Olga Berggolts, This is Radio Leningrad!. 1942
On one very cold January night in 1942, some three days after the radio had become silent in nearly all districts of Leningrad, an idea was conceived at the Radio Committee, in the hostel of the literary department, of writing a book entitled “This Is Radio Leningrad!”
The Art Director of the Radio Committee Babushkin, Makogonenko, editor of the Literary Department and myself drew up a detailed plan, toiling over it practically all through the night by the light of our only dim electric bulb with a newspaper for a shade.
While outside, in the thick, icy darkness racking explosions roared, in the big long room members of the department staff lay sleeping on camp-beds, armchairs and sofas ranged along the walls, making the room rather like a railroad carriage. Wearing their coats, felt boots and gloves, they were sunk in heavy, oppressive slumber, moaning and muttering, either dried up or bloated from hunger. One of them, the journalist Pravdich no longer moaned or muttered. It crossed my mind that he was probably dead. In the morning we discovered that he was.
Both for me and my companions that night of January 10, 1942 was one of the happiest and most sublime nights in our lives: once we had started planning our book, we suddenly found ourselves, for the first time since the war had begun, looking back over the path trodden by our city, its people and its art (including our Radio Committee) and, full of wonder to find it so appalling and so glorious, we were overwhelmed by a thrilling realization, which was almost physical that, however horrible the reality, the wonderful, natural, wise mode of human existence referred to as “peace” was bound to return, and we felt that both victory and peace would conic very shortly-why, it was only a matter of days!
And therefore the three of us, hungry and weak as we were, were proud and happy, and felt a magic influx of strength.
“All the same, we are going to live to see it, don’t you think?” Yasha Babushkin exclaimed happily. “I so want to live to see how it’ll all be, don’t you?”
He laughed shyly, cast us a quick glance and there was Such avid, impatient pleading in his large shining eyes, that we hastened to agree.
“Of course, we’ll live to see it, Yasha. We all shall!”
We could see perfectly well that he was in a very bad way, almost at death’s door. He was bloated all over, his skin had a greenish tinge and it cost him a tremendous effort to climb the stairs. Yet he slept little and worked hard, and we understood that it could not be otherwise (for he shouldered such a weight of responsibilities: the orchestra alone was a full-time job), that he could not and would not spare himself. We were powerless to help him in any way, and so we hastened to assure him that we would definitely live to see victory, all of us.
He smiled happily, and said nothing, as if pondering over our answer, and then lowered his eyelids slowly. They were inflamed, dark and heavy. As always, when Babushkin closed his eyes, his youthful face immediately grew older, he looked exhausted and terribly ill. We exchanged glances and were silent too. Suddenly, without opening his eyes he said slowly and softly,
Here he is, the chemist, silent, lofty-browed,
Wrinkling his forehead, new experiments contriving.
Through the World Who’s Who he leafs and thinks aloud:
“Twentieth century.
Let’s look who’s worth reviving?”
He paused and then went on, his voice gradually rising louder:
“Here’s Maiakovskii not among the brightest.
No, the poet isn’t nice enough to see.”
From Today
I’ll holler to the scientist,
“Leave off turning pages!
Revive me!”
“We shall include broadcasts of his poems in our book,” Babushkin said enthusiastically, opening his eyes and immediately growing young again. “They acquire a special meaning in our conditions. Why, Leningrad speaks with his voice too!”
The book we planned that night was to include poems, short stories, articles, satirical prose, documents, whole programs broadcast by Radio Leningrad and, most important of all, the voices of Leningraders-soldiers and sailors, workers and scientists, actors and writers.
We intended to arrange it all in chronological order, beginning with the first days of the war and ending with the breach of the blockade which, on that sublime night, seemed quite imminent. The breach of the blockade was somehow identified in our minds with total victory. Yet a whole year was to pass before the blockade was broken, over two until the city was completely relieved, and more than three till final victory…. But although firmly believing that victory was nigh and with no idea of the truly inconceivable calamities that were in store for us, we were neither blind nor naive, nor flippant: I repeat, that night, as we looked back on the short and tragic but inherently victorious and valiant path trodden by our city, we felt with every fiber of our beings the invincibility of our people and, consequently, of our city, Leningrad. Rare, precious moments like that night should be treasured and revered.
Nowhere had radio broadcasts played such a big role as in our besieged city.
In August of 1941, when the last roads leading from Leningrad had been cut and the noose of the blockade tightened on the city’s throat, the radio remained practically the only means of communication with the rest of the country.
From the radio the Leningraders learned about what happened at the fronts (newspapers from the “mainland” reached us with great difficulty), it was only over the radio that Russia learned about what was happening in Leningrad. And it had to know the truth about it, for the Germans who were making frantic efforts to capture the city, declared every day for all the world to know, that Leningrad’s fall was a matter of hours. Actually, German newspapers in occupied parts of the Leningrad region announced the capture of the city and carried faked photographs of an SS man standing on guard outside a building on Nevskii Prospect. The German command set the date for a ceremonious parade in Palace Square and an officers’ banquet at the Astoria Hotel, and even printed invitations for the banquet.
On the instructions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Leningrad began its radio broadcasts-at a different time every day in order to confuse the Germans who did their best to jam our broadcasts. Leningrad put on the air its defenders: soldiers and sailors, workers and party officials, poets, composers and scientists.
Our broadcasts were relayed from Moscow to all parts of the country so that our whole people knew: Leningrad was still holding out, Leningrad had not surrendered. This was during the most desperate period of the war when the German armies were crashing forwards and we were forced to abandon one town after another. And there was Leningrad bringing the Germans to a halt! Leningrad held out, live voices of Leningraders vowed that it would not surrender either today or tomorrow or ever, and the next day the city spoke again. Leningrad stood its ground and fought back, full of strength, wrath and resolution.
These broadcasts continued despite bombing raids and shellings. They always began with the same words: “This is Radio Leningrad, the city of Lenin calling the Country!”
The composer Dmitrii Shostakovich spoke in this program on the day when Leningradskaia Pravda carried a huge headline: “The Enemy Is at Our Gates.” “Our city is facing an immediate danger of invasion by a base and ruthless enemy,” the editorial ran. “Leningrad has become the front line.” The appeals of the Military Council pasted on the walls bore the same message: “The Enemy Is at Our Gates!” While the composer was driving to the Radio Committee, an air-raid warning sounded. But the country which was avidly listening to Leningrad’s voice did not know that Shostakovich was speaking to the coughing of AA guns and the roar of explosions.
Luckily no bombs dropped near the Committee. The composer spoke with great emotion, and his voice, though somewhat hollow, was clear and outwardly calm.
“An hour ago I completed the second part of my new work,” Shostakovich began. “If I manage to complete the third and fourth parts of this composition and if it turns out well, I shall be able to call it the Seventh Symphony…. Despite the war-time conditions, despite the danger which is threatening Leningrad, I have written the first two parts in a comparatively short time. Why am I telling you this? I am telling you so that listeners tuned in to me now should know that life in our city is normal. All of us are soldiers today, and those who work in the field of culture and the arts are doing their duty on a par with all the other citizens of Leningrad.”
… Twenty-two years have passed since I first held in my hands these two pages torn from a note-book and covered with nervous minute handwriting, almost without corrections. Today, as then, they pierce my heart with their ineffable civic dignity and chaste modesty. The editor gave me these pages and asked my opinion: did I not think that the speech sounded “too calm”?
“No,” I said. “We must make no changes here and mustn’t add a single elevated sentence. Only, please, can I keep this rough copy?”
“By all means,” he said laughing, “only let me copy some of the things I jotted down on the back. It’s a plan of current broadcasts for the city.”
And I still hold on to this rough copy of Shostakovich’s speech. On the back, in a different but also hurried handwriting, is the following plan of current broadcasts for the city:
1. Organization of detachments.
2. Street communications.
3. The building of barricades.
4. Fighting with incendiary bottles.
5. Defense of a house.
6. Stress that fighting is now going on the near approaches….
These instructions were to be broadcast within the next day or two. Meanwhile Shostakovich was speaking on in his subdued voice:
“Soviet musicians, my dear, numerous comrades-in-arms, my friends! Remember that grave danger faces our art. Let us defend our music, let us work honestly and selflessly … ”
And they certainty did work for the defense, the musicians of the only orchestra which remained in Leningrad, the orchestra of the Radio Committee. True, in those days, not a single song or melody sounded over the radio-somebody had decided that “this was no time for music”. But the orchestra was alive, it broadcast concerts for England and Sweden, for it was important that they, too, should know that we were riot only fighting and resisting the enemy, but even performing Chaikovskii and Beethoven. Besides, nearly all members of the orchestra did air defense duty and helped to build fortifications. The violinist A. Presser was head of the Radio Committee’s fire-watching team; the very first incendiary bomb which fell on our roof was put out by our first viola I. Iasiniavskii; Iu. Shakh and A. Safonov helped to dig trenches round the city on the very day when Shostakovich spoke over the radio. Little did they imagine then that one day they would play that same symphony the composer was speaking about.
“Goodbye, comrades,” he said in conclusion. “I shall soon be completing my Seventh Symphony. My mind is clear and the drive to create urges me on to conclude my composition. And then I shall come on the air again, with my new work and shall nervously await your stern, friendly judgment. I assure you in the name of all Leningraders, in the name of all those working in the field of culture and the arts, that we are invincible and that we are ever at our posts … ”
“I assure you that we arc invincible … ” Thus spoke Shostakovich, one of the famous sons of Leningrad, its pride: and he spoke for all Leningraders. And the whole country, listening to Leningrad’s every word with pride, pain and anxiety, believed him.
Late that autumn, when the first partisans of Leningrad region crossed the front line into the city and visited the Radio Committee in order to speak to the citizens-under an assumed name or just one letter we learned just how much broadcasts from Leningrad meant to them.
“Day after day the Germans wrote in their newspapers that Leningrad had been captured and the Baltic Fleet destroyed,” the commander of the Luga detachment N. A. Panov (then Comrade P.) told us. “The people were depressed by the news and morale in our detachment was low too. What were we to do? We held a party meeting, with only one question on the agenda: has Leningrad been surrendered or not. We passed the decision that it hadn’t. Yes, we wrote it down in these very words: to consider Leningrad not surrendered. But we had a gnawing feeling in our heart of hearts. Then one day we met some partisans from Oredczha. Our first question was, of course, ‘How are things in Leningrad?’ They had a radio receiver. Let’s try and tune in, they said. And can you imagine such luck, within the hour we heard: ‘This is Radio -Leningrad. The cruiser Kirov calling.’ You can’t imagine what it meant for us! So Leningrad was alive and kicking, and so was the Baltic Fleet! Our party meeting had adopted the right decision after all. Immediately we dispatched our men into the villages to let the people know that Leningrad had not surrendered and was not going to surrender. It helped us no end.”
The voice of Leningrad reached the furthermost corners of our country. In 1944, housewives in Sevastopol and the curator of the Kherson museum Alexander Takhtai told us about the impact of the Leningrad broadcasts. In the autumn of 1941, the besieged cities of Sevastopol, Kiev and Odessa started exchanges of broadcasts with blockaded Leningrad. It was a bitter and heroic time and, sadly, the exchanges did not continue for very long. The longest of all was the series of exchanges with Sevastopol, which lasted right up until the Germans captured the city.
“We tuned in to Leningrad with a particular kind of trepidation,” Takhtai told us, “for it was the voice of a comrade-in-arms, the voice of our elder brother. The calm and determination of the Leningraders’ voices amazed and inspired us. We knew from our own experience what lay behind those simple words: “despite fierce enemy attacks both on land and in the air … “. But we were to be still more impressed later, when we learned what you lived through in the winter and spring of 1942 besides those “fierce attacks”.
No, we never concealed anything or tried to deceive anybody: we simply spoke about the main truth which mattered most for everybody-we were holding out and would continue to hold out.
In broadcasts to the city we were more outspoken.
I remember how on September 19, 1941, the day of a particularly savage air-raid that will be remembered by all Leningraders, a woman who lived in Stremiannaia Street came to the studio. Her name was Moskovskaia and she had just lost two children under the ruins of their house. She had never spoken over the radio before, but she came to us and said: “Let me speak over the radio…. Please, I want to speak!”
She told the listeners what had happened to her children an hour before. What I remember most is not so much her words as her breathing. The heavy, labored breathing of a person who is all the time keeping down a scream, suppressing a fit of violent sobbing. This breathing amplified by the loudspeakers came into the houses of Leningrad and into the trenches on the approaches to the city, and soldiers listened to a mother’s story of how her little boy and girl had died in Stremiannaia Street, listened to her breathing, tile breathing of boundless grief and boundless courage. They all remembered this breathing and it helped them to bold out.
Speaking from the rostrum provided by the radio the people of the city where personal and public had merged into one, supported and encouraged one another and rallied closer together.
As a writer I am proud to be able to say that the voices of Leningrad writers sounded loud and clear in those days. Art had mounted this huge, unprecedented rostrum not only to make speeches, agitate and appeal: no, it also conducted heart-to-heart talks with fellow citizens, it pondered aloud on the most vital issues, it counseled and comforted, and shared in the joys and sorrows of all who listened, reaching their hearts by the route that is open to art alone.
As regards speeches and appeals, we had our aces too. No Leningrader who lived through the blockade will ever forget the passionate addresses of Vsevolod Vishnevskii. The radio, whose instruments are sound, voice and timbre, was an ideal medium for communicating to listeners the inimitable tone of this author who was a Baltic sailor serving on the cruiser Aurora when it fired its historic shot during the storming of the Winter Palace. His tone and manner were in themselves a live bond with the revolutionary history of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad. This devil-may-care manner of the Baltic sailor, this familiar fo’c’sle note, that had been vindicated so splendidly during the October Revolution and the Civil War, now made a come-back, so alive, so authentic, so dear to everybody’s heart. True, the Baltic sailor had grown older and sterner, but in that terrible autumn of 1941, in those desperate days of the assault, his passionate, at times rather disjointed speeches were so encouraging and so necessary for this city which not only cherished its traditions but lived by them.
Every appeal of old Petersburg workers to their fellow-citizens, to the volunteers and the soldiers ended with the oath: “We shall die rather than surrender our beloved Leningrad!”
The oath repeated almost word for word the slogans written on the banners of soldiers and Red Guards who went out in 1917-1919 to defend the city against Kornilov, Kerenskii or Iudenich: “We shall Die Rather than Surrender Red Peter (Petrograd)!”
Nor was it a quotation either, it was a live cri du coeur, as alive and urgent as were the speeches of Vsevolod Vishnevskii with his inimitable manner of a revolutionary sailor of the Baltic Fleet.
On several occasions I had the good luck to hear him speak to army units, at factories or over the radio. It was a sheer delight to listen to him, delight and hard work. Yes, work, because at such moments your heart and brain began to work strenuously and you found yourself automatically clenching your fists. Take, for example, his radio speech on the occasion of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution:
“… The night before the October anniversary: the evening dusk has fallen over the city on the frozen Neva which is ready for anything … The front-city is alive, and the heartbeats of the revolution are as strong in it as ever. It is calm and confident, like a true Russian, like Lenin. The loudspeakers arc broadcasting Lev Tolstoy’s story ‘Sevastopol. Winter, 1854′. The crowd listens spellbound. They recognize themselves. Tolstoy’s Fourth Bastion is Leningrad today. Everything in Tolstoy’s account is accurate, everything is as it is now. The matter-of fact Russian heroism, modest and pure. A blacked-out tram goes out to the front-line, to the Fourth Bastion…. This great city is faithful to October, it is fully aware of its destiny and of itself. It knows what awaits it-work, sacrifices, loyalty, courage and victory … ”
Or take his famous speech “Listen, beloved Moscow!” made in the hardest days of the war, when the enemy was on the approaches to the capital, when we Leningraders used to say: “Moscow’s defense line passes through the heart of every Leningrader.”
“Moscow! We, Leningraders and Baltic sailors, are with you, shoulder to shoulder with you, our beloved capital! You have fought many battles, Moscow, and the whole world listens to your voice; your labors and holidays are a revelation and the morrow of mankind…. Moscow, throw into battle everything that is alive, militant and honest. Do it without delay. Allow no hesitation, no fear, no failures…. The dying Baltic sailors can show you an example…. Even on the brink of death these men were able to see, indeed did see victory: our future victory. It will come! It is beyond the winter blizzards, ahead yonder!”
No, this speech cannot be quoted in parts. How fortunate that it has been preserved almost in full in a recording.
I recollect another talk in the series “This Is Radio Leningrad!”, at the end of September 1941, when the city was subjected to the most ferocious artillery bombardments and air-raids. This talk was made by the poetess Anna Akhmatova. We recorded it not in the studio, but at the Writers’ House, a building which was jokingly called the “sky-scriber”, in the flat of Mikhail Zoshchenko. As luck would have it, there was a terrific artillery bombardment going on, we were all terribly nervous and the recording was going badly. To Anna Akhmatova’s dictation I wrote down her short speech, which she subsequently corrected, and this yellowed sheet of paper is as precious to me as is the draft of Shostakovich’s speech. And just as clearly as I remember today, after the lapse of twenty years, the subdued, wise, calm voice of Shostakovich and the effervescent voice of Vishnevskii, now high, now low and intense, so I preserve in my memory the deep, tragic and proud voice of the “Muse of Sobbing” as it floated over evening Leningrad, dark gold and hushed for a short while. But in those days she wrote and spoke not at all as a “Muse of Sobbing” but as a true and valiant daughter of Russia and Leningrad.
“My dear fellow-citizens,” she said. “Mothers, wives and sisters of Leningrad. For more than a month now the enemy has been threatening our city with capture and inflicting severe wounds on it. The city of Peter the Great, the city of Lenin, the city of Pushkin, Dostoevskii and Blok, the city of a great culture and labor is threatened with disgrace and destruction. Like all Leningraders, I go numb with horror at the very thought that our city, my city may be trampled under. My whole life has been bound up with Leningrad; I became a poet in Leningrad; Leningrad is the very air my verse breathes…. Like all of you, I only live by my unshakable faith that Leningrad will never bow down to the Nazis. This faith is made stronger when I see the women of Leningrad defending the city with such simple velour and enabling ordinary human existence to continue. Our descendants will pay tribute to every mother of the time of the Patriotic War, but particularly so to the woman of Leningrad who stands on the roof during an air raid, watching for the incendiaries; to a Leningrad volunteer-nurse helping the wounded among the ruins of a burning house…. No, a city which has raised such women cannot be vanquished. We Leningraders are living through very hard times, but we know that our country and all our fellow countrymen are with us. We can feet their anxiety for us, their love and their help. We arc grateful to them and we promise that we shall remain staunch and brave … ”
I forgot to mention that the broadcasts for the country at large were listened to by Leningraders as well, and that was why Anna Akhmatova was addressing the women of Leningrad. But, first and foremost, these were broadcasts for the country at large and the whole world, and it was very important that alongside with rank-and-file defenders of the city, people whose names were known all over the globe should appear on the air. The Nazis listened to our broadcasts, too, of course. They listened to them and, as we found out later, wrote down the names of the speakers, longing for a “day of reckoning”. As we all know, these paranoid ambitions were not to be realized. It makes me proud to think that not one Leningrad author ever refused to take part in those broadcasts-on the contrary, it was regarded as a great honor to be invited. Nikolai Tikhonov, Alexander Prokofiev and Vissarion Saianov made many appearances on Radio Leningrad with their courageous verse, poems and sketches. Alexander Fadeev who came to Leningrad by plane in the spring of 1942 spoke over the radio twice. I still have the text of the warm address by Mikhail Sholokhov:
“Dear Comrade Leningraders!
“We know how hard it is for you to live, work and fight in a city encircled by the enemy. At all the fighting fronts and in the rear we are always thinking of you. The steel-founder in the faraway Urals thinks of you as he watches the stream of molten metal, and he works furiously in order to hasten the hour of your liberation. The soldier fighting the German invaders in the Donbass avenges not only his raped Ukraine, but also the cruel sufferings inflicted on you, Leningraders, by our enemies.
“We long for the hour when the ring of the blockade will be broken and the great Soviet land will press to its breast the heroic sons and daughters of eternally glorious Leningrad who have gone through so much suffering and privation.”
Almost all Leningrad writers spoke over the radio. One of our best contributors was Vladimir Volzhenin, who worked with real inspiration and supplied us with material which was in the greatest demand-satirical verse, couplets and fables deriding the Hitlerites, and short sketches. This went into our special daily program which was called Radio News. It always contained reports from the Leningrad Front and about the life of the city, a poem and, strange as it may appear to one today, a lot of humorous and satirical stuff. Oh yes, we could still laugh at that terrible time. Nor was it sick humor. It was rather in the style of Maiakovskii’s “Terrible Laughter”. We ridiculed panic-mongers, windbags, loafers, all those rare but disgusting foreign bodies which occasionally appeared in the stern and clean Leningrad organism. And, of course, we vented on the Nazis whole Niagaras of sarcasm, irony, mockery and derision, everything they deserved, not to mention, Of Course, our sacred and burning hatred, repugnance and contempt.
Other excellent regular contributors to Radio News were Zoshchenko, Evgenii Shvarts and I. Metter. Radio News was very popular both with civilians and soldiers and we often received delegations from army units who wanted to obtain material from a broadcast for use by propaganda teams. In December when the Political Administration of the Baltic Fleet commissioned me to compile a small collection “The Baltic Fleet Laughs” I used some of the material from our Radio News, in particular Eugene Schwarz’s charming “Tales about the Devil”. And this was in December 1941, in a starving city deprived of light and warmth.
Now we intended to take all this -Shostakovich’s speech of September 1941, the voice of the mother who had lost her children in the ruins, the passionate addresses by Vishnevskii, the stern war poems of Tikhonov, the audacious couplets of Volzhenin and even some whole programs for the country and from Radio News, as well as the partisans’ stories about the encouragement they gained from the voice of Leningrad-and include it in the first part of the book “This Is Radio Leningrad!”
We also included in our plan for the book out winter broadcasts (“This Is Radio Leningrad” and Radio News survived even in those incredibly hard days)-a report from an arms works where starving Komsomols repaired tanks and wrote on them “Death to Hitler!” and “Victory”, speeches, poems and talks by Leningrad writers, “Theatre by the Microphone” programs, letters from listeners and descriptions of the fantastic mode of life of the Radio Committee staff (the celebrations of the fiftieth and hundredth programs of Radio News were unforgettable).
Here I would like to add a small but very important explanation. When we drew up our plan on that feverishly inspired night of 10th January 1942 there was much we did not know and were unable to foresee. For instance, we included a talk by Shostakovich about the symphony he was composing, but little did we imagine that the symphony would be performed in Moscow in March that same year, and that the composer and all the world were to name it the Leningrad Symphony, or that later in that same year it was to be performed in our besieged city by our own orchestra, the orchestra of the Radio Committee! That winter the orchestra practically ceased to give performances, for its members did not have the strength. This was particularly so in the case of the wind instruments, for the performers “had nothing to strain their diaphragms against”. The orchestra kept dwindling. Some went away to the front, others died of starvation. I shall always remember those gray winter mornings when Yasha Babushkin, now completely dropsical and leaden in color, dictated to the typist his current reports on the state of the orchestra.
“The first violin is dying, the drum died on his way to work, the French horn is at death’s door,” he dictated in an outwardly dispassionate voice, hollow with despair.
Yet the members who were alive-mostly those quartered on the premises of the Radio Committee-did not abandon their jobs, and went on doing their air-defense duty. Karl Eliasberg heroically conducted rehearsals in the icy cold studio premises, choosing works that would be within the musicians’ physical capacity. When news came that the Seventh Symphony had been performed in Moscow and some time later its score was brought in by plane, the orchestra became inflamed with the practically unattainable desire to perform the symphony here, where it was born, in the besieged, starving but defiant city. From his first glance at the score Eliasberg realized that the dream was totally impracticable the monumental, forceful score required a doubled orchestra, nearly a hundred people, while the Radio Committee orchestra had dwindled by spring to fifteen musicians. Nevertheless, he decided, together with the then acting chairman of the Radio Committee Viktor Khodorenko and the art director of the Committee Babushkin, to perform the Seventh Symphony in Leningrad.
The city Party Committee came to their aid, allocating the musicians an extra daily ration of porridge by that time it amounted, I believe, to all of forty grams of cereals or beans. An appeal was broadcast for all musicians in the city to report for duty to the Radio orchestra. The response was quite impressive. Among those who came was the first violin of the Philharmonic Society Zavetnovskii, emaciated, but trim and collected as ever, and Leningrad’s oldest musician, seventy-year-old Nagornyuk, who had played the French horn in orchestras conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov, Napravnik and Glazunov. Nagornyuk’s son, a soldier demobilized after a severe wound, had been evacuated from Leningrad and had pleaded with his father to go with him. But the old musician had refused: he just had to play the Seventh Symphony!
There were still not enough, and the Political Administrations of the Front and the Baltic Fleet issued an order that the best musicians from army and navy orchestras should be transferred to a combined city orchestra. Thus the defenders of Leningrad grappled with their own symphony.
And then the day came, August 9, 1942, when the white-columned hall of the Philharmonic Society, after months of desolation, was bright with festive lights and thronged with Leningraders. They came from the front line and from wherever it was possible to walk or come by tram (trams had started running again in the spring). The audience was composed of workers who forged the weapons of defense, architects already planning the resurrection of the city, teachers who gave dictations to children in air raid shelters, writers and poets who had not laid down their pens in the appalling months of the past winter, soldiers, officers, party functionaries and representatives of the city administration.
The musicians of the combined orchestra came out onto the huge platform of the Philharmonic Society packing it to capacity. We could see its nucleus: the musicians of the Radio Orchestra-1. Iasiniavskii, who put out the first incendiary on the studio roof, the commander of the fire-watching squad violinist A. Presser, A. Safonov and Iu. Shakh, who had helped to dig trenches near Pulkovo. We could see musicians in army tunics and pea jackets, we could see before us defenders of Leningrad prepared as ever, at any moment, to give their lives for their native city, their country and their people.
Karl Eliasberg mounted the conductor’s rostrum. He was wearing a tail-coat, a real tail-coat, as befits a conductor, though it hung down from his emaciated frame as from a coat hanger. There were a few moments of complete silence and then the Symphony began. From its very first bars we recognized ourselves and the path we had trodden, the epic of Leningrad which had already become legendary: the ruthless enemy bearing down on us, our defiant resistance, our grief, our dream of a bright world, our undoubted forthcoming victory. And we who had not cried over the dead bodies of our dear ones in winter were now unable to hold back soundless, bitter and relieving tears and were not ashamed of them. Those of us who worked on the radio heard through that wonderful music the subdued, calm and wise voice of its creator, Dmitrii Shostakovich, coming from besieged Leningrad in September 1941, when the enemy was making frantic efforts to seize the city:
“I assure you, comrades, in the name of all Leningraders, that we are invincible and that we are ever at our posts … ”
On that memorable night of January 10 we put down in our plan “the breach of the blockade’, although we had no idea how it would come. It seemed to us, I repeat once again, that it would happen very soon: we were not to know that the whole unbearably difficult year of 1942 was to pass before the blockade was broken.
All that was happening at the Radio Committee the night the blockade was broken was spontaneous, unprepared and unplanned the music, the poems written there and then, the speeches-it was a solid, unbroken current of rejoicing, heard by the Volkhov Front, the whole country, the entire world. And the greatest reward for us at the studio was that on that happy festive night Leningraders came flocking to us, to their beloved, truly popular rostrum.
One old woman walked all night from the other side of the city and when accosted by militiamen, answered: “I’m going to the radio, sonny, to congratulate the Leningraders.”
And the militiamen let her through though she had no night pass. She reached us in the morning and did her congratulation bit.
Another woman, a housewife, told us:
“When I heard in the news that the blockade had been broken, I burst into tears and ran back and forth around the flat, looking for somebody to hug, but I was all alone. Then I thought I must run over here to the radio, but I was afraid to leave the flat. So I just stood by the loudspeaker all night long, listening, and I did not feel alone.”
And although the blockade lasted another year after the breach had been made, with more exhausting shellings, bombings and new trials for the people, although the happy day of the final relief of the city only came a year later, the Leningraders remember the night of the 18th of January, 1943, as the summit of joy, a night when all hearts opened to one another. And an indispensable part of that night was the voice of the radio which, for the first time in many long months, sang and spoke night through to the dawn, for all the world to hear Leningrad’s jubilation.
The book “This Is Radio Leningrad!” never materialized. Instead, a radio recording entitled “Nine Hundred Days” was made in 1945 for the anniversary of the German defeat at Leningrad. Although it was only sound without pictures, here sound often attains an almost visual force. “Nine Hundred Days” was made up of documentary recordings, beginning with the first days of the war and ending with the German defeat at Leningrad. You hear in it live voices of Leningraders, the whistling of shells and the roar of explosions, the weeping of a mother over her wounded child at 26, Rubinstein Street, and the hooting of the first train to arrive from the “Mainland” in February 1943, a speech by Vishnevskii and a lot of other things belonging to the tragic and glorious past.
This film was made by workers of the Radio Committee who were in Leningrad throughout the blockade: the chief engineer N. Sviridov, war correspondents L. Magrachov and G. Makogonenko, recording technician Liubov Spektor, sound director N. Rogov. If Babushkin had been alive, he would have certainly taken part in the making of this film. But Yasha Babushkin was dead. We had been afraid that he would not be able to stand the rigors of the blockade and would starve to death, but he held out, and the blockade was unable to break him. He fell in battle near Narva, in February 1944, in the fighting for the final relief of Leningrad.
Source: Moscow – Stalingrad, 1941-1942 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), pp. 163-177.