointed Professor Mikhail Dobroklonsky as acting director of the Hermitage. A former imperial civil servant, Dobroklonsky had always dreamed of becoming director of the Hermitage, according to his adopted granddaughter who works there today. He had trained as a lawyer and spent 1910–15 visiting the great museums of Europe to study how they ran their exhibitions and scholarly work in preparation for his future role. However, the likelihood of realising his dream appeared to go out of the window when the Bolsheviks took over. Nevertheless, he was one of the many members of the old nobility given jobs by the museum after the Revolution, working in the Drawings Department under Benois. His scholarly catalogue of the Hermitage drawings is still the last word on the collection.

The war tested Dobroklonsky almost beyond endurance. Both his sons were killed. The eldest, Login, died in his arms in the military hospital while the younger, Dmitry, who was really too young for the army but lied about his age because it was hoped there would be more to eat at the front, disappeared without trace. His home was destroyed by a bomb. In March 1942, however, he realised – temporarily – his youthful dream, becoming acting director of the Hermitage. In June 1943 he drew up a report on the activities of the Hermitage staff:

Our main tasks were to restore the building and do everything we could to ensure the preservation of the collection in our care. As a result of the shelling, most of the windows and the hanging lights were broken in all the buildings and many of the rooms were full of broken glass, snow and ice. All of us worked on cleaning out these rooms, regardless of our age or status in the museum. Everyone, workers, security guards, professors and scholars, helped to sweep up the glass and snow and carry buckets of sand. Using only our own staff, we cleaned a surface of over 2,000 square metres and carried out around thirty-six tonnes of broken glass, building rubbish, snow and ice. We also had to try to prevent glass from being rebroken by covering it with wood; we had to repair the roofs, pump water out of the cellars, repair the water system and, to date, we have covered 6,000 metres [of glass] with hardboard. As it became clear which storerooms were in better condition than others, we moved furniture and other exhibits into those rooms. It was necessary to dry out and air all the furniture and fabrics.

Most of the staff Dobroklonsky directed were women, the able-bodied men having gone to war, but they included a former museum guide and lecturer, Pavel Gubchevsky, who had been rejected by the army on account of a serious cardiac defect. He was appointed chief of the museum security guard. Writing in 1942, he left his own account of the problems:

As the spring weather began after the long, harsh winter of 1941–2, the water pipes burst and melting snow gushed into the museum through holes in the roof caused by the German attack. The ‘mighty troop’ of old ladies had to rescue the collections in the basement and ground floor from the ensuing floods. The porcelain figures and vases which had been half buried in sand in the cellar under the Athena gallery had survived bombs and shells but were now in even greater danger. One of those who helped with the rescue was Olga Mikhailova, an art historian and critic.

I saw with horror that all the porcelain was drowned in water. ‘We ran for rubber waders and descended into the dark cellar. The water reached our knees. Each movement created waves which raised it even higher. Placing each foot down carefully, so as not to tread on the fragile porcelain, we felt around to pluck out piece after piece. Some of the porcelain vessels were floating on the surface. Here and there the necks of some of the taller vases jutted out above the water, but most of the items had filled up with sand and filth and settled on the floor. Much later, recalling these searches in the darkness, the wading through the water, and how we, loaded down with porcelain, climbed the dark steep staircase, not seeing the steps but feeling them with our feet only, it was all unbelievable, as if we had pulled off some incredible acrobatic stunt, and we were amazed that we broke nothing.

Having removed the porcelain from the cellar, we set to to clean off all the dirt. Though they were not the gems of the Hermitage collection, still every piece before us was a work of art…. It was easy enough to wipe the glazed items clean. But as for the biscuit pieces, their unglazed white porcelain had absorbed the water and had yellowed. Some of the items that had previously been restored had come unstuck. Many objects had lost their inventory numbers, which could lead to head-spinning confusion in museum inventorisation; hundreds of soaked paper labels were floating around in the cellar…. We had to do everything at once – wash, wipe clean and restore the number. We dried the porcelain out in the yard in the spring sunshine, on top of sacking or right out on the greening grass.

The Hermitage courtyards did not only sprout porcelain. Furniture was also carried there to dry out. ‘We made use of every sunny day,’ wrote another member of the troop, Alexandra Anosova, ‘to drag all the upholstered furniture out into the courtyard. The upholstery on the sofas and chairs was covered with a thick, furry layer of mildew, as if these pieces of furniture had been upholstered not in velvet and silk but in some revolting, hideous yellow-green sheepskin. The sundried mildew was brushed off and all day long clouds of dust and the acrid fumes of sulphide filled the air, so much so that towards evening our clothes reeked of it, while the dust choked eyes, ears and nose and rasped the throat.’

There were other uses for the courtyards too. The city was still under siege and food supplies were pathetically small and deficient in vitamins. Vegetable gardens began to spring up in all the city squares and, of course, the palace courtyards. However, the museum’s principal vegetable supply came from the Hanging Garden that Catherine the Great had built on the first floor of the Small Hermitage. It was planted with carrots, beet, dill, spinach and cabbage in place of the ornamental shrubbery favoured by the Romanovs. ‘We ripped out the bushes of lilac and honeysuckle to make way for our vegetable garden,’ Olga Mikhailova recalled. ‘As, day after day, we dug the earth and planted the vegetables, the torn-out bushes lay by the wall, with clods of earth still clinging to their roots, and slowly withered. During that blockade spring we witnessed many deaths. The lilacs of the Hermitage also died a long and tortured death.’

German bombing and shelling continued and new wounds were constantly inflicted on the Hermitage. On 18 June a shell broke into the carriage store, blasting to smithereens seven carriages and two palanquins used by the imperial family in the eighteenth century. On 25 January 1943 a one-ton bomb exploded in Palace Square, causing the Winter Palace to ‘rock like a cockle-shell on a storm-ridden, choppy sea’, in the words of Pavel Gubchevsky. In May a second bomb was dropped on the Winter Palace itself but did not explode – an almost miraculous escape. The gardeners working in the Hanging Garden gave the alarm after seeing what they took to be smoke billowing out of the Kitchen Yard.

‘What we feared most of all was fire’, wrote Pavel Gubchevsky:

By the time I reached the Kitchen Yard the clouds of smoke had dispersed. A few minutes later the municipal fire chiefs arrived. We examined the spot carefully, but did not see anything burning. Nor could we smell fire. The firemen left but I still felt worried. Once again we looked around carefully and I suddenly noticed a broken window on the ground floor…. Dragging a stepladder to the spot, I climbed up and peered inside. You can imagine how startled I was to see a quarter-ton bomb lying amidst the scattered paintings on a bed of torn canvases and shattered stretchers. Only later did I realise what had actually happened. It appeared that the bomb dropped by a Nazi plane had hit the eaves of the building across the yard, not, however, with its detonator but with its casing. Under the impact, the hundred-year-old masonry had crumbled into dust and raised a thick cloud. Meanwhile the bomb itself had ricocheted and fallen into the window, but again sideways, and then came to rest, without exploding, on a disarrayed stack of paintings.

The very last German shell struck the Hermitage in December 1943. Professor Dobroklonsky immediately reported the damage to the city administration. ‘An enemy shell that exploded in the courtyard of the Winter Palace on 16 December blew out up to 750 metres of glass, including windows in the Armorial Hall, the Fieldmarshals Hall, the Peter the Great Hall and other premises with richly decorated interiors. The State Hermitage requests assistance in the procurement of 5.5 cubic metres of plywood.’

On 27 January 1944 the blockade of Leningrad was finally lifted. According to the radio announcement that sounded from the loudspeakers throughout the city that day: ‘after twelve days of fierce fighting the troops of the Leningrad front have hurled the enemy back across its entire length to distances of between sixty-five and one hundred kilometres from the city. Our forces are continuing to thrust forward.’ That night a victory salute of twenty-four salvoes was fired from 324 guns on the battered battleships anchored in the Neva. A flaming stream of red, white and blue rockets lit up the skies above the city.

Once it was known that Leningrad was saved, the fate of the  Hermitage immediately became a topic of vivid interest to the culture-loving population of the Soviet Union. The government newspaper Izvestiya sent a reporter up from Moscow to investigate its condition. ‘At the door was a gray-haired elderly lady who looked more like a music teacher,’ wrote Tatyana Tess.

The old lady sat in a warm sheepskin and with a warm hood on her head. A rifle was propped by her side. As she examined my identity card, a stream of bluish vapour issued from her mouth. It was so bitterly cold in there that it seemed to me as though the cold had been gathered from all over the city and had been packed and locked in this place. Right in front of the door two medieval knights stood as sentinels, stripped of their armour — two dummies, no more than faded trunks on skinny legs stuffed with sawdust. By their side were crates of sand, axes, crowbars and a pair of enormous pincers.

Orbeli was put back in charge of the museum in June 1944. Summoned to Moscow from Armenia, he was ordered to draw up a list of the building materials that would be needed to start the restoration work on the Hermitage. His list included sixty-five tons of gypsum plaster, eighty tons of alabaster, one hundred tons of cement, two tons of joiner’s glue, 4,000 metres of Bohemian glass of triple strength plus 2,000 metres of extra fine glass, 2,000 metres of assorted canvas, 30,000 metres of decorative fabrics, two tons of casting bronze, two tons of sheet bronze and six kilograms of gold leaf. The Germans surrendered on 9 May 1945 and the ordeal was over.