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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 February Diary, a long poem commissioned in February 1942 to mark Red Army Day. Though censored, it managed to combine patriotism with an unusual degree of realism and personal feeling, perfectly fitting the public mood. The verses, a survivor remembers, were ‘so simple that they just stuck in your head. You’d walk along, muttering the lines. . When I had to climb up on to our library roof and stand there during the shelling it was somehow a big help knowing them by heart.’ Another calls them ‘splendid. . they really shook us out of that animal brooding about food’.31 Other popular programmes were Campfire — an imaginative magazine feature for children, which continued long after the war — and, from the spring of 1942, Letters to and from the Front, which enabled Leningraders to send each other (morale-boosting) personal messages. The Radio House also broadcast to Leningrad’s besiegers. Headed by émigré Austrian Communists, the brothers Ernst and Fritz Fuchs, its German-language section featured defeatist interviews with German POWs and faked ‘letters from home’, said to have been discovered in dead soldiers’ pockets. One described the bombing of Berlin; another, written by Berggolts, waxed lyrical about Christmas in Bavaria — ‘Do you remember the smell of Christmas biscuits? Spices, raisins, vanilla? The warmth and crackle of Christmas candles?’32

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 Atheist newspaper was renamed then closed, and Leningrad’s Metropolitan Aleksei was allowed to make a patriotic appeal to the nation in which he invoked Russia’s medieval warrior-saints Dmitri Donskoi and Alexander Nevsky but did not once mention Stalin. Priests were allowed to take funeral services (as for Likhachev’s father) and to visit homes to administer the last rites. Crypts were used as bomb shelters and as distribution points for kerosene, firewood, hot water and clothing. (As a toddler, the poet Josef Brodsky sat out raids underneath the martial white and gold of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, round the corner from his family’s flat on the Liteiniy.) Leningrad churches also collected substantial defence funds — over two million roubles by the end of 1941, which paid for a Dmitri Donskoi tank column and an Alexander Nevsky air unit. So, too, did the Choral Synagogue, the one remaining place of worship for the city’s 200,000-odd Jews.