- Salisbury, Harrison E.
The 900 Days.
New York: Da Capo Press, [1969, 1985] 2003.
ISBN 978-0-306-81298-9.
-
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany, without provocation or warning,
violated its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and invaded
from the west. The German invasion force was divided into three army
groups. Army Group North, commanded by Field Marshal Ritter von
Leeb, was charged with advancing through and securing the Baltic
states, then proceeding to take or destroy the city of Leningrad.
Army Group Centre was to invade Byelorussia and take Smolensk, then
advance to Moscow. After Army Group North had reduced Leningrad,
it was to detach much of its force for the battle for Moscow. Army
Group South's objective was to conquer the Ukraine, capture Kiev, and
then seize the oil fields of the Caucasus.
The invasion took the Soviet government and military completely by
surprise, despite abundant warnings from foreign governments of
German troops massing along its western border and reports from
Soviet spies indicating an invasion was imminent. A German invasion
did not figure in Stalin's world view and, in the age of the Great
Terror, nobody had the standing or courage to challenge Stalin. Indeed,
Stalin rejected proposals to strengthen defenses on the western frontiers
for fear of provoking the Germans. The Soviet military was in near-complete
disarray. The purges which began in the 1930s had wiped out not only
most of the senior commanders, but the officer corps as a whole. By
1941, only 7 percent of Red Army officers had any higher military
education and just 37% had any military instruction at all, even at
a high school level.
Thus, it wasn't a surprise that the initial German offensive was
even more successful than optimistic German estimates. Many
Soviet aircraft were destroyed on the ground, and German
air strikes deep into Soviet territory disrupted communications
in the battle area and with senior commanders in Moscow. Stalin
appeared to be paralysed by the shock; he did not address the Soviet
people until the 3rd of July, a week and a half after the invasion,
by which time large areas of Soviet territory had already been lost.
Army Group North's advance toward Leningrad was so rapid that the
Soviets could hardly set up new defensive lines before they were
overrun by German forces. The administration in Leningrad
mobilised a million civilians (out of an initial population of
around three million) to build fortifications around
the city and on the approaches to it. By August, German forces
were within artillery range of the city and shells began to fall
throughout Leningrad. On August 21st, Hitler issued a directive
giving priority to the encirclement of Leningrad and linking up
with the advancing Finnish army over the capture of Moscow, so
Army Group North would receive what it needed for the task. When
the Germans captured the town of Mga on August 30, the last rail
link between Leningrad and the rest of Russia was severed.
Henceforth, the only way in or out of Leningrad was across
Lake Lagoda,
running the gauntlet of German ships and mines, or by
air. The
siege of
Leningrad had begun. The battle for the city was now in
the hands of the Germans' most potent allies: Generals Hunger,
Cold, and Terror.
The civil authorities were as ill-prepared for what was to come
as the military commanders had been to halt the German advance before
it invested the city. The dire situation was compounded when, on
September 8th, a German air raid burned to the ground the city's principal
food warehouses, built of wood and packed next to one another,
destroying all the reserves stored there. An
inventory taken after the raid revealed that, at normal rates
of consumption, only between two and three weeks' supply of
food remained for the population. Rationing had already been
imposed, and rations were immediately cut to 500 grams of bread
per day for workers and 300 grams for office employees and children.
This was to be just the start. The total population of encircled
Leningrad, civilian and military, totalled around 3.4 million.
While military events and the actions of the city government are
described, most of the book recounts the stories of people who
lived through the siege. The accounts are horrific, with the
previous unimaginable becoming the quotidian experience of
residents of the city. The frozen bodies of victims of starvation
were often stacked like cordwood outside apartment buildings or
hauled on children's sleds to common graves. Very quickly, Leningrad
became exclusively a city of humans: dogs, cats, and pigeons
quickly disappeared, eaten as food supplies dwindled. Even rats
vanished. While some were doubtless eaten, most seemed to have
deserted the starving metropolis for the front, where food was
more abundant. Cannibalism was not just rumoured, but documented,
and parents were careful not to let children out of their
sight.
Even as privation reached extreme levels (at one point, the daily
bread ration for workers fell to 300 grams and for children and dependents
125 grams—and that is when bread was available at all), Stalin's
secret police remained up and running, and people were arrested in
the middle of the night for suspicion of espionage, contacts with
foreigners, shirking work, or for no reason at all. The citizenry
observed that the NKVD seemed suspiciously well-fed throughout the
famine, and they wielded the power of life and death when denial of
a ration card was a sentence of death as certain as a bullet in the
back of the head.
In the brutal first winter of 1941–1942, Leningrad was
sustained largely by truck traffic over the
“Road of Life”,
constructed over the
ice of frozen Lake Lagoda. Operating from November through
April, and subject to attack by German artillery and aircraft,
thousands of tons of supplies, civilian and military, were brought
into the city and the wounded and noncombatants evacuated over
the road. The road was rebuilt during the following winter and
continued to be the city's lifeline.
The siege of Leningrad was unparalleled in the history of
urban sieges. Counting from the fall of Mga on September 8, 1941
until the lifting of the siege on January 27, 1944, the
siege had lasted 872 days. By comparison, the siege of
Paris in 1870–1871 lasted just 121 days. The siege of
Vicksburg in the American war of secession lasted 47 days and
involved only 4000 civilians. Total civilian casualties during
the siege of Paris were less than those in Leningrad every two
or three winter days. Estimates of total deaths in Leningrad
due to starvation, disease, and enemy action vary widely. Official
Soviet sources tried to minimise the toll to avoid recriminations
among Leningraders who felt they had been abandoned to their fate.
The author concludes that starvation deaths in Leningrad and the
surrounding areas were on the order of one million, with a total
of all deaths, civilian and military, between 1.3 and 1.5 million.
The author, then a foreign correspondent for United Press, was one of
the first reporters to visit Leningrad after the lifting of the
siege. The people he met then and their accounts of life during the
siege were unfiltered by the edifice of Soviet propaganda
later erected over life in besieged Leningrad. On this and subsequent
visits, he was able to reconstruct the narrative, both at the level of
policy and strategy and of individual human stories, which makes up
this book. After its initial publication in 1969, the book was
fiercely attacked in the Soviet press, with Pravda
publishing a full page denunciation. Salisbury's meticulously
documented account of the lack of preparedness, military blunders
largely due to Stalin's destruction of the officer corps in his
purges, and bungling by the Communist Party administration of the city
did not fit with the story of heroic Leningrad standing against the
Nazi onslaught in the official Soviet narrative. The book was
banned in the Soviet Union and copies brought by tourists seized by
customs. The author, who had been Moscow bureau chief for The
New York Times from 1949 through 1954, was for years denied a visa
to visit the Soviet Union. It was only after the collapse of the
Soviet Union that the work became generally available in Russia.
I read the Kindle edition, which is a
shameful and dismaying travesty of this classic and important
work. It's not a cheap knock-off: the electronic edition is issued
by the publisher at a price (at this writing) of US$ 13,
only a few dollars less than the paperback edition. It appears to
have been created by optical character recognition of a print
edition without the most rudimentary copy editing of the result of
the scan. Hundreds of words which were hyphenated at the ends of
lines in the print edition occur here with embedded hyphens. The
numbers ‘0’ and ‘1’ are confused with the
letters ‘o’ and ‘i’ in numerous places.
Somebody appears to have accidentally done a global replace of the
letters “charge” with “chargé”, both
in stand-alone words and within longer words. Embarrassingly, for
a book with “900” in its title, the number often appears
in the text as “poo”. Poetry is typeset with one
character per line. I found more than four hundred mark-ups in the
text, which even a cursory examination by a copy editor would have
revealed. The index is just a list of searchable items, not linked to
their references in the text. I have compiled a
list
of my mark-ups to this text, which I make available to readers
and the publisher, should the latter wish to redeem this electronic
edition by correcting them. I applaud publishers who make valuable books
from their back-lists available in electronic form. But respect your
customers! When you charge us almost as much as the paperback
and deliver a slapdash product which clearly hasn't been read by
anybody on your staff before it reached my eyes, I'm going to savage it.
Consider it savaged. Should the publisher supplant this regrettable
edition with one worthy of its content, I will remove this notice.
October 2016 