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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 alongside his wife, drew sketches of a fiery angel, of Christ — his skull-shaped head resembling those of the starving — and of the Virgin spreading her protective veil over the well-like courtyard of a blacked-out apartment block.38 Old Believers and Seventh Day Adventists continued, as they had done since 1938, to hold services in secret, in their homes. The mother of one such family (whose husband, a priest, was already in prison) made her six children kneel for long hours on the floor, praying. When they became emaciated she let them kneel on pillows (two out of the six died).39 Muslims and Buddhists also had to worship in secret, despite the fact that thousands were serving on the Leningrad front, and that the city possessed both a mosque and a magnificent Buddhist temple, built during the reign of Nicholas II and the tethering point of the barrage balloon that served as its wartime radio mast.

In sum, religious faith remained a private, risky source of consolation during the siege. Stalin’s relaxation of the rules was opportunistic and temporary, and Leningraders knew it. A ten-year-old girl, taken into one of ninety-eight new orphanages that opened between January and March 1942, woke one night to see her class teacher kneeling, head bowed, at the dormitory window. The teacher whispered that she was praying for her son, who had gone missing at the front — and begged the girl not to tell anybody what she had seen.40