The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
By Harrison Salisbury
( Da Capo Press, 672 pages, $23)
Eighty-two years ago, the Russian city of St. Petersburg — then called Leningrad after the founder of the Soviet Union — was under siege by German armies that had failed to seize and occupy the city (as Adolf Hitler ordered), and instead imposed a land, sea, and air blockade in the midst of one of the coldest winters in the city’s history. The World War II siege of Leningrad lasted a total of 900 days, but the worst of it for Leningrad’s residents was in December 1941 through April 1942. Hundreds of thousands of people — perhaps more than a million — froze to death, died of starvation, or were killed by German bombs and artillery. Some — the actual number is unknown — were victims of cannibalism. That harrowing, horrifying story was most memorably told by Harrison Salisbury in The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (1969).
Salisbury was a New York Times foreign correspondent and editor, Pulitzer Prize winner, and historian of Russia. He also wrote books on China under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. He reported from Russia for an eight-month time period beginning in 1944. He was the Times’ Moscow bureau chief from 1949 to 1954. He covered the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s, controversially reported on the Vietnam War from Hanoi in 1966, and later served as the op-ed page editor, assistant managing editor, and associate editor of the Times. He died in 1993 at the age of 84. His book Black Night, White Snow (1978) is a riveting history of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The 900 Days is not riveting; it is dark, somber, and morbid. It is less about armies and strategy and more about the dreadful human experience of civilians trapped in a city under siege in wartime with little food, little warmth, and little hope.
Leningrad was one of three main targets of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, which began on June 22, 1941. The other targets were Moscow and the Caucasus. General William von Leeb’s Army Group North attacked from East Prussia, and, with both a technological edge and the element of surprise, swiftly overran Soviet positions in the Baltic states. Despite numerous warnings from the Americans, the British, and his own spies, Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would break their nonaggression pact in 1941.
Meanwhile, Finnish forces — who had been attacked by the Soviet Union in 1940 — joined in the German advance toward Leningrad. By late September to early October 1941, Leningrad was cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union, except for Lake Ladoga to the north and east. “The iron ring of Hitler,” Salisbury wrote, “had closed.” It was then, Salisbury wrote, that “Leningrad, a city of three million people, a city of cowards and of patriots, of sleazy sharpers and men and women of endless dedication, of blundering military men and feuding Party leaders, moved toward the time of trial.”
The Germans launched air attacks on the city and surrounding areas, setting buildings and homes ablaze. One resident recalled that “the whole horizon over Leningrad was colored deep blood-red. The sky was crisscrossed by searchlights, and the flames of the fires, reflected from the smoke clouds, filled the streets and squares with a strange light.” But there was no determined German effort to cross the Neva River and enter the city. Salisbury called this a missed opportunity. Had German forces launched such an effort in early September, he explained, it likely would have succeeded because “[t]here were not enough Soviet forces on the north bank of the Neva to offer more than light opposition. The guns were not in place. There was no ammunition. There were no tanks.”
Later that month, von Leeb concentrated 11 divisions for the final drive on Leningrad. In Moscow, the Stavka dispatched Marshal Georgy Zhukov to save the city. Zhukov, Salisbury wrote, “demanded attacks, counterattacks, counteroffensives, from all armies under his command.” He shot some commanders who failed to follow his orders. He threatened others with the same fate if they failed to achieve his objectives. Zhukov succeeded in halting the German offensive, then was ordered back to Moscow. “Now,” Salisbury wrote, “the real struggle would begin in Leningrad — the struggle with the allies whom the Germans had called to their side: Generals Hunger, Cold, and Terror.”
When winter set in, the condition and mood of the city “grew more grim,” according to Salisbury, who interviewed survivors in 1944 and many years later. Food was strictly rationed, and supplies were very low. “People grew thinner,” he noted, “and they grew more like beasts.” There was no electricity. Clean water was scarce. The citizens of Leningrad were cold and hungry. German artillery shells pounded the city. “All around were war and death and suffering,” writes Salisbury. In every house, there were hunger, cold and darkness. And this went on for months.
“Everyone in Leningrad was hungry all the time now.” People did anything for food. Women sold their bodies. Desperate people ate wallpaper. Others ate cats, dogs, and rats. Some resorted to murder and cannibalism. Diseases such as dystrophy and scurvy spread. And people died — by the thousands, daily. They starved, froze, or were killed by German shells or other Leningraders.
Dead bodies were everywhere in Leningrad. Some lay dead in their homes — frozen by the harsh cold. Others lay dead on the streets or in heaps of corpses where bodies were deposited daily. Some were covered with snow. Some were wrapped in rugs, curtains, or sheets. Children’s sleds were used by family members to transport their dead loved ones to makeshift morgues. It was a common sight that winter to see people pulling sleds with dead bodies on them. Salisbury noted that a “mountain of corpses” could be seen on the banks of the Karpovka Canal. One correspondent for a Soviet newspaper wrote that the city was dying.
The only hole in the blockade was Lake Ladoga. As early as October, officials in Leningrad planned to use an “ice road” when Ladoga froze. The lake is 125 miles long and 80 miles across at its widest point. The “ice road,” Salisbury explained, was 20 to 30 miles long. Some 19,000 Russians worked on completing and servicing the road. It was linked to the city at a railroad depot and crossed several villages from Novaya Ladoga to Zaboyre. It became Leningrad’s only lifeline, but was far from perfect. Some trucks transporting food and supplies fell through the ice. German planes frequently strafed the ice road. The temperature on the ice reached 40 degrees below zero, causing some workers to freeze to death and some trucks to stop running. But it was Leningrad’s only hope — in December 1941, the death toll in the city exceeded 50,000 persons. Even with the “ice road,” by the end of December, Leningrad was “close to starvation.”
Things improved a bit by mid-January. The ice road expanded and more supplies reached the starving, freezing people in the city. Some Leningraders were moved out of the city. But the coming of spring meant the end of the ice road. The blockade continued and so did the suffering and dying. But Leningrad was saved. The fortunes of war gradually shifted against the Nazi war machine. The cost was immense. “More people had died in the Leningrad blockade,” wrote Salisbury, “than had ever died in a modern city — anywhere — anytime: more than ten times the number who died in Hiroshima.” Salisbury estimated that at least 1.1 million Russians died in the siege, and the figure could be as high as 1.5 million.
And throughout the siege, Stalin’s internal security forces continued their arrests for “anti-Soviet” activities. Some Leningraders, instead of dying of starvation and cold in the city, died of beatings and forced labor in the Gulag. Indeed, Stalin, Salisbury noted, used the horrors of the siege to purge Leningrad party officials because for Stalin “[m]urderous, suicidal politics came first, before everything else.” In postwar Soviet Russia, he explained, “the death of a man was nothing, the death of a million men little more than a problem in the mechanics of propaganda, the destruction of a great city a complicated but conceivable gambit in the unceasing game of power.”
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