Publisher's Synopsis
On September 8, 1941, eleven weeks after Hitler launched his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Russia's historic capital-now once again named St. Petersburg-was surrounded. The siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three-quarters of a million civilians in Leningrad-one in three of its population-had died of starvation.
Stripping away decades of Soviet propaganda, Anna Reid's Leningrad is a gripping, authoritative narrative history of this dramatic twentieth-century tragedy, interwoven with indelible personal accounts drawn from diarists on both sides.
Drawing on newly available diaries, memoirs, and government records, Leningrad also tackles a raft of previously unanswered questions: Was the size of the death toll as much the fault of Stalin as of Hitler? Why didn't the city fall to the Germans or collapse into anarchy? What decided who lived and who died? Impressive in its originality and literary style, it is a powerful work of history that gives voice to the dead and deepens our insight into mankind's inhumanity and generosity alike.
