On June 22nd, 1941, the German armies crossed the Russian frontiers. Within six weeks Army Group North were within 30 miles of Leningrad, an advance of over 400 miles. A month later the Germans had all but completed the city's encirclement; only a perilous route across Lake Ladoga connected Leningrad with the rest of Russia. The Germans got no further. Nine hundred days later their retreat began. It is of this epic siege - the longest endured by any city since biblical times - and of the fantastic blitzkreig that preceded it that Harrison Salisbury now tells in one of the great books about World War II. The siege was endured by more than three million people of whom nearly one half died, most of them in the first six months when the temperature fell to 30° below zero and there was no heat, light, transport, food or water. It was a time when cannibalism became known again, and equally citizens became heroes - artists, writers, soldiers, sailors whose daily life the author describes in horrifying and moving detail. Harrison Salisbury has been assembling the material for this story for twenty-five years. He went to Leningrad when the siege was lifted in January, 1944. He later was given access to Russian archives and secret records only made available after Stalin's death. Much of the story is still unknown inside Russia, little of it is known to the rest of the world. Stalin, as the author shows, did his best to keep it secret. Three years after the war ended he caused almost every official who had helped in the city's survival to be executed, Harrison Salisbury has defeated the Russian dictator's evil purpose; he has given us the whole stark, heroic panorama of events
