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 2½ 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 Führer has decided to raze the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth."