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Model’s army maintained a tigerish defence in the Kursk salient until 25 July, then started to fall back. On 5 August, the Germans lost Oryol and Belgorod. On the 25th the Russians regained Kharkov – and this time kept it. Soldier Alexander Slesarev wrote to his father: ‘We’re crossing liberated territory, land that has been occupied by the Germans for two years. People emerge joyfully to greet us, bringing apples, pears, tomatoes, cucumbers and so on. In the past, I knew Ukraine only from books, now I can see with my own eyes its natural beauties and many gardens.’ The resumption of Soviet rule was not an unmixed blessing for Stalin’s people. ‘It is a shame, when you travel around liberated villages, to see the cold attitude of the population,’ wrote a soldier. The Germans had permitted peasants to sow and harvest their own plots; the returning Soviets reimposed rigorous collectivisation, which provoked some protest riots recorded by Lazar Brontman. Every tractor and almost every horse was gone, so that land could be tilled only with spades and rakes, sometimes by women pulling ploughs. Even sickles were seldom available.

Local communities struggling for subsistence displayed bitter, sometimes savage hostility to refugees who passed by – in their eyes, such people were locusts. A peasant woman wrote from Kursk province: ‘It’s hard now that we don’t have cows. They took them from us two months ago … We’re ready to eat each other … There isn’t a single young man at home now that they’re fighting at the front.’ Another woman wrote to her soldier son, lamenting that she was reduced to living in the corridor outside her sister’s one-room flat. Yet another told her soldier husband: ‘We have not had bread for two months now. It’s already time for Lidiya to go to school, but we don’t have a coat for her, or anything to put on her feet. I think Lidiya and I will die of hunger in the end. We haven’t got anything … Misha, even if you stay alive, we won’t be here.’ In the village of Baranovka, which had been occupied by the Germans for seven months, Lazar Brontman found only a few farm buildings still standing. The former manager of the local collective farm was living in a cowshed with his wife and three small daughters. Their stomachs were distended by starvation.

The man told the correspondent, ‘We’ve seen no bread for three months. We eat grass.’ Then he asked fearfully, ‘Will the Germans come back?’ Brontman gave them a kilo of bread, which they gazed on as a precious delicacy. Another family, whom Brontman invited to share a brew of tea, refused the offer; they had lost the habit of such luxuries, they said dully. Yet these people lived in what was once one of Russia’s greatest agricultural regions. Censors intercepted a letter from a mother named Marukova in liberated Oryol, to her son in the Red Army: ‘There is no bread, to say nothing of potatoes. We are eating grass and my legs refuse to walk.’ Another mother named Galitsina in the same district wrote likewise: ‘When I get up in the morning I don’t know what to do, what to cook. There is no milk, bread or salt, and no help from anyone.’

The Germans staged their initial withdrawal from Kursk in good order, but no one on either side doubted that they had suffered a calamitous defeat, sustaining half a million casualties in fifty days of fighting. Stalin, triumphant, displayed his revived self-confidence by issuing new orders to rein in Zhukov and Vasilevsky. After the triumph of Stalingrad, five subsequent attempts to achieve matching envelopments of German armies had failed. In future, he decreed, the Red Army would launch frontal assaults rather than encirclements. By the end of August, eight Soviet fronts were conducting nineteen parallel offensives towards the Dnieper along a line of 660 miles from Nevel to Taganrog. On 8 September, Hitler authorised a withdrawal behind the river, where the Russians were improvising crossings with any means to hand. They staged one of their few massed air drops of the war on the west bank, landing 4,575 paratroopers, of whom