- Lifting the Blockade on the BlockadeNew Research on the Seige of Leningrad
Scholarly research on the 872-day blockade of Leningrad commenced in the late 1950s after Soviet historians gained limited access to state and communist party archives and were encouraged by Khrushchev to write histories that highlighted the heroic contributions of the Soviet people to the nation’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War.” By the end of the Soviet era, the number of important studies on the blockade, which claimed the lives of close to one million civilians and several hundred thousand Soviet military personnel, not to mention Germans and Finns, was very small. They included the pioneering studies of D. V. Pavlov (who was in charge of the food supply in the city from the beginning of the siege in September 1941 to the end of January 1942) and A. V. Karasev, a multi-authored volume produced by the Academy of Sciences (which for many years served as the official Soviet summary statement on the blockade), a couple of document collections from the 1960s, and a few studies on specific aspects of the siege from the 1970s.1 These works uniformly characterized Leningrad’s military and civilian defenders as “heroic,” but they also noted the tragedy of Leningrad’s predicament as they tried to estimate the number of civilian deaths. The factual information they revealed was accurate (as verified by recent archival disclosures) but severely restricted, because discussion of many important topics—such as conflicts between Smolnyi’s leaders and the Kremlin, the role of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), and the presence of “defeatist” morale and self-serving opportunists within the city—was banned. A collection of firsthand accounts by Ales′ Adamovich and Daniil Granin, entitled Blokadnaia kniga ([The Blockade Book], first released in 1979 and revised in 1982) shed some pre-glasnost′ light on the blockade by showing that not all Leningraders acted in a heroic manner.2 Soviet scholarship was [End Page 334] supplemented by only two prominent Western accounts: Leon Gouré’s The Siege of Leningrad (1962), which drew heavily on Karasev and Pavlov as well as on German records located in the U.S. National Archives and several anonymous survivors of the blockade, and Harrison Salisbury’s bestseller from 1969, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, which was based on published Soviet works and many interviews that the famous correspondent conducted with Soviet military, political, and cultural figures from the blockade period.3 Salisbury’s richly detailed tome with its theme of Leningraders’ love of their native city, balanced...