176. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
Here is my review on Goodreads of The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
by
Harrison E. Salisbury, which I finished reading on my last day as a resident of Russia:
I read this book during the eight months in 2017 that I lived in St. Petersburg. Prior to moving to Russia, I already knew the broad outlines of Leningrad's experiences during the Great Patriotic War (as the Eastern Front of WWII from 1941-1945 is named there). Within a short amount of time after my arrival in April I had already visited the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery, the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, and the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg in Rumyantsev Mansion. So, it would be accurate to say that I knew quite a bit about the siege. Nevertheless, I learned many details from this book that served to personalize this tragedy of epic and unprecedented proportions.
The book strikes a nice balance between covering the military and civilian situations during the Siege. The civilian sphere is where the greatest tragedies occurred - entire families dead from starvation, people blown up by Nazi shelling while walking down the street or standing in bread lines, people murdered for their ration cards, and even some people who resorted to cannibalism. The scope and scale of the human suffering is truly horrific, and Salisbury covers it in detail and with sensitivity. I also appreciated his attempt to provide the political context of Russian military decisions, as well as to investigate and explain when the official Soviet narrative of events might differ from what really happened. I enjoyed reading about spots that were within a block or two of my apartment - that really made this a personal story for me. A minor complaint is Salisbury's tendency to mention prominent landmarks in the city with some amount of disregard for their specific position in the city. There are relatively few outright inaccuracies, but many sections where his imprecise language implies proximity between locations where none exists.
My major complaint about this book is its lack of comprehensiveness, and its particular focus on what I would consider to be extraneous sources that narrow its focus too sharply in several chapters. Dozens of pages are spent on the Nazi invasion of Baltic cities other than Leningrad, and the main bulk of the narrative is spent on the autumn and winter of 1941-1942 (which was the most brutal period when the greatest number of civilian casualties occurred). The final year of the siege (1943-1944) is covered in only about 10 pages in one of the last chapters. So, this struck me as focusing too much on certain periods and not enough on others. Also, Salisbury relies too heavily on the memoirs and other writings of St. Petersburg authors, and so returns repeatedly to a discussion of how many writers in St. Petersburg had died, where they were staying, which of them had been evacuated, et cetera. This was such a small population of artists in a city of millions that I quickly grew annoyed at the outsized focus on this group. I understand that he might be limited by the available sources, but I did not think that the writer community was necessarily representative of the typical experience of Leningraders in general or even the artistic community more specifically. Finally, this book would benefit (as I believe most accounts of military history would, as well) from the inclusion of more maps and diagrams to illustrate more clearly the precise location of different towns and landmarks, as well as troop movements and military engagements.
This work is almost 50 years old now, but it remains one of the definitive works on the topic. I highly recommended it to those interested in the history of the Second World War, or in inspirational stories of the human spirit persevering in the face of absolutely extreme and almost unimaginable adversity.
I read this book during the eight months in 2017 that I lived in St. Petersburg. Prior to moving to Russia, I already knew the broad outlines of Leningrad's experiences during the Great Patriotic War (as the Eastern Front of WWII from 1941-1945 is named there). Within a short amount of time after my arrival in April I had already visited the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery, the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, and the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg in Rumyantsev Mansion. So, it would be accurate to say that I knew quite a bit about the siege. Nevertheless, I learned many details from this book that served to personalize this tragedy of epic and unprecedented proportions.
The book strikes a nice balance between covering the military and civilian situations during the Siege. The civilian sphere is where the greatest tragedies occurred - entire families dead from starvation, people blown up by Nazi shelling while walking down the street or standing in bread lines, people murdered for their ration cards, and even some people who resorted to cannibalism. The scope and scale of the human suffering is truly horrific, and Salisbury covers it in detail and with sensitivity. I also appreciated his attempt to provide the political context of Russian military decisions, as well as to investigate and explain when the official Soviet narrative of events might differ from what really happened. I enjoyed reading about spots that were within a block or two of my apartment - that really made this a personal story for me. A minor complaint is Salisbury's tendency to mention prominent landmarks in the city with some amount of disregard for their specific position in the city. There are relatively few outright inaccuracies, but many sections where his imprecise language implies proximity between locations where none exists.
My major complaint about this book is its lack of comprehensiveness, and its particular focus on what I would consider to be extraneous sources that narrow its focus too sharply in several chapters. Dozens of pages are spent on the Nazi invasion of Baltic cities other than Leningrad, and the main bulk of the narrative is spent on the autumn and winter of 1941-1942 (which was the most brutal period when the greatest number of civilian casualties occurred). The final year of the siege (1943-1944) is covered in only about 10 pages in one of the last chapters. So, this struck me as focusing too much on certain periods and not enough on others. Also, Salisbury relies too heavily on the memoirs and other writings of St. Petersburg authors, and so returns repeatedly to a discussion of how many writers in St. Petersburg had died, where they were staying, which of them had been evacuated, et cetera. This was such a small population of artists in a city of millions that I quickly grew annoyed at the outsized focus on this group. I understand that he might be limited by the available sources, but I did not think that the writer community was necessarily representative of the typical experience of Leningraders in general or even the artistic community more specifically. Finally, this book would benefit (as I believe most accounts of military history would, as well) from the inclusion of more maps and diagrams to illustrate more clearly the precise location of different towns and landmarks, as well as troop movements and military engagements.
This work is almost 50 years old now, but it remains one of the definitive works on the topic. I highly recommended it to those interested in the history of the Second World War, or in inspirational stories of the human spirit persevering in the face of absolutely extreme and almost unimaginable adversity.
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