January
28, 2024
Montréal
(Special to Informed Comment) – Eighty years ago, on January 27, 1944, people
in the street were hugging each other and weeping with joy. They were
celebrating the end of a nearly 900 days brutal siege. Soviet forces lifted the
siege of Leningrad after ferocious battles. Exactly a year later they liberated
Auschwitz. Even today, walking in Saint-Petersburg’s main avenue, the Nevsky
Prospect, one notices a blue sign painted on a wall during the siege:
“Citizens! This side of the street is the most dangerous during artillery
shelling”.
The
siege was enforced by armies and navies which had come from Germany, Finland,
Italy, Spain, and Norway. It was part of a war started by a coalition of forces
from around Europe led by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941.
The
goal of the war against the Soviet Union was different from the war Germany had
waged in Western Europe. On the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler
declared that “the empire in the east is ripe for dismemberment”. Germany
sought new living space (Lebensraum) but did not need the people who lived on
it. Most of them were despised as subhuman (Untermenschen) and destined to be
killed, starved or enslaved. Their land was to be given to “Aryan” settlers. To
make his point in racial terms familiar to the Europeans, Hitler referred to
the Soviet population as “Asians”.
Indeed,
the war against the Soviet Union had aspects of a colonial war: millions of
Soviet civilians – Slavs, Jews, Gypsies (Roma) and others – were systematically
put to death. This surpassed Germany’s genocide in Southwest Africa (today’s
Namibia) in 1904-1908 when it just as systematically massacred the local tribes
of Herero and Namas. True, Germany was not exceptional: this was common
practice among European colonial powers.
The
intentions of the Nazi invaders were summarized succinctly:
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.
As
one of the Nazi commanders enforcing the siege put it, “we shall put the
Bolsheviks on a strict diet”.
The
last rail line linking the city with the rest of the Soviet Union was severed
on August 30, 1941, a week later the last road was occupied by the invaders.
The city was completely encircled, supplies of food and fuel dried up, and a
severe winter set in. The little that the Soviet government succeeded in
delivering to Leningrad was rationed. At one time, the daily ration was reduced
to 125 grams of bread made as much of sawdust as of flour. Many did not get
even that, and people were forced to eat cats, dogs, wallpaper glue, and there
were a few cases of cannibalism. Dead bodies littered the streets as people
were dying of hunger, disease, cold and bombardment.
Leningrad,
a city of 3.4 million people, lost over one third of its population. This was
the largest loss of life in a modern city. The former imperial capital famous
for its magnificent palaces, elegant gardens and breathtaking vistas was
methodically bombed and shelled. Over 10 000 buildings were either destroyed or
damaged. This was part of the invaders’ drive to demodernize the Soviet Union,
to throw it back in time. Leningrad had to be wiped out precisely because it
was a major centre of science and engineering, home to writers and ballet
dancers, the see of famous universities and art museums. None was to survive in
the Nazi plans.
Sadly,
neither sieges, nor colonial wars ended in 1945. Britain, France and the
Netherlands waged brutal wars of “pacification” in their colonies long after
Nazism was defeated. Racism was still official in the United States, another
ally in the fight against Nazism. Twelve years after the war, it took the 101st
Airborne Division to enable nine black students to attend a school in Little
Rock, Arkansas. Today’s Western values of tolerance are recent and fragile.
Overt racism is no longer acceptable, but its impact is still with us.
Human
lives do not have the same value either in our media, or in our foreign
policies. The death of an Israeli attracts more media attention that that of a
Palestinian. Severe sanctions are imposed on Iran for its civilian nuclear
enrichment program while none are imposed on Israel for its military nuclear
arsenal. And, of course, Western powers continue to provide arms and political
support for the siege of Gaza, where civilian population is not only bombed and
shelled, but deliberately starved and let die of disease. The International
Court of Justice confirmed “plausible genocide”, even though it failed to stop
Israel.
Commemoration
of the siege of Leningrad should prompt us to put an end to all racism, to stop
the siege of Gaza and to prevent such atrocities in the future. Otherwise, the
accusation thrown in the face of the European citizen by the Martinican poet
Aimé Césaire in 1955 would remain still valid:
.. what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not
crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as
such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man,
and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then
had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India,
and the blacks of Africa.”
No comments:
Post a Comment