In September 1941, as the German Wehrmacht sped east toward Leningrad, Josef Stalin struck a blow against sentimentalism in warfare. His advisers told him that the Germans were putting Russian children and elderly at the front line and ordering them to beg the Red Army to surrender the city. Soviet troops recoiled from orders to fire on their most vulnerable countrymen, but Stalin would have none of it. "No sentimentality," he wrote in a memo to his generals. "Beat the Germans and their creatures, whoever they are. It makes no difference whether they are willing or unwilling enemies. Smash the enemy and his accomplices, sick or healthy, in the teeth."
During the same month Hitler expressed a similar disgust with the scruples of his own top brass. In June 1941 he had suddenly renounced the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and invaded the Soviet Union, opening the eastern and decisive front of World War Two. He intended to raze Leningrad and Moscow, expel or exterminate their occupants, and establish a vast settling ground for the German people. An officer protested that killing Leningrad's inhabitants outright would "let loose a worldwide storm of indignation, which we can't afford politically." Hitler unwittingly channeled Stalin by rejecting this "sentimentality." Permitting himself the liberty of the third person as he invoked the city's pre-revolutionary name, Hitler wrote, "The Führer is determined to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth."
Anguished comparisons between the moral depravity of Hitler and Stalin abound, but Uncle Joe occasionally gets a pass when it comes to the Soviets' famous stand at Leningrad. That chapter in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War remains a solemn source of pride: 800,000 civilians alone starved to death during the 900-day siege, but the city held and the Germans were pushed back. Stalin and communism emerged stronger than ever.
In her devastating book Leningrad, journalist Anna Reid admires the sacrifice and resilience of the Soviet people but challenges the myth—popularized by Brezhnev and inflated by Putin—of "selfless, disciplined heroes" who starved "nobly, in a sort of ecstatic trance." Assembling a pastiche of newly discovered siege diaries, Reid tells a story of Soviet incompetence and cruelty, and establishes that mass starvation is a nightmare wherever it occurs. While Hitler was unquestionably the aggressor and deserves the most blame, Reid demonstrates that "under a different sort of government the siege's civilian (and military) death tolls might have been far lower."
But this book is not an academic argument: it's a relentless chronicle of suffering. It bypasses the military and strategic aspects of the eastern front to illuminate the experience of civilians. Most of the starvation occurred during the harsh winter of 1941- 42 as the Germans surrounded Leningrad and shelled it mercilessly. The Soviet government did not evacuate civilians early enough or protect food stores from the German blitz, and Stalin diverted grain and matériel to fortify Moscow. Cut off from the world, Leningraders ate whatever they could find: first their rations; then their pets; then belts, shoes, pine needles, glue, and motor oil; and eventually each other. Reid's most remarkable diarist, Dmitri Lazarev, captures the limp tedium of a day spent starving at the office:
We sat round the stove in silence, heads bowed. We sat for hours, not moving, not talking. When there was no more firewood the stove went out. Though there was a big pile of wood in the courtyard nobody had the strength to chop it and carry it up the stairs. Instead we sat out the wait until lunch in the cold. After lunch we went home.
The most striking passages of Leningrad explore Russians' ambivalence toward their government during the siege. Some bitterly welcomed any respite from Bolshevism—at least until they witnessed the Nazis exterminating Russian Jews, POWs, and civilians. Others felt a surprising surge of patriotism that hardened into resolve in the face of Nazi atrocities. Hitler's greatest mistake was to underestimate the determination of the Russian people not to be conquered. Yet if anything could dampen their solidarity it was the Soviet purges and terror that continued during the siege. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans, kulaks, intellectuals, and minorities were forcibly displaced or sent to the Gulag. Reid excerpts the diary of a soldier who tired of gnawing on horse bones and made an official complaint about ration levels. He was shot for "expressing disappointment at the food supply of the Red Army." Leningrad is a major contribution to our understanding of the human side of one of the war's tragic episodes. Reid missteps only occasionally, as when she quotes passages from Solomon Volkov's book Testimony, which purports to be the dictated memoirs of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Seventh Symphony, "Leningrad," became a wartime anthem for the city in 1942—but scholars have fatally undermined the authenticity of Volkov's book. Leningrad is also a grimly relevant book as headlines tell of the famine enforced at gunpoint that currently ravages Somalia. There are no winners when hunger is used as a weapon. There are only survivors.
Michael O'Donnell is a lawyer who lives in Evanston, Illinois. His reviews and essays appear in The Nation, the Washington Monthly, and the Christian Science Monitor, among other publications. Reviewed by Mark Athitakis
Former Ukraine correspondent for the Economist and Daily Telegraph, Reid brings to this narrative a comprehensive background in Russian affairs, an eye for the telling anecdote, and an approach that integrates the everyday horrors of the three-year Nazi siege of Leningrad into wider contexts of operations and policy. Reid uses recently available material to, in another historian's words, "wip off the syrup" of Communist mythology. Stalin's government barely held the city and sustained it. It also bungled military operations, imprisoned and executed thousands for no reason, and took care of Party bigwigs while ordinary men and women died in misery. Leningrad's citizens showed courage and endurance. "Svyazi... string-pulling, exchange of favors, and bribery" made the difference between life and death. By June 1943 almost 2,000 cases of cannibalism had been processed by military tribunals. The Soviet system displayed stupidity, corruption, and callousness as the Nazis waged a war of annihilation, in which starving Leningrad was an end in itself. Leningrad's citizens endured, rebuilt, hoped for a communism with freedom and true civic life. What they received was a series of crackdowns and continued repression. Reid (The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia) makes a major contribution to lifting the curtain on that terrible siege. 16 pages of b&w photos; 6 maps. (Sept.)
Some 750,000 people of Leningrad died, primarily of starvation, during Hitler's two and a half year siege of the city, the deadliest siege in history. For the core of her book, Reid (The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia) accesses diaries of and interviews (many previously unavailable) with those who suffered. She focuses on the coldest and deadliest months of the winter of 1941–42 and also includes select German accounts for a view from the other side. Reid shows how human willpower triumphed in a desperate situation. Leningrad did not collapse, despite Hitler's desire to erase it and cruel Soviet mismanagement and oppression. The mental strain among the survivors was perhaps greater than the physical toll. VERDICT Especially well researched in Russian sources, this is an agonizing tale that belongs alongside Harrison Salisbury's classic The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. (Maps, photos, and index not seen.)
An illuminating chronicle of the greatest siege of World War II.
Historian and journalist Reid (The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia, 2003, etc.) turns her considerable investigative powers to Germany's 872-day siege on Russia's important Baltic port, "the deadliest blockade of a city in human history." The author recounts a woefully unprepared defense that would cost upwards of 800,000 lives inside Leningrad. The history of the siege has suffered from many revisions, with misinformation beginning as soon as the German army moved against Russia, when Stalinist propaganda was substituted for news. Even after Germany's defeat, the narrative of Leningrad's siege was rewritten by a victorious Stalin, declared one of the greatest victories of the Russian people, the atrocities of starvation, cold and war effectively whitewashed. Since the fall of Stalinism, different political factions have claimed the story as their own. Reid corrects this by allowing the people of Leningrad to tell the story in their own words, pulling information from a wide range of sources: the bleak diaries left by those who died inside the city, journals kept by members of the advancing German army and interviews with the remaining survivors. The political intricacies of Russia can often be overwhelming, and the shifting alliances inside and outside the city are easily confused. However, the personal histories Reid brings to life make the insufferable conditions in the city all too clear and correct the great injustice of the siege: the silencing of its many voices. They are all here, unearthed and brought back to life to tell the story of citizens caught inside the siege ring, reduced to the most desperate means of survival as they waited for spring.
A pleasing combination of assured prose and firsthand accounts from inside the city's walls.
