Leningrad

Product Description

On 8 September 1941 eleven short weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union Leningrad was surrounded. The siege would not be lifted for two & a half years & during the 872 days of blockade & bombardment as many as two million Soviet lives would be lost. Had the city fallen the history of the Second World War
- & of the twentieth century
- would have been very different. Leningrad is a gripping narrative history interwoven with personal stories
- immediate accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists & memoirists on both sides. These twentieth-century European civilians living through unbearable hardship reveal the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the all-consuming & daily search for food; crawling up ice-rounded steps on hands & knees hauling a bucket of water; a woman who has just buried her father noticing how the cemetery guards have used a frozen corpse with outstretched arm & cigarette between its teeth as a signpost to a mass grave; another using a dried pea to make a rattle for her evacuated grandsons first birthday & putting it away in a drawer when she hears six months later that he has died of meningitis. In Leningrad Anna Reid answers many of the previously unanswered questions about the siege. How good a job did Leningrads leadership do
- would many lives have been saved if it had been better organised? How much was Stalins & Moscows wariness of western-leaning Leningrad (formerly the Tsars capital St Petersburg) a contributing factor? How close did Leningrad come to falling into German hands? & above all how did those who lived through it survive?