Leningrad
Tragedy Of A City Under Siege 1941-44
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
This is the story of the siege of Leningrad, the deadliest blockade of a city in human history. Between September 1941 and January 1944, during which time the city was besieged by Nazi Germany, approximately threequarters of a million civilians starved to death: 35 times more civilians died than in London’s Blitz; four times more than in the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima put together. Had Hitler succeeded in taking Leningrad, he would have had access to the Soviet Union’s biggest arms manufacturers, shipyards and steelworks. He could have linked his armies with Finland’s, and cut the railway lines carrying Allied aid from the Arctic ports of Archangel and Murmansk. But Leningrad wasn’t taken. In Leningrad, the siege’s most eloquent victims—the diarists whose voices form the core of this book—convey stories of humanity in extremis and remind us of what it is to be human, of the depths and heights of human behaviour. Voices range from Zhdanov, the CP leader trying to organize defence and supplies for his embattled city, to Tanya Savich, whose heartwrenching diary records the deaths from starvation of her entire family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former Ukraine correspondent for the Economist and Daily Telegraph, Reid brings to this narrative a comprehensive background in Russian affairs, an eye for the telling anecdote, and an approach that integrates the everyday horrors of the three-year Nazi siege of Leningrad into wider contexts of operations and policy. Reid uses recently available material to, in another historian's words, "wip off the syrup" of Communist mythology. Stalin's government barely held the city and sustained it. It also bungled military operations, imprisoned and executed thousands for no reason, and took care of Party bigwigs while ordinary men and women died in misery. Leningrad's citizens showed courage and endurance. "Svyazi... string-pulling, exchange of favors, and bribery" made the difference between life and death. By June 1943 almost 2,000 cases of cannibalism had been processed by military tribunals. The Soviet system displayed stupidity, corruption, and callousness as the Nazis waged a war of annihilation, in which starving Leningrad was an end in itself. Leningrad's citizens endured, rebuilt, hoped for a communism with freedom and true civic life. What they received was a series of crackdowns and continued repression. Reid (The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia) makes a major contribution to lifting the curtain on that terrible siege. 16 pages of b&w photos; 6 maps.
