Starred review from June 13, 2011
Former Ukraine correspondent for the Economist and Daily Telegraph, Reid brings to this narrative a comprehensive background in Russian affairs, an eye for the telling anecdote, and an approach that integrates the everyday horrors of the three-year Nazi siege of Leningrad into wider contexts of operations and policy. Reid uses recently available material to, in another historian's words, "wip off the syrup" of Communist mythology. Stalin's government barely held the city and sustained it. It also bungled military operations, imprisoned and executed thousands for no reason, and took care of Party bigwigs while ordinary men and women died in misery. Leningrad's citizens showed courage and endurance. "Svyazi... string-pulling, exchange of favors, and bribery" made the difference between life and death. By June 1943 almost 2,000 cases of cannibalism had been processed by military tribunals. The Soviet system displayed stupidity, corruption, and callousness as the Nazis waged a war of annihilation, in which starving Leningrad was an end in itself. Leningrad's citizens endured, rebuilt, hoped for a communism with freedom and true civic life. What they received was a series of crackdowns and continued repression. Reid (The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia) makes a major contribution to lifting the curtain on that terrible siege. 16 pages of b&w photos; 6 maps.