City of Thieves by David Benioff

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This was our book club book for last month. I was unfortunately unable to attend the meeting due to an orchestra concert, but I decided to grab the audiobook anyway. 

 

David Benioff is the pen name for David Friedman - he chose to use his mother’s maiden name because he figured there were already too many David Friedmans writing, and he wanted his own recognition. 

 

Benioff is primarily known for his screenwriting - specifically Game of Thrones, but quite a few others. City of Thieves is his second novel, written in 2008. It is historical fiction that apparently draws some ideas from his own family heritage. 

 

It is easy to forget, as Americans, that the USSR played a huge role in World War Two. There is a solid argument to be made that Hitler would have conquered Europe had he not made the fatal mistake - one made by Napoleon as well - to invade the USSR/Russia. Had Hitler simply kept his treaty with Stalin, rather than launching Operation Barbarossa, he would have been able to concentrate his forces on defeating England. 

 

Hitler’s goal was understandable enough. In his view, the superior German (Aryan) people needed more land and resources. Taking inspiration from the Native American Genocide, he intended to displace the native Slavic peoples, starve them, send them to Siberia, and take the land for himself. 

 

Oh, and he also murdered a million Russian Jews. 

 

While Hitler ultimately failed in his goal - after some initial success, the Eastern Front turned into a ghastly war of attrition - the largest and most deadly land war in history. The Princess Bride would get a good line out of this: “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders – the most famous of which is 'never get involved in a land war in Asia,’”

 

But the brutal reality is that millions died either in combat or from starvation and disease. In the end, the USSR suffered the most casualties of any country in the war, many of them civilians, women and children. 

 

One of the central battles of that land war was the siege of Leningrad. Hitler focused on that city in no small part because of its name, believe it or not. The Nazi rhetoric depended on painting Communism as the great threat that they defended the German people against, and Communism was considered a Jewish plot. The former St. Petersburg, now named after Lenin, represented all that was bad about Jews and Communism and the USSR to Hitler, and thus he determined to wipe the city off the face of the earth. 

 

This siege was probably the worst in history, and the percentage of residents who died of starvation rivaled even the darkest days of the Black Death centuries before. 

 

City of Thieves is set during that siege. 

 

Lev, a Jewish teen who has chosen to stay behind when his mother and siblings evacuated, makes a fateful decision that starts his life on a crazy trajectory over the course of a week. 

 

Lev’s father was a respected poet, who was denounced by another poet for using the nickname for Leningrad - “Peter” - in his poems. The NKVD arrested and disappeared him. Since then, Lev had been part of a fire spotting brigade for his building - attempting to put out fires from the bombing raids. 

 

When a dead German pilot lands in his street after bailing out, Lev and his friends illegally loot the body. The others escape, but Lev is caught. Facing the death penalty, he finds himself with a young soldier, Kolya, who is accused of deserting. 

 

Kolya insists he is no deserter - as we later find out, he just snuck out of a New Years party to go chase tail, and got stuck in town. Thinking with one’s dick rarely ends well. 

 

The NKVD colonel who sees them the next morning offers them a reprieve…if they accept a difficult task. See, his daughter is getting married next week, and the cake requires eggs. Which have become impossible to acquire in the starving city. 

 

What else can one do? Lev and Kolya set off looking for eggs. 

 

Who is Kolya? Well, he was a literature student before being conscripted, and he is taking notes to write the next Great Russian Novel. He also is bold, fearless, and larger than life. He has a dark sense of humor that poor Lev finds tiring. 

 

But they are stuck together, and find themselves on an adventure. 

 

I should give a warning here: this book is brutally violent. Which is to say, it is realistic about the horrors of war. Lots of people die, in horrid ways. Women are forced into sex slavery. The militaries on both sides show a casual disregard for human life - although the Germans are the worst because of their deliberate targeting of civilians for extermination or enslavement. 

 

There is also plenty of language, and sex talk. Kolya is vulgar as hell at times, much to the consternation of Lev, who has zero experience with sex. 

 

Some of the episodes in the book include discovering cannibals in Leningrad (in real life, there were rumors, but little substance), sneaking through enemy lines in the countryside, discovering a farmhouse where local girls were held as sex slaves for German officers, an encounter with Russian partisan paramilitaries, and a climactic scene where Lev gets to kill a particularly horrid Einsatzgruppen officer. 

 

The book is humorous at times, but in a dark way. Which is about all you can expect given the historical setting. In some ways, the only thing that keeps the book from being a tragedy is that you know Lev survives, because the framing story is Lev’s grandson hearing the story so he can use it as a school project. We also know from the outset that Lev will meet his future wife in the story. But it is not entirely clear until the end which of the several candidates will turn out to be her. 

 

There are a few things in the book that I want to note as well done. First, Benioff did a lot of research for the book, and it really shows. From getting the weapons right - which guns are carried by which people for example - to the complexities of ethnicities within the cosmopolitan city. Whenever there is a detail, the author seems to have done the work to be accurate. This is not the case in every work of historical fiction I have read, to put it mildly. 

 

I also will give serious points for getting the chess game in the climactic scene right. I assume Benioff knows the game, given his descriptions of the moves and strategy. Now, there isn’t enough detail to recreate the game - that would make for boring reading. But from the opening to the endgame, and the strategic decisions made in the middle, it all tracks. 

 

Another good characteristic of the book is that it captures the many moral impossibilities facing everyone in a horrid situation. For the peasants: do they give away some of their precious food to sustain the partisans? If they get caught, the Germans wipe out the whole village. If they betray the partisans, they will be killed in response. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

 

Benioff also understands one reason that the Germans were unable to break the Russian people. Intelligent conquerors know they need carrots along with the sticks. You have to offer the people of the country you invade something as a benefit. The Germans offered only extermination and genocide. If people understand they die either way, they tend to go down with quite a lot of fight. 

 

My one disappointment in the book was that, amid all the focus on Lev and Kolya, we never really get a full backstory on any of the women. There is much that is left obscure. Maybe we just need a sequel from Vika’s point of view - that could be quite the story. 

 

Again with this book, I really felt it captured the senselessness and stupidity of war. For the USSR in this case, they were invaded, and threatened with genocide. They had no choice for peace. Germany, on the other hand, had no excuses.

 

There really are only two good things to have come out of the Siege of Leningrad. First, because Germany lost the war, it finally had to take a hard look in the mirror and make changes. The United States could learn a lot from how Germany went about ridding the country of Nazis and Nazi propaganda. By acknowledging the atrocities it committed, it was able to find a better path forward. Had we done that regarding our own national sin of white supremacy, I believe we would be a far better and stronger country today. 

 

The other positive was that for the first time in history, international law eventually banned starvation of civilians as a legitimate technique in war. Not that the rules are followed, unfortunately. That is the tragedy of our crumbling international rules-based order in our time. 

 

I doubt I would have discovered this book had our club not chosen it. Which is one of the reasons I am part of the club - it is a great way to expand my reading beyond the usual choices. 

 

You can check out the list of books our club has read that I have also blogged about here.