Harrison Salisbury (1908–1993)

In the spring of 1944, the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad opened to the public with hundreds of exhibits and thousands of artifacts that sought to preserve the memory of the terrible ordeal that the city had endured for over two years. For the first several thousand visitors to the museum, who had survived the nightmare of the blockade, no reminder was needed, but they still were gratified to see an official and formal recognition of their sacrifice, and to be assured that future generations would be taught what they had done to keep Leningrad alive for them.

But as Harrison Salisbury writes in his epilogue to "The 900 Days", Stalin's paranoid jealousy of the city named for Lenin, and his resentment of the praise heaped on its heroic defenders, as reflected in "the Leningrad Affair" of the late 1940's, meant that the museum was closed in 1949, and that the books, plays and poems dedicated to the story of Leningrad under siege were not published or performed, at least not as of 1969, when Salisbury's "900 Days" was published.

So it fell to an American journalist to tell the epic story of besieged Leningrad, and he tells it well. Of the 900 days of the blockade (actually about 880 days), Salisbury devotes most of the book to the first 200 days and even earlier. The first several chapters dwell on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and Stalin's failures, first to respond to abundant intelligence about Hitler's intention to break their non-aggression pact, and then, after the shooting began, to react to the emergency on his borders.

Despite the disasters of the summer of 1941, the Red Army began to rally by the autumn and to slow down and finally stop the Nazi advance. The Baltic Fleet managed to retreat to its bases at Kronstadt and Leningrad. Salisbury then describes the desperate fight to hold the invaders at the gates of Leningrad in the winter of 1941-42. That was the worst winter any major city has suffered in modern history. As many as a million Leningraders starved to death. Nearly all those who survived were reduced to emaciated shells by the draconian rationing regime.

Eventually, life in the besieged city got "better". An ice road was built across frozen Lake Ladoga in the winter months to establish a tenuous connection to the "mainland". A Red Army offensive in January 1943 opened up one rail line to the outside, the "Corridor of Death", under constant German shelling. Not until a year later, the winter of 1944, were the Nazis and their Axis partners finally driven away from the approaches to the city.

Salisbury ably covers the political and military conflicts of wartime Leningrad, and related affairs in the Kremlin. But "900 Days" is most moving in its harrowing accounts of the poets, scientists, factory workers and mothers who struggled to stay alive and to keep their humanity intact under the worst of conditions. This book is a tribute to them.… (altro)

“The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad” by Harrison E. Salisbury…SUCKS! This book really, really sucks, and is a terrible, terrible book.

The title of the book is extremely misleading; indeed, only slightly more than half the total number of pages (54%) in the book actually have anything to do with the siege of Leningrad. It is not until page 307 — that’s right, THREE-HUNDRED SEVEN — that the siege of Leningrad even starts!

What’s the first 307 pages about, you ask? Good question. The first 307 pages of the book offer very little besides anti-Stalin and anti-Soviet claims juxtaposed with some poetic and colourful descriptions of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Most of Salisbury’s anti-Stalin and anti-Soviet claims are frankly absurd, outrageous, and completely ahistorical.

Page after page, for example, Salisbury criticizes Stalin and Soviet bureaucracy for lack of preparedness for the Nazi offensive; but when the Soviet’s did take actions to defend Leningrad, Salisbury criticizes those actions as being “extraordinary dictatorial”?! What does Salisbury expect?! Is there some kind of military-style democracy I am unaware of in the armed forces of other states? Did the U.S. or British militaries have some kind of secret ballot referendum about WWII that I have somehow missed?! Were the Japanese in Canada consulted before being stripped of all their assets and thrown in concentration camps?!

Salisbury’s outrageous, sometimes contradictory, and almost always uncited, accusations don’t end there. Like all anti-Soviet writers, Salisbury loves to describe Stalin as paranoid. He criticizes Stalin’s “suspiciousness” and refusal to heed the warnings of a possible Nazi invasion by the British (p. 77), as if Stalin’s suspicions of the British weren’t historically justified. Salisbury seems totally unaware of the fact of British involvement in the Allied intervention in the Soviet Union (1918-25), British policy of appeasement with Hitler throughout the 1930s and the willingness of the British to sacrifice Czechoslovakia at Munich, and the desire of leading British statement for war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the essence of which was captured by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s comments in 1936: “We all know the German desire, and he has come out with it in his book [i.e., Hitler’s Mein Kampf], to move east, and if he should move East I should not break my heart…There is one danger, of course, which has probably been in all your minds — supposing the Russians and Germans got fighting and the French went in as allies of Russia owing to that appalling pact they made, you would not feel you were obliged to go and help France, would you? If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it” (p. 33 of “1939: The Alliance that Never Was and the Coming of World War II” by Michael Jabara Carley). Other outrageous and uncited accusations Salisbury makes include Stalin’s alleged pathological disdain for Leningrad and Leningraders (p. 126-29), Stalin’s willingness to execute someone “because he wore a funny hat” (p. 171), the execution of those whom “meticulously carried out” Stalin’s own orders (p. 182), etc.

Probably the worst book of 2021 so far. Yuck!… (altro)