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Did Covid make it feel like your life was under siege? You don’t know siege. Leningrad in World War II was a fucking siege. It was the deadliest siege the world has ever known, and if you were there, you were in what historians refer to as the “wrong fucking place at the wrong fucking time.”
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 27, 1944--
It began on September 8, 1941 and ended 872 days later on January 27, 1944. The in-between time could teach things that suck how to suck. It was eastern front WWII, Germany vs. Soviets, but did you know Finland fought on the side of the fucking Nazis? True story. Finland, we thought you were cool. Anyway, they were only a little bit Nazi collaborators, which I guess makes it okay (sarcasm). They only fought with Germany long enough to recapture territory Soviets took from them in 1939 during the Winter War. Finland did eventually join the winning anti-Nazi team in the final year of the war.
There have been longer sieges, but not more brutal ones. At the beginning of the siege there were 2.5 million people living in Leningrad, but by the time it was over, more than a million of them would be dead, mostly due to starvation. It was no picnic for the German attackers either, as they suffered over a half million casualties.
Some historians classify the siege as a purposeful genocide, which we all know Nazis had no problem with, as starvation was purposefully weaponized by Germany to take as many civilian lives as possible. It wasn’t just starvation that killed, the Germans also used artillery and aerial bombardment. This indirectly contributed to the starvation, as early in the siege such bombardment hit food warehouses, and the subsequent fires (using incendiary bombs, because of course) burned up most of the stored food.
Food rationing was strict, money was irrelevant. People ate their pets and the animals in the zoo. Old leather was boiled and eaten. Fellow human beings were eaten. But it could have been worse. Leningrad has the Baltic Sea on the west side, and Lake Ladoga on the east. During the winter, the Soviet Red Army was able to keep supplies flowing into Leningrad across the frozen lake, and via boats in the warmer months. They called it The Road of Life. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
The Siege of Leningrad was the single largest loss of life in a modern city. It wasn’t just those living in the city that died. Over a million people were evacuated early in the siege, mostly women and children, and many of them died from bombardment and starvation as they fled the city.
So maybe don’t complain so much about how your social life took a hit due to Covid.
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