Leningrad

One of the stories of WWII that has always deserved a lot more attention than it has usually gotten is the Siege of Leningrad. The Nazis blockaded the city, cutting it off from the outside world for over two years. Over a million Leningraders perished, mainly due to starvation. Aleksandr Buravsky's "Attack on Leningrad" is set amid this atrocity. It focuses on an English journalist (Mira Sorvino) caught in the city when the Nazis blockade it, although the main focus is her relationships with people in an apartment building as they all struggle to survive.

A previous review criticized the movie for concentrating more on the journalist than on the horror that the city experienced. Maybe that's true, but I still thought that it was a good movie. Obviously it can't accurately depict the tragedy that Leningrad suffered, but it does still look at this important part of history. At least that's my interpretation.

I have not yet seen the film, but as a World War 2 historian just the previews hit pretty hard ... the scene dramatizing the historical photos of people pulling sleighs with little bodies on them, for example ... and I shall try to find a copy around Oslo to watch, to complete this.

The reviewer who expressed doubt the Russians would mount an unsupported infantry attack across open ground is wrong. In the first years of the war, many Russian lives were wasted in such desperate attacks, often forced at gunpoint by NKVD political commissars.

Defense Minister Voroshilov - one of only two of five prewar Red Army marshals to survive the NKVD purges of the Red Army ordered by Stalin - had been sent to Leningrad to personally defend it, and he personally led one of these desperate counterattacks.

I will be interested to see if there are any sequences of K(limenti)V(oroshilov) tanks rolling out of the Kirov tank works and directly into battle? On my CoatneyHistory webpage, I have a free little boardgame titled Leningrad 1941: the Embattled City, about the early Wehrmacht onslaught (until the Germans shifted panzer and infantry forces to the attack on Moscow), with a dedication to its people.

The theme of my webpages is "The more we learn about the Second World War, the better our chances it will be the LAST world war." We NEVER want another one, and this film looks like it inescapably shows how the innocent - especially children - suffer most.

By the way, the pretty Russian actress who played Natalia in Sergey Bondarshuk's epic 1966 War and Peace film, Lyudmila Saveleva, was born in Leningrad on 24 January 1942, during the worst of the siege and starvation.

Lou Coatney

April 2019:

I have now seen the film, checked out on interlibrary loan here in Norway, and it is exactly as grim as I had expected, showcasing the innocent ... especially children ... starving.

I suspect the improvised armored car rolling out of the Kirov tank factory (which had been evacuated in time, I understand) may have been out of a museum.

The suggestion of intimacy between the female characters recalls the lesbian portrayal of the Russian female sniper (and Eleanor Roosevelt's interest in her) in that film. Female homosexuality seems to be more tolerated in Russia, unlike male homosexuality.

I am reading that Hitler decided not to take the casualties a block-by-block (Stalingrad later) battle would have required, and instead just wanted to starve Leningrad to death. One of those who died ... of malnutrition and disease ... was Vladimir Putin's 3 year old brother Viktor, whom he never knew. Both his parents nearly died in the war - his father on a commando mission from which he was permanently wounded and his mother found by his father already in the morgue, expected to die and somehow brought back to life.

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was a racist war of enslavement and extermination, and its 27 million deaths toll, should be considered and made part of the Nazi Holocaust's total.

After such a holocaust, the Russian people fear another (from the West) just like Jewish people.

Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Buravsky seems to have been chasing Hollywood aesthetics his entire career. His 1995 film SACRED CARGO was filled with B-list American stars and seemed to hide its Russian roots, but with LENINGRAD (aka Attack on Leningard) he's finally got the budget and the balance right. Boasting a huge budget, it looks as good as any American World War 2 drama and stars Mira Sorvino, Gabriel Byrne and Armin Mueller-Stahl. But significantly this is not a film designed strictly to appeal to the international market, LENINGRAD is first and foremost a Russian film. Although at first it seems the Hollywood performers are just window dressing, that does seem to be the case with Byrne and Mueller-Stahl, Sorvino actually plays a key role and shares leading lady duties with native actress Olga Sutulova. Sorvino is a bit miscast as an English journalist (bad accent) stranded in the starving city of Leningard, but delivers a good performance and it's possibly the most credible of the myriad Hollywood Effect movies produced in Russia to date. An interesting story, strong production values and engaging performances make this very satisfying viewing. But those seeking typically macho fare should look elsewhere.

With a larger budget 'Leningrad' would have been great.

All ingredients are there. Above all, one of the most horrible scenes in history of mankind: the Nazi-siege + deliberate starvation of Leningrad, nowadays St. Petersburg. Russia's second city, renowned for its magnificent architecture. This siege from 1941-'44 caused a few million casualties, and an unending amount of human suffering.

'Leningrad' deserves praise for its research: the wartime Soviet-society from Stalin's days is well reflected. The film also is adequately in touch with the harshness of the North Russian winter. And the almost unparallelled tragedy of this siege comes out beyond doubt.

After this we arrive at 'Leningrad's weak points: its acting is barely adequate, and its shooting no more than mediocre. A severe tragedy like this surely deserves a lot more dignity and respect than shown here.

'Some fight. Others fall. All are heroes.' ATTACK ON LENINGRAD as written and directed by Aleksandr Buravsky does indeed address one of the longest and costliest sieges in the history of war. History books relate it as follows: 'This was undoubtedly the most tragic period in the history of the city, a period full of suffering and heroism. For everyone who lives in St. Petersburg the Blokada (the Siege) of Leningrad is an important part of the city's heritage and a painful memory for the population's older generations. Less than two and a half months after the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany, German troops were already approaching Leningrad. The Red Army was outflanked and on September 8 1941 the Germans had fully encircled Leningrad and the siege began. The siege lasted for a total of 900 days, from September 8 1941 until January 27 1944. The city's almost 3 million civilians (including about 400,000 children) refused to surrender and endured rapidly increasing hardships in the encircled city. Food and fuel stocks were limited to a mere 1-2 month supply, public transport was not operational and by the winter of 1941-42 there was no heating, no water supply, almost no electricity and very little food. In January 1942 in the depths of an unusually cold winter, the city's food rations reached an all time low of only 125 grams (about 1/4 of a pound) of bread per person per day. In just two months, January and February of 1942, 200,000 people died in Leningrad of cold and starvation. Despite these tragic losses and the inhuman conditions the city's war industries still continued to work and the city did not surrender.' Buravsky made a tough decision in this film - whether to sow all the tragedy of a grand scale or reduce it to an examination of the effects of this heinous event as it affected the lives of a few characters. He elected to choose the latter approach which is one reason this film stands tall among the many films about the Siege of Leningrad. Yes, there are reenactments of the battles at the beginning of the film (and the atrocities throughout the film) but Buravsky focuses on three cultures in the form of individuals - the Russians, the Germans, and the British - and is careful to present the extremes of all three groups in telling his story.

The time is 1941 and Kate Davis (Mira Sorvino) is a British journalist who pleads with fellow journalist Philip Parker (Gabriel Byrne) to be assigned to the war front. She succeeds and is assigned to Leningrad where very quickly she is separated from her confrères and is left, wounded, inside the city of Leningrad as the Germans attempt to destroy the city and conquer Russia. Kate speaks little to no Russian, is discovered by Nina Tsvetkova (Olga Sutulova), a member of the Russian resistance, and takes Kate to safety where she becomes friends with children Sima and Yura Krasko (the brother is severely handicapped), manages to write articles about the war around her when she receives a typewriter as a gift, and in general aids the Russians in surviving the lack of food an supplies and support. The film includes vignettes of the Nazi's involvement (meetings with Hitler as portrayed by Eckehard Hoffmann and Armin Mueller-Stahl as von Leeb, et al) and the Russian military and political groups to keep the action plausible. But by far the main point of the film is to honor the citizens of Leningrad as they struggled to survive - with some caring help from the outside.

The film is in Russian, German, and English with subtitles; the choice is solid for keeping the atmosphere but the mix of the three languages seems to stall the propulsion of the action in many spots. The screenplay is more concerned with depicting the sense of the event than it is in providing a dialogue of sophistication. But the actors make the best of the script: Mira Sorvino, Gabriel Byrne, and Olga Sutulova are strong enough to carry the film. This may not be the best of the films about this subject, but it is certainly one of the most successful depictions of the degree of human suffering war inflicts - and for that reason it is worthy of a larger audience.

Grady Harp