Another siege cliche borne out by the diaries is the emotional sustenance Leningraders derived from the radio. Portable sets having been confiscated at the outbreak of war, they listened on fixed-wire loudspeakers, more than 400,000 of which had been installed in domestic apartments, as well as in outdoor public spaces, from the 1920s onwards.* Headquartered in the art deco ‘Radio House’ on the corner of Italyanskaya and Malaya Sadovaya streets, the city radio station continued to broadcast, despite power outages and shell damage to its transmission network, throughout the mass-death winter. Stories of its resuscitating power are legion: Olga Berggolts, collapsed in the street, picking herself up at the sound of her own voice reading her own poetry; a fighter pilot making it home ‘on one wing’ on hearing Klavdiya Shulzhenko — Russia’s Vera Lynn — singing ‘Little Blue Scarf’; the housewife, stumbling home to her family, ‘handed’ from loudspeaker to loudspeaker as if along a human chain. A (hammily Stalinist) programme for teenagers, titled ‘Letter to my Friend in Leningrad’ and broadcast on 7 December, delighted sixteen-year-old Klara Rakhman. ‘What a wonderful letter!’ she wrote in her diary: ‘It very precisely expresses my thoughts. I’ll put down everything I can remember of it.’28 The writer Lev Uspensky, smoking a late-night cigarette at a railway junction south of Ladoga, was startled to hear the words ‘Leningrad speaking’ echoing out of the fog above his head. A time delay between loudspeakers attached to a series of telegraph poles meant that the words overlapped, fading into the distance. It sounded, he thought, as if a line of giants were speaking, gently urging the German idiots to give it up, to go back home before they got hurt.29
The most listened-to items were the Sovinform news bulletins, broadcast at 11 a.m. and 11 p.m. daily. Having got hold of a radio just in time for the Red Army’s January offensives, Fridenberg and her mother tearfully hung on the announcer’s every word. They knew the reports were untruthful, not to be relied upon — ‘but all the same, one listened and believed’.30 Genuinely beloved were Berggolts’s readings of her own verse, in particular her
In December and January programming shrank to a few hours per day. In the gaps, the radio broadcast the calm ticking (at fifty strikes per minute) of a metronome — the steady beating, for households whose sets still worked, of Leningrad’s heart. What exactly the Radio House put out hardly mattered; the important thing was that the organism lived, that communication was maintained. Ivan Zhilinsky was one of the many diarists to record each day, even as his entries shrivelled to a bare record of food intake and deaths among neighbours, whether or not he had radio reception.
Much harder to gauge is how much solace Leningraders got from religious faith during the months of mass death.33 By the late 1930s organised religion had been suborned or driven underground in the Soviet Union, following Stalin’s closure or demolition of thousands of churches and monasteries, and execution, imprisonment or exile of their monks, nuns and priests. At the start of the war only twenty-one churches operated in the whole of the Leningrad diocese, the rest having been knocked down or turned into warehouses, garages, cinemas, planetaria or ‘museums of religion’. The Cathedral of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood — a multicoloured neo- Russian confection, filled with glowing mosaic, that is today one of Petersburg’s chief tourist attractions — was only saved from demolition, ironically, by the outbreak of war.
With the German invasion, Stalin made a swift U-turn, allowing the Orthodox (but not the Catholic, Baptist or Lutheran) Church to play a tightly circumscribed role in public life in exchange for supporting the war effort. Some churches were reopened, the
Independent congregations, in contrast, were still ruthlessly persecuted. Typical was a small underground group discovered and liquidated in the summer of 1942. It was led, the NKVD’s case report tells us, by a sixty- year-old known as Archimandrite Klavdi, who had already served time in prison for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ and was now living in Leningrad illegally. His elderly, mostly unemployed followers included ‘kulaks’, former nuns, ‘monastic elements’ and a nurse from the Lenin Hospital. Their crimes, according to Klavdi’s confession, included ‘illegally trying to recruit believers’, ‘praising the pre-revolutionary order and living standards’, and ‘voicing disapproval of the methods of Soviet power’.34 What became of them we do not know, but it was probably similar to what happened to Berggolts’s doctor father, who in early 1942 was deported to Siberia for refusing to inform on a Father Vyacheslav, an old friend with whom he used to enjoy playing cards.35
How many Leningraders actually attended services during the first siege winter is hard to say. Though one memoirist movingly describes services at the St Vladimir Cathedral — choir wrapped in shawls and felt boots, oil in the icon lamps frozen solid, the sacraments taken with beetroot juice in place of wine — the diarists of the time make no remark, even when recklessly frank on other matters. Perhaps the packed Vladimirsky was a benevolent trick of the memory; perhaps it only attracted crowds from the spring onwards, when surviving Leningraders had the strength to begin mourning their dead; or perhaps it was simply that it was the intelligentsia, on the whole, who kept diaries, and the working class who went to church. Educated Leningraders may have also found it harder to maintain what faith they had. Berggolts — Jewish by background and an idealistic Communist in youth — saw the siege as a collective punishment for having allowed the Revolution to be perverted, for the lies and moral cowardice of the purge years:
What unhappy people we are! What did we wander into? What savage dead end and delirium? Oh what weakness and terror! I can do nothing, nothing. I should have ended my own life, that would have been the most honest thing. I have lied so much, made so many mistakes, that can’t be redeemed or set right. . We have to fight off the Germans, destroy fascism, end the war. And then we have to change everything about ourselves. . (Just now Kolka [her husband] had [an epileptic] fit — I had to hold his mouth shut so he wouldn’t frighten the children in the next door room. He fought terribly.) Why do we live? Oh God, why do we live? Have we really not suffered enough? Nothing better will ever come.
She had caught her mood from a friend, a traumatised survivor of the naval retreat from Tallinn, who had visited earlier in the day, incoherently mumbling ‘For twenty years we have been in the wrong, and we’re paying for it now.’36
Others found themselves returning to faith as their fear and suffering increased. Party members whispered prayers and crossed themselves in the air-raid shelters; Georgi Knyazev, self-styled humanist and worshipper of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov, by the depths of January mused through the eighteen-hour nights on the strength of the light fitting in his ceiling — he would hang himself, he had decided, if his wife died before him — and his ‘favourite theme of Christ, that amazing teacher of love and mercy from faraway Galilee’.37 A painter, dying
