900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad Book

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.