NEW BOOK ON LENINGRAD SIEGE SHEDS LIGHT ON SOVIET SECRECY BEHING TRAGEDY

Leningrad, The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

Ana Reid

Walker and Company, New York

492 pages

2011

By Juan Montoya
Anyone who has a cursory knowledge of the nearly three-year siege of Leningrad knows that the story of the inhabitants of that tortured city is one of valor, misery, starvation and resistance in the face of Nazi aggression.

Yet, although the world has been fed that depiction of its inhabitants, it wasn't until the breakup of the Soviet empire and the opening of its files on the siege that we have gotten a clearer picture of the true dimensions of suffering in that anguished city not only as a result of the privations of the siege, but also the terror inflicted upon its residents by the paranoid state apparatus under dictator Josef Satalin.

Yelena Kochina's 1941 Blockade Diary has long been the basic text on the travails of the Leningraders. Yet, its account has whitewashed the shortcomings of the Soviet government in dealing with Hitler's blockade of the city. With access to up until recently prohibited government documents, the picture becomes clearer.

For those of us uninitiated on the theme, some numbers of the siege of this city of some 3 million by Nazi divisions will give us a context of this calamity. Between December 1941 and July 1942, when the siege was finally lifted, some 750,000 Leningraders died, some 17,000 as a result of German fire and bombardment, the rest, incredibly, of sheer starvation.
Think of it.

During the 872 days of siege,  between one in three or one in four of its city residents perished from cold and hunger. It has been documented as the deadliest blockade of a city in human history. Between September 1941 and January 1944, 30 more times civilians died in Leningrad than in the London blitz. In fact, four times as many people died there than in the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima put together.

Yet, the blockade was just the latest in a series of disasters that afflicted its residents. They had already been through three wars: WW I, the civil war between Bolsheviks and the Whites, and the Winter War with Finlnad. They had endured two famines, one during the civil war and another during the disastrous collectivization of farms during 1932-1933. 

Additionally, Stalin's paranoia and depravity had also resulted in two waves of political terror that decimated the leadership of the Party, the military and intelligentsia. In short, as poet Olga Berggolts wrote of Leningraders: "We measured time by the intervals between one suicide and the next."

The groundwork for the siege was laid way back in 1939 when Stalin and Hitler negotiated their non-aggression pact that divided Poland and gave the Soviet regime the false hops that the pact would keep Germany from invading Mother Russia. Just prior to that, between 1937 and 1939, Stalin's terror resulted i the arrests of more than 40,000 of Russia's military forces. Fifteen thousand o them were shot, the rest sent off to gulags all across Russia. The damage done to the military was disastrous and in fact made it easier for the German army to sweep into western Russia. Three out of five Marshals of the Soviet Union were arrested and shot. Fifteen out of 16 army commanders were also liquidated as were 136 out of 169 divisional commanders and 15 of 25 naval admirals. In short, Stalin's terror decapitated the Soviet armed forces just before German invaded.

Even during the spring of 1940, as the German army overran France, the Low countries and Yugoslavia, Stalin held on to the hope that Hitler would not attack Russia.

"Notoriously," Reid writes, "the trade commissariat continued to send grain, petroleum, rubber, and copper to Germany right up to the very night of the invasion (June 21)."

Once the siege was in place, the mortality rate reached unprecedented levels. At the height of the siege, in 1942, 101,881 Leningraders died of starvation in January, 107,477 died in February and another 100,000 died in March. On either side of that peak period, Leningraders died in startling numbers, 52,881 one month, 79,796 on another, and another 53,183 in another month.

The only avenue left the besieged city was frozen Lake Ladoga, and even then Soviet authorities bungled the evacuation of its citizens with a system riddled with corruption where everything necessitated a bribe to some crooked official to get anything done. Reid writes that even as the residents left the city, they had to bear the inadequacy of the truck transports, some of the hunger-weakened passengers simply jolted out because they lacked the strength to hold on.

"A woman soldier assigned to the route picked up the corpses of half a dozen babies and toddlers each morning, flung from their mothers' arms as the lorries raced to beat the dawn (and enemy planes)," she writes.

In the city, the corpses of the frozen and starved were packed on sleds and pulled to a morgue where they were bunched together with the other dead and dumped in mass graves, today a large park in the city.

After the war, Soviet authorities tried to paint the travails of the residents as a demonstration of Soviet courage and determination against the fascist Hitler regime. Yet, in this new account, Reid lays bare the truth that in many ways, it was Soviet bungling that led to the siege in the first place.
As starvation set in, the courage and compassion of the few were offset by the desperation of the many who were not above mugging weaker residents for their precious ration cards, eating cats and dogs, and later, the dead. In some cases, the residents were too weak to carry off the dead and many lived with the corpses of relatives for days and weeks after they died in their homes.

Reid's unsentimental account of the siege of this city is a must read for those students of human nature and institutions  in the face of dire adversity. Get it at the public library of buy it. It's worth reading.