Evacuees started returning in large numbers in the summer of 1944, more than doubling Leningrad’s population in twelve months and bringing with them breaths of Central Asia and the deep Russian countryside. One girl, fresh from a farm on the southern steppe, missed riding horses bareback out to pasture and instead took to climbing the city rooftops — ‘five floors or higher, and the steeper the better’. A friend of Vera Inber’s brought home a spinning wheel, which she plied in between playing Beethoven sonatas.8 Soldiers started coming home a year later, in the summer of 1945. Brought up to believe in the backwardness of capitalism, they had been astonished by their glimpse of German living standards, even in wartime. Why, many wondered, had the Germans bothered to invade, when they already had so much themselves?
Slowest to return were surviving POWs. Of the approximately 4.5 million Soviet servicemen taken prisoner in total during the war, about 1.8 million were still alive at its end, the remainder having been executed (if Jewish or Party members), or killed by starvation and disease. Many died on forced marches westward as the Wehrmacht retreated. The Red Army, when it reached their camps, promptly reinterned the survivors and subjected them to ‘filtration’. Standard questions were ‘Why didn’t you shoot yourself instead of surrendering?’ ‘Why didn’t you die in the prisoner-of-war camp?’ and ‘What assignments were you given by the Gestapo and the Abwehr?’ — plus, for those liberated by the Allies, ‘What assignments were you given by Anglo-American intelligence?’ Lev Kopelev, a
Reunions (for those lucky enough to have them) were often difficult. Children failed to recognise their parents, parents no longer knew their children, spouses found each other changed and alien. Even the city looked different — lean and hard, hollow-eyed, gap-toothed, shrapnel-pocked. Elated to be home again, Anna Akhmatova was met at the railway station by her pre-war lover, the pathologist Vladimir Garshin. They had agreed, via letters, to marry, and that Akhmatova would take his name. Now she discovered that he had changed his mind. Akhmatova pretended to herself that Garshin had lost his reason (‘The man who means/Nothing to me now. . Wanders like a ghost on the outskirts/The back streets and backyards of life’) but in fact he had simply fallen in love with someone else.Humiliated, Akhmatova cut all dedications to him from her poems, and moved back into her old room next to Nikolai Punin’s in an annexe to the Sheremetyev Palace. Its windows were repaired thanks to Olga Berggolts, who begged help from a conservator at the Public Library. When she stressed Akhmatova’s importance, the man told her not to insult his intelligence — ‘I am literate!’ — and removed the necessary glass — ‘I think they will forgive us’ — from some framed prints of great nineteenth-century writers.
Churkin, both of his sons having died at the front and his wife of starvation, had nobody to come home to at all. Put up by friends, it was three days before he could bring himself to visit his own flat. It had been broken into:
An awful mess; the thieves had turned everything upside down. All the clothes — suits and coats — and valuables gone. Everything that didn’t interest them strewn about the floor. . All I took was our photo album. Here they are, my darlings, looking silently up at me. I’ll never see them again. I felt such pain that I burst into tears.10
