Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, eds., The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, trans. of documents by Marian Schwartz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. xxix + 486 pp. $75.00

The war on the Eastern Front was not “the good war” remembered in the West but a total war fought by totalitarian regimes capable of mass mobilization that the Western democracies did not and could not match. Two cities represented the greatest excesses of the Vernichtungskrieg, the ideological war of annihilation without limit on the use of force or reference to political objectives: Warsaw was destroyed by its occupiers, and Leningrad was subjected to material privation by the symbiotic relationship between besiegers and defenders. In both cases, the end result was the mass loss of civilian life. In Warsaw this came in stages from 1939 to 1944 with first the conquest of the city, then the destruction of the ghetto, and finally the destruction of the rest of the city. Leningrad was one long narrative, from the isolation of the city on 8 September 1941, through the winter of...