Reflections
on the Siege of Leningrad
I have
been to the city that was then called Leningrad several times. I was
first there in the summer of 1968 on a Russian language study tour
from Indiana University. I spent the better part of five weeks there
doing dissertation research in the spring of 1976. I was last there
later in 1976 when my late wife Francie, our son Matthew (two years
old at the time) and I spent a few days there on our way out of the
Soviet Union because I really wanted Francie to see it.1
It is of course Peter the Great’s city of St. Petersburg, the city
he built on the Neva river near the Gulf of Finland to be his window
to the west. It is one of the world’s great cities, more European
than Russian in many ways though it was the capital city (or one of
them, Moscow being the other) of the Russian Empire for roughly two
hundred years. It is Russia’s second largest city after Moscow. In
2012 its population was five million, though it wasn’t nearly that
big during World War II. St. Petersburg, as it is now again called,
holds a place in my heart because of the time I spent there and
because the city and its environs are replete with sites of crucial
importance in the history of Russia, the field in which I hold a
Ph.D.
It was
during my first visit there in 1968 that I first learned of the Nazi
siege of the city and the utterly unspeakable horror the residents of
that great city suffered. Today I am learning more about that horror
from the book Leningrad, Siege and Symphony
by the British author Brian Moynahan. This
fascinating book weaves together the story of the suffering of
Leningrad during the siege
with the story of Dmitrii
Shostakovich writing his 7th
symphony, which came to be called the Leningrad Symphony and which
was performed there at the height of the siege. The
Nazis effectively blockaded the city for 872 days from June, 1941, to
January, 1944. During that time the only supply route into the city
was across Lake Ladoga, a large freshwater lake northeast of the
city. Even when supplies of food and other essentials were carried
across the frozen lake during the winter much of the material never
got to Leningrad because the only access to
the city from the lake’s
western shore was by a wholly inadequate rail line. During the
roughly two and one half years of the Nazi siege something like one
million people in the city died, most of them from starvation.
Cannibalism was not unknown during those years. In
reading Moynahan’s book I am learning how death was a constant
companion of everyone in the city during the siege. Moynahan makes it
sound like people simply became resigned to it, for there was no
escaping it. Life in the city was so miserable that many people
welcomed death as a blessed relief from the suffering. The sight of
dead bodies in the streets became commonplace. In the winter, of
course, people also suffered from the cold. In December, 1941, and
January, 1942, temperatures got as low as -30 Celsius. That’s -22
Fahrenheit. Most dwellings had little or no heat. The bitter cold of
course only made the people’s suffering worse. The Germans shelled
and bombed the city from time to time, but they never mounted an
all-out assault to capture it. They were contend simply to blockade
it and wait for it to starve to death, which it very nearly did.
There
was essentially nothing the Soviets could do to break the blockade.
Most of the Red Army was occupied fighting the Germans and their
allies farther east and south of Leningrad. Stalin on occasion
ordered what amounted to suicide assaults on German positions in an
attempt to break the siege. The army had neither enough men nor
enough munitions to have any hope of succeeding in those assaults,
and the men who carried them out and died in them in their thousands
were themselves suffering from malnutrition and often near the point
of death before the Germans
even shot at them.
The
German soldiers ordered to enforce the blockade didn’t have it easy
of course. They didn’t have the cold weather gear that the Russian
soldiers, or at least some of them, had. The
extreme cold of the winter stopped tanks and other military vehicles
from operating. In warmer
weather that equipment got stuck in the mud.
Yet the Germans suffered nothing like the Russians did. They weren’t
supplied well, but they didn’t starve to death. Moynahan quotes one
German soldier as wondering why they were besieging the city. He
didn’t understand what his country so wanted from the Russians that
they invaded in the first place. The soldiers were of course just
soldiers following orders, as were the soldiers of the Soviet army.
In following those orders they killed one million innocent civilians
and achieved no worthwhile military objective.
During
the Nazi siege one of the world’s great cities suffered as few
cities ever have. That suffering was inflicted wholly by other
humans. Most of the suffering
was inflicted by the Germans, but the Soviet authorities actually
made the situation worse. They couldn’t supply the city. We can’t
really blame them for not doing so. They did what they could. Yet in
the midst of mass starvation and death from hypothermia the Soviet
terror apparatus continued to operate. The NKVD (the Narodnyi
Kommissariat Vnutrinykh Del,
the National (or People’s) Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the
predecessor of the better known KGB) remained active. Anyone who
complained or expressed pessimism was likely to be shot on the spot.
Doctors were not permitted to do research into malnutrition or
hypothermia. They were not permitted to list starvation or
malnutrition as a cause of
death on a death certificate. Still, the NKVD was the one institution
that had complete information on just how bad things were in the
city. They had complete statistics on deaths, but they suppressed
that information and only a handful of people had access to it.
Anyone suspected of sabotage or even just of having a negative
attitude was likely to be arrested and summarily shot or shipped out
across Lake Ladoga to the camps of the Gulag farther east and
north.
All
in all the story of the Nazi siege of Leningrad is one of the
saddest, most tragic stories of modern times or perhaps of any time.
Yes, people everywhere in the Soviet Union suffered under Communism
and especially under Stalin. Stalin famously said one death is a
tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic. He starved more people to
death in Ukraine than
died of starvation in Leningrad during the siege. He killed more
people in the Gulag than starved to death in Leningrad during the
siege. Other Soviet cities
suffered as much under different circumstances, especially perhaps
Stalingrad (originally called Tsaritsyn and today called Volgograd).
Nonetheless the siege of
Leningrad produce a level of horror that I don’t think those of us
who have never experienced anything like it can even imagine. People
simply did not expect to survive, and most of them didn’t. Memories
of the siege were still fresh in many people’s minds when I was
first in Leningrad in 1968. That was, after all, only twenty-four
years after the siege had been lifted. Many
remembered the siege. The psyche of the whole city had been scarred
by it just as the psyche of all Russia had been scarred by the German
invasion. Being in that place where it all happened was a bit eerie.
The city had recovered a good
deal by 1968, but the horror of the siege was still very much a part
of its reality.
Many
thoughts come into my mind as I read Moynahan’s book. I
remember having been at some of the places he mentions. Nevskii
Prospekt, the main street of the city. The cruiser Aurora, a ship
that fired (ineffectively) at the Winter Palace during the Bolshevik
coup in 1917. She’s moored in the Neva next to the Winter Palace.
The Winter Palace itself, now
the Hermitage Museum. Walking
along the river itself and crossing it to one of islands Moynahan
mentions where Leningrad State University (now St. Petersburg State
University) is located. I remember the first time I landed in an
Aeroflot plane from
Copenhagen at the Leningrad
airport and seeing the big sign on the terminal building that read,
in Russian of course, “Welcome to Leningrad, A Hero City.” The
Soviet government designated the city a hero because of its suffering
during the siege and because
it never capitulated.
Another
thought that comes to me is
that the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was a war
between two of the worst systems of human social organization
diabolical human minds have ever created. I think most Americans know
more about the horrors of Nazism than they do about
the horrors of Soviet Communism. That’s probably because we’ve
heard so much about the Holocaust, but we’ve heard less about the
Gulag unless we’ve read Solzhenitsyn. It’s hard to say whether
Nazism or Soviet Communism was worse, and I suppose we don’t really
need to decide that question. They were both unspeakably murderous,
oppressive, destructive, and
cruel. Yes, the Soviets were our allies in World War II. We supplied
them with a good deal of equipment during the war, and many American
sailors died from German U boat attacks along the run up
the coast of Nazi occupied Norway to Murmansk, the only route we had
for getting supplies to Russia.2
Moynahan mentions Studebaker trucks, for example. There
was more specifically military material too. That
the Soviets were our allies, however, does nothing to mitigate the
monstrous character of Soviet Communism. Our
alliance with them was purely a matter of having a common enemy in
the Germans. Scholars
estimate that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of twenty or more
million Soviet people before the German invasion of 1941. Despite
its diabolical nature, the Soviets were the ones who truly defeated
Hitler’s Germany, but most of the
Russian soldiers in that war
weren’t fighting for Stalin
or for Communism. They fought for Mother Russia despite the way that
she was being so degraded and humiliated by Communism. It is good
that the Germans lost. It is a
mixed blessing that the
Soviets won.
Yet
there is another thought that predominates in my thinking about the
siege of Leningrad. All the
horror of the siege was entirely human caused, as indeed is most
of the horror of all wars3.
Humans ordered the blockade of the city. Humans established it and
enforced it. Humans kept food from reaching other humans so that tens
of thousands upon tens
of thousands (or
perhaps better hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands) of
them starved to death. Humans
kept medical supplies from reaching other humans so that an untold
number of them died from curable diseases. Humans ordered the siege,
then sat by while one of the world’s great cities starved to death.
I read the book. I hear the stories, and my heart is close to
despair. How can it happen? How can we human beings do such things to
one another? Anyone who has ever fought in a war knows that war is
hell, as General Sherman famously said. (He should have known. He
certainly inflicted enough hell on Georgia and other parts of the
Confederacy.) We say it is hell. We know it is hell, and we keep
doing it to
one another over and over and over again. Wars never cease, or at
least they never cease for long. In war people do things they would
never do during peacetime and call them good. They do things that are
serious crimes during peacetime and call them honorable. People
who in civilian life would never kill anyone kill and are proud that
they did their duty. Both Christian just war theory and Islamic
theology of jihad prohibit killing civilians, but armies all over the
world do it all the time without reservations. Civilization
thinks war is normal. Empire thinks war is good, or at least it
thinks the wars it chooses to
fight are good. We convince
ourselves that war is necessary, and we are brilliant at maneuvering
ourselves into positions where that seems to be true. Or at least we
sit by and let situations develop to the point where it seems to be
true. I ask, no, I cry: Why? And I get no answer. War came with the
rise of civilizations millennia ago. Civilization still engages in it
and calls it good. Calls it honorable. Calls it the call of duty.
Why? I wish I knew.
I
believe in, preach, and teach Christian nonviolence, and people call
me unreasonable, too idealistic, too pie in the sky naive
to think nonviolence could ever work. Well, all I know is that I have
dedicated my life to following Jesus of Nazareth as my Lord and
Savior, and he preached and lived nonviolence. He called his
followers to preach and live nonviolence, and for the first three
hundred years or so they did. It was only when Christianity became
the official state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century
CE that Christians began to justify and
engage in violence. We’ve
been justifying it and engaging in it ever since. And all I know is
that Jesus would have none of it. Jesus resisted empire in
what he said and in what he did,
albeit nonviolently. Imperial Christianity has embraced empire and
the violence that always comes with it for nearly seventeen hundred
years. In doing that our religious establishments and
the people who participate in them
have been profoundly un-Christian.
We
are entering, indeed we have entered, a time when Christianity is no
longer the de jure or de facto established religion of empire. It is
way past time for us to stop thinking and acting like the religion of
empire and to return to our non-imperial, indeed anti-imperial roots.
Those roots include a radical
commitment to nonviolence. Is nonviolence practical? Does it “work”?
Maybe. It has on occasion.
Maybe not, but that doesn’t
matter. What matters is that we follow a nonviolent Lord and Savior
who taught us a nonviolent God. Either we follow Jesus and his
teachings or we don’t. Yes, we have to be critical of his
teachings. They were given in a context very different from ours, and
some of them don’t apply today like the did in his day. His radical
prohibition of divorce is one example. But Jesus’ teaching of
nonviolence was absolutely foundational for him. It was foundational
for him because it is foundational for God. The older I get and
the more time I spend working
as a Christian pastor who sees the world for what it is and comes to
know Jesus ever more deeply the more convinced I become that being
Christian means being a disciple of a nonviolent Lord who calls us
always to nonviolence. Maybe that isn’t practical. If not, it’s
way past time for us to become radically impractical. Only in that
way can we change the world.
The
siege of Leningrad was one of the many enormous tragedies of human
history in which some humans inflicted the tragedy on other humans.
Let us study the horror of that siege and of all war. Let
us enter into that horror
deeply in our imaginations or, for those who have been there, in our
memories. Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop calling war
honorable. Let’s stop saying our military is defending our freedom
when they are doing no such thing. Let’s stop thinking we have a
duty to go to war. As Christians our duty is to a higher power than
any power that says go to war. It
is to a God who says make all war cease. Let
Leningrad be a lesson. Let all war be a lesson. Then let’s start
thinking and living the way Jesus calls us to do. Let’s
simply stop killing each other. Let’s
at long last truly become nonviolent.
1Francie
and Matthew didn’t go with me when I went to Leningrad in the
spring of 1976 but stayed with Matthew in our rooms at Moscow State
University because Leningrad State University didn’t have family
housing for us and because the water supply in Leningrad was
contaminated with giardia, a nasty intestinal parasite. As I
understand it, it still is. Just why the Russians don’t treat the
water to get rid of it I don’t understand.
2The
Soviets won the war in part because they were able to move their
military factories east of Urals where the Germans couldn’t reach
them. Today no place on earth is safe from ballistic missile attack.
Who knows how the war would have turned out had the Germans had
today’s missiles.
3I
say most of the horror not all of the horror because people die in
war from causes other than military violence. In the conditions of
military life diseases can reach epidemic proportions. The diseases
aren’t human caused, though the conditions under which they spread
may well be.
