Saint Petersburg
Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler
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- $249.00
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- $249.00
Descripción editorial
‘Richly-layered and packed with insight, this riveting account of terrible events tells us as much about the present as it does the past’ Patrick Bishop, author of Paris '44
From Peter the Great to Putin, a biography of the city Hitler tried - and failed - to wipe off the map
The siege of Saint Petersburg – then known as Leningrad – stands as a testament to human endurance. Intended by the Nazis as civilian extermination, the numbers who perished in this 900-day ordeal almost outweighed the entire total of British and American troop deaths in the Second World War.
The city’s 2.5 million residents began to starve as rations shrank and dwindled. As temperatures plunged to minus 43°C, electricity faltered, and fuel ran out. Yet, amid this suffering, the resilience of culture and hope shone through, with orchestras and theatres defiantly continuing their performances, a flicker of humanity against the backdrop of despair.
In Saint Petersburg, bestselling historian Sinclair McKay book chronicles the horrors of the siege through immersive prose and gripping first-hand accounts. He also traces the pivotal importance of Saint Petersburg across the centuries, from Peter the Great’s visionary founding of the city to the way it has shaped its most infamous son, Vladimir Putin.
From its darkest moments to its enduring spirit, Saint Petersburg explore the layers of history that have shaped this extraordinary place.
'McKay is a gifted writer; his prose has the cadence, tone and power of a Shostakovich symphony. Horror is majestically conveyed’ Gerard DeGroot, The Times
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Historian McKay (The Hidden History of Code-Breaking) offers an elegiac chronicle of the three-year siege of Leningrad. In September 1941, the Nazis surrounded the city with the express purpose of starving its inhabitants to death. But Leningraders maintained their poetic spirit throughout the hardships, McKay shows, including during the siege's first weeks, when city residents persevered in enjoying the White Nights social season, "a time of studied elegance and grace" during the far north city's twilit summer evenings. Even years into the siege, "pared down" performances continued at the city's Philharmonic Hall and other venues, and "encouraging" poems were "declaimed from loudspeakers." Most famously, the composer Shostakovich labored over his Seventh Symphony, playing it in the "rare moments of silence" between air-raid warnings and bombs. McKay's re-creations of the highs and lows of the siege are striking and vivid, and include horrible scenes of cannibalism alongside piercing profiles of famous denizens like poet Anna Akhmatova. The author also astutely dips into the city's past and future, from its 1703 founding (as Saint Petersburg) by Peter the Great through Vladimir Putin's birth there in 1952, looking for insights into what in the city's character allowed it to endure the siege's horrors. Lyrical and arresting, it's a kaleidoscopic account of a population pushed to the edge, but still enamored of life's splendor.
