On August 9, 1942, the Soviet Army fired 3,000 artillery shells at the German lines around Leningrad in an operation code-named Squall. The objective was not to gain ground but to buy silence, so that a group of starving musicians could perform Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony and broadcast it across a decimated city and toward the German trenches. This episode explores how that music came to exist and why its true meaning stayed hidden for decades.

The official story called the relentless snare-drum march an invasion theme depicting the Nazi war machine, but Shostakovich conceived it before the German attack as a portrait of Stalin's terror, the purges that made him keep a packed suitcase by the door and sleep in the stairwell awaiting arrest. We follow him composing between air raid sirens in besieged Leningrad, his calm radio broad ...