The Soviet Army – Books – The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison Salisbury

Review by Anthony Winning:

The story of Leningrad is one so horrific and on such a scale that nothing has probably ever equaled it. Nazi forces managed to surround the city, forming an iron ring around the city’s three million inhabitants. Attacks by incendiary artillery managed to destroy the majority of the food stored for the city. With a winter of sustained temperatures of minus thirty degrees and a siege that lasted nine hundred days over one and a half million inhabitants perished. Salisbury takes us inside the city and shows us what life was like during the siege; a place where people just collapsed dead from starvation and exhaustion, bodies were piled in the street because no one had the energy to bury them and where cannibalism was practiced. He makes good use of diaries and letters to show how gruesome life really was for those who had to live through Leningrad. This is not merely a study of a city under siege, it’s also a study of humanity.