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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.