Leningrad - Anna Reid

Anna Reid's Leningrad: The Eipc Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 showed up as part of some book club order of my dad's. It is what the title suggests, a history of the Siege of Leningrad, focusing primarily on the people inside the city, though it also includes letters and journal entries from a German soldier stationed as part of the besieging force.

Reid's purpose seems to be to present the experience as honestly as possible. In the last chapter she expresses the opinion that many of the earlier descriptions of it have been skewed, focusing on only the good things the ordinary citizens did, or being too kind towards the Party officials in charge. Reid focuses primarily on the first year, when things where the worst (by the second, less harsh winter, the Party seems to have gotten its act together), it's more than simply looking at the Soviet Party, its corruption, incompetence, or perhaps outright indifference to the plight of the people trapped within Leningrad. While using the records left by people who spent at least part of the war in that city, she highlights both the good and the bad of the regular citizens. The ones who made up fictious jobs at their places of business for a friend, so that person could have a worker's ration card, rather than the more meager dependent's card, or hiding them from the NKVD, which was still rounding up people on the typical bullshit charges*. The people who stole other's bread as they left the store, or bought starving people's possessions for a ridiculously small portions of food. The difficulties families had, once evacuations over Lake Ladoga were possible, about whether to bring weakened loved along, and risk their death on the trip, to stay and hope they could keep themselves and the loved ones alive, or to split up, with maybe one person staying behind to look after the elderly or extremely young.

Reid also looks at the situation from the military perspective occasionally. What the Soviets were doing to open rail lines to Leningrad, Hitler's absolute insistence that the city be taken and utterly destroyed, which at least drained off German soldiers that might have been useful elsewhere. It's a sad situation, because I had the feeling Leningrad, despite having a Baltic sea port, wasn't really strategically that important. But Hitler really badly wanted to make a statement, and for a long time, the Red Army was too poorly trained, equipped, and perhaps most critically, poorly run to do anything. Except get killed in staggeringly large numbers, of course.

Having not read any other books on Leningrad, I can't judge this one against others. I found it highly informative, and Reid uses the entries from people who lived through it to good effect in describing what it was like to live through. Also, the book was affecting enough that I had a deeply detailed dream that seemed heavily influenced by what she describes. It's a little staggering to realize, though, that the conditions in my dream were significantly better than what those people in Leningrad went through. Either my subconscious can't match up to reality, or it didn't want to try.

* One man, Ivan Zhilinsky, was arrested in March of 1942 for 'slandering Soviet reality'. He was initially supposed to be executed, but then received only 10 years in prison. Apparently relevant quotes includes stating the Brits and Americans were supplying the Soviets just enough to keep going, but not enough to launch a counter-offensive, and that even if Russians aren't natural Bolsheviks, they hate invaders. Another man was sent to prison after the war, when Stalin cracked down, for 'advocating the revolutionary idea of "art for art's sake".