Saint Petersburg is a gripping history of the city with a focus on its siege by the Germans in World War II, particularly its civilian experience, recommends Chris Bambery

On the 22 June, 1941 the German army, the Wehrmacht, smashed into the Soviet Union, enjoying close support from their air force, the Luftwaffe. The Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, had refused to believe reports from London and from his own secret service that Hitler was about to tear up a treaty of friendship with Russia signed in August 1939. As a consequence, the USSR acquired the Baltic States, eastern Poland and a chunk of Romania.

On 22 June, these border regions were not in a state of readiness and German tanks swept through them. The Luftwaffe destroyed thousands of aircraft lined up on their runways as if for inspection.

It was a weekend. Leningrad (once and now once again St Petersburg, and during World War I, Petrograd), the Soviet Union’s second city, was enjoying the White Nights, endless days of daylight in these far northern parts. On the Sunday, there was shock as news spread of the German invasion.

Rather than Stalin, it was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, who broadcast to the nation, striking a patriotic tone rather than that of class war. Indeed, Stalin was not heard of for some weeks, in a state of shock at Hitler’s ‘betrayal’.

Russia’s leading city

Leningrad was the artistic centre of the USSR with a dazzling array of composers, poets, actors and authors. It was also a key industrial city.

Stalin distrusted it. In part, this was because, in October 1917, Lenin and Trotsky, not he, had played the key role in the October Revolution. Afterwards, it became personal stronghold of Grigori Zinoviev, President of the Communist International, until he formed the defeated Joint Opposition with Trotsky in opposition to Stalin in the mid-1920s. By the early 1930s, Leningrad was the fiefdom of Sergei Kirov, and ardent Stalinist, but a popular figure in the Communist Party, something Stalin would always resent.

On the night of 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot dead in his office by a party member who had somehow entered the heavily guarded city headquarters of the party and made his way to Kirov’s office with a revolver in his bag. It is widely accepted that the assassination was carried out with the approval of Stalin.

Despite that, the killing allowed Stalin to unleash the great purges in which he wiped out the remaining leaders and cadre of the old Bolshevik Party, but went further too so that terror was used to create total submission to the ‘Great Leader’.

A near victim of the terror was the Soviet Union’s greatest composer, Dimitri Shostakovich, after Stalin, in 1936, publicly criticised his great modernist opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Night after night, Shostakovich went to bed expecting the secret police to arrive in the early hours and drag him away for a show trial and execution.

Sinclair McKay’s St Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler, brings alive the rich and varied society of the city that was to face an ordeal at the hands of the Nazis none could have imagined. He brings the wonderful city, built on the islands and marshes where the River Neva joins the Gulf of Finland by Tsar Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century as Russia’s ‘gateway to the West’.

By the 1930s, much of the working class who had made the revolution in 1917 had been wiped out in the civil war which followed, or had been absorbed into the state bureaucracy which emerged with the decimation of that working class and the isolation of young Soviet Russia due to the failure of the post-war wave of revolutions to achieve a breakthrough.

If I have a criticism of the book, it is that it never addresses how Stalin and the dictatorship emerged from the isolation and defeat of the revolution. The city was, for instance, re-named Leningrad in 1924 after Lenin’s death, despite the fact that his last will and testament contained a direct instruction not to do such a thing. Stalin created a cult of Lenin which neutered the latter’s own beliefs, as for instance his vision of the beginnings of socialist rule in his 1917 pamphlet, State and Revolution. However, the idea that Leninism seamlessly morphed into Stalinism is so dominant, this gap is not surprising.

The siege begins

So, leaving this aside that this is history of the Nazi siege of the city, which lasted 872 days, or almost two and a half years, from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944, this is not in the main a military history but one of what its population endured and the terrible price they paid. More than one-million civilians were killed, mainly from starvation.

When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, they advanced on three prongs. In the south, the objective was the Ukraine and its wheatfields, which Hitler believed could feed the Third Reich, and beyond them the Caucuses and the oilfields which Hitler so much desired.

The middle prong aimed at the capital, Moscow, and the northern one at Leningrad. In less than two months, the Germans had swept through the Baltic States to the very boundaries of the city.

The man in charge of Army Group North was Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, an ardent Nazi who had under him the SS Totenkopf, the Death Head division, and in the wake of his troops came the Einsatzgruppe A execution squads who targeted Jews and Communist Party members. Regular German troops took part in the mass executions. The commander of Einsatzgruppe A praised Army Group North, in a report to Berlin, for its exemplary co-operation with his men in murdering Jews in the Baltic states.

In Leningrad, anti-Semitism was common, and there where many who hoped the Nazis would end the horror of Stalinism. Yet, as refugees flooded into the city, stories of Nazi atrocities spread and citizens became aware an even greater barbarism was at their gates.

Von Leeb and the Nazi command decided not to take the city as they feared getting bogged down in the large urban sprawl where tanks could not operate well, as would be the case the following year in Stalingrad. Instead they decided to lay siege to it. Their aim was to wipe out the city’s population and then physically destroy or loot the city with its wonderful museums and galleries. Luckily, most of the great works in the Hermitage (one of the world’s great art galleries) had been evacuated by a director who had laid plans for such an eventuality. In fact, the Germans, while inflicting dreadful damage, never had the heavy guns which were used on the south to take Sebastopol; the Leningrad front was not the German priority.

From the north, Finnish troops, allied to Germany, invaded, reconquering territory they had lost in the 1940 Russo-Finnish Winter War. Leningrad was cut off, reliant at the outset on one narrow bridgehead across the River Neva which connected to a railway line. Soon the Germans cut that.

Stalemate

The city was under the control of Andrei Zhdanov, the alcoholic buddy of Stalin. The internal repression never ended but it was more relaxed compared to the worst days of the Terror. There were carrots. One was that the Greek Orthodox Church, which had loyally allied to the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was allowed to operate once more.

As the German neared, industrial plants were evacuated east along with skilled workers. The evacuation of mothers and children was not a priority initially. But the giant plants like the Kirov Works (once the Putilov Works, which played a crucial role in 1917), kept working producing tanks, artillery and munitions.

The city was now under constant bombardment and air attack. The city regime had allowed its main food supplies to remain concentrated in one wooden warehouse which was hit and set on fire, destroying the city’s reserves.

As winter set in, a military stalemate developed. Stuck in siege lines, the Germans could only intensify their terror against civilians including those with mental illnesses or other conditions, as well as Jews. Leningrad was now having to face starvation rations which gave priority to workers in the operating plants as well as the Red Army (Zhdanov and the party bosses were unaffected, of course).

Sinclair McKay tells the story of that terrible winter when people would collapse and die in the street or would fall into inertia then death. Bodies piled up unburied under the snow and rubble.

Some aid came when an ice road was created across Lake Lagoda to the east of the city. This was very risky and brought minimal food supplies, but the tracks also evacuated mothers and children. Leningrad held out that winter but at terrible cost.

Shostakovich joined Leningrad Conservatory’s firefighter brigade, often on roofs trying to spot Luftwaffe attackers. He began work on his Seventh symphony, the Leningrad, before the regime decided to evacuate him to Kuibyshev, where he finished it to be performed there by the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre, and broadcast across the Soviet Union and to Britain and the USA. It was performed too in besieged Leningrad by a scratch orchestra of civilian and military musicians.

The summer of 1942 brought some relief to the city and a land corridor was eventually opened that winter which enabled rations to meet needs. By January 1944, the Germans were in full retreat having lost Ukraine and the Crimea. With the Red Army ready to finally lift the siege, the Germans retreated to Estonia. The siege was over.

Sinclair McKay tells the story of the siege well. He does not spare us the horrors of Stalinism but shows that Nazism was even worse. It’s good history and a gripping read which I applaud.