group member. The "infamous radio speech" Exactly how and why did Merezhkovsky found himself on the German radio in June 1941 nobody was quite sure of. Gippius (according to Yury Terapiano who was quoting Nina Berberova) blamed her own secretary Vladimir Zlobin who, using his German connections, allegedly persuaded the elderly man to come to the studio in the early days of the Nazi invasion of the USSR. In his speech (if its printed version entitled "Bolshevism and Humanity" is to be believed) Merezhkovsky, comparing Hitler to Joan of Arc, called for an anti-Bolshevik crusade, reiterating, among other things, what he was saying all through the 1920s and 1930s:Bolshevism will never change its nature... because right from the start it's been not a national, but international phenomenon. From the very first day Russia has been – and remains to this very day – only a means to the end: that of its conquering the whole world. "This is the end for us," Gippius allegedly commented, disgusted and horrified. In the days to come, though, husband and wife (as those who knew them later attested) often expressed horror at the news of Nazis' atrocities on the Eastern front; according to Gippius' friend, poet Victor Mamchenko, Merezhkovsky far from supporting Hitler, in those days was actually condemning him. Biographer Zobnin doubts that Merezhkovsky appeared on German radio at all, noting that none of the memoirists who mentioned it had himself heard Merezhkovsky speaking on air. All of those "witnesses" invariably referred to the printed version of the "speech" published in 1944 by Parizhsky Vestnik. This document, according to Zobnin (the author of the first comprehensive Merezhkovsky biography published in Russia) was most certainly a montage fake, concocted by Nazi propagandists out of the 1939 unpublished essay The Mystery of the Russian Revolution (on Dostoyevsky's Demons novel), with bits and pieces thrown in. The researcher insists such a speech could not have been broadcast in the late June: the couple resided in Biarritz and for an elderly person to give everybody a slip and somehow get to Paris was hardly probable. Adding to the confusion is the well-documented fact that Merezhkovsky had already made one speech mentioning Hitler and Joan of Arc in one breath. It happened in August 1940 at his 75th-birthday celebration in Biarritz, and in a different context. In fact, his speech caused trouble because it was deemed too pro-Russian