PROLOGUE

Eugene Weintraub of the Am-Rus Music Corporation inspects the microfi lm of Shostakovich’s Seventh Sym-phony (Leningrad ), op. 60.

An American agent An American agent met with a Russian agent one bright summer

morning when the world was collapsing in the face of Nazi terror. It was

June 2, 1942; the Second World War was not going well for the Allied forces.

Most of Europe had already been conquered by the Nazi German onslaught.

France had fallen, and so had Norway, Denmark, Poland, Belgium, and

Czechoslovakia. Now the Germans were deep inside Russia, clawing away

at the country’s innards.

The American agent and the Soviet agent may have spoken of these

things when they met. They may have talked about the need for cooperation

between their countries, which were now allied against the Nazi threat. All

we know is that after they spoke, the Soviet agent passed a wooden box to

the American, who took the box and left the building.

Inside the wooden box was a strip of microfi lm that, when unrolled,

would stretch over a hundred feet long. It contained hardly any words: just

lines and dots and ancient monastic symbols in complicated arrangements.

The Russians hoped it would help change the course of the war.

SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEADSYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD2

The microfi lm had taken a long route to get all the way from Russia to

Washington, D.C. It had been fl own by plane to Tehran, then driven across

the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa to Cairo. From Cairo, it had

been put back on a plane and fl own to Brazil, and from there, to the United

States. Now it was about to embark on the fi nal leg of its journey — to New

York City.

First the American agent stopped for lunch at a cafeteria. He got up

from the table to go to the bathroom. When he came back, the table was

empty. The box with the microfi lm was gone.

He had just lost one of the most widely discussed documents of the war.

Panicked, he scanned the room: People ate. Knives scraped across

plates. A busboy retreated toward the trash cans with a tray full of garbage.

There, on the kid’s tray, tipping toward the peelings and rinds, was

the box.

After a journey of ten thousand miles across steppe, sand, sea, and

jungle, the microfi lm almost ended its trip in the trash.

The agent stopped the kid short of dumping the microfi lm. He retrieved

the box. The stupid accident was averted.

The agent set out for New York City. There was a lot to be done. In

the next few weeks, hundreds of copies of the documents encrypted on that

strip needed to be made, and people were already clamoring for it to be made

public.

By the day the Soviet agent and the American agent met to pass along the

microfi lm, the Germans had conquered most of Europe and then had poured

east into Russia. They seemed unstoppable. Their tanks had swarmed across

the fertile fi elds of Russia’s southern provinces, destroying villages as they

went. And in the north of Russia, the city of Leningrad, once the country’s

capital, had been surrounded for nine months, locked within its rivers and

its trenches, blasted daily by air raids and long-range artillery.

The document on the microfi lm concerned the city of Leningrad.

PROLOGUEPROLOGUE 3

The U.S. Air Transport Command carried the microfi lm of Shostakovich’s symphony from Payne Field, near Cairo, Egypt, across the deserts of North Africa. Touching down occasion-ally to refuel, the cargo plane crossed the Atlantic, landed briefl y in Brazil, and fi nally made its way to Washington, D.C.

SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEADSYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD4

More than a million people trapped inside the city were blocked off

almost entirely from the outside world. Over the winter, they had been with-

out electricity, without running water, without food, without fi rewood, and

almost without hope. Families ate wallpaper paste and sawdust. Women

prowled basements for corpses to eat, and there were rumors that gangs

of men who had turned cannibal went out at night to hunt for victims in

alleys. Germans rained down incendiary bombs on the roofs and strafed the

squares and avenues during nightly air raids. Adolf Hitler had demanded

that the city and all its inhabitants be utterly destroyed.

Secret Directive No. 1a 1601/41: “The Führer has decided to erase the

city of [Leningrad] from the face of the earth. I have no interest in the further

existence of this large population point after the defeat of Soviet Russia.”

German high command felt it would be too costly to feed all the prison-

ers of Leningrad if they were captured, and Hitler considered the Russian

Slavs, like the Jews, to be an inferior race, fi t only for slavery or extermina-

tion. His vision was to make “room to live” for his Aryan cohorts. Russia

would become breadbasket, oil fi eld, and Teutonic playground in the thrill-

ing gymnastic future of the triumphant Nazi Reich.

In New York, on June 3, the microfi lm was unspooled and stretched across

an illuminated table. Men inspected it with magnifying glasses. Contained

on the fi lm was not, peculiarly, the plans for some technological secret — a

submarine or the atomic bomb. It was not some fragment of Enigma code or

unscrambled German battle order.

Instead, the microfi lm contained 252 pages of the musical score for

the Seventh Symphony of a nervous Russian composer named Dmitri

Shostakovich. Its codes and symbols would be translated by an orchestra

of more than a hundred and would be broadcast to millions sitting by their

radios — but we are still arguing today about what secret messages the

piece contains, what cries for help.

The score included few words: a few typical performance directions

PROLOGUEPROLOGUE 5

in Italian, as was the tradition. And, on the fi rst page, an inscription in

Russian: “Dedicated to the city of Leningrad.” For this reason, it was called

the Leningrad Symphony.

Why had the Soviet government arranged so carefully for this piece to

be shipped to the West across battle lines, across a Middle East that was

swarming with Fascist tanks, across seas festering with enemy subs? How

could it possibly be worth it?

And who was the composer of this desperately sought-after score?

Dmitri Shostakovich spent the fi rst several months of the Siege of Leningrad

trapped in that city under fi re, writing much of his Seventh Symphony in

breaks between air raids. He had fi rst announced that he was working

on the piece over the radio in September 1941, just a few weeks after the

Germans had started shelling the city. He had explained his intentions to an

audience of thousands.

The day of his radio broadcast, Shostakovich almost missed his appoint-

ment to speak on the air. As he was walking through the streets of the city,

the Germans started their daily assault. Sirens howled. An urgent voice

barked over the loudspeakers, “This is the local defense headquarters! Air

raid! Air raid!” Shostakovich scampered to a bomb shelter. Planes roared

over the city’s spires and canals. Explosions echoed through the Classical

avenues. The composer hid until the all-clear sounded.

As a result, by the time he got to the radio studio, he was almost late.

The staff rushed him in front of a microphone, and he delivered his message

in his high, tense tenor. It buzzed out of radios all over the city where build-

ings burned and windows gaped without glass.

“An hour ago I fi nished scoring the second movement of my latest large

orchestral composition,” he told his fellow citizens.

In spite of the war and the danger threatening Leningrad, I wrote

the fi rst movements quickly.

SYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEADSYMPHONY FOR THE CITY OF THE DEAD6

Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this so that the

people of Leningrad listening to me will know that life goes on in

our city. . . .

Leningrad is my country. It is my native city and my home.

Many thousands of other people from Leningrad know this same

feeling of infi nite love for our native town, for its wonderful, spa-

cious streets, its incomparably beautiful squares and buildings.

When I walk through our city a feeling of deep conviction grows

within me that Leningrad will always stand, grand and beautiful,

on the banks of the Neva, that it will always be a bastion of my

country, that it will always be there to enrich the fruits of culture.

We still have the piece of paper on which he typed out the message he

read on air. Shostakovich must have left it on a desk at the radio station when

he was fi nished with the announcement. It was used for scrap paper. On

the other side, the studio director scribbled his notes about the lineup of

radio shows for the next day’s broadcasts: instructions on how to construct

barricades, suggestions for how to defend your home against German

troops, and, fi nally, the recipe for Molotov cocktails. This was not a drink

but a homemade explosive, a bottle of gasoline stuffed with a rag, named

after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.

Everyone in Leningrad was on the front line.

Shostakovich’s attachment to his native Leningrad is more complicated

than it might seem from his brave and defi ant declaration. In the course

of his short life, he had been named both a Soviet hero and an enemy of

the people. And similarly, Leningrad itself had been renamed several times

since Shostakovich’s birth, seen as both Russia’s prize jewel and a canker

on the hide of the body politic. The Communist government had celebrated

Leningrad as the cradle of Soviet Russia — and had punished its citizens

viciously for supposed crimes against the Soviet state. As the people of

Leningrad fought to defend their city from the Germans, they could not

PROLOGUEPROLOGUE 7

forget that their own army had recently been decimated by Joseph Stalin,

their own nation’s terrifying dictator. Supposedly, Shostakovich once

said that the Leningrad Symphony was about “the Leningrad that Stalin

destroyed and that Hitler merely fi nished off.” To understand Shostakovich

and his music, we must also understand how he was caught up in these

struggles for power, these murders and assassinations.

For much of the war, Dmitri Shostakovich worked by day writing kick-line

tunes for the homicidal secret police’s dance band. At night, he sat huddled

at a table in a friend’s apartment, smoking cheap cigarettes, playing cards

with a man who would later denounce him. They played poker. They drank

vodka, when they could get it. Food was extremely scarce at this time. They

ate pancakes made out of coffee grounds.

We can imagine him there, in the smoke of that kitchen, throwing down

cards. It is late at night. He is, supposedly, a poker fi end. His face is gentle

and kind and birdlike behind his round, owlish glasses. Though he is in his

late thirties, it is the face of a boy. And that face twitches almost ceaselessly.

As he plays, he cannot stop touching his lips with his hands or adjusting his

glasses. He pats the back of his hair, but his cowlick won’t stay down.

He may have looked frail, but he survived greater assaults and catastro-

phes than most of us can imagine. And though he seemed nervous, his music

would change the lives of thousands and give hope to millions.

This is a tale of microfi lm canisters and secret police, of Communists

and capitalists, of battles lost and wars won. It is the tale of a utopian dream

that turned into a dystopian nightmare. It is the tale of Dmitri Shostakovich

and of his beloved city, Leningrad. But at its heart, it is a story about the

power of music and its meanings — a story of secret messages and double-

speak, and of how music itself is a code; how music coaxes people to endure

unthinkable tragedy; how it allows us to whisper between the prison bars

when we cannot speak aloud; how it can still comfort the suffering, saying,

“Whatever has befallen you — you are not alone.”