A Past Too Terrible To Be Buried

THE 900 DAYS: The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison E. Salisbury. 635 pages. Harper & Row. $10.

On Aug. 30, 1941, a powerful Nazi army captured the obscure Russian town of Mga, a railhead east of the Baltic. The Nazis thereby severed the last overland link between Leningrad and the rest of the Soviet Union, clamping an iron ring of men, armor and artillery around the beautiful city first raised by Peter the Great. Thus began the most murderous siege in modern history.

Beside Leningrad, the celebrated sieges of modern times are dwarfed: the 121-day blockade of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, in which 30,000 perished; even the more famous six-month German onslaught at Stalingrad, where almost half a million were killed. In Leningrad, which had a population of about 3,000,000, some 1,500,000 men, women and children died --of starvation or under the unremitting rain of Nazi shells and bombs, which continued for 2 1/2 years.

Memory Hole. Surprisingly, little has been written on the Leningrad tragedy. Many of the Russian records, according to Harrison Salisbury, an assistant managing editor of the New York Times, were destroyed or suppressed by Stalin, "as in Orwell's 'memory hole.' " Years of contacts in Russia, where he served six years as a reporter, and the information thaw that set in after Stalin's death, finally permitted Salisbury to accumulate the records, diaries and interviews from which he shaped this massive and horrifying account.

Both the enormity of the task and the event described occasionally seem too much for him, especially when he pelts the reader with chunks of indigestible statistics--apparently for no other reason than that they were available. Salisbury also spends too much time in scene setting. It isn't until page 307, for example, that he finally announces, "The nine hundred days were beginning."

Salisbury obviously loves Leningrad and its people. Much of the background that he feels called upon to paint in deals with the city's illustrious history as St. Petersburg (Russia's capital until the honor was ceded to Moscow in 1918) and its cosmopolitan, cultural effervescence, which stirred not only Adolf Hitler's ire but the enduring suspicions of a xenophobic Georgian peasant, Joseph Stalin. The Paris of the Baltic, the city of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Leningrad stood, in Salisbury's words, as "the invisible barrier between the end of Russia and the beginning of Europe." It was a prime military and propaganda target for Hitler's surging armies when, in June 1941, the Germans suddenly loosed Operation Barbarossa against their erstwhile Russian allies.

For a time, Hitler openly savored the prospect of humiliating Russia by reviewing his triumphant soldiers from a stand in Leningrad's Palace Square. But three months after the invasion of Russia began and the prospects of quickly subduing Leningrad began to fade, he grew angry. The German high command declared: "The Fuehrer has decided to raze the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth."

The Fuehrer came perilously close to carrying out that objective. Beyond all reason, Stalin had rejected overwhelming evidence that the Nazis were preparing an attack; not even the movement of 4,200,000 troops to Russia's borders convinced him. As a result, Nazi infantry and panzer divisions smashed to the outskirts of Leningrad. The unprepared, disorganized Russians sustained unimaginable losses; 28 of their front-line divisions were obliterated. By the time the Germans were finally stopped, the city was surrounded. Its only open access lay to the northeast, across Lake Ladoga, toward Finland.

Metallic Ring. When the blockade began, scant food reserves were swiftly consumed. Luftwaffe raids on warehouses sent tons of sugar, meat and flour up in smoke. Rations were cut again and again, finally falling to half a pound of bread per day for workers and only two slices (about 150 calories) for children. Citizens grew accustomed to eating library paste, boiled leather, and bread baked with cottonseed cake, even sawdust and cellulose. Cats and dogs swiftly disappeared. Any stray horse was likely to be set upon and butchered on the hoof by starving citizens. In the final stages of the famine, parents kept a close eye on their children lest they be kidnaped; the "meat patties" that were sold in the Haymarket, Leningrad's slum quarter, sometimes contained human flesh. Salisbury describes how Red Army soldiers, after gunning down two suspected cannibals, found the hocks of five human beings hanging from hooks in their apartment.

The winter of 1941-42 was one of the coldest ever endured. Temperatures averaged 4DEG below zero in January. People died in their apartments, and weakened relatives left them wherever they were--in a bed, at a table, in a chair near a cold stove. Men and women dropped in the streets, dead of hunger and exhaustion, and sometimes their bodies lay untouched for weeks. When they were finally hoisted onto trucks, one observer recalls, they were so frozen that "they gave a metallic ring." The silence of the city was broken only by bouts of German shellfire and, in winter, by the squeak of children's sleds bearing corpses to cemeteries.

"Hell Machine." For a time, Stalin thought of abandoning the city. Then, rather than let the Germans occupy it whole, he ordered that Leningrad's giant Kirov works, its railroad viaducts, its bridges, its ports, and all its historic buildings be mined for pushbutton destruction. But the button on what Leningraders referred to as Stalin's "hell machine" was never pushed. Nazi troops were drained off to other fronts, and enough Red Army units and citizen volunteers remained to keep the besiegers out. The Germans settled in, hoping to starve and shell the city to death. That they did not succeed, as logic suggested they would, was due largely to Leningrad's astonishing capacity to take punishment.

It was also due to expedients like "the Road of Life" across Lake Ladoga. Frozen solid in winter, it supported occasional food trucks and even the great 60-ton KV tanks that eventually began to roll in to the city's defense. At the end of 1943, the Russian buildup--some 1,200,000 men--was big enough for a successful counteroffensive. On Jan. 27, 1944, the siege was lifted.

Tolstoy saw men and battles as unwitting pawns used in an inscrutable game played by history. Modest and matter-of-fact reporter Salisbury does not permit himself the luxury of such speculative indulgences. If he sees a shaping force in the tragedy of Leningrad, beyond Hitler's madness, it lies in the villainy and vanity of Joseph Stalin. For the Soviet dictator not only misjudged the course of events in 1941 and refused to arm his country adequately, he systematically falsified history and brutally suppressed the truth afterward to hide his own foolishness. Thousands of men associated with the siege years were killed or exiled in a savage, Kremlin-inspired purge that came to be known as "the Leningrad Affair." Leningrad was the last of Russia's major cities to be rebuilt. "Leningrad survived the Nazis," writes Salisbury. "Whether it would survive the Kremlin was not so clear."

If the Kremlin was anxious to bury the memory of Leningrad's tragic, heroic wartime stand, its citizens were not. For nearly ten years, on Stalin's orders, coats of paint covered the blue and white signs that had sprouted on the Nevsky Prospekt and other major avenues during the siege, with the warning: "Citizens: In case of shelling, this side of the street is the most dangerous." Today, the signs have been repainted as they were. Touched up every spring, they stand as reminders of a past too terrible to be buried.

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