Leningradas

by Anna Reid, Dalia Uržaitė (Translator)

1941-ieji – metai, amžiams įsirėžę į Leningrado (dab. Sankt Peterburgo) atmintį. Jais prasidėjo negailestingiausia žmonijos istorijoje miesto blokada, nusinešusi per 750 000 gyvybių. Iki jos karas atrodė labai toli. Niekas nesitikėjo, kad Vokietija užpuls Sovietų Sąjungą, valstybę, turinčią per 200 mln. gyventojų; ir vis dėlto − valstybę, visiškai nepasirengusią gintis. Didžiausia šio nepasirengimo auka tapo Leningradas.
Miesto gyventojai susidūrė ne tik su nacių brutalumu, bet ir pačios bolševikų valdžios abejingumu. Kiekvieną mėnesį mirdavo dešimtys tūkstančių žmonių. Badas, prasidėjęs jau pirmaisiais mėnesiais, ir lavonų krūvos, augančios tiesiog gatvėje, tapo kasdienybe. Šimtai suimtųjų, nužudžiusių kaimynus dėl maisto kortelių, net lavonų valgymas nieko nebegalėjo nustebinti. Visi bandė išgyventi. Bet kokia kaina.
Ši knyga – tai tikrasis ir nepagražintas beveik trejus metus trukusio košmaro vaizdas, kurio niekas taip neiliustruoja, kaip liudininkų prisiminimai. Tai yra išsami didžiausios miestą ištikusios tragedijos istorija kartu su pasakojimais tų, kurie sugebėjo išlikti žmonėmis, kai tai padaryti buvo sunkiausia.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, World War II, War, Military History, Military Fiction

552 pages, Hardcover

First published August 30, 2011

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

"With his back to the post, a man sits in the snow, wrapped in rags, wearing a knapsack… Probably he was on his way to Finland Station, got tired and sat down to rest. For two weeks I passed him every day as I went back and forth to the hospital. He sat 1. Without his knapsack; 2. Without his rags; 3. In his underwear; 4. Naked; 5. A skeleton with ripped out entrails. They took him away in May…"
- Vera Kostrovitskaya, diary entry written during the siege of Leningrad

"The point at which an entire family was doomed was when its last mobile member became too weak to queue for rations. Heads of households – usually mothers – were thus faced with a heartbreaking dilemma: whether to eat more food themselves, so as to stay on their feet, or whether to give more to the family’s sickest member – usually a grandparent or child – and risk the lives of all. That many or most prioritized their children is indicated by the large numbers of orphans they left behind…"
- Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

There was never so miserable a time on earth as during the Second World War. Attempting to chronicle the many horrific incidents of human suffering is like attempting to separate and identify the individual strands of hay in a haystack. It’s hard to know where to start or end, when you have a list that includes gas chambers disguised as showers; thousands of people being shot and dumped into huge pits; medical experiments performed on children; cities firebombed and later atomized.

Even with all this, the siege of Leningrad between 1941 and 1944 should stand out. This is not simply because – using the lowest estimates – 650,000 people died (which is comparable, depending on what statistics you use, to the combined deaths suffered by both North and South in the American Civil War, America’s bloodiest war). No, it’s more than that. It’s the way the disaster unfolded: the slow and agonizing death of a civilian population due to starvation.

For a number of reasons, though, not the least of which was the Soviet Union’s attempts to obscure and ignore the siege, Leningrad tends to get lost in the shuffle of World War II remembrances. Anna Reid’s Leningrad sets out to rectify this, by shining a spotlight on a tale of high-level failures and low-level endurance. She tells the story of the siege of Leningrad by focusing on the ordinary Leningraders caught in one of history’s biggest crap sandwiches, squeezed between two of the worst totalitarian systems to ever darken humanity’s door.

Leningrad is a book of tremendous power and laudable attributes. However, it gets off to a rocky, uneven start. This is a function of Reid’s narrative approach, which is close to that of an oral history. She relies very heavily on the words of the participants, often quoted directly from so-called “siege diaries.” While incredibly effective in providing an intimate sense of what the siege was like, it is not a great method for providing a strategic context. The early days of Barbarossa and the ensuing battles leading to Leningrad’s near-encirclement is not handled clearly. Moreover, Reid is relatively indifferent to characterizing the upper echelons of either the German or Soviet high command, meaning that it becomes hard to keep people and their roles straight.

The opening act lasts just over a hundred pages (out of 416 pages of text). Once we get into the siege proper (with most of the attention focused on the winter of mass death, 1941-42), Leningrad becomes a whole different book. Reid takes us onto the streets and houses of a doomed and dying city. She stitches together individual memories to create an unforgettable mosaic of anguish.

The day-to-day account of life and death in Leningrad does not lend itself easily to a chronological telling. To be sure, Reid lays out the progression of events: how the Germans tightened the cordon around the city, content to let them wither on the vine; how the city was bombed and shelled (one of the fascinating aspects of the siege is the lengths that workers went to save the priceless artistic treasures from places such as the Hermitage); and how the Soviets attempted to forge a supply line, even using an ice road across a frozen lake. For the most part, though, Reid’s chapters are thematic, and since starvation is the heart of the Leningrad siege, most of those themes coalesce around food: rationing and coupons and queuing; the black market and crime and cannibalism. This is a people’s history of starving to death.

It is one thing to be told that people starved. It is another thing to provide a meticulous description of what that means.

The physical symptoms of starvation, suffered in varying combinations by the large majority of Leningraders, were emaciation, dropsical swelling of the legs and face, skin discoloration (“hunger tan” in the slang of the time – faces are described as turning “black,” “blue-black,” “yellow” or “green”), ulcers, loosening or loss of teeth and weakening of the heart. Women stopped menstruating and sexual desire vanished.

Beyond the physical manifestations, Reid discusses the mental aspects of attempting to live with minimal caloric intake. The onset of lethargy and hopelessness is heartbreaking, especially among children. There are unforgettable passages of diarists watching the generations of their family die off before their helpless eyes. Of people simply giving up, of sitting down and expiring as though nodding off for a nap. Desperation led to dramatic improvisations and a search for food substitutes:

Within the city, institutions involved in food processing and distribution were ordered to search their premises for forgotten or defective stocks that could substitute for conventional flours in the production of bread. At the mills, flour dust was scraped from walls and from under floorboards; breweries came up with 8,000 tons of malt, and the army with oats previously destined for its horses. (The horses were instead fed with birch twigs soaked in hot water and sprinkled with salt. Another feed, involving compressed peat shavings and bonemeal, they rejected). Grain barges sunk by bombing off Osinovets were salvaged by naval divers, and the rescued grain, which had begun to sprout, dried and milled… At the docks, large quantities of cotton-seed cake, usually burned in ships’ furnaces, were discovered. Though poisonous in its raw state, its toxins were found to break down at high temperatures, and it too went into bread.

Leningrad is not simply a litany of vicious facts. Reid does an excellent job of presenting short arcs, and of checking in on various people throughout the siege. You get to know the living and the dead, and that makes their experiences more meaningful to read.

(Also, in a book featuring cannibalism, Reid does a fine job of veering away from any hint of exploitation. Leningrad is not suffering porn).

As I mentioned above, this is not a comprehensive view of the siege. The last two years are covered in less than a hundred pages. Reid explains this by saying that conditions, though by no means “normal,” had certainly improved by then. I did not find this to be a problem. The substance of this book is so potent that at some point it becomes an exercise in gratuity to keep expounding.

Early on, Reid notes that the siege of Leningrad has a tenuous place in Soviet retellings of the Great Patriotic War. The reason, of course, is that Stalin’s regime was caught flat-footed and unprepared by the German invasion, despite the signs and portents that their Nazi ally was about to betray them. (Insert your own joke regarding how if you can't trust Hitler, who can you trust?).

Reid might have been forgiven if she attempted to reframe this event as a moment of tremendous collective courage and defiance. But that is not the interpretive route she takes. There is no false redemption here. It is simply a brutal story of ordinary people caught between the ruthless forces of evil on one side, and inept indifference on the other.

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

One might say that Leningrad is particularly well suited to catastrophes. That cold river, those menacing sunsets, that operatic, terrifying moon.
- Anna Akhmatova

When the Wehrmacht attacked Leningrad in 1941, Leningraders had yet been generously endowed with war, terror and famines. Still, the worst was yet to come. Relying for most part on diaries, memoires and interviews of survivors, journalist and historian Anna Reid chronicles Leningrad’s ghastly blockade fate during WWII. The city had to endure an appalling siege that would last from September 8th, 1941 to January 1944 and would take the lives of about 1,5 million people, of which approximately 750.000 were civilians.

From its conception on, Hitler’s Barbarossa campaign was to be conducted with unprecedented harshness. ‘This war will be very different from the war in the west. . Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples.’ The army got a license for summary executions, rape and murder of civilians. Food was to be ruthlessly requisitioned, even if this meant that civilians had to starve.

Apart from the rational justifications for the attack on the USSR - securing Lebensraum and destruction of the Bolshevik regime - it was also meant as an outright Vernichtungskrieg, a war of extermination of Bolsheviks, Jews and Slavs alike. Russian towns were to be looted and demolished (Moscow was to be replaced with an artificial lake), and to be populated with Aryan settlers. The Russians were to be deported to Siberia, reduced to serfdom, or eliminated, like once the native Americans. Hitler dreamed about making ‘the beauties of the Crimea’ accessible by means of an autobahn and turning the Crimea into the German Rivera , making Croatia into another German tourism paradise. About Moscow and Leningrad, Hitler decided they had to be levelled and made uninhabitable, in order not to have to feed their populations through the winter. The cities had to razed by air force.

It is of sad notoriety that the USSR wasn’t ready to counter the invasion. As Stalin disregarded the warnings of his diplomats, the army was totally unprepared, even still recovering after literally having been decapitated by Stalin’s purges. Soldiers were sent into battle untrained and unarmed and leaderless. By the end of September 1941 the Red Army has lost 142,000 out of its total 440,000 officers. Anthoy Beevor wrote‘The waste of lives was so terrible that it is hard to comprehend: a carnage whose futility was perhaps exceeded only by the Zulu king marching an impi of his warriors over a cliff to prove their discipline.’ One of the surviving volunteers of the Leningrader People’s Levy wrote ‘It was mass, completely unjustified, senseless sacrifice, at the pleasure of our moronic command’.

Still Leningrad was the first city in Europe that Hitler failed to take. When neither side could positively beat the other and the war got stuck in the deadlock of positional trench warfare, the Wehrmacht changed strategy and shifted from ground assault to starvation and air raids, so it could focus itself on Moscow. All supply routes were blocked. A directive by Hitler to Army Group North was very clear about Hitler’s determination to raze Leningrad to the ground and extinguish its population:

The Führer is determined to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban centre. Finland has likewise shown no interest in the maintenance of the city immediately on its new border.

It is intended to encircle the city and level it to the ground by means of artillery bombardment using every calibre of shell, and continual bombing from the air.

Following the city’s encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population.

Reid’s central focus is on the months of mass death by starvation and freezing during the first winter - the unusual harsh winter of 1941-42. Vividly she depicts daily life – or actually death – under the siege.

Over the course of three months, the city changed from something quite familiar — in outward appearance not unlike London during the Blitz — to a Goya-esque charnel house, with buildings burning unattended for days and emaciated corpses littering the streets. For individuals the accelerating downward spiral was from relatively ‘normal’ wartime life — disruption, shortages, air raids — to helpless witness of the death by starvation of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and children — and for many, of course, to death itself.

The first hand testimonials Reid quotes and comments convey the horror in an often eloquent way; the book brims with harrowing and detailed descriptions about the mass graves, the corpses dragged on sledges through the frozen streets, the struggle to survive, the rationing system, the hunt for food, the mental state of the citizens trapped in hell, eating pets and wallpaper glue, desperately cooking leather belts or an extract of fermented birch sawdust, hoping it to turn into soup. The food obsession, the excruciating starvation process, euphemistically called ‘dystrophy’ , a pseudo-medical term, the despair and grief for the dead - the staggering facts and figures are piercing and bewilder.

Fighting the cold was of great importance to survive too, as water and energy were cut off. Books turned out to be quite useful, not only to read, but also as fuel. Observations go from the constatation that prose provided more heat than poetry and that nineteenth century paper gave out more heat the flimsy Soviet sort. A family started with burning reference works and technical manuals, moved on to the German classics, then to Shakespeare, and finally to their blue and gold-bound editions of Pushkin and Tolstoy.

Reid analyses the failure of the authorities to evacuate the population before the siege ring closed or stockpile extra food when still possible, calling it ‘one of the Soviet regime’s worst blunders of the war’, leading to more civilian deaths than any other save the failure to anticipate Barbarossa itself – comparing it with the 660.000 civilians that got evacuated from London in only a few days. She suggests an amalgam of causal factors, from not getting the priorities right, combined with an all-pervading culture of fear – the fear to be labelled a defeatist, which was life-threateningly dangerous, as the political terror and purges relentlessly continued during the siege. Deciding to leave the city was made harder by the semi-official disapproval of those who did. People didn’t believe the Nazi’s could be worse than the Bolsheviks, dismissing the warnings of the authorities as propaganda. Industrial and institutional evacuation was preferred over that of the non-working population. Whole factories were moved and masterpieces of the Hermitage were saved in time, many people weren’t.

Reid concludes that Russia’s 'Great Patriotic War' was won at unnecessarily huge cost, the blockade of Leningrad being perhaps the most extreme example of this, blaming both Nazi Germany and the Soviet regime - the first for initiating it, the second for exacerbating it.

Roughly chronological in general, Reid structures her narrative around themes (the corruption, intellectual life under the siege, cannibalism, purges, the Ice Road, the transport of the dead, emotions) . This approach is working well but at times slows down the pace of the narrative or blurs it. Not every topic is as thoroughly dealt with (the chapter on Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony was fairly uneven as well as the chapter on the corruption as a means to survive). Though the focus is on daily life of the citizens, Read skillfully intertwines civil life recounts with the military peripeties so the reader can keep track of the events (a timeline would have been nice too).

Powerful, very well-written and compelling it is, I wouldn’t go so far as affirming the acclaim that this book undermines Soviet myths about the siege which haven’t been demystified before, or fills some essential gaps in historiography or is of the revelatory kind as to the mass starvation facts, because I honestly don’t know. Recalling one of the best now classic youth novels I ever read, The Ice Road, first published in 1966 by the Dutch author Jaap ter Haar, a Dutch novelist and historian, plausibly conveying the hunger and the moral quandaries the siege bestowed upon the starving population from the perspective of a 12 year old Russian Boy living through the siege, I’d be slightly surprised.

Exposing some of the darkest sides of human nature, this is an utterly engrossing history book which is very hard to put down. However common as a war strategy in the past (Rouen, Munster), starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited under international humanitarian law and considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Recalling the news on what was happening in Syria in January, we learn from history that we do not learn from history.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Other Russian City

When thinking of Operation Barbarossa, the Third Reich’s invasion of the USSR in 1941 during the Second World War, the majority of attention is given to Stalingrad and the epic struggle upon the Volga River. This is of course more exciting. The Wehrmacht versus the Red Army in house to house fighting, the fate of the world balancing on one tiny city on the Asian Steppe. If Hitler gets through he gets the Baku, Grozny and Maikop oil fields. If he gets through the city, Russia will crumble. But to the north, on the River Neva there was another struggle. The huge 900 day siege of Leningrad, the former capital city of the Russian Empire, Peter the Great’s city, Saint Petersburg. Not as exciting or as famous, this is equally fascinating and just as shocking and gruesome. Anna Reid brings this story back to life and gives it a place it deserves in human memory.

Reid’s main argument in this book is that 750,000 people lost their lives not only due to Nazi hatred of Slavic peoples and Hitler’s desire to wipe Russia of the map and push its people into Siberia, but also due to the oppressive Soviet regime and its incompetence. This was the most brutal siege in human history. When the Germans surrounded the city, it was completed unprepared. 2.5 million were trapped and starvation set in immediately. This should not have happened. Even in April 1941, Stalin supplied Hitler with grain, rubber, metal and other vital supplies even though he had said to the Politburo he expected an attack from the Nazis. The people of these Bloodlands were truly trapped between the combined hubris of Hitler and Stalin. They paid highly for this. When the ice road across Lake Ladoga was opened, supplies were small and those who were ‘saved’ still died in droves. Only the end of the war would truly end the suffering.

Reid uses diaries of those who were trapped inside this hell to give memory to human experience. She explains this is one of the key themes of her book. She strips away the soviet propaganda and reminds us that the people left behind were ordinarily people, teachers, shopkeepers, cleaners, factory workers and bookkeepers. They were all caught up in this mess. They struggled on not for love of Stalin, but for Russia. This is the only way to really tell this story, the struggle for food, the hours of queuing for bread, the crime, the dilemma of eating your own pets or wallpaper paste. How to bury a dead family member or neighbour. The using of ration cards of death fathers, brothers, sisters and mothers to survive. Then there are those who murdered and those who turned to cannibalism. Even in this hell, this was too far for most, they were often denounced as insane and shot.

Sir Antony Beevor has stated that this book is in his top five on WWII and I can see why. It’s a harrowing tale well told. A lot of history is morbid or violent, however the story of the Siege of Leningrad was still able to shock me. It’s still hard to conceive what they went through. Being unable to sleep through hunger, unable to speak, but if you stopped you were like never to get back up again. Russia’s war was more than Stalingrad or Operation Uranus, there were civilians too and they suffered being stuck between the fire and the frying pan. A tragic story well told.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting, wrenching account of the Siege of Leningrad. Anna Reid moves seamlessly between the macro political and military forces that shaped the siege and the deeply personal stories of the everyday citizens who lived (and died) inside the city. There is tremendous heroism and unbelievable horror. I've read novels about the siege, but this was my first deep dive into the precise history of the tragedy.

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anna Reid's book is a riveting account of the siege of Leningrad, the deadliest blockade in human history, which lasted from September 1941 to January 1944 and claimed an appallingly heavy toll on human life – three quarters of a million civilians. While briefly outlining operation Barbarossa and the German advance towards Leningrad in the beginning of her work, Reid's utmost focus is the unfathomable depths of human suffering experienced by Leningraders. Although all people of the city over the age of thirty were no strangers to death, starvation, exile, or impoverishment – they had already lived through three wars (WWI, the Russian Civil War, and the Winter War with Finland), two famines (the first during the Civil War and the second the collectivization famine of 1932-1933, caused by Stalin's cruel seizure of peasant farms), and two major waves of political terror – the siege was unprecedented in the number of its deaths, physical and spiritual.

Anna Reid does not overlook the question "Why did this happen?" which I was searching an answer for. In the beginning of her work, she explains that Stalin, who expected a German invasion sooner or later, still did not, and could not, anticipate the timing of Operation Barbarossa. As the Russian-Polish border was overrun immediately and the Red Army found itself defending the major cities of Russia herself, Leningrad fell main victim of this unpreparedness. When in mid-September 1941 the German and Finnish armies cut the city off from the rest of the Soviet Union, over half million civilians were evacuated. However, 2.5 million civilians remained trapped within the city. Why did more people not get away in time? Reid reveals the reasons behind this "mouse trap": to blame was a mixture of deliberate government policy and Leningraders' own faulty decision-making, aggravated by fear.
From the outset of the war, policy was to prioritize industrial evacuation over that of non-working population. The railway network, Reid explains, became chaotically overloaded because identical raw materials were simultaneously shipped in and out of the city, and some factories were dismantled when it was already too late for them to leave.
Even more disastrous was the children evacuation program. The Leningrad soviet announced the evacuation of 392,000 children with their schools, nurseries or children's homes, but without their parents, which of course, proved to be extremely unpopular. Yelena Skryabina, one of the diarists whose accounts Reid draws upon, wrote, "The idea of separating from [five-year-old] Yura is so horrible that I am ready to do anything to keep him. I have decided to evade the order. I won't give my son for anything." Many other parents successfully evaded the order. Furthermore, it turned out that the evacuated children were put right in the path the advancing German army. "When we arrived in the village they put is in a cottage," fifteen-year-old Klara Rakhman wrote. "Oh yes, I quite forgot, while we were in the truck a German plane flew right overhead. That's evacuation for you!"
The awful rumors about the muddled children's evacuation were not the only reason why civilians chose not to leave Leningrad, narrates Reid. Many were tied to the city by relatives. A friend of Skryabina offered her a post as governess to a factory kindergarten, which was leaving for Moscow region. When she telephoned a day later to say that all plans had fallen through, however, Skryabina was actually relieved: "My agonizing problem has been resolved by circumstances. . . . I no longer have to worry about abandoning Mama and Nana; there will be no parting."

This was the beginning of the blockade. The mistakes had been made, the tragedy would inevitably play out. Yet, at the time few anticipated a siege: either the Germans would quickly be pushed back, it was assumed, or Leningrad would fall. Some, like fiercely anti-Bolshevik Lydia Osipova watched with cynical detachment as friends and acquaintances tried do decide what to do. On 17 August she wrote about a split that had arisen between "patriots" and "defeatists": "'Patriots' try to get themselves evacuated as fast as they can, and the latter, including us, try by every means possible to evade it." Like many, she disbelieved reports of Nazi atrocities. "Of course," she wrote in her diary. "Hitler isn't the beast that our propaganda paints him."

Hunger, Reid narrates, set in almost immediately, though. Failure to lay in adequate stores of food and fuel before the siege ring closed was due to the same lethal mixture of denial, disorganization and carelessness as the failure to evacuate the population. While the most efficient administration couldn't have prevented shortages, errors and the leadership's refusal to face reality made the situation much worse than it need have been, argues Reid. Most visibly, the authorities failed to redistribute food stores so as to minimize the risk of loss in air raids. As Reid demonstrates, the result was the "spectacular" Badayev warehouse fire of 8 September, which Leningraders believed to have destroyed almost the whole of the city's food stocks – the air is described as filled with the smell of burning ham and sugar. "It was when life ended, and existence began" writes Marina Yerukhmanova, the nineteen-year-old descendant of Peter the Great's favourite Alexander Menshikov.
As early as October the police began to report the appearance of emaciated corpses on the streets. "Deaths quadrupled in December, peaking in January and February at 100,000 per month. By the end of what was even by Russian standards a savage winter . . . cold and hunger had taken somewhere around half a million lives," describes Reid the nightmarish months of mass death, on which her book concentrates.

She masterfully and in stunning detail conveys what it was like to live through such hell. Many diaries she's drawn upon peter out in January or February, their authors too weak to write or at loss for words. Others condense into curt records of relatives' deaths and of food obtained and consumed. The siege winter meant existence narrowed to the "iron triangle" of home, bread queue and water source. Isolated in their dark and freezing flats, reliant on home-made lamps and scavenged fuel, Leningraders compared themselves to Robinson Crusoe, or even considered him a lucky man in comparison. Pre-war life seemed like a distant fairy-tale.
Most shocking was the narrowing of emotions that came together with the narrowing of the physical world. Anna Reid cites survivors who describe themselves as having been "like wolves" or more commonly "like stones" – drained of feeling or interest except that of prolonging their own survival. One Aleksandr Boldyrev heard that his neigbor, "grown completely old and dilapidated in the last couple of months", had collapsed outside on the pavement and been dragged indoors by passing soldiers, who didn't want people to die outside because that meant they'd have more "flowers to pick up" (a dark-humored term for collecting corpses from the streets). "He's still there, in the stairwell, apparently dying. But I didn't go in, and went to get lunch," writes Boldyrev. "The journey there and back uses up all my strength, my little daily reserve."
Yet, others retained a tinge of their humaneness, sharing their furniture with neighbors to use as fuel.

For almost everyone, however, it was impossible to think about anything except for food – obtaining it, preparing it, calculating how long it could be made to last. Leningraders, Reid narrates, also resorted to the most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. On sale in the street markets was "Badyev earth", dug from underneath the remains of the burned Badyev warehouses and supposedly containing charred sugar.

Another aspect of the siege Reid touches is crime. Murder for food or ration cards became frequent. Most Leningraders feared attacks by strangers on a lonely street, but sadly, the cases detailed by the NKVD are of people killing family members, colleagues, and neighbors. Reid presents such pathetic examples as that of an eighteen-year-old who killed his two younger brothers with an axe and was arrested while trying to kill his mother. Questioned, he explained that he had lost his job, and with it his worker's ration card, when caught in a petty theft, and that he wanted to use his brothers' coupons.
Most notorious and hair-raising of the blockade crimes was cannibalism. As Reid shows, however, the real cannibals of Leningrad were nothing like the terrible pictures our mind may conjure upon hearing this gruesome word. While there are incidents like those of a twenty-six-year-old man, who had murdered his eighteen-year-old roommate for food, the overwhelming number of cases was not of людоедство ("person-eating") but of трупоедство ("corpse-eating"). Those cannibals subsisted on easily accessible corpses, such as those of colleagues and relatives who died of starvation: a woman factory worker shared the corpse of her eleven-year-old son with two female friends; a cleaner shared the body of her husband with her unemployed neighbor. "The typical Leningrad 'cannibal', therefore," concludes Reid, "was neither the Sweeney Todd of legend nor the bestial lowlife of Soviet history writing, but an honest, working-class housewife . . . scavenging for provinces to save her family."

The following two siege winters, as Reid reveals, were less deadly, mostly because there were fewer mouths left to feed. In January 1943 fighting cleared a land corridor out of the city, through which the Soviets were able to build a railway line and supply provisions. Nevertheless, mortality remained high, taking one in every three or four of the pre-siege population, by January 1944, when the Wehrmacht finally began its retreat to Berlin.

In her meticulously researched work, Anna Reid spares us none of the ghastly details of the epic siege of Leningrad. Her book graphically conveys the unspeakable horror of the blockade through the eyes of Leningraders themselves, especially through those of strong, courageous women, such as Vera Inber, poets Olga Bergholz and Anna Akhmatova, and many others. An outstanding study with a unique approach to its subject.

Note: Keep in mind that the logistics of the blockade – the besieging of the city by Nazi forces, the routes of delivery of provisions, and the Soviet defense – are not covered in this study. Otherwise, it is highly recommendable.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

The German army raced east in the early stages of the Barbarossa campaign and soon reached Leningrad. It stopped at the outskirts of the city and settled down to a long siege. The Russians, demoralised and bloodied but not beaten, hunkered down too.

What followed was three years of unremitting hardship as the inhabitants ran out of food and fuel. Hundreds of thousands starved to death and those that survived had to fight to stay alive. We see the usual stories of selfless sacrifice and heroism, we see fat cat apparatchiks with access to ample food sending young people off to dig tank traps with no tools and no food, we see filth and disease as the tattered citizens weaken and succumb to cold and hunger, we see societies bonds of humanity loosen as people lie, steal, cheat and -in extreme cases - resort to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to live.

Above all we see the callous disregard to life of the German army, bent on wiping Lenins town off the map - and even worse the Russian Government which could and should have built up provisions and evacuated civilians, but which was mainly indifferent to their fate.

A chilling and harrowing account of the reality of war told with great verve and flair, with lots of detail from documents and first hand accounts. There were many individual cases which caused me to sit up and take notice, perhaps the one that was most searing was an account of a woman arrested for cooking and feeding a dead child to their surviving siblings. I cannot imagine what that poor woman was going through.

An important book, worth a read.

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent account of the horrifying siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) that occurred following the German invasion of June, 1941.

This is a ground view look at the siege taken mostly from the diaries, and to a lesser extent, interviews of the survivors. Many are wrenching, many are poetic, and provide us with portrayals of their terrible ordeal. There is little in the book of the military details of the long blockade and these are told from a humanistic viewpoint – for instance there were several hopeless attempts by Russian troops to breakthrough the encirclement; the bodies and equipment can still be found in the marshlands outside of St. Petersburg today.

The author does away with many Leningrad siege myths – on the Lake Ladoga ice road many escapees had to bribe their way through the different levels of this vast route and it was laden with the bodies of those who did not survive.

Two other aspects stand out from Ms. Reid’s book – the ruthlessness and corruption of the Stalinist regime, where authority came only from the top (allowing no local empowerment) led directly to more starvation and deaths. Evacuations should have been started much earlier and were atrociously organized. The rationing system was corrupt and younger children and adolescents were the most penalized because they did not work.

The other and most insidious aspect was that the Germans deliberately and systematically wanted the city removed from the face of the earth. They knew and desired that the residents starve; they used their air force to bomb and their artillery to shell the city. Nothing was done to alleviate the dire circumstances of the inhabitants. This lasted for over two years, by the end of the first winter hundreds of thousands of residents were dead. In the areas the German troops occupied, they stole and vandalized the art treasures from Peterhof and the Pushkin areas as well as terrorizing the local populace.

This book is far better written and organized than Harrison Salisbury’s “The 900 Days”. We are given a grim chronicle of this beleaguered city that underwent the worst siege in modern history. As the author points out, the level of fatalities was much higher than other more publicized events of the era like Hiroshima or the London Blitz.

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well balanced book telling a historical event with both personal stories and history book info. This made for an enjoyable and informative read.
I knew very little about the siege of Leningrad prior to reading this. I knew Hitler failed to win in Russia much like Napoleon. So I definitely learned a lot.
It seemed Hitler and his generals didn’t agree on where to throw all there military might to capture cities Moscow or Leningrad. This didn’t help them to succeed at either place before harsh winter arrived.
So this book largely covers how people in Leningrad survived being surrounded and almost completely caught off from Russia. Hitler didn’t want to feed the millions of people inside the city so decided to starve them to death, then had plans to obliterate the city from the face of the earth.
Stories from letters and diaries were used to recreate a personal point of view. The harsh winter cold, rations that led to starvation, air bombing of the city. Food became a huge issue. People made soups from leather boots and belts. They ate the glue that held wallpaper to the wall. Food Rationing helped but many did starve to death.
There was also an uplifting side with people helping each other to survive, continuous radio broadcasts that kept people feeling together, and many heroic tales.

[A.L. Sowards]

Author Anna Reid sets out to disprove some of the myths of the siege of Leningrad (ones that say everyone endured stoically), so the focus of this book is about people starving to death (about 650,000 to 800,000). It’s not a happy book.

The siege would have been a tragedy regardless, but Soviet leadership made it worse (one could argue that if it wasn’t for the purges in the late 30s, the Red Army might have been able to stop the Nazi invasion sooner, thus eliminating the siege altogether). Not enough civilians were evacuated, not enough supplies were brought in, corruption kept the distribution of food uneven, and inadequate training doomed the local levys/militias to quick military defeat.

Of course, no one was expecting a siege, let alone one that lasted almost 900 days. Most people thought either the Red Army would stop the Nazis, or the Nazis would take over. Many in the city hoped that would happen—surely the Nazis couldn’t be that much worse than the Bolsheviks. Reid does a good job showing that the siege was just one horrible incident in a series of horrible incidents (famines, purges, crack-downs) for St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad.

The first winter of the blockade, from 1941-2, was by far the worse in terms of hunger and mass deaths, and it’s the focus of the book. Some things were heartbreaking to read about. There was the woman who refused to share with a neighbor, even though the neighbor’s child was dying, because she feared that if she did, her own weak mother would die. There was the husband who began the siege bringing home food from work for his nursing wife and baby, then started stealing food from them as the winter passed. Then there was the mother who was too weak to carry her sick teenage son from his apartment to the train station, so she took her daughter, left her son, and evacuated.

Hunger does scary things to people. Definitely not something I’d want to live through. Is survival at all costs worth it, even if you become a monster? And what happens when you have a family to try to keep alive?

During the siege, some took to theft, some to cannibalism. The large number of orphans left in the city suggests that many parents sacrificed their own health for their children. Death was common, public services broke down, and so did normal rules of right and wrong.

The book’s strengths are the frequent quotes from diaries and interviews with survivors. Its weakness is its narrow focus on civilian life, especially that of the academic people who were more likely to keep diaries. Reid does cover some of the military campaign, but not much of it. Overall, the first-hand accounts make this a useful addition to books about Leningrad. Readers who want to read just one book about the siege may want to pick something that balances civilian life with the military situation.

[Manray9 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The distinguished historian, Antony Beevor, wrote that Anna Reid with her Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 provides an “honest reappraisal of the myths surrounding this epic siege.” Her contribution is not in simply retelling the narrative of Leningrad’s brave citizenry and their tenacious defense of the city against Nazi aggression, but in exposing the incompetence, cruelty and indifference of Soviet authorities and the Germans alike. She shows that life in Leningrad during the siege revealed people at their best and worst. The common citizens were corrupt, criminal and morally-bankrupt while also performing acts of great courage, endurance, and compassion. The typical human story was told -- heroism and cowardice, selfishness and magnanimity.

Anna Reid broke new ground with broad use of the personal memoirs of survivors, as well as archival material from St. Petersburg, Moscow and international sources. Her book is a solid accomplishment and well worth reading.

[Thore Husfeldt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Perhaps I’ll be able to understand Beethoven’s music better, and the genius of Lermontov and Pushkin, once I’ve been to war…” Heartbreaking words of 18-year old Oleg to his girlfriend at the advent of operation Barbarossa: Hitler’s attack on Stalin that would see Leningrad besieged for years by German and Finnish troops and reliant on the incompetence, corruption, paranoia, and callousness of the Soviet Union.

This is an expertly written book about a terrible time. Caught between the two monstrous regimes of the European 20th century, besieged Leningrad quickly plunges into starvation and apathy. The amount of human suffering is unbearable, the injustice and incompetence of Soviet authorities is galling. At the height of the hunger, in the winter of 1941-1942, everything gets eaten: bark, the glue off old wallpaper, sawdust, Pavlov’s slavering dogs at the Physiological Institute, corpses. The physiological effects of starvation are combined with the psychological pressure from living in an environment of constant shelling by the besiegers, NKVD terror, collapse of the civil society, lack of water and electricity, temperatures down to −30 °C, theft, corruption, jealousy, guilt, and the gradual erosion of compassion and trust between family, lovers, and friends.

What makes this book highly readable is that Reid leaves most of the observations and commentaries to contemporary Leningraders: many of her sources are excerpts from diaries and other writings of besieged intellectuals, some of them published only recently. Leningrad’s intelligentsiya keeps writing through the siege; literate, lucid, poignant, sometimes sardonic. (Those who didn’t die from starvation. Those who weren’t shot or sent to the Gulag on random charges of anti-soviet activity.) Reid’s own prose is effortless and precise. An impeccable book.

[Matt Brady · Rating 4 out of 5]

The epic Siege of Leningrad during the Second World War is an event that, while not exactly overlooked, seems to be given less importance when compared to the Battle of Stalingrad, or the massive tank clashes of Kursk, or the desperate last-gasp defence of Moscow. Anna Reid sets out to describe exactly why the Siege was so important, illuminating lesser known details and dispelling popular Soviet myths that sprang up in the years following the war. She traces the Siege from the very beginning of war on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1941, the sudden invasion famously taking Stalin and, seemingly, most Russians by complete surprise, through the disastrous early campaigns, as the Red Army was chewed to pieces and the Germas swallowed great swathes of territory, through to the investment of the city itself, it’s liberation nearly three years later, and the legacy of the siege, and it’s many transformations as a monument of Russian and Soviet History. She gives particular attention to the first horrific siege of the winter, when the food shortages hit the city’s population hardest, and the vast majority of Leningrad’s casualties fell (over 100,000 citizens died of starvation in each of the months of January, February, and March)

This isn’t a military history. Though Reid does highlight several incident’s that she thinks haven’t received the attention they should, such as the “Russian Dunkirk” (the disastrous retreat of the Soviet Baltic Fleet from Tallinn), or the grim and tragic tale of the near extermination of the 2nd Shock Army, the campaigns, strategies, and equipment of the various armies are not dealt with in depth. Instead, Reid focuses on the people and their experiences, using diary excerpts, letters, official records and interviews, and devotes as much attention to the civilians trapped inside Leningrad as to the soldiers fighting outside it.

It’s very grim stuff. Spoiler alert - a whole lot of people died. The sheer scale of suffering on the Eastern Front during WWII can be hard to process at times. Germans brutalised Russians. Russians brutalised Germans. Russians brutalised each other. Both sides brutalised Jews, and various other ethnic minorities unlucky enough to be caught in the middle. And the vicious Russian winter of 1941-42 brutalised everyone, showing mother nature’s bloodthirsty sense of equality. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers, and let them become meaningless. This many people died. That many were wounded. This many starved to death. Reid does an excellent job of giving faces, names, and personalities to these anonymous numbers. The vivid and lively personalities of these Leningraders (and it’s nearly entirely Leningraders whose personal accounts are recorded, though a single German soldier is also given some time) come to life in the pages of this book, making individual tragedies out of the statistics.

This isn’t a happy story. Close to one-in-three Leningraders did not live to see the Siege broken, and victory for the Russian people did not bring true liberty (Stalin’s ruthless purges actually increased after the war, and continued, in fits and spurts, until his death) There are villains and heroes, but most of the ordinary people are just that, normal people swept up in something so vastly bigger than they are, struggling to survive and often completely helpless to the whims of the war. It’s a very compelling and intense account of incredible atrocity.

[Calzean · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book focuses on the people of Leningrad and their experiences during WWII. The was some original research and interviews as well as use of many other published references.

The book was structured mainly chronologically with a focus on 1941. There were chapters on certain themes (cannibalism, purges, crime, etc), a couple of chapters on particular military battles and an odd occasional use of a German officer's experience. The way the book was structured, for me, did not allow the story to flow. I certainly got the fact the people starved, the Government was inept in planning and failed their citizens and that corruption was rife. But somehow I just was left a bit disappointed.

[Leftbanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I began to read this essential book on the terrible siege of Leningrad in which approximately three-quarters of a million civilians starved to death during its almost nine hundred days – from September 1941 to January 1944, I realized that I’ve never really been hungry, ever. Few of the people who will read this have. There were a few man-made incidents when I went with little food—like during Air Force Survival School where for five days my caloric intake was still something people in Leningrad could only dream about—but food was always available, or not far ahead. I couldn’t imagine living with hunger as something that looms over you 24 hours a day until your body literally starts to consume itself.

This amazing book is based mainly on the personal diaries of folks who lived through the siege that many of them didn’t survive. Of course, the starvation suffered by the inhabitants was also man-made. You can and should blame the Nazis, first and foremost, and then keep blaming them until you are blue in the face. However, the Soviet Union basically sentenced many of its own citizens to death during those years in Leningrad, what is once again called Saint Petersburg. They didn’t evacuate enough people, they didn’t set up proper defenses, they didn’t come to the aid of the stranded populace, and on and on.

I’ve probably read a half dozen histories of the Siege of Stalingrad but this was the first I’d read about its sister city to the north. I suppose that is mostly due to the fact that Stalingrad was the site of a desperate, years-long fight to the death between the Soviets and the Nazis, while Leningrad saw much less armed conflict. This leads me to my one criticism of this book: the author spends very few pages (or none) actually outlining the actual siege and how it was carried out.

As the writer points out, most of the misery inflicted upon the people of Leningrad was the result of the Soviet forces attending other battles on the huge front while allowing Leningrad to languish.

The take-away from this history is the same as I learn from all stories of hardship and survival: throwing away food is truly a crime.

[Koray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kitabı ATO kitap fuarından aldıktan yaklaşık bir yıl sonra nihayet okuyabildim. Kitap "Rusya'yı mantıkla anlayamazsınız" sözünü kanıtlar nitelikte. İnsanların çektiği acılar çok canlı biçimde aktarılmış. Ayrıca Olga Berggolts ve Anna Ahmatova gibi önemli insanları daha iyi tanımış oldum. Sovyetlerin tüm bürokratik beceriksizliklerine ve siyasi baskısına rağmen insanların direnmeye çalışmaları ve Nazileri Leningrad'a sokmamaları takdire şayan. Aşağıda kitaptan aktarmak istediğim bölümler şunlar:

"... Kışın, yatakta yatarken, başım ağrıyana kadar tek bir şey düşündüm: orada, dükkânlardaki raflarda, konserve balık vardı. Onları neden satın almadım? Neden sadece on bir kavanoz balık yağı satın aldım ve neden eczaneye beşinci kez gidip üç kavanoz daha satın almadım? Neden biraz C vitamini ve glikoz tableti satın almadım? Bu nedenler korkunç bir acı veriyorlardı. İçilmeyen her kâse çorbayı, atılan her ekmek kırıntısını, her patates dilimini sanki kendi çocuklarımın katiliymişim gibi öylesine büyük bir vicdan azabı ve kederle hatırlıyordum. Fakat ne olursa olsun elimizden geleni yaptık ve radyodaki teskin edici anonsların hiçbirine inanmadık… "

"... Sovyetler Birliği için savaşın ilk on bir günü tam bir yıkımdı. Karşılarındaki ordu dünyanın bugüne kadar gördüğü en büyük istila ordusuydu: dört milyon Alman ve Mihver askeri, 3350 tank, 7000 sahra topu, 2000'den fazla uçak ve 600.000 at. Özellikle kuzeyde Kızıl Ordu Wehrmacht'ın 655.000 askerine karşı 370.000 askeriyle sayısal olarak bariz biçimde eksikti…"

"... Insan boynunu ve kulaklarını yıkamaktan vazgeçtiğinde, işe gitmeyi bıraktığında, yiyecek karnesindeki ekmeğini tek oturuşta yediğinde ve ardından uzanıp üzerini battaniye ile örttüğünde, ölümü yakındı… "


"... Vladimir Garşin -Erisman Hastanesinin 54 yaşındaki kültürlü baş patoloğu ve Anna Ahmatova'nın aşığı için normalleşmeye dönüşün yolu çalışmaktı. Mart'ta üç aydır ilk kez kıyafetlerini çıkardı: "Bu tuhaf kemikli vücudu suya soktular ve yeniden çıkardılar. Vücut cennetlik sudan kendi başına çıkamıyordu. Ilık- tı!... Başka birinin vücuduydu, benim değil. Onu tanımıyorum, öncekinden daha farklı işliyor. Farklı salgılar üretiyor, onunla ilgili her şey yeni ve yabancı." Kişiliği de yeniydi. Şans eseri toplu ölümler sırasında nefrete ve öfkeye değil kayıtsızlığa bürünmüştü. (Bu doğruydu -Ahmatova'nın tahliyeden önce birlikte kaldığı aileye verdiği bir torba yulaf hayatlarını kurtarmıştı.) Yine de çok şey değişmişti, "pek iyi değildi". Kendi içini dinlemeliydi,sanki yeni, tanımadığım bir apartman dairesine taşınmışım gibi he yeni beden ve ruh üzerinde çalışmalı, gizli köşelerini keşfet melindim. Aynica Erisman morgunda gerçek anlamda da bedenleri parçalara ayırmıştı.. Beklendiği üzere bedenlerde hiç yağ yoktu, fakat onlarla ilgili en çarpıcı şey organlarıydı: İşte bir karaciğer ağırlığının neredeyse üçte ikisini kaybetmiş. İşte bir kalp -üçte birinden fazlasını, bazen yaklaşık yarısını kaybetmiş. Dalak normal boyutlarının yarısına kadar küçülmüş. Bu insanların tibbi geçmişlerine baktık. Bazıları ölmeden önce oldukça yeterli besleniyorlarmış, fakat yine de kurtulamamışlar, iyileşemeyecek kadar zarar görmüşler. Yağ depolarının tamamını kullandıktan sonra beden kendi hücrelerini yok etmeye başlar, tipkı yakıtı biten bir geminin kazanlarına atacak hiçbir şeyinin kalmaması gibi. Bunların hepsini teorik olarak biliyorduk, fakat artık kendi gözlerimizle görebiliyoruz, ellerimizle dokunabiliyoruz, mikroskop altına koyabiliyoruz… "

"... Bir deri bir kemik kalmış, romatizmalı kocası kendi içine kapanmıştı, çok az konuşuyordu ve kendisi kızgın bir şekilde çoraplara yama yaparken veya Karamazov Kardeşler'i okurken o akşamları "bir dağ sıçanı" gibi uyuyordu. Arkadaşı Olga Berggolts'un Radyo Evindeki flörtler ve kıskançlıklar hakkında dedikodu yapmasını anlayamıyordu ve bir doktorun bekleme odasında çocuklarını emziren bir kadının görüntüsü neredeyse midesini kaldırıyordu. Kadının geçen yılın Şubat'ında veya Mart'ında gebe kaldığını hesapladı - "yüzbinlerce insanın yere yığıldığı, açlıktan öldüğü, morgların dolduğu, her yerde cesetlerin ve kara kırışık yüzlerin olduğu aylarda. Ve bununla beraber, yeni bir hayatın başlangıcı! O gücü, arzuyu nereden buldular?..."

[Abril Camino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impresionante ensayo, con testimonios reales, de uno de los episodios más espeluznantes de la historia del siglo XX: el asedio de Leningrado. Los datos impresionan y los diarios de los habitantes de la ciudad, más. Para leer con calma y el corazón encogido.

[Tamara]

The books focuses mostly on the civilian experience of the siege, and - probably because of a bias in the availability of sources - on the experiences of educated middle class people. Who wrote. A lot.

Diaries are a major source, along with interviews conducted many years later, and for me that was the most fascinating aspect of the book. Once all the staggeringly grim statistics, the disgusting politics and the bureacratic incompetence are processed, there's this absolutely riveting thread of individual and collective human experience still to take in.

An entire city is locked up and starved. Is it a universal story? Maybe? (let's never find out) maybe not. Leningrad is not everycity, it's a particular, specific place. It's a grand, historical city, a highly educated one, a cultural and political center. It is a Russian city, and it's a city with its own, ineffable, character.

So what happens when everything is peeled away, bit by bit, from the human experience, and this city is sent down Maslow's pyramid? Security, safety, warmth, food and pretty quickly, life, all go. What remains? An easy myth is that everything is fine, people struggle nobly on in dignified, honest misery. But the notion that it's three meals to barbarism also appears to be an oversimplification. The reality is complicated, changeable and difficult to summarize.

I don't know that there's any particular conclusion to take away, but the collection of diaries, conversations and memories presented here are simply impossible to look away from. The thoughts and feelings of people being reduced down to corpses and then, for some, coming back. The small things that become vast outrages and vice versa. What stays important and what loses all meaning. Are people the same people through all that? Does a city stay a city?

[Dem]

Review to follow

[Hipp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Väga ülevaatlik teos nii Nordi tegevuse kohta idarindel kui ka loomulikult Leningradi blokaadi kohta, mis on enim tsiviilelanike elusid nõudnud piiramine ajaloos. Raamat põhineb nii arhiiviallikatel, kui ka blokaadi läbielanud inimeste mälestustel ja päevikutel, mida on nii laste, teadlaste kui ka saksa sõdurite sulest.
Kogu teos meenutab väga mõne vene klassikalise autori teost, kus on mitukümmend tegelast, kes siin ja seal mängu tulevad ja siis jälle lehekülgedeks unustatakse. Koledusi, surma, nälga, kavalaid toiduleiutisi ja sooja saamise viise on raamatus tõeliselt palju ning see kõik paneb mõtlema inimese vastupidavusele ning sellele, kuidas inimlikkus raskes olukorras vaikselt kaob. Palju imestust tekitab inimsöömise ja laibamägede kõrval rohkem isegi see režiim, mis linna piiras ja linna enda võim, mis ei teinud küllalt, et inimesi päästa - samas jäid paljud leningradlased siiski kommunismile truuks, olgu, mis oli.

[Kristen Freiburger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably not a great idea to read during a global pandemic. Circuits overloaded.

[Cav · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...With his back to the post, a man sits in the snow, wrapped in rags, wearing a knapsack . . . Probably he was on his way to Finland Station, got tired and sat down to rest. For two weeks I passed him every day as I went back and forth to the hospital. He sat 1. Without his knapsack; 2. Without his rags; 3. In his underwear; 4. Naked; 5. A skeleton with ripped out entrails.
They took him away in May..."

The story told in Leningrad is sure to horrify the average reader, as the reality of what happened during this time is more shocking than can be imagined...
Author Anna Reid, an English journalist and author whose work focuses primarily on the history of Eastern Europe tells the story of the siege of Leningrad here; tapping into newly found primary sources, including the private diaries of ordinary citizens who suffered from cold and starvation during the winter of 1941-1942.

Anna Reid:


The Siege of Leningrad was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history, lasting a mind-boggling 872 days; from 8 September 1941 – 27 January 1944. Some historians have classified it as a genocide due to the systematic starvation and intentional destruction of the city's civilian population by Hitler's Wehrmacht Army.

Anna Reid did a fantastic job of telling the story of the siege here, and conveying to the reader the unfathomable suffering and misery felt by those who either lived through it, or died because of it.
Leningrad is a great example of writing history effectively. Reid's writing has a natural, easy, and engaging flow, making the book very accessible and readable. I found her style a welcome change from many of the other history books that I have read, which can drone on in a monotonous fashion, eventually losing the reader in the weeds...

I'd like to include a few quotes from the book in my review, to give the reader a sense of historical context, and Reid's telling of it. These quotes tell the story better than any summary I would be able to produce.
She provides some background in the book's introduction:

"...Immediately pre-war, the city had a population of just over three million. In the twelve weeks to mid- September 1941, when the German and Finnish armies cut it off from the rest of the Soviet Union, about half a million Leningraders were drafted or evacuated, leaving just over 2.5 million civilians, at least 400,000 of them children, trapped within the city. Hunger set in almost immediately, and in October police began to report the appearance of emaciated corpses on the streets. Deaths quadrupled in December, peaking in January and February at 100,000 per month. By the end of what was even by Russian standards a savage winter – on some days temperatures dropped to -30°C or below – cold and hunger had taken somewhere around half a million lives. It is on these months of mass death – what Russian historians call the ‘heroic period’ of the siege – that this book concentrates. The following two siege winters were less deadly, thanks to there being fewer mouths left to feed, and to food deliveries across Lake Ladoga, the inland sea to Leningrad’s east whose south-eastern shores the Red Army continued to hold. In January 1943 fighting also cleared a fragile land corridor out of the city, through which the Soviets were able to build a railway line. Mortality nonetheless remained high, taking the total death toll to somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000 – one in every three or four of the immediate pre-siege population – by January 1944, when the Wehrmacht finally began its long retreat to Berlin..."

Bomb damage, September 1941:


Reid talks about Operation Barbarossa here:

"The first rule of foreign policy, the dinner-party truism has it, is never to invade Russia. Why did Hitler, very conscious of the disaster that befell Napoleon there, decide to attack the Soviet Union?
His aims, from the campaign’s inception in 1940, were not those of conventional geopolitics. He did not want just to annexe useful territory and create a new balance of power, but to wipe out a culture and an ideology, if necessary a race. His vision for the newly conquered territories, as expounded over meals at his various wartime headquarters, was of a thousand-mile-wide Reich stretching from Berlin to Archangel on the White Sea and Astrakhan on the Caspian. ‘The whole area’, he harangued his architect Albert Speer, must cease to be Asiatic steppe, it must be Europeanized! The Reich peasants will live on handsome, spacious farms; the German authorities in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces. Around each town there will be a belt of delightful villages, 30–40km deep, connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which we mean to let the Russians live as they like.12
Existing cities were to be stripped of their valuables and destroyed (Moscow was to be replaced with an artificial lake), and the delightful new villages populated with Aryan settlers imported from Scandinavia and America. Within twenty years, Hitler dreamed, they would number twenty million. Russians – lowest of the Slavs – were to be deported to Siberia, reduced to serfdom, or simply exterminated, like the native tribes of America. Putting down any lingering Russian resistance would serve merely as sporting exercise. ‘Every few years’, Speer remembered, ‘Hitler planned to lead a small campaign beyond the Urals, so as to demonstrate the authority of the Reich and keep the military preparedness of the German army at a high level.’ As a later SS planning document put it, the Reich’s ever-mobile eastern marches, like the British Raj’s North-West Frontier, would ‘keep Germany young’..."

October 1941: courtyard of the Young People’s Theatre, after shelling:


The accounts of normal people during this time included by Reid did a fantastic job of bringing this history to the reader:

"...In winter, lying in bed, I thought of one thing until my head hurt: there, on the shelves in the shops, there had been canned fish. Why hadn’t I bought it? Why had I bought only eleven jars of cod-liver oil, and not gone to the chemist’s a fifth time to get another three? Why hadn’t I bought a few vitamin C and glucose tablets? These ‘whys’ were terribly tormenting.
I thought of every uneaten bowl of soup, every crust of bread thrown away, every potato peeling, with as much remorse and despair as if I’d been the murderer of my own children. But all the same, we did as much as we could, and believed none of the reassuring announcements on the radio..."

Reid writes of the failure of Stalin's government to evacuate the city before the siege began:

"Failing to empty Leningrad of its surplus population before the siege ring closed was one of the Soviet regime’s worst blunders of the war, leading to more civilian deaths than any other save the failure to anticipate Barbarossa itself. By the time the last train left, on 29 August, 636,283 people, according to official sources, had been evacuated from Leningrad. (This compares with 660,000 civilians evacuated from London in only a few days on Britain’s declaration of war two years earlier.) Excluding refugees from the Baltics and elsewhere who passed through the city, the number falls to 400,000 at best. Just over two and a half million civilians were left behind in the city, plus another 343,000 in the surrounding towns and villages within the siege ring. Over 400,000 of them were children, and over 700,000 other non-working dependants..."

Scavenging meat from a horse killed by shelling. Date unknown:


Leningrad also tells the story of the incredible resilience of the Russian character, and their iron-hard will to survive despite overwhelming odds:

"...Also celebrated as a manifestation of the defiant Leningrad spirit is the fact that some of its dozens of theatres and concert halls continued to function. The Musical Comedy Theatre – the Muzkomediya – stayed open almost throughout the winter, and concerts continued to be held under the crystal-less chandeliers of the Philharmonia into December. (Of the string players, an audience member noted, only the double bassists could wear sheepskin coats. The rest wore padded cotton jackets, which allowed freer movement of the arms.)
It is claimed that altogether, Leningraders enjoyed over twenty-five thousand public performances of different kinds in the course of the blockade, and the image of artists flinging themselves into war work – Shostakovich on the roof of the Conservatoire, Akhmatova standing guard duty outside the Sheremetyev Palace, prima ballerinas sewing camouflage nets – is one of the key tropes of the siege..."

As the siege prolonged, and the winter got colder, desperate times set in. Ordinary citizens and even soldiers and officers of the Red Army were forced to resort to cannibalism:

"Like Leningrad’s starving civilians, some soldiers resorted to cannibalism. Hockenjos came across what he called a ‘man-eaters’ camp’ in the woods behind Zvanka, the stripped limbs confirming the statements of two young Red Army nurses who had been taken prisoner and given jobs in his battalion’s field hospital...
...‘One day’, Yershov relates, Sergeant Lagun noticed that an army doctor, Captain Chepurniy, was digging in the snow in the yard. Covertly watching, the sergeant saw him cut a piece of flesh from an amputated leg, put it in his pocket, re-bury the leg in the snow and walk away. Half an hour later Lagun walked into Chepurniy’s room as if he had something to ask him, and saw that he was eating meat out of a frying pan. The sergeant was convinced that it was human flesh . . . So he raised the alarm and in the course of the ensuing investigation it became clear that not only were the hospital’s sick and wounded eating human flesh, but so too were about twenty medical personnel, from doctors and nurses to outdoor workers – systematically feeding on dead bodies and amputated legs.
They were all shot on a special order of the Military Council...

...Overall, 64 per cent of those arrested for ‘use of human meat as food’ were female, 44 per cent unemployed or ‘without fixed occupation’ and over 90 per cent illiterate or in possession of only basic education. Only 15 per cent were ‘rooted inhabitants’ of Leningrad and only 2 per cent had a criminal record.37 The typical Leningrad ‘cannibal’, therefore, was neither the Sweeney Todd of legend nor the bestial lowlife of Soviet history writing, but an honest, workingclass housewife from the provinces, scavenging protein to save her family..."

Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 was an excellent book. Author Anna Reid did an incredible job putting this work together. It was exceptionally well researched, formatted, written, and delivered.
I would definitely recommend this one to anyone interested.
5 stars.

A dystrophic walked along
With a dull look
In a basket he carried a corpse's arse.
I'm having human flesh for lunch,
This piece will do!
Ugh, hungry sorrow!
And for supper, clearly
I'll need a little baby.
I'll take the neighbours',
Steal him out of his cradle...

[S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

fantastic read, all the more impressive because Reid only finished a bachelor's degree.

*one error: Reid writes, "Stalin shouldn't have liquidated his army's generals during his purge;" however, among Hitler's last words were "I should have purged the army's generals like Stalin." these kind of broad historical judgments are "too big" to make. USSR won the war, so who can say 70 years after the fact which of Stalin's decisions were correct and which were wrong?

second, Reid spends hundreds of pages on Olga Bergholz,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Ber...

whose name she Russifies, missing the larger point; Bergholz is being chosen to read poetry and propaganda because she is ethnic German.. Get it? the soviets are keeping up morale through using an ethnic german fighting on the soviet side. russifying her name fails to allow the english-speaking reader to understand the dynamic here.

other than that, the cannibalism, the first winter, the poverty, the class is covered, with some slight weakness in truly showing how the poor and orphans really went first. a fantastic work, marred by some slight class prejudice.

Face it, Reid, all the poor hungry technical school boys died first!!!

this Stalin-lover, Reid, totally ignores all the Kruschev reforms.
then that bastard Gorbachav came to power and ruined everything.

Союз нерушимый республик свободных
Сплотила навеки Великая Русь.
Да здравствует созданный волей народов
Единый, могучий Советский Союз!

ПРИПЕВ:
Славься, Отечество наше свободное,
Дружбы народов надёжный оплот!
Знамя советское, знамя народное
Пусть от победы к победе ведёт!
Сквозь грозы сияло нам солнце свободы,
И Ленин великий нам путь озарил:
Нас вырастил Сталин — на верность народу,
На труд и на подвиги нас вдохновил!

ПРИПЕВ:
Славься, Отечество наше свободное,
Счастья народов надёжный оплот!
Знамя советское, знамя народное
Пусть от победы к победе ведёт!
Мы армию нашу растили в сраженьях.
Захватчиков подлых с дороги сметём!
Мы в битвах решаем судьбу поколений,
Мы к славе Отчизну свою поведём!

ПРИПЕВ:
Славься, Отечество наше свободное,
Славы народов надёжный оплот!
Знамя советское, знамя народное
Пусть от победы к победе ведёт!



this is Bergholz, who Reid identified with.



however, most people agree Shostakovich was the premier musician /motivator. in fact. some felt he was too closely associated with Stalin.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

This authoritative history of the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II, and of the effects of the siege on the city's inhabitants, is meticulously researched and fluidly and crisply told. Reid is a disciplined writer with an eye for the telling detail.

The book is arranged chronologically, and much of the story is told through contemporaneous accounts of the siege. This is a very effective approach: the personal stories have a powerful cumulative impact and provide a thoroughly immersive (and often emotionally wrenching) reading experience.

Reid provides just enough information about what's happening outside the siege zone to place the book's events in context. In a typical 20-page chapter we get 2 to 3 pages of conventional history (troop movements, body counts, diplomatic initiatives, military developments in other zones of the Eastern Front, strategic decisions made by Stalin or Hitler, etc.) and 17 to 18 pages of what life was like at that stage of the siege for typical Leningrad residents. This strikes the right balance. The reader learns the personal stories of a great many survivors and victims, but is always aware of what's happening in the broader world.

The siege lasted for 3 years, but most of the book's attention is (correctly) devoted to describing the experience of the first winter (1941-42), which was extremely harsh and during which 100,000+ people died in Leningrad each month. The accounts are gripping and heartrending: conditions deteriorate steadily, then they get even worse. And just when you think they can't possibly get any worse, they do.

The prospective reader should be forewarned that this is primarily a book about death. The firsthand accounts are filled with dying, with the loss of loved ones, with the repugnant physical details of what it's like to starve or freeze to death; we see corpses everywhere; we witness cannibalism and other forms of desperation. So the book is not recommended for the squeamish or the faint of heart. But I can't imagine a more vivid account of this epic human tragedy.

The text is supplemented with excellent maps.

[Dara Salley · Rating 4 out of 5]

One question runs through your mind over and over while reading “Leningrad” It is, “What would I have done?” Would I eat my pets, would I let a relative starve, would I leave a weak friend behind to seek relief, would I take more than my fair share and watch others suffer? I don’t think anyone can really answer these questions, it’s impossible to know what you would do in such extreme circumstances. But you can’t help wondering.

The book forces you to contemplate how fragile civilization is. It only takes a few months for a city to go from normal, healthy life to mass starvation. Reid makes sure to parcel out blame equally between the Nazi occupiers and the incompetent, and at times downright counterproductive, Soviet government. Indeed, she spends more time dwelling on the cruel bureaucracy of the Soviet government that preferred to continue spending resources searching for “foreign agents” in a city where citizens were starving to death by the hundreds daily. Americans often complain about the incompetence of our legislative bodies. You have to hope that if there were a disaster on this scale, that our leaders could pull together to save lives, but I think we all have our doubts. The siege of Leningrad is a case study in how a government tied to ideology can turn a difficult situation into something horrific.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Siege of Leningrad is an important part of the national World War II narrative in Russia. It is not well-known in English-speaking countries, although not as completely unknown as the 1945 famine in Japanese-occupied Vietnam. The last popular book on the subject, The 900 Days by Harrison Salisbury, came out in 1969, and it has its flaws: it accepts uncritically a cannibalism story from a novel about the siege published in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1943, and it overestimates the number of victims by a factor of approximately two. Since then, Soviet censorship has disappeared, and archives have been opened. I have seen the siege being referred to as "a Hitlerite-Stalinite crime". It wasn't; it was a Hitlerite crime pure and simple. Having surrounded Leningrad by September 8, 1941, Hitler's forces deliberately destroyed its food stocks, water system, power system by artillery and aerial bombardment so as to cause the city residents to die. As the result, approximately 750,000 people starved to death (the precise numbers will never be known), some 500,000 in the winter of 1941-1942. Some actions of Soviet authorities are now known to be wrong, but they weren't crimes like the actions of Hitler and his generals. Not enough civilians had been evacuated from the city when the ring of the siege was closed - but no one expected the Germans to get as far as they did. Guns and shells manufactured in Leningrad were sent to the defense of Moscow instead of being used against the Germans locally - but no one expected the siege to last as long as it did. An attempt to break the siege ring in early 1942 ended in a disaster for the Red Army, with some 100,000 soldiers killed and captured and some 200,000 wounded - but then the Red Army was losing to the Wehrmacht through 1941 and 1942; it was only in 1943 and 1944 that it learned how to win.

What happens when millions of people are sent down the road of starvation? Some will behave nobly, and some ignominiously. There will be street crime. There will be cannibalism and corpse-eating. Some of those in power will use it to steal from their powerless compatriots. In 2014, 43-year-old Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky accused 95-year-old writer Daniil Granin, the author of a book about the siege, of lying when somebody mentioned that Granin's book has pictures of a bakery making rum pastries for the Communist Party elite, while ordinary people ate a starvation ration of ersatz bread. Medinsky later said that his words were "taken out of context and turned inside out." At a lower level, one diarist's friend saw some "Rubensesque" women at a public bathhouse in the spring of 1942, and assumed that they worked (and stole) in bakeries, soup kitchens or orphanages.

As a popular history book, Reid's book is mostly based on diaries, interviews with siege survivors, and secondary sources such as military histories and contemporary Russian books about the siege, including Granin's.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I'm not dissatisfied with the book. I am glad the author included additional details about how Stalin and his generals managed the war effort and a German commander commanded his troops held the territory around Leningrad. This gave the book an perspective outside of the besieged Leningrad, and contrasted with the plights of the starving Leningraders. Many of the anecdotes and stories of the besieged citizens of Leningrad were well chosen (for example, stories of doormen allowing the well dressed to rest outside their entrances, and how those who worked in food distribution were relatively well fed).

The organization of the book was noticeably lacking, and I agree with the other reviewers' comments about the book's "choppiness". Other than a rough chronological ordering of events of the siege, I did not detect other logic in the author's arrangement of the book's chapters. The chapters were built around themes, and the transitions from topic to topic within chapters were often times abrupt, forcing me to re-read certain paragraphs.

I appreciated many of the literal translations of the original Russian (I'm assuming the author translated them herself), but I would have preferred she take more liberty in her phrasing, as often times meaning was lost in her murky syntax. I re-read some sentences several times, sometimes even failing to grasp the basic meaning. Further, I would have appreciated the original Russian terms in the appendix. Vladimir Nabokov would have provided this detail, had he written the book.

I was hoping for a treatment of the Leningrad Blockade that was as impressive as Anne Applebaum's treatment of the Soviet Gulags, but was let down. I am fine with Leningrad being on my bookshelf if only because its appendix provides a wealth of primary sources. 3 stars out of 5.

[Costantino Andrea De Luca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buon saggio storico che ripercorre gli anni tragici dell'assedio di Leningrado.

Il libro fa riflettere sulle profondità più oscure dell'animo umano, descrivendo le reazioni della gente di fronte alla mancanza di cibo. Mostra come molte persone civili possano trasformarsi in breve tempo in bestie, se private delle risorse basilari per sopravvivere, ma racconta anche gli atti di gentilezza e "umanità" in mezzo al disastro.

Oltre all'assedio vero e proprio, l'autrice ricostruisce il contesto storico, raccontando i deliri di Hitler e la totale disorganizzazione di Stalin e dei suoi collaboratori. Tutte le citazioni e i dati sono accompagnati da valide fonti.

Personalmente ho trovato due lievi difetti: l'enorme mole di nomi difficili da tenere a mente e l'eccessiva ripetitività di certe testimonianze molto simili tra loro. Forse l'autrice avrebbe potuto ripetere di tanto in tanto i ruoli di alcuni personaggi secondari, in modo da rinfrescare la memoria ai lettori, e tagliare una cinquantina di pagine ridondanti.

Il giudizio complessivo è comunque positivo.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Considering this was one of the great events of world history, the book is surprisingly bland. Not much about the political scene, or the military, or life in starving Leningrad other than the starvation. For an "epic siege," it's not a very compelling read. But, imagine, a crown jewel of a city surrounded by the enemy during the worst winter in memory, and in which almost every occupant is starving to death - and this occurs over a period of years. 750,000 starvation deaths. Zombie tales have nothing on human history.

[Colin Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is probably wrong to say that you really like a book of this nature that tells the harrowing story of those left in Leningrad as the German Army advanced to the outskirts, never breaking in. The people who survived tell of the gradual starvation of their friends and family through the winter of 1942-42. Of the inept leaders who were for themselves and then persecuted and executed many thousands on very slim political grounds. Of the inept leadership, badly organised relief columns and evacuation procedures of families left to starve, children often found with families dead around them. Throughout the people seemed to retain an affiliation to Stalin and his deputies. It is a wonder why.

Anna Reid presents the accounts of survivors in a calm easily read format that is difficult to put down but difficult to understand the reasons behind the stories.

4 stars. and a moment of quiet reflection.

[Na Tou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal. I read this book in just a few weeks, and was captivated by the multiple accounts of the blockade written by the victims. Many diaries were written during the war, then buried at the end of the war and released to the public many years later. The secrecy of that historic event was astonishing.
Not only these were victims of the blockade but also of the Soviet rule. This is a stark reminder what an autocratic government can do and not do for it's people.
What surprised me the most was how a person's character can change under severe hunger. At the end, most of us care only about our primal needs and all the values and morals matter less and less with time.