A review of a best-selling, 50-year-old book seems superfluous. Harrison E. Salisbury’s The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad was originally published in 1969. I read it first in 1978 in the year between finishing my MA and beginning my PhD in English. Recently, I reread it, and thus, found that on the 50th anniversary of its original publication, this monumental work deserved a fresh reappraisal.
First, it is a must for any student of World War II history. And an absolute must for anyone interested in fully understanding the depravity of dictatorships as found throughout the world even today. I have two particular reasons for these assertions, both of them actually background points of this thorough work.
One, Salisbury makes it clear what the terrors of total war are. In the years since World War II, the Cold War, and even the Vietnam War, society’s memory is clouding over the first-hand knowledge of the abject horror of war. And society may have forgotten the horrors a total war brings to its most vulnerable citizens: civilians, mostly women and children, all noncombatants.
The encirclement of Leningrad by German and Finnish armies was intended to starve the civilian population. Soon after the siege began, Hitler moved his panzer units, his spear tip for assault, to the south to attack Moscow. He wasn’t giving up on capturing the city of Communism’s birth, which he intended to raze, to wipe from the face of the earth; he was committing a style of genocide. Easier to starve his enemy to death than capture them and be at least somewhat answerable to the International Red Cross and world community for their safety.
More than 1.5 million Russians died in the 900-day siege, well over 2 million if the causalities leading up to the actual encirclement are added in. All told, Russia lost more than 20 million men, women, and children in their fight against Hitler’s invasion.
And Leningrad is only one of four major battles that raged in Russian territory and cost Russia so dearly: Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. Of them, only Kursk was mainly an army-to-army battle, often considered the greatest tank battle in history. The rest battered the civilian population caught between two modern armies.
The second reason for reading Salisbury is the backstory of two totalitarian regimes: Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Communist Russia. Neither leader actually cared for his people. Their armies were to serve without any concern for casualty rates. In the case of Germany, the Wehrmacht received orders that essentially freed them from any restraints by the rules of war concerning civilians. Death of Russian civilians was expected. To Hitler, all Slavs were a mongrel race, best exterminated by conflict and starvation or used for slave labor.
For his part, Stalin cared little for his own soldiers and ordered attacks by hordes of unarmed, half-trained units at times when fixed defensive positions with such troops would have been militarily wiser. Nor did the citizens of the Soviet Union fare better under his leadership. Stalin was notorious for engineering famine among the people he ruled as a way of punishing them or keeping them in check. Likewise, in his paranoia, he executed subordinates who failed to carry out his orders or who succeeded and might become a rival to his power. Almost all the civilian and military leaders in Leningrad who held off the Germans and Finns, thus saving the city, were dead at Stalin’s hands, either during or soon after the War.
Salisbury’s stunning and meticulous work is a testament to the spirit of human survival. And it stands as an indictment of unbridled power, draconian leadership unhindered by empathy, one that can act without a conscience. On the Leningrad front and throughout the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler and Stalin ground humanity to ashes without remorse. Contemporary readers should be aware of such barbarism if only because it is all too often repeated by other dictators.
The St. Petersburg Siege Museum. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Leningrad has reverted to its original name, St. Petersburg.
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