James A. Zarzana.com
  • Home/Bio
  • The Eclectic Blog
  • Poetry
    • At the Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, May 2010
  • Marsco Saga
    • Summary
    • Sample Chapters >
      • The Dissident's Daughter
      • The Plague Ship
  • Miscellany
  • Contact

The 900-Day Siege

2/11/2019

1 Comment

 
Picture

        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.  
 

​
Picture
The St. Petersburg Siege Museum. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Leningrad has reverted to its original name, St. Petersburg. 
1 Comment
Tom Runholt
2/13/2019 07:41:28 pm

Muriel, myself, Marshall HS Counselor Jeri LaFontaine and husband Lloyd visited St. Petersburg in August 2000 as the Kursk submarine disaster was unfolding. We were guests of the Zack family, best friends of Moisey and Irena Gutman, immigrants to Marshall from Leningrad.
Tzar Putin of course did not accept NATO assistance that might have saved the Kursk crew to the outrage of ordinary Russians...It was a time when Great Patriotic War vets were picking up pop bottles on the street to supplement their meager pensions. Everyone was struggling, converting rubles to dollars and hiding same under their beds. Still Putin did get a pass to assume more power from most people because like all dictators, he made the trains run on time. Glasnost had failed,because people didn't trust self-government, never having lived in a system with unselfish citizen participation. Communism may have been worse than the Romanoffs'. The Zacks' pre-1917 apartment was vastly better built than the shoddy cement edifices that followed. Amazingly, you still couldn't drink the water in Peter and Catherine's capitol city.

One thing that was better under the Reds, than in the early Oligarch-Putin years, was a respect for education. Ordinary folks in many cases could access higher education based on merit under the Communists, and qualify for non-political prestigious jobs, including Jewish people like the Zacks' and Gutmans'. The Gutmans' and many other Russian Jews found emigration to Israel or the West to be prudent in the less tolerant Post-Red environment.

Irena escaped the 1941 siege and starvation in Leningrad as a small child on one of the last trains out, but was separated from her mother. Miraculously, an aunt rescued her by searching trains at a later stop, and she avoided being raised as an orphan.

I think it would have been impossible to defeat Hitler without the sacrifice of those 25 million Russian patriots. But Stalin, as Mr. Salisbury pointed out was as as much a heartless butcher as his fellow dictator-protagonist Hitler, and added needless millions to the slaughter pile.

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    The purpose of this blog...

    The Zarzana Eclectic Blog seeks to occasionally publish essays about assorted topics that would interest a wide reading audience.

    Blogroll

    Marianne Zarzana

    Archives

    March 2020
    September 2019
    February 2019
    September 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    September 2015
    June 2014
    May 2014
    September 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    March 2012
    February 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011

    Categories

    All
    Books
    Cats
    Church And State
    Coffee
    Cowan Award
    Democracy
    Disability
    Dogs
    Downton Abbey
    Education
    Friends
    Italy
    Libya
    Marsco
    Marshall
    Minnesota Transfer Curriculum
    Movies
    Notre Dame
    Novels
    Reading
    Sicily
    Smsu
    Space
    The Civil War
    The Great War
    Time
    Travel
    Us Constitution
    Winter
    World War Two
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.