The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad

by Harrison E. Salisbury

The Nazi siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944 was one of the most gruesome battles of World War II. Nearly three million people endured it; just under half of them died. For twenty-five years the distinguished journalist and historian Harrison Salisbury pieced together this remarkable narrative of villainy and survival, in which the city had much to fear-from both Hitler and Stalin.

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

672 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Harrison E. Salisbury was a long time reporter and editor at The New York Times. Earlier in his career he had worked for the United Press, which he joined after earning a B.A. at the University of Minnesota in 1930. He began his career in journalism as a part-time reporter for the Minneapolis Journal during 1928-29. Although he served in many different positions and places during his long career at the Times, Mr. Salisbury is perhaps most famous for his work as Moscow correspondent, covering the U.S.S.R. during the early years of the Cold War. After serving as the Times' Moscow Bureau Chief from 1949 to 1954, he returned to the U.S. and wrote a series of articles for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. He spent a great deal of time concentrating on Asia during his later years at the Times, covering the Vietnam War as well as many different issues and events having to do with China.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book before going to Russia, on a river cruise, Moscow to St. Petersburg. My experience there:
A word about safety. Irina warned us about pickpockets at the Kremlin. Moscow, SPB and some Baltic cities have pedestrian tunnels at some intersections. You have to use these tunnels to cross the street. On the last day in SPB, I asked a guide, Marina,, on how to get to a sign on Nevski Prospekt from the WWII **** blockade of Leningrad(Mentioned in “900 Days: The Siege Of Leningrad” by Harrison Salisbury). This sign--”Citizens: In case of artillery shelling, this side of the street is more dangerous.” Marina said to take a bus 3 stops and walk a ways. The bus that I got on went 1 stop and turned left. I walked the rest of about 12 blocks, took a picture of the sign and walked back, In the second of 2 tunnels, a man stopped in front of me. I attempted to go around him, and a 2nd man blocked my way. In the meantime a 3rd man came behind me and started to take my fanny pack/pick my pockets. I grabbed my pockets and fanny pack, They gave up and went away. There were a lot of people on the steps out of the tunnel and they didn’t want witnesses. I was very fortunate not to be hurt.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a global event of such horrific superlatives as WWII it is almost criminal that the Siege of Leningrad isn’t discussed more frequently, or at least recognized more readily for the terror it was. And it isn’t just a matter of reciting statistics to put someone in a place of awe – although those numbers speak loudly, for sure. Certainly a large part of the blame can be placed on the former Soviet Union and their insistence of altering facts to support whatever their current propaganda machine needed; but I think there might also be a more human element at work that requires constant vigilance: the need for forgetting.

History owes a great debt to Harrison Salisbury for this near perfect work of non-fiction. Arriving just days after the Leningrad blockade was lifted on January 27, 1944, Salisbury put to work his rich journalism background to interview dozens and dozens of siege survivors, Soviet party leaders and soldiers. The author allows the horror of survival, especially the winter of 1941/42, to exist in this work between the quotation marks of his interviewees. The Cold, the Hunger were as much villains as the German army that surrounded Leningrad. It took me so long to finish this book because there were chapters that haunted my sleep. Here’s a sampling: young Tanya Savicheva keeps a diary during the first winter of the siege, and as her family members die one-by-one she notes their passing in a full page entry. Death by starvation takes seven family members – until only Tanya is left alone and found by chance in an apartment filled with frozen corpses, barely alive. Her diary is one of the exhibits in the Leningrad Siege Museum in St. Petersburg:


So how does one approach experiencing an event like this via the written word? As I read Salisbury’s text (a good half the book covers that first winter and the struggle for the City to survive) I constantly felt unable to cope with the scale and terror. A million dead citizens? I live in a city of roughly 750,000 souls. To imagine everyone dead, with another quarter of a million left to go, isn’t possible. How about a couple of communal graves with 200,000 bodies? Or imagine Lake Michigan as a mass grave (when the corpses piled up in the winter, and people were too weak to bury them, they were thrown onto the iced-over Lake Lagoda for the birds and animals to eat, ultimately to sink in the spring’s thaw). The crippling ineptitude of Stalin lead Soviet leadership made me thankful for my country’s flawed disaster response programs. I have a special connection with San Francisco. I wasn’t born here, but I’m attached to this City in a meaningful way – but would I be prepared to die for it? Hundreds of thousands of Russians paid with their lives in their devotion to Piter. Here’s a picture of hundreds of starving citizens attempting to clean-up their city by clearing debris and corpses as the Russian winter of 1942 comes to a close:



In October of this year my wife and I traveled to Russia – our first visit to this beautiful country. I wanted to read a book of fiction and non-fiction with St. Petersburg as the setting; The 900 Days was my non-fiction choice. When we arrived in the City my wife signed us up for a dinner on EatWith (a fantastic business that I cannot recommend highly enough) – we had an opportunity to eat at a St. Petersburg chef’s home withcomplete strangers. There were eight of us (including the chef) at dinner, all of our new friends spoke English and they were as excited to talk to us about America as we were to ask them questions about Russia. Midway through the dinner I mentioned I was reading a book about the Siege of Leningrad. I was very sensitive to the fact that this topic had the potential of eliciting strong emotions – especially amongst multi-generational Petersburgians whose parents / grandparents suffered during those 900 days. What happened exceeded my wildest imagination of where the topic would potentially lead. Our friends were absolutely ecstatic that I was interested in the Siege. One of them is a software developer and he created a free iPhone app for Russians that uses your GPS location within St. Petersburg and tells you where key events on days during the Siege took place (he showed it to me and it wasn’t the first time I wish I could read Russian – it looked amazing). They told us that they were so sad that the current generation is quickly forgetting what happened less than 100 years ago to their grandparents’ generation. I’d like to think I made a big leap forward in American / Russian citizen relations. Heck, they even poured me a special glass of vodka for a toast!


Other than Rising Up and Rising Down, this book comes with my highest recommendation of all the non-fiction I’ve read in 2014. It’s ok to cry when you read it. Those that are alive today in St. Petersburg would thank you.

Taken just outside of St. Petersburg on a cool October morning.

[LA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, dark details of the siege. Factual accounts of dogs turned into living anti-tank bombs, people eating cups of molasses-saturated dirt or chewing the glued bindings on books, cannibalism, and more - we American civilians know nothing of war. A book of horrors.

While we readers have had ample access to stories about the holocaust and what befell Jewish citizens, Romas, and political prisoners, until I read a wonderful work of fiction called City of Thieves many years ago (you should recognize the author if you watch Game of Thrones), I had zero understanding of the nightmare of this siege.

Surrounded on all sides by Nazi forces, Hitler's aim to starve the one and a half million Russians to death came pretty close to meeting its goal. The reason most of us know nothing of this lock-down into starvation and death is that the Soviet government erased heart ache and insult and failure. Like a predecessor to the attitudes in North Korea, denying the occurrence of famine was the route taken by Lenin and others. A million dead women and little kids and grandparents, their frozen corpses stacked on the ice until it thawed and they sunk, were collectively disappeared from official accounts.

The author, a newspaperman, arrived on scene when the war ended and later served as the Moscow correspondent for the Times. He was not a novelist but one who documented current events, and had he not been there to collect secret stories from survivors, this transcript of yet another of World War II's atrocities would not exist. The Soviets hid failure, would not admit to any hardships but while the USA, great chronicler of WWII lost 400,000 lives, these people lost 27 MILLION.

If you think you've got a handle on war history and have not read this, you're fooling yourself. Shocking and important.

[William2]

Harrowing. Stalin’s stupidity with regard to the Siege of Leningrad is mind boggling. First, there was his inability to acknowledge that the Nazis were mobilizing on his borders in their teeming thousands. But, no, to suggest that war was imminent was a “provocation,” it was treachery, because of Stalin’s iron-clad belief in the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, signed August 23, 1939. Therefore, when the attack attack began on June 22, 1941, reports of it were not believed in the Kremlin! Even as they commenced denial was rife throughout the Soviet leadership. The so-called intelligence was disbelieved. (Sound like anyone we know?) Eventually the truth came to be known, even to Stalin. He went into a 6-week depression. He took no part in government or wartime decisions. This may have been for the best had he stayed away, but of course he did not. He emerged from his bed eventually to begin to countermand those few remaining officers he had, thereby making the siege worse than in would have been without him. Author Salisbury goes methodically over these fuckups one by one.

The important thing to keep in mind is that Stalin murdered many of his army officers during The Great Terror of 1936-37. He purged them by the thousands so no one could challenge his authority. So there was no one to fight when war came. Not surprisingly, his leadership in the war had been criticized unremittingly. It saddened me when reading poet Pablo Neruda's excellent memoirs how staunchly he believed in Stalin. But then little was known about Stalin’s incompetence in the 1960s when Neruda was writing. Nothing was known about the impact of Lend-Lease. This book wasn’t published until 1969.

[Olive Fellows (abookolive) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece.

[amapola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Città eroica

https://youtu.be/nOKL_q-Ribs
Shostakovich dice:
”La mia settima sinfonia ispirata ai terribili eventi del 1941. Alla nostra lotta contro il fascismo, alla nostra vittoria sul nemico, alla mia città natale di Leningrado dedico questa composizione. Suonerò un estratto dalla prima parte della 7a sinfonia ".

Dici Seconda Guerra Mondiale e pensi subito all’Olocausto, a Pearl Harbour, allo Sbarco in Normandia, alla Battaglia d’Inghilterra, a Stalingrado… ma dell’Assedio di Leningrado non c’è memoria se non (forse) tra gli appassionati di Storia del secondo conflitto mondiale. Eppure è uno degli episodi decisivi per le sorti della guerra.
Questo saggio è la ricostruzione efficace e molto accurata del più lungo assedio che una città abbia mai subìto in epoca moderna.
Durata: dall’8 settembre 1941 al 18 gennaio 1944 (due anni e cinque mesi, 900 giorni)
Vittime: oltre un milione tra civili morti per fame, freddo o sotto i bombardamenti, e militari caduti in combattimento.
In questo libro, che possiamo considerare un classico della saggistica sulla Seconda Guerra Mondiale, il terribile ed epico assedio subito da Leningrado è descritto attraverso le storie di tanti dei suoi cittadini, raccolte e organizzate dall’autore in maniera accurata, in grado di restituirci la portata della tragedia e il coraggio, l’abnegazione, l’orgogliosa resistenza degli abitanti di Leningrado.

L’uomo distrugge, l’uomo resiste, l’uomo (a volte) crea

https://youtu.be/vRHZu5xoIe0

Solo un appunto. Il libro si merita indubbiamente le cinque stelle, ma va detto che c’è una pecca (e non da poco): l’assenza di piantine che aiutino chi legge ad orizzontarsi nell’evolversi degli avvenimenti.

[Michael Rubin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book while on a trip with some college buddies in California. I had to read this book over the trip for school. In the sunny summer of the west coast, on the streets of santa cruz and san francisco I sat in the back seat of a car, crushed by luggage and read this book.

It blew my mind. I understand the horrors the Americans and the French and the Jews withstood in WWII. But the siege was a whole new chapter of the war I was unaware of. I don't think most Americans are aware of the events that transpired in those 900 days. No horror movie will ever come close. People do not imagine these experiences. They live them. Or they don't get a chance to live through them.

This book changed my view of Soviet American politics. These 900 days had, in my opinion a profound effect on Russian and Soviet policy for decades to come.

The book holds so many details, and lessons, and experiences on a type of war that will never make it to the movie screen. It's a lesson and a testament that should never be forgotten.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to the Russian front I don't think I'll ever read any better writers than Malaparte and Grossman - simply because they lived it; they were there. There have been so many historians writing about WW2 since that we are now spoiled for choice. Antony Beevor is certainly up there with the best of them, and I seriously considered his book Stalingrad, but seeing as I already owned this I thought I'd give it a go; and it didn't disappoint. This was an extremely well researched, richly detailed, and brilliantly written account of the battle for Leningrad. It's an easy 5/5 for me.

[Mikey B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intense examination of the siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1941-42. Most of the book is concerned with the German invasion in June 1941 and takes us to the disastrous winter of 1941-42 when possibly over 600,000 Leningraders died of deliberate starvation from the German siege. The city understandably was in such disarray during this time that we will never know the exact number of deaths – and how many died of residual effects after, will also never be known. During and after the spring and summer of 1942 many more residents were evacuated and sadly rations could be increased because there were simply far fewer people to feed as so many had perished.

Mr. Salisbury is at his best when describing the terrible events of the German siege – the constant bombardment, the total collapse of infrastructure (no water or heating, public transportation became non-existent) – people were just too weak from starvation to carry on normal activities – most were barely living. It makes for very despairing reading, but we must never forget the cruelty that Nazism brought to the people of the Soviet Union and the titanic struggle they waged to fight off the Nazi aggression.

It would be nice to say that this book is eloquently written to capture this crucial period of history, but unfortunately the writing left much to be desired, as if an editor did not do the job properly. Most chapters have a surfeit of people introduced (at least 20 to 30) with little continuity from one to the other; some disappear entirely or may spring up again 100 or 200 pages afterwards for another short paragraph. The military history can be rather dry – with the constant citing of division numbers. The chronology is confusing and goes back and forth in time; the taking of Mga by the Germans is mentioned on three different occasions. Statistics are over-used and add to the staleness. In a military or civilian operation the numbers are even broken down from the total by giving a sub-total of the number of Communist members taking part – what is the point of this?

There is an overwhelming tendency when speaking of the civilian population of Leningrad to mention writers, musicians and the theatres they attended – as if everyone in Leningrad was a creative artist. The author remarks (on page 536 of my book) that in the springtime, after the long winter starvation, that in the “Writers House meals were once again served in the dining room by waitresses in neat uniforms”. I am sure that the vast majority of survivors had no such treatment.

The last half of the book is far better – and Mr. Salisbury acknowledges the sordidness of the Soviet system. Books were written on the siege, but never published or highly censored. A documentary film has never seen the light of day. Due to Soviet suppression many first-hand accounts of this painful period have disappeared forever.

As the author states there has never, in the long history of human afflictions, been a siege as vicious and deliberate as this one; therein lies the importance of this book.

[Leftbanker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second history that I’ve read on the Siege of Leningrad, a story that reads like a tale of horror. This history, even more than the first, is like a shopping list of utter misery. It's a very, very long list. I’m ashamed to have ever complained about this past year of lock-down and restrictions due to Covid-19 during which my biggest concern was over-eating out of boredom.

I was directed to this book by the acknowledgements from City of Thieves by David Benioff. Reading this book, I started jotting down passages that impressed me, in one way or another. I had to stop because it was like those students at university that annoyed me so much when they marked their entire text book with yellow highlight markers. I’ve chosen a few passages to point out the scope and complete desperation of the tragedy, and this was all from the first winter of 1941-9142:

On December 29 Luknitsky noted in his diary that ten days earlier he had been told that six thousand persons a day were dying of starvation

Leningrad’s terrible winter—it was the coldest in modern times, with an average temperature in December of 9 above zero Fahrenheit (13 degrees below normal) and 4 degrees below zero in January (20 degrees below normal)

Sometimes the survivors took bodies to the street and laid them there for someone, they hoped, to bury. But the bodies were not necessarily buried. Passers-by might lift their hats slightly and go on past.

A few days after New Year’s Vera Inber ventured for the first time into the hospital reception room. She went into the shower rooms. The nude body of a male corpse lay on a stretcher. It was a mere skeleton. She found it hard to believe it had ever known human life. In other rooms and in the corridors, on benches, on stretchers and simply on the floor, sat or lay living corpses— patients who were only a step from death. They sat or lay motionless hour by hour. Two nurses attended them, and the nurses, too, were more like corpses than humans. The patients were not being treated; they were simply being fed—an infinitesimal quantity. The disease from which they suffered was hunger.

This book, as the author points out in the new forward written in 1985, was never published in the Soviet Union. The Soviet state refused to admit that there was anything but the most noble of actions carried out by the citizens of Leningrad. History doesn’t always jibe with party lines. One of the things the Party didn’t want revealed was the new kind of crime occurring in the starving city.

The crimes were the acts of ordinary Soviet citizens, driven to murder and robbery by starvation, bombardment, cold, suffering. Some had wives or children at home, dying of dystrophy.

A stolen ration card—all but impossible to replace—meant almost certain death for the victim. Money was all but useless for a population starving to death.

Bread was the common currency. Vodka held second place as a medium of exchange. For bread anything was for sale—women’s bodies or men’s lives.

The dead also served the living through their ration cards. The cards were supposed to be invalid as soon as the holder died. There were strict penalties for not reporting deaths and turning in cards. In practice no one turned in a ration card. They were used to the end of the month. At that time the bonus to the living came to an end for everyone had to appear in person to get his card renewed.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite nonfiction books, an overwhelming, endlessly fascinating account of an epochal, monumental event of World War II, including the preliminary actions of Hitler and Stalin and the initial invasions of eastern Europe that led to the siege. If you ever find yourself complaining about your lot in life, you really need to read this book to get some inkling of that it feels like to have REAL problems: stranded in a huge, arctic cold city with millions of walking dead starving to death with you and wondering when the next bomb or shell will hit.
Salisbury knows how to weave a complex, multi-focused story that reads like a rattling good novel, with a large cast of characters and centers of interest. A truly great book.

[Betsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Holocaust, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, there are many horror stories of WWII, but Harrison E. Salisbury's book, The 900 Days about the Siege of Leningrad has a unique spot in that list because so much of the misery was caused by one man, the leader of the Soviet state, Joseph Stalin. His blindness to reality prevented the great city from taking preventive measures when the Germans attacked in 1941. As a result, for the next three years death and destruction reigned over Peter I's magnificent city. Cold, starvation, German attacks and murders of Leningraders by Stalin's police (including army officers and politicians who lost battles) terrorized the city. The stories provided in the book are heinous and heartbreaking, but the people who remained endured.

Russia paid an extreme price for Stalin's stubborn vision that he could prevent an attack by not providing 'provocation' when in reality the only provocation that Hitler needed was knowing that the Soviet Union existed.

[Christie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my 2nd read on the Eastern front but my first on Leningrad. While the book was quite lengthy, there was a lot to be told about the days leading up to the siege and the 900 days that followed. It was very heartbreaking to read in many places as the conditions that the residents of Leningrad endured during that time were horrendous. Overall, a very thorough account of the generals who led the charge to finally break the blockade and the challenges they faced with the political infighting and whims of Stalin. It was interesting to read about the great artists and musicians that stayed together in the city that they loved even though there were offers for safe passage out. Incredible to learn that this is the time that Shastakovich wrote his 7th Symphony.
This one passage in the book moved me the most:

From chapter 35 of "900 Days, The Siege of Leningrad"

Anna Akhmatova waits outside for hours in the prison lines as she had for the past seventeen months. She waits for word of her son's fate in prison, meanwhile bringing him food and packages. A woman in line with her recognizes her as the famous poet and asks her with lips blue from cold or fear, "And this-can you write about it?"
"Yes," Anna Akhmatova replied, "I can."
The woman smiled a strange and secret smile.
Anna Akhmatova did, finally, write about those days:

Would you like to see yourself now, you girl so full of laughter?
The favorite of her friends,
The gay sinner of Tsarskoye Selo?
Would you like to see what happened to your life?
At the end of a queue of three hundred,
You stand outside Kresty Prison,
And your hot tears are burning holes in the New Year's ice.

By this time her son had been cast into exile, there to remain until Stalin's death in 1953.

This poem moved me so much I literally felt the anguish and despair Anna Akmatova must have felt as she could do no more than wait in the cold and bring her son food and packages but couldn't bring him the freedom she so wished for him.

[Wanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was much looking forward to reading this, as I was not particularly knowledgeable about the plight of the Leningraders – except to know that they suffered terribly, as did millions of others at Stalin’s hands. Reading this certainly added one more piece of evidence to my already hefty collection, that the man was a beast. Often when I read about him and Hitler, I yearn for an afterlife in which they are punished in perpetuity for their acts of cruelty.
But, on to the book. This book is not really a classic history – despite being called a history. Salisbury was a NY Times journalist, and he writes like a journalist. While the theme itself is amazing, with the two major totalitarian powers of WW II coming to a standoff over the fate of the most beautiful city in Russia, this reads more like a series of reports, or vignettes or scenes. He is passionate in his gruesome and disturbing descriptions of the misery, deprivation and starvation among the ever dwindling Leningrad residents. These very human scenes are among the best written in the book.
What is lacking in this book are the military elements of the siege, the geography, the combat and there is almost no discussion of battle strategy or tactics. It seems to me that it would have been important to discuss the German’s siege policy and procedure, so that readers could understand why the Russians had such a hard time lifting it.
He does explain that Stalinist-era Soviet incompetence, mendacity, and villainy exacerbated or even caused much of the Leningraders' suffering, but there is a lack of detail as to how this incompetence played out. For example, what kind of bureaucratic bungling (or worse) prevented an efficient and effective distribution of basic supplies to the Leningraders. He tells us that basic supplies dwindled, but not really the reasons for the why. It is simply not enough in what is the definitive study of this time to say that it was incompetence. We also learn very little about the political and social structure of Leningrad. He communicates the political tensions among the ambitious political elites of the USSR, but his treatment is superficial.
His characters are flat, and they tend to be clustered among the poets, playwrights and writers. I would have liked a broader view of the population of Leningrad.
So, why did I give this 5 stars. I gave it 5 stars because it remains the definitive work on this subject and as a document of the dogged resilience of the human spirit, it is extraordinary. Moreover, despite its flaws, Salisbury actually managed to document these extraordinary times and speak with those who lived through them. This is no small feat with the history of a country that continually re-invents their “history.”

[Jeff Dawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Read

Despite reading this over twenty years ago, it left a lasting impression how desperate the plight of Lenigraders was during the titanic struggle. Imagine being completely cut-off six months of the year from your country. The only life-line is lake Ladoga when it freezes over. Yet even then, thin ice, constant shelling and mechanical failures imped the arrival of the few sparse supplies coming into to the city.

Imagine funeral pyres being the norm. Men and women bathing naked in the cities fountains, ignoring their nakedness or sexual desires. Local merchants falling back on the human basic function—survival. Cannibalism ran through the streets as a plague. Rummaging around the bombed our warehouses hoping to find a scrap of meat, a rat or re-boil pulverized sugar.

No heat. No electricity. No phones. No help. The only constant for 900 days—death.

This is a gripping account of a people who refused to surrender, to the elements, the situation or the enemy. Excellent read.

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aaahhh, the book starts out with a wonderful description of Leningrad on the whitest of the white nights, June 21, 1941 after a cold spring: People are out enjoying life and the culture the wonderful city offered to them, many of them quite confident their lives are safe from German invasion because their government has been telling them that. There have been so many warning signs of upcoming German aggression, based on flights into Russian airspace, movements of troops, movements of German civilian out of Russia, reports from spies, German defectors, Americans and Brits. Stalin seemed to thoroughly trust Hitler and determined that all these reports were from Germans acting without Hitler's approval, to provoke Russia, or they were ploys to get Russian to capitulate even more to Germany. There were many Russian military leaders who were concerned but knew they would be executed for being bolder than they were, and many of them did take actions on their own accord (very brave of them). When the attacks did begin at 4:00 AM on the 22nd, Moscow would not allow retaliation and did not for about five days afterwards. The book is quite scathing of Stalin, and hence is still not published in Russia, even after all these years. Hitler wanted to take Leningrad and then Moscow, using Russia's resources in the war. He had a fascination with Leningrad as the incubator of communism and also because of the Germanic mystique about the Baltic, THEIR sea. Leningrad was poorly defended - machines were old and few, the battle plan had always been to stop aggressors before the city was reached, the Baltic countries recently seized by Russia were quite supportive of the Nazis. Actually, it seems quite a few Soviets thought Hitler might be a nice escape from Stalin and all his terrors; people of Leningrad were still piqued that Moscow had been made the "temporary" capital, especially since the citizens were so very different from each other. Leningrad citizens were very proud of their city and its European ways, of its being the site of the Bolshevik Revolution, and were determined to maintain this important military, industrial and historic city. It had been the result of big purges in 1938, rather making Paris during the French Revolution seem almost tame. Citizens realized early on that Stalin wouldn't hesitate to sell them out and they realized their destiny was tied to Zhdanov, whose picture replaced Stalin's on everyone's walls. Germans quickly encircled the city with the exception of Lake Ladoga and the effectively bombed the city's food warehouses. The Soviets put up resistance and by September the decision was to just blockade Leningrad and troops were pulled away from that area to attack Moscow. Some Soviet outfits had been wiped out two to three times over, but the Germans lost up to 2/3 of their personnel. That first winter was an absolute horror although there was a food system over the ice of Lake Ladoga to bring some supplies to the city. In the summer people were able to clean up the city and regroup a bit, and there were enough military movements that the rest of the days were not as dire but still terrible. The officials who so honorably kept the city "safe" and functioning were later executed because of the trumped up "Leningrad Affair." Some of those people's memoirs still seem to be kept under lock and key by the Russian government. Leningrad was the last on the list of the Soviet cities too be restored after the war. About 1 1/2 million people lost their lives.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read. I went to this book after reading a footnote in one of my history books. Any friend you know that may have family in Russia will be able to add to this historical narrative about what Salisbury confirms that (quoting the official historical record) 'In world history there are no examples which in their tragedy equal the terrors of starving Leningrad. Each day.. was the equal of many months of ordinary life.' Those who maintain that suffering—undeserved and unexplained—must show there cannot be a loving God out there need only ask these people who never lost their faith or hope.

[Ella Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just could not get through this. I absolutely love nonfiction and I got interested in the Siege of Leningrad after reading the amazing Deathless by Catherynne Valente, so I thought this would be a great way to explore it more... but I just cannot get past the first 100 pages. I keep trying and trying, but the description of military action at the start of the book is so frenetic with a stream of names, dates, and places that are not particularly well connected or illustrated that it's really difficult to follow. Frankly, it's become my go to when I can't get to sleep. The first 20 pages are absolutely guaranteed to knock you out.

I'll come back to this when I'm not pregnant and exhausted (so possibly never) and update my review if I ever get past the military action at the start, but for now, it's on my not recommended list.

[Athena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book and did not touch it for a year. I knew it would be grim, the events described would be difficult, upsetting, sad. I was also afraid that a lot of numbers would be thrown my way, a lot of armies, battalions, troop movements, generals, marshals and deaths would dominate the narrative. And sure thing, all these happened but in a way I could follow, in a way that did not overwhelm me or overburden me. At no point did I feel myself compelled to put down the book and never pick it up again. This is a well written, well researched and well balanced book and I appreciated it for that.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed, but dry, this book treats of the almost-900-days of the German siege of Leningrad, focusing on the worst of it, 1941-42, and cursorily with the rest. What came across most forcefully was the inefficiency of dictatorship and terror whereby the moods of the autocrat, Stalin, and his henchmen, Beria, Malentov, Molotov, could adversely effect the course of state action, in this case national defense. What I hadn't known is how unprepared the Soviets were and how unnecessary the magnitude of their initial defeats were.

[Sal Valdez · Rating 5 out of 5]

from an emaciated starving leningrad citizen who gives up a meal to attend the philharmonic - man does not live by bread alone. triumph of the human spirit. an amazing chronology of the most horrific siege of the modern era. yet also uplifting to learn of the countless ways the residents of Lwningrad managed to survive with their spirit intact

[Rich]

“The city was filled with corpses. They lay by the thousands on the streets, in the ice, in the snowdrifts, in the courtyards and cellars of the great apartment houses. The city and Party authorities were preparing to launch an enormous spring clean-up. But V.N. Ivanov, secretary of the Young Communists, was afraid of the psychological effect on his young boys and girls when they confronted the mountains of frozen, decayed and disintegrating bodies.”
- Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad

Leningrad, Russia – January 1942: The city has been bombed and besieged by the Nazis since mid-June. It’s 20 degrees below zero. There’s no heat because there’s nothing to burn, and electricity is rationed so that only the hospitals, the city radio station, and a few businesses can remain open. There’s no water because the pipes are frozen. One can chop a hole in the Neva to get water, but it’s tainted. It wasn’t good water before the war, now there are corpses being thrown in. Corpses are everywhere. Food is being rationed too. Few people even have the strength to do mundane things. Moving a corpse from their house or apartment is difficult. They drop them from windows. Corpses lay outside and get covered in ice and snow. People die walking to work, on the job, in the doctor’s office, everywhere. One family has twelve family members dead and frozen in their bedroom. Sometimes only children are the sole survivors. They live with the corpses. Someone gets the idea to use children’s sleds to move them. The idea catches on. It’s along way to the cemetery. It takes strength even to pull a sled. Bodies stack up there too. Dynamite is used make mass graves, instead of trying to impossibly dig in the frozen earth. One passes dozens of frozen bodies on the street on the way to work. On the way to get their daily ration of bread. On the way to the cemetery. The same bodies day after day. Most bread isn’t really bread; it’s made of various substitute products barely fit for consumption. It’s made with water from the Neva. People eat unimaginable things: paste extracted from wallpaper they’ve torn off the wall, boiled leather, rodents, each other. Dogs and cats are rarely seen. People are convinced that most of the rats have left town to go to the front, where there is food. Some people take their daily piece of bread and eat one-third in the morning, one-third near mid-day, and the rest in the evening. The radio is the only thing keeping people alive. The broadcast stops sometimes due to bombs severing wires, shortages of fuel to burn to create the needed electricity, and employees dying. There are dead bodies all over the home of Central Radio, but they keep broadcasting.

This is the grim reality that Salisbury writes about. He manages to extract these stories from a dead city. The writers and poets, the ones more likely to capture this important tragedy so relevant to history, are dying too. The ones with strength to write have a difficult time getting it past the censors and their stories don’t get told. How Salisbury pieces it all together is remarkable.
He begins by laying out the military and political landscape in the Soviet Union. Frankly, with a bit too much detail for me. It takes the first 95% of the book to cover the first 526 days of the 900-day siege. The remainder of the siege is comparably skimmed over in much less detail.

The human condition stories in this book are fascinating; the military aspect is very detailed and sometimes feels a little too much like a textbook, making it tedious reading through much of it. Of note, too, is that the author doesn’t keep the reader informed at all as to the bigger picture of the war and what is happening politically and in other venues. Because of the level of detail given on such an importance subject, this is at least a 4-star book.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce livre qui raconte l’histoire du siège de 900 jours de Léningrad (Saint-Petersbourg) pendant lequel un million de civils sont morts est aussi actuel aujourd’hui sinon plus qu’en 1969 l’année de sa publication. De nos jours les armées ne se confrontent plus sur les champs de bataille. Normalement, ils se livrent leurs batailles dans les grands villes. Les boules frappent bien gens mais c’est surtout la faim qui tuent. La recette est très simple. D’abord on mange ses vivres conventionels. Ensuite, c’est le tour des chiens, des chats et des rats. Finallement, avant de crever de faim on mange d’autres êtres humains.
Heureusement, l’auteur ne consacre pas plus de pages à l’anthropophagie que le sujet mérite. Salisbury donne un portrait de la vie des assiegés riches en details. Sa grande réussite auprès du public n’a pas été du aux aspects macabres de l’ouvrage. Depuis son lancement les lecteurs ont adoré ce livre parce qu’il montré surtout le grand courage des Léningradois pendant leur épreuve terrible.
Il y a d’autres lecteurs qui ont reproché à Salisbury de s’être servi presque exclusivement des témoignages des poetes et romanciers afin de décrire le vie de tous les jours sous le siège. C’est une critique assez bete. Après tout, c’est normal que c’est les gens qui ont le métier d’écrire qui aient laissé les plus grands nombres d’écrits. Salisbury a simplement decide d’utiliser des documents qui étaient disponibles et qui en plus étaient de grande quailité.
Ce qui est très evident est que l’ouvrage est de l’époque post-Stalinienne. Les gens avec lesquels, Salisbury faisaient des entrevues vidaient le coeur. Le livre contient tant d‘histoires de l’incompétence et du sadisme du Staline que l’on mal à les croire. Pourtant, les livres qui ont paru depuis tendent à confirmer tous ce que Salisbury prétendait. Staline croyait dur comme fer qu’Hitler allait respecter son accord de paix avec L’URSS. Donc, il n’a rien fait pour preparer la Russie avant l’attaque des Allemands en Juin 1941. Durant la guerre Staline a préféré laisser les populations dans les villes que les Allemands attaquaient plutot que de les évacuer. Salisbury a été parmi les premiers dans le monde Anglophone à blamer Staline pour le nombre extraordinaire des morts en Russie pendant la deuxième grande guerre mondiale. Tout ce que l’on a appris depuis cinquante ans appuie la these de Salisbury.
Les 900 Days de Salisbury est une des très grands livres d’histoire du vingtième siècle. Je vous encourage fortement à le lire.

[Dschreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to imagine a better book being written on the siege of Leningrad. The author not only used hundreds of Russian print sources, but he visited Leningrad soon after the siege, and he interviewed many residents who lived through the experience.

In the early chapters there are sections that require some patience, as the arrangement of military forces is described and statistics about weapons and so on are given. I'd say, too, that the build-up to the outbreak of hostilities is a little too prolonged.

You will need to follow with a detailed map of the area, covering the Baltic states, the southern part of Lake Ladoga, the vicinity of Leningrad itself, of course, as well as the areas of Russia to the south of Leningrad. Having a tablet or notebook next to you open to Google maps is an enormous help. You will do a fair amount of searching on the map, sometimes focusing down to a granular level, then backing out to a wider perspective.

The heart of the book is the chapters on the terrible privations of the winter of 1941-42. It is made extremely vivid with scores, probably hundreds, of eye-witness accounts and anecdotes, really giving you some sense of what it was like to live there (not that we could ever truly grasp it in all its horrific reality).

I was not quite sure why the author glossed over the quite lengthy period after that winter until the lifting of the siege.

I think the Cold War has blinded us to Russia's part in World War II, partly through bias, partly through lack of information. All our story-telling, our books and movies, focus on the western front—naturally enough, to some extent, because it was there that members of our families fought—whereas, according to what I now believe, mostly after having read this book and Ostkrieg, the real war was fought in the east. It now seems quite clear to me that Hitler was defeated by the Soviets and that the western allies served an important but definitely a secondary role.

I don't think I will ever get over how one man can deliberately create so much horror in the world.

[danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume continues to be the most complete history of the WWII Leningrad blockade, even though it was published in 1968. Harrison Salisbury was afforded remarkable access to extensive Soviet historical archival material, significant military figures, as well as individual civilians that had lived through the seige. I'm actually curious if, with the increased accessablity of Soviet-era historical information, there is more information published on this amazing event...

Mr. Salisbury's research, interviews, and composition took place in that odd historical period between the end of the Stalin regime in 1953 and the return of a more repressive rule in the Brezhnev era commencing in 1968. During that 15 year period, it became almost "OK" to be critical of Stalin and his minions, including myriad senior officers from the recently-purged Soviet Army. And apparently there was a lot blame to go around for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, beginning with Stalin! Without any Soviet/Russian historical "reckoning" for the Siege of Leningrad and the resultant political backlash of the "Leningrad Affair", the historical and cultural insights afforded to Mr. Salisbury were remarkable (in any Soviet era). I doubt that the overall conclusions drawn by Mr. Salisbury would have been supportable by Soviet leaders, Brezhnev and beyond (maybe Gorbachov...?). The fact that the book was never published in the Soviet Union (though a Russian language version was published in the West and commonly smuggled into the USSR) is certainly a reflection of the official Soviet line...

Overall a marvelous book on an amazing period of world history.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing story. How many people know that almost 1.5 million people--about half the population of Leningrad (St. Petersburg)--died as a result of the Nazi siege in WWII? Most of the deaths were from starvation. As is often the case in Russian history, the people also suffered terribly from the actions and inaction of their own government. (Is there any country whose people have suffered more from their fellow human beings in the last 200 years than the Russians?)

One of the creepiest scenes in the book is when the supply trucks, which hauled in food across the enormous Lake Lagoda--the only lifeline into the city--kept crashing through the thin ice, trucks and drivers plunging into the black water (hundreds of feet deep in most places).

The book, written in 1969, does not have the brilliance of Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor. The effort to cast the story in the context of the perseverance of the starving artists and poets of Leningrad was mostly lost on me. I would rather read the nitty-gritty military and political details, though of course there is plenty of that in the book.

(The Nazis of course were ultimately punished for their deeds through military defeat, the humiliating loss of their country, imprisonment, the Nuremburg trials, etc. But what about the Soviets? Stalin? Malenkov? Except for those that were purged by their own henchmen, most of the evil Soviet leaders seem to die peaceful deaths.)

[Karl Jorgenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine historical narrative. I was directed to this book because David Benoit relied upon it to create his 'City of Thieves' (allegedly what Hitler called Leningrad). The book describes the siege and the machinations of Soviet Bureaucracy in excruciating detail, punctuated with personal stories of the starving, freezing, dying population. An amazing story, a holocaust for the ages. I found one anecdote stolen by Benoit wholesale from this book. Good for him. I learned the basic principles of Soviet administration: when disaster threatens, do nothing until it is too late, then shoot the administrators who did nothing, shoot the administrators who argued to do something, and shoot those who actually did something, but who did not wait for orders from the top. Replace dead administrators and repeat cycle.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very comprehensive description of the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Since Salisbury covers both the military events and the life of the population, it can be difficult to juggle all the names. He is particularly good at depicting how much of the suffering was due to Stalin's maniacal need to control everyone, and to kill anyone who might have questioned his leadership. As soon as the war was over, Stalin tried to erase all knowledge of the heroism and the suffering, and the fact that perhaps a million Russians starved to death during the siege.

[Adam Whitehead · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the evening of 21 June 1941, Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg, the former capital of Russia and birthplace of the Soviet Union, was one of Europe's greatest cities. Three million people lived in a city where art and literature flourished, at least as much as was possible under Stalin's paranoid rule. The city and its hundreds of factories also benefited from the peace treaty with Nazi Germany, as materials poured out towards the German border to help drive the German war machine in the west. Rumours that Germany would turn on the Soviet Union were rejected as British propaganda, and those who persisted in making those claims felt the wrath of Beria's secret police.

In the early hours of 22 June, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest and most grandiose military undertaking in history to that time. Between three and four million German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union on a front more than 700 miles wide. Army Group Nord under Field Marshal von Leeb was directed to advance more than 400 miles through the Baltic States to Leningrad and destroy the city, link up with the Finnish armies advancing from the north and then swing south and east to help in the destruction of Moscow.

The Soviet Union was taken by total surprise. Its armies were strung out across the frontier and through rear-echelon areas, often lacking arms or ammunition to avoid 'provoking' any incident. Stalin had a near-total breakdown due to his disbelief in the invasion and was out of action for weeks. In his absence no-one was prepared to take responsibility for the disaster, resulting in total chaos, through which the Germans advanced almost at will, encircling, capturing or destroying hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers in individual battles. Where the Soviets stood and fought on well-prepared ground with modern equipment (such as the formidable T-34 and KV-1 tanks) they proved the equal of the German attackers, but the overall situation was a disaster. The Baltic Fleet was thrown back from Riga to Leningrad with thousands of deaths and dozens of ships sunk. Defensive line after defensive line was overrun. Divisions were sent into battle under-strength and under-armed, just to try to hold the Germans back for a few days longer.

Just nine weeks into the invasion, the German army reached the southern suburbs of Leningrad and was only stopped by the frantic digging of defensive works, with hundreds of thousands of civilians from the city recruited to help, and colossal artillery barrages from the heavy warships of the Baltic Fleet laid down to delay the advance. Finally, the Germans switched their attention to Moscow and the Panzer divisions leading the attack on Leningrad were diverted south, sparing the city from direct assault. Instead it was invested, beginning on 8 September with the cutting of all land links to the city. The Russians expected a speedy relief by the Red Army. Instead, whilst a very tentative corridor was opened in January 1943, it wasn't until 27 January 1944 that the siege was fully lifted. In full, the siege lasted 880 days, one of the longest in history and by far the most deadly.

After the siege was lifted, the Soviets admitted that 600,000 people within the city had died. They were wrong. Even conservative estimates drawing on the number of bodies interred in the cemeteries and recovered afterwards place it in the region of 1,200,000 (or considerably more than the combined British and American casualties - civilian and military - of World War II in its entirety).

During WWII Harrison E. Salisbury was the head of the United Press Office in London, and subsequently was Moscow correspondent for The New York Times. He took a contemporary interest in the Siege of Leningrad and was one of the first western journalists allowed into the city after the siege. He interviewed hundreds of people who'd lived through the nine hundred days, from senior Communist Party officials to factory-workers and front-line soldiers (some of whom he corresponded with for decades afterwards), and collected vast reams of notes for a potential book on the siege. However, whilst the siege may have ended the machinery of Soviet politics had not, and he found many of his correspondents being chewed and spat out - sometimes in pieces - by Stalin's paranoid post-war purges. The book was published in 1969 and immediately banned in the Soviet Union due to its pinning of the blame for the disasters of Barbarossa on Stalin and the blinkered reactions of the Party.

Salisbury's technique with the book is to grant an overview of the entirety of the siege as seen from the Russian side (the German perspective is given at regular intervals, but after the initial advance and prior to the liberation the Germans are essentially just standing still outside the city, so they are not a major focus of the book). He looks at the military, supply and administrative problems faced in running and protecting a massive European city under siege from a militarily superior enemy, as well as the view from the streets, from common workers, soldiers and shopworkers. This is a massive undertaking - the book was almost 25 years in the writing - but Salisbury pulls it off masterfully. One second we are with Party Secretary Zhdanov authorising the building of a road across the frozen Lake Ladoga in the hope of opening a supply route, then we might be with a truck driver crossing the dangerous route and then with a soldier trying to protect the supply depots on the far side of the lake from Luftwaffe bombardment. It's an immersive technique, one that makes the book read like a thriller in its opening chapters as the Nazi steamroller inexorably closes on the city.

Contained in this book are hundreds of anecdotes and stories that could almost be full novels by themselves: a woman whose children are evacuated from the city but stupidly into an area closer to the German advance (she successfully goes behind German lines to rescue them and returns them to Leningrad); the Russian sailors on ice-locked ships who stave off boredom by forming a book club and reading the complete works of Dostoyevsky; the tiny fortress at the edge of the siege line which the Russians hold for 500 days against overwhelming German attacks until relieved; a starving child who can't decide whether or not to eat a mouse he finds stealing his tiny bread ration; and many more. Extensive footnotes and appendices list the sources for the claims and clarify confusion between different accounts of the same events, whilst the bibliography is one of the largest I've ever seen for such a (relatively) contained event. The amount of research that went into the book is staggering.

By its nature, the book is not going to be a laugh riot, though Salisbury does include moments of lightness and kindness where he finds them. However, the final third of the book, which focuses in detail on the most desperate days of the siege (when people were left on a few crumbs of bread a day to eat), is harrowing. Soldiers return from the front to find their entire families dead of starvation. Building walls burst from the swelling corpses within. Cannibals prey on unsuspecting children. It's a catalogue of horrors not quite like anything I've read before and is very heavy-going. However, it is also inspiring when you realise how many people did endure these privations and lived to tell the tale.

Salisbury's book has a few major issues. It's been criticised for focusing a little too much on the city's artists, particularly its poets and writers. Its true this group gets maybe a little bit more of a focus than others, but then it is understandable: they generally kept detailed diaries during the siege which other residents didn't. Also, their jobs generally entailed a minimum of dangerous or physically-exhausting activity, which killed so many of the city's other residents. The biggest problem is that, despite its name, the book focuses almost entirely on the first year of the siege (particularly the period up to April 1942), then the remainder is covered very quickly in the final 100 pages of the book. This is because Salisbury has taken a human-interest approach and the bulk of Leningrad's civilian population (or rather the bulk that hadn't starved to death in the horrific winter of 1941-42) was shipped out via Lake Ladoga after that first horrific year. More in-depth coverage of the latter part of the siege would have been welcome.

Despite this, The 900 Days (*****) is a brilliantly-written, breathtakingly-researched work of history focusing on (in the west, anyway) one of the more under-reported battles of the Second World War. It's powerful, dark, harrowing but also curiously uplifting and occasionally even awe-inspiring.

[Jeff Swystun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anytime I read a history concerning the Eastern Front in WW2, I am always stupefied as to the scale. If you come from a Western nation, you are exposed to stories of Dunkirk, Dieppe, D-Day, The Bulge. And as horrific and important as those were, they cannot match in terms of shocking numbers between the Nazis and Soviets.

Over the 900 days, ten times the number of people died than that of Hiroshima. The actual number is widely debated with official Soviet accounting putting it at over 600,000. The author breaks it down from other research, and double that seems more likely. And the city had to be rebuilt given the bombing damage and infrastructure breakdowns. The Germans destroyed 15,000,000 square feet of housing, 526 schools, 187 historic buildings, 840 factories and 71 bridges. The total damage was put at 45 billion rubles in 1944 currency.

The book rightfully deals with the astounding deprivations of the city's citizens. Food shortages and rationing killed hundreds of thousands, children grew up with developmental issues, some people dropped half their body weight. Infection and disease ran rampant. Then there was the black market, crime (killing for ration cards or a loaf of ersatz bread) and cannibalism.

Throughout the book is the hope and spirit of Leningraders. Many broke and all were tested but Salisbury does an amazing job highlighting individual and civic spirit in the face of daily death. His research over 25 years of writing the book is incredible. It is no wonder the Soviet Union banned the book. It exposes so much that was wrong in their form of governing. People were pawns to be tossed aside, reprisals were normal, as were executions and exile.

There were so many clues that Hitler was coming, that authorities should have been held accountable. How Stalin escaped an overthrow in those early weeks of the invasion is amazing. He was a basket case for weeks ("thrust into traumatic depression") and then once again regained his power and vindictiveness. His purge of the officer corps in the late 30's nearly cost the Soviets the war. On a small side note, the author talks about Stalin never leaving Moscow except to visit Crimea or Sochi which seems rather Putin-like.

The Soviets were so preoccupied with the Finnish front after being beat up by the smaller nation that they left an opening for the Nazis. It is the lead up to the siege that Salisbury really shines. It provides such context and background that I felt like I was in the midst of the mayhem. The author writes, "There was nearly total incomprehension on the part of Soviet commanders as to how to halt the Nazi Panzers." I have to come back to scale. Out of the 2.5 million citizens, 1 million signed up and were trained for Air Raid Precaution.

This is a huge story but Salisbury humanizes it with incredible tales of individuals. I am still haunted by the one of a young man who almost fell prey to cannibals and the story of children's sleds being used for everything but their original purpose is riveting. What people were forced to eat and the strange concoctions will stay with you long after you put the book down. Perhaps the most impactful story is that of Daniel Harms, an eccentric poet (with a very Anglo name that is never explained) and his sad fate.

Leningrad was a city of arts and culture. Its poets, writers, musicians and dancers signed up for frontline duty or took on tasks to keep the city limping along. The Germans sent in disrupting agents, as they controlled several suburban areas and its exurbia, to spread disinformation and impact morale. There is just so much going on that I am surprised the book is not double its 583 pages.

A fantastic work of history that will stand out forever and counters the Soviet Union's attempt to water down what went down. This is a book that takes on the scale that so awes but puts it in context by telling the tales of the people who were there.