The Russian language distinguishes two verbs related to cannibalism: one means “to eat a corpse” and the other means “to eat a human being.” During the siege of Leningrad by Nazi forces, both forms occurred, marking a grim era of 872 days that stands as the longest siege in modern history.
In the first brutal year of the siege, authorities recorded 2,015 arrests for acts of anthropophagy, whether involving corpses or living people, according to the report in Sinfonía para la ciudad de los muertos by MT Anderson (Es Pop Ediciones). The declassification of NKVD files in 2002 made it possible to quantify and analyze a horror once whispered. A woman shared her son’s body with colleagues; a grandmother was caught preparing to cook her granddaughter alive; a young man went to buy boots in an apartment of a seemingly healthy man and was shocked by the sight of a ghastly cellar behind a half-open door…
Yet in this bomb-scarred, frozen, and famished city, the collective spirit prevailed far more than any individual brutality. The people of Leningrad resisted against impossible odds.
human heat
Relatives and friends gathered in rooms of houses almost swallowed by cold to raise temperatures and share tasks, with the paramount aim of reaching the meager bread rations. Communal laundries, bathrooms, and nurseries were created. The Public Library became a gathering point, expanding its shelves by buying books from desperate people, money seeming almost worthless but still a lifeline. Patrols collected volumes from buildings made of phosphate. The Musical Comedy Theater and the Leningrad radio continued operating despite live broadcasts interrupted by malnutritioned performers and announcers.
Anderson opens a compelling narrative that ties the Bolshevik Revolution, the Stalinist terror, and the Russian front of World War II. Against this historical canvas, the life cycle of composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) unfolds, with particular emphasis on his Seventh Symphony, commonly known as Leningrad. He resists any simplified or propagandistic reading of his life, resisting the idea that his figure is a tool for political blocs.
The son of a prosperous Saint Petersburg family (later Petrograd, then Leningrad, and again Saint Petersburg from 1991), Shostakovich did not appear to relish the 1917 Revolution, once playing piano in a cinema called La Retina Radiante.
As Stalin’s power consolidated after Lenin’s death, Shostakovich—like millions of others—witnessed friends and colleagues fall to purges and paranoia at the highest military levels. An international star and once favored by the Soviet regime, a notable figure linked to an opera titled Lady Macbeth of the Mtsenk region faced punishment in 1936.
The Wehrmacht began its assault on Leningrad on June 22, 1941, as part of Operation Barbarossa to invade Russia. The city was encircled, and nutritionist Ernst Ziegelmeyer projected that the population would soon starve. Wasted effort in battle would be better spent elsewhere, so constant shelling punctuated the outskirts of the city.
The musician started drafting his Seventh Symphony in July 1941 within the besieged city. The work gained a mythic aura after Shostakovich announced it over Radio House, a broadcasting site nicknamed for its shell-scarred appearance. By September 17 he had completed two movements and declared, in effect, that life would go on in Leningrad despite the siege.
Shostakovich, his wife, and their two children were evacuated to Moscow by plane on October 1, saving themselves from a brutal winter in Leningrad. The rest of the family evacuated east by train toward Kuibyshev as German advances threatened to cut off routes. There, the composer completed the fourth and final part of Symphony No. 7 in December.
News of the symphony spread rapidly, and conductors around the world rushed to broadcast it. A symphony written under such oppressive conditions became a symbol of resilience. The piece premiered on March 5, 1942, performed by the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra in Kuibyshev. A new chapter in the Leningrad saga began.
Russia urging its allies, especially the United States, to intervene on the eastern front led to limited results: military aid arrived, but direct involvement on that front did not materialize in the manner hoped. Still, the musical work found a voice beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, serving as a propaganda instrument in some narratives while standing as a testament to endurance in others.
The score, about 2,750 pages long, was microfilmed and circulated globally. From Moscow to Tehran, then by land to Iraq, onward to Cairo, with eventual movements to Casablanca or Accra, finally reaching Washington, DC, by May 30, 1942, where it was handed to the Soviet embassy through the U.S. Department.
trembling hero
For the first time Time magazine put a composer on its cover, featuring Shostakovich and signaling recognition of his resilience. The moment was heavy with emotion as he learned he was framed as a symbol of bourgeois virtue, a contrast to the harsh realities faced at home. On July 19, 1942, the NBC Radio Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini performed the Seventh Symphony, with the performance broadcast to millions of households across America. Hollywood also explored turning the epic into a film, while private donations to aid Russia surged and the Roosevelt administration supplied weapons, medicine, and food to allied forces.
Only fifteen musicians answered the call from the Leningrad Radio Orchestra to perform the Seventh Symphony live. The rest were exhausted by war and hunger. The first rehearsal was held on March 30, 1942, with conductor Karl Eliasberg forced to endure extreme hardship. A trumpeter said he could not blow, a violinist collapsed, and yet, with the help of military musicians and a city undergoing the pain of melting away into the season, the performance finally took place on August 9. The Great Philharmonic Hall was packed. Eliasberg’s coat seemed overwhelming in its pace and length.
Anderson frames a refrain: the first part of Symphony No. 7 resonated as a brutal portrait of Nazi expansion, yet it also reflected the brutality of Stalinist rule with which the composer was intimately familiar.