Book Review: Leningrad by Anna Reid

Elberry finds historian Anna Reid successfully managing a difficult balancing act in her new book about the seige of Leningrad, which killed four times as many people as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined…

“When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it’s statistics”
(Stalin to Churchill at Teheran)

And the opening of Reid’s book:

Before the Russian Revolution it was the capital of the Russian Empire, and called St Petersburg after its founder, the tsar Peter the Great. With the fall of Communism twenty years ago it regained its old name, but for its older inhabitants it is Leningrad still, not so much for Lenin as in honour of the approximately three-quarters of a million civilians who starved to death during the almost nine hundred days – from September 1941 to January 1944 – during which the city was besieged by Nazi Germany. 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.

The purely statistical kind of history – number of people who starved to death, number killed by Germans, number killed by the NKVD – is alluringly sparse but, as history, a flattening-out of human detail. Reid strikes an adroit balance between necessary statistics and human particularity, drawing both on eyewitness accounts and official statistics. It would be easy to fall prey to any of the gross simplifications on offer – the evil Nazis versus the heroic workers, for example. The besieged were circled by ferocious simplicities of one kind or another. On the Nazi side, Hitler:

[…] failed – in common with mainstream British and American opinion of the time – to see that most Russians, despite having been terrorised and impoverished over the preceding two decades by their own leadership, would tenaciously resist foreign invasion. ‘Smash in the door!’ he famously declared, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!’ The crass slurs – ‘the Slavs are a mess of born slaves’; ‘their bottomless stupidity’; ‘those stupid masses of the East’ – endlessly repeated in his mealtime diatribes were a measure not only of his racism, but of intellectual laziness, of complacency in the face of a vast, fast-changing and secretive country of which he and his advisers knew very little.

And in classic Socialist style, the Russian authorities responded to invasion by imprisoning and killing greater numbers of ordinary Russians:

Also deported or arrested in large numbers (71,112 up to October 1942, according to security service documents) were ‘socially alien’ and ‘criminal-felonious’ elements among the general population. In practice this meant the same sorts of people targeted during the 1936-8 purges: members of the old bourgeoisie (‘de-classed elements’), peasants (‘former kulaks’), ethnic minorities (‘nationalists’), churchgoers (‘sectarians’), the wives of children of earlier repression victims (‘relatives of enemies of the people’), and anyone with foreign connections or knowledge of a foreign language (‘spy-traitors’).

Nor were soldiers exempt from the blood-letting:

Instructive is the story of Vyacheslav Kaliteyev, captain of the Kazakhstan, the largest troopship in the flotilla. Knocked unconscious by a bomb that hit the bridge soon after departure on the first morning of the evacuation, he fell into the sea and was lucky to be picked up by a submarine, which took him to Kronshtadt. […]The crewmen who nursed the Kazakhstan home were rewarded with Orders of the Red Banner in a special communiqué from Stavka. Kaliteyev was executed by firing squad, ‘for cowardice’ and ‘desertion under fire’.

The volunteer corps were appallingly ill-equipped, untrained, and died accordingly. Their officers, if they survived, were blamed for everything and executed. The Communist approach – a mixture of incompetence, stupidity, murderous paranoia, and a refusal to accept reality – was not well suited for the strenuous testing ground of warfare. And in 1941 the Red Army was not in a fit state to do battle against the Wehrmacht, after Stalin’s purges:

From 1937 to 1939 an extraordinary 40,000 officers had been arrested, and of those about 15,000 shot. Among them were three out of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union, fifteen out of sixteen army commanders, sixty out of sixty-seven corps commanders, 136 out of 169 divisional commanders, and fifteen out of twenty-five admirals.

Caught between the Wehrmacht and the Communist government, Leningrad starved. The food warehouse was bombed and went up in flames. The Communist authorities failed to evacuate the city, failed to lay in enough stores of food, and actively prevented private citizens from delivering supplies. There were far too many hungry mouths and almost no food. Reid provides gruelling eyewitness accounts of families squabbling over breadcrumbs, eating their pets, eating shoes, each other.

At the mills, flour dust was scraped from walls and from under floorboards; breweries came up with 8,000 tonnes of malt, and the army with oats previously destined for its horses. (The horses were instead fed with birch twigs soaked in hot water and sprinkled with salt. […] Grain barges sunk by bombing off Osinovets were salvaged by naval divers, and the rescued grain, which had begun to sprout, dried and milled. (The resulting bread, Pavlov admitted, reeked of mould.)

From the diary of Vera Kostrovitskaya, a dance teacher:

With his back to the post, a man sits in the snow, wrapped in rags, wearing a knapsack…Probably he was on his way to Finland Station, got tired and sat down to rest. For two weeks I passed him every day as I went back and forth to the hospital. He sat 1. Without his knapsack; 2. Without his rags; 3. In his underwear; 4. Naked; 5. A skeleton with ripped out entrails. They took him away in May.

Frozen, emaciated corpses became commonplace; and cannibalism, if not common, was not rare. I am reminded of the title of a Martin Cruz Smith book, Wolves Eat Dogs. Pushed far enough, most people will resort to strange measures; the besieged were no exception. Interestingly:

Overall, 64 per cent of those arrested for ‘use of human meat as food’ were female, 44 per cent unemployed or ‘without fixed occupation’ and over 90 per cent illiterate or in possession of only basic education. Only 15 per cent were ‘rooted inhabitants’ of Leningrad and only 2 per cent had a criminal record.

And so, as Reid suggests, the average cannibal was most likely an unremarkable peasant woman.

That the Russians prevailed is, in part, owing to Stalin being slightly less crazy than Hitler. Whereas Hitler had assumed supreme military command, and seemed to more and more inhabit his own private reality, divorced from the actuality of his disintegrating armies, Stalin was, for all his homicidal paranoia, occasionally pragmatic. He ceded power to his most gifted general, Zhukov (in Max Hastings’ estimation, the great commander of the Second World War) and allowed the military professionals to run the war for him.

The Nazis planned to get rid of the population of Leningrad, one way or another. Hitler, in particular, was keen on razing it to the ground, and even his more balanced generals had no intention of sparing, let alone feeding, the citizens – they were only concerned as to the logistics of getting rid of an entire city. It seems probable that Stalin was likewise indifferent to the people of Leningrad.

While this is in a sense, mere history, I think Reid is right to use eyewitness accounts. A historian is obliged to respect the facts, not to misrepresent the past; and I don’t see how one could respectably write of mass starvation without involving human experience. Reid manages a difficult balance here: precise without being remote; passionate but never sensationalist.

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4 thoughts on “Book Review: Leningrad by Anna Reid

  1. Wormstir@gmail.com'
    Worm
    April 27, 2012 at 23:48

    Gruesome. Does anyone ever read more than one of these books?

  2. becandben@gmail.com'
    Ben
    April 28, 2012 at 23:49

    Yes. I, for one, have an inexhaustible appetite for them. Adding this to my wishlist as we speak.

  3. alasguinns@me.com'
    Hey Skipper
    April 29, 2012 at 06:28

    ‘Smash in the door!’ he famously declared, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!’

    Which is pretty much what bin Laden said after 9/11.

  4. walter_aske@yahoo.co.uk'
    April 29, 2012 at 12:30

    i find it interesting to know what human beings are capable of.

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