prepared to bow to it in this hour of need. Akhmatova was sick, so it was agreed to record her speech in the Fountain House. Akhmatova's address was proud and courageous. She appealed to the city's entire legacy - not just to Lenin but to Peter the Great, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Blok, too. She ended with a stirring tribute to the women of the old capital:
Our descendants will honour every mother who lived at the time of the war, but their gaze will be caught and held fast by the image of the Leningrad woman standing during an air raid on the roof of a house, with a boat-hook and fire-tongs in her hand, protecting the city from fire; the Leningrad girl volunteer giving aid to the wounded among the still smoking ruins of a building… No, a city which has bred women like these cannot be conquered.145
Shostakovich also took part in the radio broadcast. He and Akhmatova had never met, even though they loved each other's work and felt a spiritual affinity. * Both felt profoundly the suffering of their city, and expressed that suffering in their own ways. Like Akhmatova, Shostakovich had joined the Civil Defence, as a fireman. Only his bad eyesight had prevented him from joining up with the Red Army in the first days of the war. He turned down the chance to leave the besieged city in July, when the musicians of the Conservatory were evacuated to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. In between the fire fighting, he began composing marches for the front-line troops, and in the first two weeks of September, as the bombs began to fall on Leningrad, he worked by candlelight, in a city now deprived of electricity, to finish what would be his Seventh Symphony. As one might expect from his Terror-induced caution and St Petersburg reserve, Shostakovich was rather circumspect in his radio address. He simply told the city that he was about to complete a new symphony. Normal life was going on.146
* Akhmatova rarely missed a Shostakovich premiere. After the first performance of his Eleventh Symphony ('The Year 1905') in 1957, she compared its hopeful revolutionary songs, which the critics had dismissed as devoid of interest (this was the time of the Khrushchev thaw), to 'white birds flying against a terrible black sky'. The next year she dedicated the Soviet edition of her
Later that same day, 16 September 1941, the Germans broke through to the gates of Leningrad. For 900 days they cut the city off from virtually all its food and fuel supplies; perhaps a million people, or one third of the pre-war population, died by disease or starvation, before the siege of Leningrad was at last broken in January 1944. Akhmatova was evacuated to Tashkent soon after the German invasion; Shostakovich to the Volga city of Kuibyshev (now known by its pre-revolutionary name of Samara), where he completed the final movement of the Seventh Symphony on a battered upright piano in his two-room apartment. At the top of the first page he scribbled in red ink: 'To the city of Leningrad'. On 5 March 1942. the symphony received its premiere in Kuibyshev. It was performed by the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, which had also been evacuated to the Volga town. Broadcast by radio throughout the land, it transmitted, in the words of the violinist David Oistrakh, who was listening in Moscow, 'the prophetic affirmation… of our faith in the eventual triumph of humanity and light'.147 The Moscow premiere later that month was broadcast globally, its drama only highlighted by an air raid in the middle of the performance. Soon the symphony was being performed throughout the Allied world, a symbol of the spirit of endurance and survival, not just of Leningrad but of all countries united against the fascist threat, with sixty-two performances in the USA alone during 1942.148
