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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
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| 33607002597733 | Adult Nonfiction | 940.54 REID | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
On September 8, 1941, eleven weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a million Leningraders had died of starvation.
Anna Reid's Leningrad is a gripping, authoritative narrative history of this dramatic moment in the twentieth century, interwoven with indelible personal accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists on both sides. They reveal the Nazis' deliberate decision to starve Leningrad into surrender and Hitler's messianic miscalculation, the incompetence and cruelty of the Soviet war leadership, the horrors experienced by soldiers on the front lines, and, above all, the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the relentless search for food and water; the withering of emotions and family ties; looting, murder, and cannibalism- and at the same time, extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice.
Stripping away decades of Soviet propaganda, and drawing on newly available diaries and government records, Leningrad also tackles a raft of unanswered questions: Was the size of the death toll as much the fault of Stalin as of Hitler? Why didn't the Germans capture the city? Why didn't it collapse into anarchy? What decided who lived and who died? Impressive in its originality and literary style, Leningrad gives voice to the dead and will rival Anthony Beevor's classic Stalingrad in its impact.
Author Notes
Anna Reid is the author of The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia and Borderland: A Journey Through the History of the Ukraine . She holds a master degree in Russian history and reform economics from the University of London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies. She was Ukraine correspondent for The Economist and the Daily Telegraph from 1993-1995, and from 2003-2007 she ran the foreign affairs program at the think-tank Policy Exchange
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former Ukraine correspondent for the Economist and Daily Telegraph, Reid brings to this narrative a comprehensive background in Russian affairs, an eye for the telling anecdote, and an approach that integrates the everyday horrors of the three-year Nazi siege of Leningrad into wider contexts of operations and policy. Reid uses recently available material to, in another historian's words, "wip[e] off the syrup" of Communist mythology. Stalin's government barely held the city and sustained it. It also bungled military operations, imprisoned and executed thousands for no reason, and took care of Party bigwigs while ordinary men and women died in misery. Leningrad's citizens showed courage and endurance. "Svyazi... string-pulling, exchange of favors, and bribery" made the difference between life and death. By June 1943 almost 2,000 cases of cannibalism had been processed by military tribunals. The Soviet system displayed stupidity, corruption, and callousness as the Nazis waged a war of annihilation, in which starving Leningrad was an end in itself. Leningrad's citizens endured, rebuilt, hoped for a communism with freedom and true civic life. What they received was a series of crackdowns and continued repression. Reid (The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia) makes a major contribution to lifting the curtain on that terrible siege. 16 pages of b&w photos; 6 maps. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
Some 750,000 people of Leningrad died, primarily of starvation, during Hitler's two and a half year siege of the city, the deadliest siege in history. For the core of her book, Reid (The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia) accesses diaries of and interviews (many previously unavailable) with those who suffered. She focuses on the coldest and deadliest months of the winter of 1941-42 and also includes select German accounts for a view from the other side. Reid shows how human willpower triumphed in a desperate situation. Leningrad did not collapse, despite Hitler's desire to erase it and cruel Soviet mismanagement and oppression. The mental strain among the survivors was perhaps greater than the physical toll. VERDICT Especially well researched in Russian sources, this is an agonizing tale that belongs alongside Harrison Salisbury's classic The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. (Maps, photos, and index not seen.) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Maps | p. ix |
| Acknowledgements | p. xiii |
| Introduction | p. I |
| Part I Invasion: June-September 1941 | |
| 1 22 June 1941 | p. 13 |
| 2 Barbarossa | p. 25 |
| 3 'We're Winning, but the Germans are Advancing' | p. 51 |
| 4 The People's Levy | p. 73 |
| 5 'Caught in a Mousetrap' | p. 91 |
| Part 2 The Siege Begins: September-December 1941 | |
| 6 'No Sentimentality' | p. 113 |
| 7 'To Our Last Heartbeat' | p. 139 |
| 8 125 Gram | p. 158 |
| 9 Falling Down the Funnel | p. 174 |
| Part 3 Mass Death: Winter 1941-2 | |
| 10 The Ice Road | p. 195 |
| 11 Sleds and Cocoons | p. 208 |
| 12 'We Were Like Stones' | p. 232 |
| 13 Svyazi | p. 252 |
| 14 'Robinson Crusoe Was a Lucky Man' | p. 268 |
| 15 Corpse-Eating and Person-Eating | p. 280 |
| 16 Anton Ivanovich is Angry | p. 293 |
| 17 The Big House | p. 303 |
| Part 4 Waiting for Liberation: January 1942-January 1944 | |
| 18 Meat Wood | p. 313 |
| 19 The Gentle Joy of Living and Breathing | p. 331 |
| 20 The Leningrad Symphony | p. 356 |
| 21 The Last Year | p. 370 |
| Part 5 Aftermath | |
| 22 Coming Home | p. 389 |
| 23 The Cellar of Memory | p. 406 |
| Appendix I How Many? | p. 417 |
| Appendix II p. 419 | |
| Notes | p. 421 |
| Bibliography | p. 459 |
| Index | p. 473 |