Book Review: The 900 Days by Harrison Salisbury

A great American author once wrote that truth is stranger than fiction. In fact, truth is sometimes far stranger than any fiction ever created. 

If you dare, read The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, is a riveting narrative nonfiction epic by Harrison E. Salisbury about one of the harrowing and heroic chapters in the annals of history. In nine hundred days, beginning in 1941 when a German army blockaded the city, as many people died in Leningrad as the entire war losses suffered by the United States in the whole of its history – nearly a million and a half men, women and children. They died fighting in citizen militias on the front line, fell to the incessant German shelling that pounded the streets and avenues of city, starved in their unheated apartments and hospitals and froze to death in the frigid cold and deep snow of the brutal Russian winter.

It is also believed that some even died to feed a thriving market in human flesh that sprang up in The Haymarket, a great peasant market before the war but now operated by fat, oily, steel-eyed men and women, the most terrible people of their day. There is no question people practiced cannibalism on a large scale during the darkest and most desperate months of the siege: the evidence clearly shows that people butchered corpses on a widespread basis.

More people died in the Leningrad blockade than ever died in a modern city – anywhere and anytime. But 600,000 people remained when the Russians finally broke the siege and Salisbury weaves the stories of these survivors, and those who died in this city of ice and death, through the fabric of this searing narrative.

Review by Peter Critchley from the Vernon Branch of the ORL