Saint Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City that Defied Hitler, by Sinclair McKay
The Leningrad Symphony continued to perform as the Nazis laid siege to their city. Their endurance became a symbol of the city’s fortitude as the invading Germans cut supply lines and rained bombs and shells. During the winters of 1941 and ’42, as casualties mounted, corpses were stacked like firewood on the frozen ground. Electricity was off and on. Edible food was scarce.
British author Sinclair McKay brings that history to life in vivid prose. Unlike many previous accounts of the siege, McKay goes deep into the cultural life of St. Petersburg, as the city was called before and after Communism. Petersburg was a place of poets, novelists and composers, albeit they were forced to step carefully (and back track) to avoid the wrath of the regime. Stalin had particular interests in the arts, and woe to anyone who violated the slippery dictates of “socialist realism.”
Leningrad’s population, like most Soviet citizens, had already been steeled by adversity. They knew hunger during the Russian Civil War that followed the Bolshevik power grab, but never such starvation. They knew the arbitrary terror of the Soviet police state, which continued during the siege and augmented by the random destruction of Nazi shellfire.
McKay places the reader into the lives of people within the beleaguered city. Working from survivor memoirs, he describes the “long bakery queues for a nugget or medallion of what was now no longer bread, but an alchemical concoction of oilseed and bran.” Worse was to come when Soviet chemists devised ersatz food from indigestible cellulose.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
One wonders with the author about the trauma carried by survivors of the cold, hunger, darkness, mayhem and high probability of death, and what the blokadniki, as they proudly called themselves, passed on to the next generation. Vladimir Putin was born in Leningrad after the war, the child of parents who suffered unnamable horror at the hands of vicious enemies.
Get Saint Petersburg on Amazon here.
Paid link
