" That year, it was as if the city was built of ideas and argument: People walked across a pavement of propaganda, and the walls were plastered with posters. Buildings were coated in debates. Type ran in every direction. Newspapers sprang up, printed a few issues in flurries, then died. "

― M.T. Anderson , Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad