Leningrad

I went downstairs and ran along the desks and the cabinets, opening all the doors. And in the last cupboard I saw some portfolios. I opened one and went numb. Here were all [the architect] Rossi’s original plans. Then I opened the biggest one and circles danced in front of my eyes. Here were all Cameron’s drawings — and Gonzago’s, Quarenghi’s, Voronikhin’s. My instructions hadn’t been followed. These priceless documents were going to be left behind.

The folders wouldn’t fit into a standard crate so we had to make a special one. Fortunately the carpenters were still there. I gave them the measurements but they said ‘We’ve got no more wood.’ So I told them to break up a chest in which cushions were kept. While the crate was being put together I made up my mind to perform an act of vandalism. I was tormented by the fact that the unique tapestry upholstery on Voronikhin’s furniture from the Greek Hall was being abandoned. We couldn’t save the chairs, but we could save the tapestries. Every piece was held in place with hundreds of tiny gilt nails. I still probably couldn’t have brought myself to touch them if at that precise moment a gun hadn’t started firing. As it was I grabbed a razor blade and started slicing into the upholstery, cutting as close to the nails as I could. We laid the portfolios in the new crate, with the tapestries between them.

Next to be dealt with were the palace’s sculptures, now looking painfully fine in the bare galleries. Too bulky to evacuate, they were manoeuvred down into an inconspicuous corner of the palace cellars and bricked in. To make the new wall blend with the old it was smeared with mud and sand. The outdoor statues — Apollo, Mercury, Flora, Niobe with her weeping children — were buried where they stood, dotted about the park. On the white marble of Justice and Peace a workman wrote, ‘We’ll come back for you’, before disguising the newly turned earth with fallen leaves.

All around, the Red Army was now in full retreat. Entering the palace on the morning of 19 September, Zelenova was angry to see dusty military motorbikes carelessly parked among the lilac bushes of Empress Maria Fedorovna’s Dutch garden. In her office, she found a major cranking the handle of a telephone:

I was struck by how tired he looked. Someone was grunting on the other end of the line, and he replied (obviously not for the first time) that he hadn’t hung up, that the line was bad, and that he hadn’t got any more men. The person at the other end carried on angrily grunting away. The major very slowly put down the receiver and I started my speech. ‘Please immediately tell your soldiers to remove their motorcycles from the private gardens!’ He asked, ‘Whose private gardens?’ And this poor exhausted major had to listen to a whole lecture on Cameron.

That evening Zelenova received a call from Leningrad’s museums administration, telling her that she had been made Pavlovsk’s director — an empty promotion since she was also put formally in charge of its ‘rapid evacuation’. ‘Then the call was cut off, so I couldn’t explain anything. . I knew we had to leave, but how could we abandon all the crates we had prepared, and all the things we hadn’t packed yet? No, let’s keep on working!’ Realising that no more lorries would arrive from Leningrad, she commandeered horse-drawn carts:

After we had seen off the last of the cart-drivers a green MK [car] appeared. A short lieutenant jumped out and demanded, in an unexpectedly loud, bossy, voice, ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ I explained that I was director of the Palace museum and park, and that these were my colleagues. The lieutenant exploded: ‘But everyone in the town has been evacuated!’

‘We are arranging evacuation ourselves, and waiting for transport.’

‘There won’t be any transport! You’re lucky that I came round to check that everyone from divisional headquarters had gone. Get in my car this minute!’

‘I can’t go anywhere, even if you tell me to, because I’m here on the orders of the High Command’ — and I gave him the number of the order.

‘You don’t understand! Pavlovsk isn’t on the front, it isn’t even on the front line. It’s in the German rear!’

A siren went off, and Zelenova ran down to the palace cellars, which were being used as air-raid shelters. Stepping over samovars and sewing machines, she announced to a crowd of women and children that Pavlovsk had been abandoned, and that those who wanted to leave for the city would have to walk. As she was speaking a forester dashed in: ‘There are German motorcyclists in the park. I saw them myself. By the White Birches!’ The women, Zelenova quickly realised, were not going to move, so she went upstairs, emptied her desk drawer into a briefcase, and set off on foot in the general direction of Leningrad.