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REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON
St Petersburg has an immensely dark history. Built largely by slave labour on the orders of Peter the Great in the early 1700s, it has endured more than its fair share of assassination, revolution, flooding, and famine – and that is before it became the centre of one of the most brutal sieges in history during the Second World War. Indeed, so blood-soaked is the city’s past that the Russian novelist Andrei Bely referred to it as ‘Gehenna’ – a Biblical term meaning the realm of doomed souls.
As the armies of the Third Reich marched towards St Petersburg in the autumn of 1941, having begun their invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) that June, the city certainly seemed destined for calamity. The 872-day siege that followed – a remarkable and horrifying story of endurance – is the subject of this wonderfully written new book by Sinclair McKay. The author and journalist has become something of a biographer of European cities in the mid-20th century; his previous works include entertaining social histories of Berlin and Dresden.
At that time, of course, St Petersburg was known as Leningrad, in honour of the late Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution in October 1917. It had also lost its status as the centre of Soviet life, having been usurped by Moscow as the capital the following year. The Germans fully intended to conquer Leningrad and Moscow as part of Operation Barbarossa, as well as to capture the resource-rich southern lands of Ukraine and the Caucasus. They very nearly succeeded.
From the outset, McKay reminds us, the Nazi policy towards Leningrad was explicitly genocidal. Hitler had no desire to lose large numbers of troops in a street-by-street battle, so the city and its one-and-a-half-million inhabitants were condemned to death by isolation. The Wehrmacht’s Army Group North, which eventually became entrenched around 18 miles to the south and west of the city, shelled it relentlessly with no concern for civilian casualties.
Having briefly gone into hiding on the outbreak of war, Stalin too considered Leningrad a lost cause. He shared the slightly resentful attitude many Russians felt towards its most ‘European’ city – it was seen as a little too opulent, too obsessed with itself, and too preoccupied with the ephemeral pursuits of poetry and classical music. But as the siege began, Leningraders would also demonstrate a quite remarkable toughness. By the winter of 1941, the Germans, now hunkering down as the cold set in, were beginning to take notice.
Hunger for life
That first winter of the siege was by far the worst. Despite continuous attacks from German artillery and temperatures dropping to −40°, Leningrad attempted to maintain some normality at first, with concerts and church services continuing to take place even as bombs rained down from above. The first real inkling of catastrophe was to come on 8 September 1941, when the city’s food storage site at the Badayev warehouses was bombed by the Luftwaffe. The authorities had barricaded the many factories, but had failed to save the food. Soon, hunger presented a much more lethal threat than invasion.
As McKay points out, there is quite a difference between a controlled fast – for religious or political reasons – with the participant knowing when it will end, and actual starvation, which is what Leningraders endured and what drove many of them to the brink of insanity. Citizens had to queue for hours outside bakeries for a ration of a mere 20g of bread a day, forcing them to look elsewhere for sustenance. Some ate their pets. One man snatched rats off the street and cooked them for himself and his wife. Others took apart copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and melted down the glue in the binding for soup. ‘Mother soaked the pages in water,’ recalled a girl named Tamara Zaitseva, ‘and we swallowed the liquid.’
An estimated 800,000 died that first winter, but many could not be buried as the ground was frozen and, in any case, there were no gravediggers. McKay doesn’t linger too long over the stories of human corpses being repurposed as food, but then they are already well known and – on some horrifying level – understandable. The agonising hunger was making Leningraders half-mad, as well as darkening their skin and swelling their stomachs. Many reported a sensation of ants burrowing under the flesh: a sign of the body starting to consume itself in desperation.
The initial Soviet attempts to relieve the siege were disastrous. The ineffectual Kliment Voroshilov, commander of the North-western Front, was quickly replaced by Georgy Zhukov – who later found credit on the march to Berlin but hardly distinguished himself in attempting to dislodge the Germans from the south of the city (the Finnish, aligned with Hitler, blocked the only other land route to the north). For much of the siege, Stalin was tied up elsewhere, determined to deny the Nazis access to the oil fields of the Caucasus. He only reluctantly signed off a plan, which seemed suicidal, to establish a supply line across Ladoga, the vast lake to the north-east of the city, over which the Nazis had also air superiority.
The ‘Road of Life’, as it became known, is one of the most remarkable aspects of the story of the siege. It was an early example of the Soviet Union, having been so overwhelmed by Barbarossa initially, beginning to use the country’s vast resources, climate, and geography to its advantage. Soon regular convoys were making the perilous 90-minute journey across the frozen lake, transporting food and weaponry into Leningrad, and women and children out. For many it was too late, but it did mark a turning point.
Throughout this book, McKay draws on diaries written by the city’s inhabitants, something that was encouraged by the authorities to maintain morale. We hear from bakers, manual labourers, off-duty soldiers, dancers, sailors, and even poets. One name that pops up frequently is that of writer Olga Berggolts, whose regular radio broadcasts made her a symbol of the city’s resistance. After her husband died of starvation, Berggolts was forced to cart his body to a graveyard in a child’s sledge. But this did not break her. ‘That winter, death looked straight into our eyes,’ she would later write. ‘But those who sent us so much death miscalculated. They underestimated our voracious hunger for life.’
Artistic spirit
That same voracious hunger burned deeply within one Leonid Govorov, an indisputably brilliant military commander who was later made Marshal of the Soviet Union for his efforts in turning the siege around. Govorov was something of a new, modernising figure in the Red Army, which had been badly depleted of expertise by Stalin’s pre-war purges. Taking over command of the Leningrad front in spring 1942, Govorov developed innovative artillery techniques to terrorise the increasingly bedraggled Germans. A narrow land corridor was eventually established, through which food and other supplies could flow in abundance.
Govorov wanted to help project the image of the defiant Soviets to the world, too. One night in August 1942, he ordered a strike on German artillery positions – not in advance of any offensive, but in order to ensure that the first performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony within the city would go ahead without interruption. With an orchestra cobbled together from many serving Red Army soldiers, the performance was conducted by Karl Eliasberg and broadcast live around the world from the Philharmonic Hall. Joining that global audience were the Werhmacht troops outside the city, who picked up the concert on their radios. Eliasberg was to meet some of these men years later, who told him that on hearing the music they knew Leningrad would never fall.
The city and its one-and-a-half-million inhabitants were condemned to death by isolation.
McKay writes warmly of the city as a whole, and clearly admires its ‘ungovernable artistic spirit’ – exemplified by the Shostakovich performance – which maintained it during the siege and so concerned the Soviet authorities (Stalin began enthusiastically purging its leaders again after the ordeal was over). The author largely glosses over the later events of the war and the rolling back of the German invasion, although this has been covered extensively elsewhere.
In a final chapter, he briefly discusses the childhood of Vladimir Putin, whose older brother Viktor died in the city in 1942 and is buried in an unmarked grave somewhere within its precincts. Whether it was this loss – something of which Putin still speaks angrily – that shaped the man he was to become can only be speculated. Though it would chime with what Andrei Bely observed about the city being the realm of the doomed.
Saint Petersburg: sacrifice and redemption in the city that defied Hitler
Sinclair McKay
Viking, hbk, 432pp (£25)
ISBN 978-0241741313
