History of the Mission House of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States

One described the bombing of Berlin; another, written by Berggolts, waxed lyrical about Christmas in Bavaria БЂ” БЂDo you remember the smell of Christmas biscuits? Spices, raisins, vanilla? The warmth and crackle of Christmas candles?БЂ™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 БЂ” the steady beating, for households whose sets still worked, of LeningradБЂ™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 StalinБЂ™s closure or demolition of thousands of churches and monasteries, and execution, imprisonment or exile of their monks, nuns and priests ...»