The 900 Days: The Siege Of Leningrad (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
In a global event of such horrific superlatives as WWII it is almost criminal that the Siege of Leningrad isn’t discussed more frequently, or at least recognized more readily for the terror it was. And it isn’t just a matter of reciting statistics to put someone in a place of awe – although those numbers speak loudly, for sure. Certainly a large part of the blame can be placed on the former Soviet Union and their insistence of altering facts to support whatever their current propaganda machine needed; but I think there might also be a more human element at work that requires constant vigilance: the need for forgetting. History owes a great debt to Harrison Salisbury for this near perfect work of non-fiction. Arriving just days after the Leningrad blockade was lifted on January 27, 1944, Salisbury put to work his rich journalism background to interview dozens and dozens of siege survivors, Soviet party leaders and soldiers. The author allows the horror of survival, especially the winter of 1941/42, to exist in this work between the quotation marks of his interviewees. The Cold, the Hunger were as much villains as the German army that surrounded Leningrad. It took me so long to finish this book because there were chapters that haunted my sleep. Here’s a sampling: young Tanya Savicheva keeps a diary during the first winter of the siege, and as her family members die one-by-one she notes their passing in a full page entry. Death by starvation takes seven family members – until only Tanya is left alone and found by chance in an apartment filled with frozen corpses, barely alive. Her diary is one of the exhibits in the Leningrad Siege Museum in St. Petersburg:So how does one approach experiencing an event like this via the written word? As I read Salisbury’s text (a good half the book covers that first winter and the struggle for the City to survive) I constantly felt unable to cope with the scale and terror. A million dead citizens? I live in a city of roughly 750,000 souls. To imagine everyone dead, with another quarter of a million left to go, isn’t possible. How about a couple of communal graves with 200,000 bodies? Or imagine Lake Michigan as a mass grave (when the corpses piled up in the winter, and people were too weak to bury them, they were thrown onto the iced-over Lake Lagoda for the birds and animals to eat, ultimately to sink in the spring’s thaw). The crippling ineptitude of Stalin lead Soviet leadership made me thankful for my country’s flawed disaster response programs. I have a special connection with San Francisco. I wasn’t born here, but I’m attached to this City in a meaningful way – but would I be prepared to die for it? Hundreds of thousands of Russians paid with their lives in their devotion to Piter. Here’s a picture of hundreds of starving citizens attempting to clean-up their city by clearing debris and corpses as the Russian winter of 1942 comes to a close:In October of this year my wife and I traveled to Russia – our first visit to this beautiful country. I wanted to read a book of fiction and non-fiction with St. Petersburg as the setting; The 900 Days was my non-fiction choice. When we arrived in the City my wife signed us up for a dinner on EatWith (a fantastic business that I cannot recommend highly enough) – we had an opportunity to eat at a St. Petersburg chef’s home withcomplete strangers. There were eight of us (including the chef) at dinner, all of our new friends spoke English and they were as excited to talk to us about America as we were to ask them questions about Russia. Midway through the dinner I mentioned I was reading a book about the Siege of Leningrad. I was very sensitive to the fact that this topic had the potential of eliciting strong emotions – especially amongst multi-generational Petersburgians whose parents / grandparents suffered during those 900 days. What happened exceeded my wildest imagination of where the topic would potentially lead. Our friends were absolutely ecstatic that I was interested in the Siege. One of them is a software developer and he created a free iPhone app for Russians that uses your GPS location within St. Petersburg and tells you where key events on days during the Siege took place (he showed it to me and it wasn’t the first time I wish I could read Russian – it looked amazing). They told us that they were so sad that the current generation is quickly forgetting what happened less than 100 years ago to their grandparents’ generation. I’d like to think I made a big leap forward in American / Russian citizen relations. Heck, they even poured me a special glass of vodka for a toast!Other than Rising Up and Rising Down, this book comes with my highest recommendation of all the non-fiction I’ve read in 2014. It’s ok to cry when you read it. Those that are alive today in St. Petersburg would thank you. Taken just outside of St. Petersburg on a cool October morning.
An intense examination of the siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1941-42. Most of the book is concerned with the German invasion in June 1941 and takes us to the disastrous winter of 1941-42 when possibly over 600,000 Leningraders died of deliberate starvation from the German siege. The city understandably was in such disarray during this time that we will never know the exact number of deaths – and how many died of residual effects after, will also never be known. During and after the spring and summer of 1942 many more residents were evacuated and sadly rations could be increased because there were simply far fewer people to feed as so many had perished.Mr. Salisbury is at his best when describing the terrible events of the German siege – the constant bombardment, the total collapse of infrastructure (no water or heating, public transportation became non-existent) – people were just too weak from starvation to carry on normal activities – most were barely living. It makes for very despairing reading, but we must never forget the cruelty that Nazism brought to the people of the Soviet Union and the titanic struggle they waged to fight off the Nazi aggression.It would be nice to say that this book is eloquently written to capture this crucial period of history, but unfortunately the writing left much to be desired, as if an editor did not do the job properly. Most chapters have a surfeit of people introduced (at least 20 to 30) with little continuity from one to the other; some disappear entirely or may spring up again 100 or 200 pages afterwards for another short paragraph. The military history can be rather dry – with the constant citing of division numbers. The chronology is confusing and goes back and forth in time; the taking of Mga by the Germans is mentioned on three different occasions. Statistics are over-used and add to the staleness. In a military or civilian operation the numbers are even broken down from the total by giving a sub-total of the number of Communist members taking part – what is the point of this? There is an overwhelming tendency when speaking of the civilian population of Leningrad to mention writers, musicians and the theatres they attended – as if everyone in Leningrad was a creative artist. The author remarks (on page 536 of my book) that in the springtime, after the long winter starvation, that in the “Writers House meals were once again served in the dining room by waitresses in neat uniforms”. I am sure that the vast majority of survivors had no such treatment.The last half of the book is far better – and Mr. Salisbury acknowledges the sordidness of the Soviet system. Books were written on the siege, but never published or highly censored. A documentary film has never seen the light of day. Due to Soviet suppression many first-hand accounts of this painful period have disappeared forever.As the author states there has never, in the long history of human afflictions, been a siege as vicious and deliberate as this one; therein lies the importance of this book.
What do You think about The 900 Days: The Siege Of Leningrad (2003)?
Through archival research and personal interviews conducted in the USSR, Salisbury recounts the events leading up to and during the 900-day long siege of Leningrad during World War 2. Salisbury mixes inspirational stories of Soviet determination, such as the establishment of a dangerous supply route over frozen lakes to ship food in while simultaneously shipping women and children out, and genuinely uplifting stories of kindness, such as soldiers giving their rations to starving families, with the utterly heartbreaking tales of misery and death in a city where over 1,000,000 civilians died. While it’s hard to read at times the 900 Days is well worth the intellectual and emotional investment.
—Justin
Excellent account of the longest siege during WWII. Usually I'm not partial to the man on the street accounts of battle but Salisbury writes so compellingly that it is hard not to feel connected with Leningraders subsisting on 150gms (5oz) of bread made up mostly of sawdust a day during -20 degree winter. If you want to learn more about the battles between Von Leeb and Voronov/Zhukov there are other more detailed accounts of the battle order (such as Glantz' Barbarosa). This is mostly about survival and the will to fight. Greatest generation? I have no doubt about the Leningrad version.
—Chris
Amazing story. How many people know that almost 1.5 million people--about half the population of Leningrad (St. Petersburg)--died as a result of the Nazi siege in WWII? Most of the deaths were from starvation. As is often the case in Russian history, the people also suffered terribly from the actions and inaction of their own government. (Is there any country whose people have suffered more from their fellow human beings in the last 200 years than the Russians?)One of the creepiest scenes in the book is when the supply trucks, which hauled in food across the enormous Lake Lagoda--the only lifeline into the city--kept crashing through the thin ice, trucks and drivers plunging into the black water (hundreds of feet deep in most places).The book, written in 1969, does not have the brilliance of Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor. The effort to cast the story in the context of the perseverance of the starving artists and poets of Leningrad was mostly lost on me. I would rather read the nitty-gritty military and political details, though of course there is plenty of that in the book.(The Nazis of course were ultimately punished for their deeds through military defeat, the humiliating loss of their country, imprisonment, the Nuremburg trials, etc. But what about the Soviets? Stalin? Malenkov? Except for those that were purged by their own henchmen, most of the evil Soviet leaders seem to die peaceful deaths.)
—Chris
