“When the War Came” -- The Decemberists
We in the West often view the Second World War as belonging to us. And indeed many nations of Western Europe suffered horribly under German occupation. In reality, however, the Western Front was a sideshow in Hitler’s war. From the beginning, the Führer’s eyes were firmly fixed on the East. Hitler’s dreams were rooted in Poland and European Russia, and it was there his dreams were crushed. By the time the Western Armies landed at Normandy in June of 1944, the Red Army had already shattered the backbone of the Wehrmacht, and were rapidly closing in on Germany’s frontiers: Although Hitler adamantly refused to admit so publicly, he had gambled and lost everything.
So what did Hitler hope to accomplish? In short, he dreamed of establishing a new German Empire on the ruins of Poland and the European Republics of the Soviet Union. The Slavic inhabitants of these regions were to be reduced by starvation or liquidation to a small, uneducated slave labor force allowed to survive only so long as it proved useful to the homesteads of the Master Race the Nazies hoped to establish.
Hitler’s plans called for every trace of Slavic civilization to be completely eradicated. Cities of cultural or historical importance -- Warsaw, Stalingrad, and Leningrad for example -- would be razed and erased from existence, their inhabitants slaughtered. When people speak of Hitler's failure to force the surrender of Leningrad, they miss the point: Hitler never intended to capture Leningrad. Hitler’s goal was made clear in a directive to commanders of Army Group North shortly after the city was enveloped:
"After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban center. ... Following the city's encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population."
Within those outlying regions of Leningrad occupied by the German armies, this directive was carried out to horrifying effect. Entire communities were wiped from existence. The palaces of the Czars and other historic landmarks were utterly destroyed after their art and valuables were removed for transport to Germany where they would find their way into the private collections of Nazi leaders.
Starvation was the major cause of death. There were numerous cases in which people murdered their fellow citizens to gain possession of their ration cards. Even more gruesome were the thankfully rare situations in which desperate men and women, driven mad by hunger, partook in cannibalism. German artillery and air raids, often targeting schools and hospitals, added to the human toll.
According to many historians, the siege of Leningrad was the longest and perhaps the costliest in all human history. According to Soviet records, the pre-war population of Leningrad exceeded three-million inhabitants. Over the course of the siege, the Soviets managed to evacuate about 1,700,000 citizens, mostly across the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga during the cold Russian winters. Of those remaining in city, about one-million perished in the nearly 900-day siege.
Leningrad dairist Tanya Savicheva was 11-years-old when German forces descended on her city. She and her fellow children were employed digging anti-tank trenches, an indication of Soviet desperation. Her diary tells of her family's constant thinning over the course of the siege: It describes the deaths of her sister, then her grandmother, her brother, her uncle, then another uncle, and finally her mother. The last entries of Tanya’s diary read:
"Savichevs died."
"Everyone died."
“Only Tanya is left."
In August, 1942 Tanya was one of 140 children evacuated from the city, but stress and hunger had already ensured her demise. A teacher at the orphanage receiving Tanya wrote her brother, “ "Tanya is now alive, but she doesn't look healthy. A doctor, who visited her recently, says she is very ill. She needs rest, special care, nutrition, better climate and, most of all, tender motherly care." Such things were luxuries in Stalin's Soviet Union, even before the German invasion, and poor Tanya succumbed to intestine tuberculosis on 1 July 1944 at the age of 14.
Also among the victims of the siege were the famed dogs of the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Leningrad. It was there that the remarkable Ivan Pavlov had begun his experiments some five decades earlier. Dr. Pavlov died of natural causes in 1936, but his research continued. But during the starving time, the Institute’s dogs were eaten by the hungry people of Leningrad.
In 2006, the American band the Decemberists released this heart-wrenching song about that horrible time. Songwriter and lead singer Colin Meloy explains:
"The last great book I read was Hunger by Elise Blackwell. It's about the siege of Leningrad in World War II, and there was a botanical institute. During the siege, which lasted a long time, the entire population were starving, but all of the botanists in the institute swore themselves to protect the catalog of seeds and plants and things, from not only a starving population, but also from themselves. It's pretty amazing. I actually ended up writing ‘When the War Came,’ a song on the new record, about that."
Since this is a post about Russian history, I would be amiss were were I not to mention the origin of the band’s name.
On 26 December 1825 -- or 14 December by the Julian calendar which remained in use by Russia until 14 February 1918 -- Russian army officers led some 3,000 or so soldiers in a protest against Nicholas I, the new Czar. Following the death of Alexander I of Russia the previous month, Konstantin Pavlovich, the deceased ruler’s younger brother was next in line for the Russian throne. Reform-minded army officers, inspired by liberal sentiments unleashed by the French Revolution and perhaps even the American Declaration of Independance, viewing him as being more amenable to reform than were other members of the Ancien Régime, swore allegiance to Konstantin. These hopes were dashed when Konstantin elected to renounce the throne in favor of yet an even younger brother, the aforementioned Nicholas, thus leading the mutineers’ officers to take the fatal step of refusing to recognize the legimancy of the new Czar. The rebels, who would eventually become known as the Decemberists, were similarly mistaken in seeing in Konstantin a leader receptive to western-style liberalization and the reformation of serfdom, but that is another story. The band which painted this portrait of the awful Siege of Leningrad choose as its name the title history has assigned to the failed revolutionaries of 1825 Russia.
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