Leningrad in Agony
Hollander, Paul
Leningrad in Agony The 900 Days—The Siege of Leningrad, by Harrison E. Salisbury. Harper & Row. 635 pp. $10. Reviewed by Paul Hollander Soviet leaders from Stalin to our contemporaries never...
...Harrison Salisbury's book—along with many other pieces of evidence—raises some questions about this proposition...
...Reviewed by Paul Hollander Soviet leaders from Stalin to our contemporaries never tired of claiming that victory over Nazi Germany had proved the vitality and superiority of the Soviet political system...
...Salisbury's account, graced by sympathy for the suffering of the people of Leningrad, is immensely detailed and absorbingly written...
...Paradoxically and pathologically, Stalin seemed to reserve his rather meager funds of trust for Hitler alone and refused to take any military measure that might be interpreted as "provocation"—an ill-defined concept that occupies a preeminent place in the vocabulary of totalitarian rulers...
...The city was completely destroyed by aerial and artillery bombardment...
...With the possible exception of Hitler's extermination of Europe's Jews, the siege of Leningrad was probably the most enduring accumulation of suffering for the greatest number of civilians in World War II...
...This, of course, follows from the enforced belief in the infallibility of the totalitarian leader...
...The loss of ration cards was equal to a death sentence...
...Nor was it clear to this reviewer what principle guided his use of footnotes and references...
...It seems that as far as certain periods and episodes of World War II were concerned, the opposite claim might also be made: The Soviet people and armed forces emerged victorious despite the Soviet political system and the blunders and shortsightedness of its leaders—Stalin in particular...
...it was also symbolic of the nature of the entire Soviet social-political system, its strength and weaknesses, flexibilities and rigidities...
...Thus, the siege of Leningrad was not only a dramatic chapter of World War II and a new record in mass destruction and human suffering...
...Salisbury captures both the political-military and the social and personal aspects of the siege...
...They had no war plans—except offensive plans for carrying war beyond the frontiers of the Soviet Union...
...It lasted for two and a half years...
...More than a million civilians died of hunger...
...Salisbury's story of the siege of Leningrad provides a massive documentation of the inhumanity of the German military machine...
...Nor did they provide the population adequate psychological preparations for the hardships ahead...
...If a dictator decrees that there will be no attack, an officer who prepares for one is liable to execution as a traitor...
...Many plays, books, and reports written about it were (and some still are) suppressed or radically altered by the censors in an effort to brighten up the depressing accounts of the siege...
...To be sure, the Party and its leadership did overcome the initial chaos and disorganization and regained control over the situation, aided by the innate patriotism of the Soviet people and by their long-standing capacity for enduring hardships...
...they were practically irreplaceable...
...Ordinary citizens are unable or unwilling to take initiatives, officials are fearful of exceeding their authority, groups are bereft of the capacity for spontaneous organization...
...Yet the mistakes made by the leadership—both in Moscow and in Leningrad—were magnified by the highly centralized and bu-reaucratized framework that demanded total submission to any policy until its abrupt reversal, just as totally enforced as had been the discarded policies...
...There is, however, a rich bibliography and a listing of sources used for each chapter...
...As long as such infallibility is sacred doctrine, it is difficult to point out his errors, let alone correct them...
...As is common on occasions when physical survival is threatened daily, there was much evidence of both superhuman heroism and selflessness and subhuman brutality and callousness...
...The Nazi military forces were bent on the total annihilation of the Leningrad population...
...A paradox that emerges from Salisbury's detailed account of the beginning phases of the war is that in some ways a totalitarian system—despite its constant mood of emergency—is not as well equipped to handle real crises as one would expect...
...Once the minutely defined chains of command and the elaborate hierarchies of decision-making are disrupted, the results of totalitarian atomization begin their destructive course...
...They had no contingency plans for liaisons between staffs...
...Not only was it difficult for Stalin personally to accept the reality of Hitler's treachery, but the rigidly fashioned policies of the regime hindered at many levels the efficient handling of the attack...
...They had no prepared schemes on which to fall back in event of sudden Nazi attack because Stalin had decreed that there would be no Nazi attack...
...It is a mixture of history, journalism, and fiction...
...He is not always clear regarding the source of a particular episode or event...
...It was not possible," Salisbury notes, "for responsible commanders in the General Staff or the High Command to take even ordinary precautions...
...Murder for food was not uncommon...
...The Soviet Union was unprepared for World War II to an extent which, if Salisbury's sources are correct, is almost incredible...
...Interestingly enough, for a long time the siege of Leningrad was a taboo subject for public discussion and historiography in the Soviet Union...
...Most astonishing was that while Stalin's responsibility in the causal sense was enormous for the military defeats and human disasters of the first year of the Soviet-Nazi conflict, he did not have to shoulder any responsibility, in the legal and moral sense, in being held accountable for his staggering miscalculations...
Vol. 34 • January 1970 • No. 1
