Leningrad: State of Siege
By Michael K. Jones. 352 pp. Basic Books, 2008. $27.95.
The first thing that registers when one visits St. Petersburg’s (formerly Leningrad’s) Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery is its immense size. The second realization is even more sobering— visitors are literally surrounded by a half-million corpses. Perhaps one-third to one-half of all Leningraders who perished in the 900-day siege (which lasted from September 1941 to January 1944) are buried there in 183 mass graves. Nobody is certain how many died. For years, Communist officials claimed the total was 632,253, a suspiciously precise figure given the chaotic conditions of the siege; surely a more accurate accounting is twice that, possibly 1.5 million.
Overwhelmingly, the dead were civilians who perished from starvation or malnutrition-associated illnesses; children and the elderly were particularly hard-hit. As Michael K. Jones documents in his compelling Leningrad: State of Siege, these casualties were victims of the worst manifestations of two of history’s most diabolical political systems—the clinically applied racist terrorism of Hitler’s Nazi regime, and the venal, suffocating, bureaucratic incompetence of Stalinism. Ordinary Leningraders (the vast majority who had no lifesaving Party connections) were caught between Hitler’s avowed mission to totally obliterate Leningrad by deliberately starving the population to death, and the indifference and near-total inability of the city’s bumbling administration, headed by Stalinist toady Andrei Zhdanov, to cope with the simplest problems.
Using eyewitness accounts supplemented by information from newly opened Soviet archives—the format that proved so successful in his book Stalingrad: How the Red Army Survived the German Onslaught—Jones lets the Leningraders who experienced the horrors of the siege recount their unbelievable ordeal. We learn what it feels like to be trapped in a city that is slowly dying, trying to exist on the equivalent of three slices of bread a day— that is, when incompetent but well-fed Soviet apparatchiki can provide the ration—while seeking to avoid freezing to death (or being eaten by one’s neighbor). As he did in Stalingrad, Jones destroys much of the Soviet-era mythology that obscured the egregious blunders of Leningrad’s self-serving bureaucracy. Leningraders who survived, he suggests, did so despite the Communist leadership.
Red Army leaders get mixed grades. While it has been agreed for years that the incompetent Kliment Voroshilov failed dismally in leading Leningrad’s early defense, World War II icon Georgi Zhukov usually receives high marks for preventing the city’s fall in September and October 1941.
Jones, however, criticizes Zhukov for brutal frontal assaults with unnecessarily high casualties after it was clear the Germans were settling in for a siege rather than an assault. Lesser-known, and receiving Jones’s high praise, is Leonid Govorov, the brilliant artilleryman who led Leningrad’s defenses from April 1942 until the siege was lifted.
Yet the real heroes of Jones’s book are Leningrad’s ordinary citizens. As one wrote, “We were fighting a battle to keep a human face, to stay human beings. And we won it.” Their stories of how they “won it,” though often gruesome and disturbing, are ultimately inspiring.
Originally published in the November 2008 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here.
