Reflections on the Siege of Leningrad

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 7^th 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.