In September 1941, the German Wehrmacht put the Soviet city of Leningrad under siege. It would not be lifted for almost 900 days.
By that time, the toll on the
city and its inhabitants had become immense. Shortly before the siege began,
around 400,000 people, mostly children, were hurriedly evacuated. Those left
behind were subjected to daily bombardment, starvation, and chronic fuel
shortages.
By the end of the siege, in January
1944, some 800,000 people had died of starvation and up to 200,000 more had
been killed by military attacks or in fighting to defend the city.
Leningrad as the Destruction of the Urban Environment
The siege of Leningrad was
conducted as part of Nazi Germany’s murderous and genocidal campaign against the Soviet
Union and its peoples, both as the supposed world centre of a “Jewish-Bolshevik” conspiracy and
against its “sub-human” Slavic population.
As such, it represents a clear
case of the attempted physical extermination of (several) peoples; in other words,
genocide.
Yet the targeting of the city itself
also speaks to the deliberate and calculated destruction of its urban environment.
As historian Richard Overy, in Russia’s War, describes it:
Every day like clockwork the shells would fall: from eight o’clock until nine in the morning; for an hour before noon; from five until six in the afternoon; and finally a two-hour shelling between eight and ten at night. The shell bursts left great craters in the road, which filled with ice, mud and refuse. Buildings crumbled and cracked; debris lay uncleared in the streets. Transport came to a halt. Electricity was rationed […]. […] The shelling gave way each day to air attacks. German airmen were ordered deliberately to promote the slow death of the city by bombing food stores, power-plants and water-works.
Leningrad is by no means the only city to have been targeted in
this way through history. In the case of the USSR in World War Two, it sits
alongside Stalingrad, which was systematically and almost entirely destroyed
during the bitterest fighting between the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht.
Outside the USSR, huge sections of the city of Warsaw were razed by the Nazis, first
in 1943 through the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto following the uprising of
its Jewish population, then in 1944 following the Warsaw Uprising.
These instances fit into a much broader history of the destruction
of cities. The best known of these fall in the modern period, including Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, Dresden, and London in World War Two, and Guernica in the Spanish
Civil War. In the 1990s, Mostar and Sarajevo in Bosnia were systematically
bombarded by Croat forces, while the Russian military virtually annihilated the
Chechen capital city of Grozny.
Today, all urban centres in Gaza have been methodically flattened
by the IDF in retaliation for the 7 October 2023 terror attacks on Israel,
while over the border in Syria huge chunks of the city of Aleppo (back in the news
following the astonishing collapse of Assad’s regime) have been obliterated by
a combination of Syrian and Russian terror-bombing. Russia’s war of aggression
against Ukraine has seen the annihilation of entire urban centres in the east
of the country, most notably Mariupol.
Yet this is not an entirely new phenomenon. Scholars of urban
destruction also note cases that go back to antiquity, including the example of
the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE and the later Mongol attacks on
cities across Eurasia.
Conceptualising
“Urbicide”
Increasingly, and especially after returning to and reworking a
KS3 scheme on the Spanish Civil War, I’ve begun to consider these attacks on
urban space as part of a discreet historical phenomenon: urbicide.
This term, particularly associated with the geography of conflict and
coined by Bosnian commentators in the 1990s, has been broadly defined as “the
destruction of whole or parts of the built environment for political and
military ends.” Yet this destruction frequently has a logic of its own, and can
be seen as driven by a desire to obliterate and extinguish the collective
identities embodied by those urban spaces. In this sense, according to Martin
Coward, urbicide should be seen as the targeting of buildings and cities as “that
which constitutes the possibility of community, or being-with-others.”
According to this definition, urbicide closely correlates with the
crime of genocide, as the attempted destruction of a people or nation as
such. Indeed, Rafael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term “genocide”,
highlighted the Roman destruction of Carthage as an ancient example of
destruction of a people. The Nazis’ attempted destruction of Jews and Slavs
likewise witnessed the targeting of Warsaw and other cities, while current
accusations of genocide committed by the State of Israel against the
Palestinians hinge to a considerable degree on the calculated destruction ofGaza’s urban infrastructure.
Yet in fundamental ways, urbicide is distinct from genocide. While inevitably entailing massive human casualties, it targets the built environment as such, seeking to erase cities and their identities for particular purposes. Moreover, unlike the concept of genocide, urbicide has been far less politicised and, as a descriptive and analytical rather than legal category, does not require a legal threshold to be reached (something which makes genocide today notoriously difficult to prove).
Using “Urbicide”
to Understand Leningrad in Context
At this point, I’d like to propose urbicide as a potentially powerful
tool for teaching histories such as Leningrad’s. This, I think, is for at least
three reasons.
- Conceptually, it provides students with a term to describe the destruction of urban environments and targeting of cities, enabling them to express the intentions and actions of aggressors in conflict.
- Historically, it provides students with a temporal schema by which to trace the origins of military targeting of cities. (This is an idea which I partially explored in my KS3 scheme of work on the Spanish Civil War, which draws links between Guernica and the aerial bombardment of cities in the Second World War several years later. That scheme of work and rationale has recently been added to the SHP’s “Curriculum PATHS” website and can be found here.)
- Morally, it also provides students with a tool to make links between events in the past and the brutal world they see around them, providing them with a means to critique and challenge the logic of massive urban destruction put forward by regimes which terrorise their own, and their neighbours’, populations in this way today.
In the case of the siege of Leningrad, my intention is to begin
teaching this explicitly as a historically rooted example of urbicide, one
following a pattern and practice of aggression established by Nazi Germany from
its trial run in Spain, in particular with the annihilation of Guernica in 1937, and
subsequently to be repeated time and time again through to the present day.
Guernica during the Spanish Civil War was a loyalist-held Basque town
with no discernible military value but huge symbolic importance to the local
population. Indeed, as Paul Preston has demonstrated, the military case for its
destruction – a local weapons factory which was about to be captured by Franco’s
forces and a nearby bridge which was left intact by the bombing – is entirely
undermined by the evidence. Instead, as the historic capital of the Basque country
and a substantial and undefended population centre, Guernica presented Franco’s
Nazi allies with a prime opportunity to demoralise the local population and to
test out the new and awesome destructive capabilities of their air force, the Luftwaffe, ahead of broader future conflicts.
Like Guernica, the destruction of Leningrad had considerable
symbolic significance to the Nazis’ genocidal war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg)
in World War Two (although, unlike Guernica, the city also had genuine
political and military significance as a centre of regional and national government
and industry). It had been the heart of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and therefore
represented the focal-point of the Nazis’ imagined Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy.
In longer-term perspective, the city also represented the historic western
outpost of Russian state power, established by Peter the Great as his “window
onto the west”. At the same time, there was a straightforwardly brutal human
aim for the siege during World War Two; to starve and pummel the population,
and its strategically vital city, into submission and thereby hasten the fall
of the USSR.
Within a Russian and Soviet context, urbicide would be perpetrated
again after the Second World War, this time by the Russian and Soviet military.
In the late-1970s and 1980s, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the
designation of virtually all parts of the country and its infrastructure as
military targets gave rise to a strategy of “rubbleisation”. This would be replicated
following the fall of the USSR when the Russian military devastated Chechnyaand its capital city, Grozny, in two successive wars, as well as during the
aerial bombardment of rebel-controlled parts of Syrian cities including Aleppo in support of Russia’s ally, the now-deposed president Bashar Al-Assad.
Further
Reading
Martin Coward, Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction,
Routledge (2009)
Derek Gregory, Rob Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael Watts, and
Sarah Whatmore (eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography (Fifth Edition),
Wiley-Blackwell (2009)
Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Third Edition),
Routledge (2017), esp. pp. 37-39
Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort,
1941-1945, Penguin (1998)
Paul Preston, The Destruction of Guernica, Harper Press (2012)
Alisdair Rogers, Noel Castree, and Rob Kitchin, A Dictionary of
Human Geography, Oxford University Press (2013)
Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, “900 Days” (brief and excellent
account of the siege of Leningrad: https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1943-2/900-days/
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