Before reading Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941-1944 by Anna Reid, I knew nothing about the siege. I had a vague memory from history class that it had in fact happened and, like seemingly most things involving Russia during the war, the fatalities were absurdly high. It is a shocking and at times difficult book to read, given the epic scale of the tragedy, but it is an amazing record of what happened in the lead up to and during the almost 900 days of the siege.
The siege of Leningrad was the longest of the war and the deadliest in recorded history (approximately 750,000 civilians died). As she begins, Reid tries to put the tragedy in context for the reader:
Other modern sieges – those of Madrid and Sarajevo – lasted longer, but none killed even a tenth as many people. Around thirty-five times more civilians died in Leningrad than in London’s Blitz; four times more than in the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima put together.
This is destruction on a scale I can’t even begin to process, especially given the very short time period in which most of it happen (estimates put the civilian deaths during the first winter of the siege at half a million). Using diaries written during the siege and the memoirs of those who lived through it, Reid gives a vivid and chilling portrait of everyday life within the city as the trappings of civilization evaporated:
Over the course of three months, the city changed from something quite familiar – in outward appearance not unlike London during the Blitz – to the Goya-esque charnel house, with buildings burning unattended for days and emaciated corpses littering the streets. For individuals the accelerating downward spiral was from relatively ‘normal’ wartime life – disruption, shortages, air raids – to helpless witness of the death by starvation of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and children – and for many, of course, to death itself.
Due to inept Soviet bureaucracy, the city was particularly ill-prepared to withstand a siege. Extra food stores that could have been sent were diverted away, leaving Leningrad with only a month’s worth of rations once the siege ring closed. But the worst blunder, as Reid sees it, was the Soviet regime’s failure to evacuate Leningrad’s civilian population when they had the chance. 636,283 civilians (including Baltic refugees) were evacuated during the two months leading up to 29 August 1941, when the last train left. Pointedly, Reid reminds us that “this compares with 660,000 civilians evacuated from London in only a few days on Britain’s declaration of war two years earlier.” This left almost three million civilians within the siege circle, including 400,000 children and “over 700,000 other non-working dependents.”
The winter of 1941-1942 was unusually harsh and, by the time that weather set in, most of Leningrad’s buildings no longer had running water or electricity. The city was under heavy German shelling but starvation was the real danger. With so little food in the city when the siege began and with poorly judged rations that saw what stores there were being handed out too quickly, the food situation became dire almost immediately. People who worked in food processing or distribution, unsurprisingly, had the best chance of surviving: “All 713 employees of the Krupskaya sweet factory survived; so did all those at the no. 4 bakery and at a margarine manufacturer. At the Baltika bakery, only twenty-seven out of what grew from 276 to 334 workers died, all the victims being men.” Anywhere else, those kind of survival rates were unheard of. Leningraders tried to extract calories from clothing, household items, anything they could find really when the rations proved insufficient but, in many cases, that was not enough to keep them alive. The ration system was modeled on the one used in the Gulags:
Though articulated as giving to each according to his needs, in practice it tended to preserve (just) the lives of those vital to the city’s defence – soldiers and industrial workers – and condemn office workers, old people, the unemployed and children to death.
Thanks to this design, it became possible to predict the order in which the members of a family would die of starvation:
…mortality followed a clear demographic. In January 73 per cent of fatalities were male, and 74 per cent children under five or adults aged forty or over. By May the majority – 65 per cent – were female, and a slightly smaller majority – 59 per cent – children under five or adults aged forty or over. Children aged ten to nineteen made up only 3 per cent of the total in the first ten days of December, but 11 per cent in May. Within a single family, therefore, the order in which its members typically died was grandfather and infants first, grandmother and father (if not at the front) second, mother and oldest children last.
The bulk of the book focuses on what happened from June 1941, when the Germans launched their attack on Russia, to the spring of 1942, after the first devastating winter of the siege. The diary entries from this period are terrifying, offering a glimpse into the minds of those driven mad by hunger and by their horrific surroundings. Honestly, all the details from this period are disturbing and I am not finding it easy to think back and to recall all of the things that I found so upsetting. It is important that they are recorded and I feel thankful for having read this book, if only because I’d otherwise have had no idea of the scale of the siege’s destruction, but it is not a comfortable book to revisit. It is unrelentingly horrifying.
The remaining two years of the siege (it ended in February 1944) are quickly summarized in a few chapters, which felt like a bit of a relief after having survived the gruesome details of the first winter but does seem strangely unbalanced. The following winters were much warmer, ration levels were higher, electricity and water had been restored to many buildings, and Leningrad was down to a fifth of its pre-war population (after the deaths of the first winter and successful evacuations begun in early 1942). Such relatively comfortable conditions are no match for the drama of that first, ill-prepared winter when 500,000 civilians died.
Though Reid’s focus is on the plight of civilians within Leningrad, she provides a good balance by reminding us every so often what the armies were doing. Intriguingly, she uses the diaries of a German officer for this, allowing us to see the Red Army through his eyes. It is not an inspiring sight. Armed with rifles from the 19th Century, and poorly led and chaotically disorganized after Stalin’s military purges during the 1930s, those who had volunteered to fight in the summer of 1941 were ill-prepared to meet the German tank divisions. Being treated as cannon-fodder, it did not take long for many soldiers to become disheartened and seek a way out:
Between 16 and 22 August 1941 more than four thousand servicemen were seized as suspected deserters while trying to get to Leningrad from the front, and in some medical units, a worried political report noted, up to 50 per cent of the wounded were suspected of self-mutilation. At Evacuation Hospital no 61, for example, out of a thousand wounded 460 had been shot in the left forearm or left hand.
Though Reid does provide these glimpses into the lives of soldiers and their activities at the front, the focus of Leningrad is firmly on the civilians trapped in the city. It is a social history, describing the thoughts and day-to-day activities of Leningraders, but the world in which they live is almost bizarrely unrecognizable. Death is a constant and people become numbed by the sheer number of bodies in the streets, the number of friends and family lost. As a reader though, I was anything but numbed. Reid has crafted an absorbing chronicle of a horrific event, filling it with amazing detail and offering a good critical analysis of the siege myths presented in Soviet-era publications. It is a wonderful book (not to be confused with an enjoyable one) and I’m very glad to have read it.
A compelling review, Claire. Well done.
This seems to be the type of read that one needs to set it down and walk away for awhile. So devastating and graphic the conditions, so dire. I cannot imagine what these people endured. The siege was rather well covered by my world history teacher in high school. Not as graphic in detail, of course, but it horrified me as a teenager. He had been to Russia, unusual for a teacher in the 60’s, and put a human touch on a country we were in a cold war with at the time.
This sounds like an excellent book. Have you read Helen Dunmore’s The Siege? It’s a fictional account of the same event and was nominated for the Orange Prize in 2002. It’s superb, although probably redundant if you’ve read Leningrad.
Laura, I agree with you that “The Seige” is a superbly written book; I think it complements “Leningrad.”
I read a historical fiction trilogy recently about Leningrad and since I have been a bit obsessed with the time period. I highly recommend checking out The Bronze Horseman trilogy by Paullina Simons. It’s HF but an amazing story.
There’s a giant memorial to those who were lost in the siege; it’s rather like a little park, and much more touching than most Soviet memorials. I learned a lot about this when I was studying in St. Petersburg, of course, but it’d be interesting to read the Western perspective.
I studied in Petersburg a few years ago and one of our class trips was to a museum focused soley on the siege. It made for a very emotional afternoon…
Clare, here’s a story that has stayed with me for years, told to me by a Russian friend: her great uncle was a 12 year old living in St. Petersburg with his mother, father and grandfather during this period. His grandfather died at the beginning of winter and his parents within a few hours of one another in the beginning of February, 1942. He didn’t report his parents’ deaths, but kept their frozen bodies in their apartment so that he could use their ration cards during the rest of the month. Those are the kinds of terrible extremes to which people were driven so that they could survive.
Reid has done an excellent job of finding new sources (such as stories like the one my friend told me) to provide us with what is indeed a “vivid and chilling portrait of everyday life” during the seige.
Wow. I don’t think I’ve read anything specifically about Russia during WW2. This sounds like a good place to start.
I have been fascinated by the Siege of Leningrad since reading The Bronze Horseman. Other novels I have read that are either set during the siege or reference it are Helen Dunmore’s The Siege and Madonnas of Leningrad (by Debra Dean I think). There are others around. I think Gillian Slovo has written something as well but I haven’t read that one yet.
I haven’t read any non fiction about it though.
I knew some about this, but I don’t think I fully grasped the scale of this tragedy. Thanks for this review. I think I’d like to read this book, although I have to be careful and pace myself with nonfiction books like this.
I read a fictional book that was partly set during the siege, Deathless by Catherynne Valente (it’s fantasy too). That was fairly horrifying, though it was only a brief-ish section. This sounds fascinating but at the same time maybe too unbearable to read? Interesting to read your account of it though.