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For years, I heard bizarre, thrilling stories about Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony; how it was written by the Soviet composer in the besieged city of Leningrad as the Nazis bombed the city; how it was performed there by a starving orchestra while the Red Army shelled the Germans to protect the concert hall; and how it was put onto microfilm and slipped out of the USSR, flown to Tehran, driven across the desert to Cairo, and finally brought to America to interest the United States in the Soviet cause.