Leningrad

Wherever possible, paintings were packed flat, but those too large to fit into a railway carriage had to be rolled, including, after much anguished indecision, Rembrandt’s fragile Descent from the Cross. Only one painting — Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son — got a crate to itself, and only another three — two Leonardo Madonnas and Raphael’s exquisite little Madonna Conestabile — were left in their frames. The rest — Giorgiones, Tiepolos, Breughels, Van Dycks, Holbeins, Rubens, Gainsboroughs, Canalettos, Velázquezes, El Grecos — were removed from their stretchers and the empty frames hung back in their usual places on the gallery walls. Houdon’s magnificent sculpture of Voltaire, all beaky nose and twisted smile, was lowered down the three flights of a ceremonial staircase with the help of naval ratings, using wooden runners and a system of blocks and pulleys. The Chertomlyk Vase, a fourth-century bc silver ewer magnificently decorated with doves and horses, had to be filled with tiny pieces of crumbled cork, which two women spent the night patiently feeding through a crack in its lip with teaspoons.

After six days and nights of frantic activity, a first trainload of treasures — about half a million items in more than one thousand crates — left the city on 1 July. Originally intended for the evacuation of machinery from the Kirov defence works, the train was made up of two engines, twenty-two freight wagons, an armoured car for the most valuable items and passenger carriages for guards and Hermitage staff, with flatbeds for anti-aircraft guns at either end. Its destination, known only to a few, was Sverdlovsk in the Urals (formerly Yekaterinburg, the town in which Nicholas II and his family had been assassinated). A second train, containing 700,000 items in 422 crates, left on 20 July. Orbeli’s packing materials had now run out, and an Egyptologist, Militsa Matye, was given charge of finding more. ‘For almost two years’, she marvelled later, ‘some long smooth poles had stood in the corner of my office. I would never have believed that the time would come when I would wrap them round with fabrics from Coptic Egypt and send them to the Urals.’19 Pleading with shops and warehouses for everything from sawdust to egg boxes, she gathered enough to pack another 351 crates, but by the time they were ready the siege ring had almost closed, and they spent the war stacked in a gallery on the Winter Palace’s ground floor.

Included on the second Hermitage train was Lomonosov’s mosaic of Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava, which hung (and still hangs) at the top of the main staircase of the Academy of Sciences building on the Vasilyevsky embankment. Knyazev oversaw its departure:

No words can describe what I felt when they took away the Peter the Great mosaic. . The Hermitage workers carefully removed it from the wall and carried it out to the waiting lorry. I accompanied them in what was, to be honest, an agitated state. . Initially we discussed secure storage in the city, but now, in view of developments at the front, our only concern is to get as much as possible evacuated. I feel that evacuation with the Hermitage will be safer. . But my heart aches. I came home quite drained.

A week later it was the turn of the Academy’s most precious manuscripts:

Altogether we packed thirty boxes. We’ve taken every precaution against damp and dust (rubber sheeting, cellophane, oilcloth, folders and paper), and made an inventory of all the materials, with a separate list for each box. With us all working flat out, it took two weeks. The boxes were wired round and sealed. I followed the lorry as far as the embankment. It was like seeing off someone near and dear — a son, a daughter, a wife. . I watched for a long time as the lorry slowly (I had asked the driver to go carefully), drove across the Palace Bridge. . Orphaned, I returned to the Archives.20

Another 360,000 items — among them a Gutenberg Bible, Pushkin’s letters, Mary Queen of Scots’s prayer book and the world’s second-oldest surviving Greek text of the New Testament — left the Public Library (affectionately known as the ‘Publichka’) on the Nevsky.

Yelena Skryabina and Yelena Kochina, both working mothers, were among the many torn between evacuating with their children and colleagues, and staying behind with their husbands and elderly parents. ‘I am faced’, wrote Skryabina on 28 June,

with a serious problem. And that is, that although I could take Dima and Yura with me, I would have to leave my mother and our elderly nanny behind. When I returned home with this news my mother burst into tears. . Nana is overcome and silent. I am caught between two fires. On the one hand, I understand perfectly well that the children must be saved, and on the other, I pity these helpless old women. How can I leave them at the mercy of fate?

Like many, she also half believed the soothing propaganda: