Siege of Leningrad

On 8 September 1941 German forces cut the last land route into Leningrad, and the city of about three million people was besieged for the next 872 days. Hitler had decided to starve the city rather than storm it. In the winter of 1941 to 1942 rations fell to a few slices of bread a day, and hundreds of thousands of people died of hunger and cold. Supplies and evacuees crossed the frozen Lake Ladoga on the ice road the people called the Road of Life, while factories kept producing under shellfire. A narrow land corridor was opened in January 1943, and the siege was lifted in January 1944.

The siege is the central memory of the war for the people of Saint Petersburg, and one the Soviet state shaped for decades by stressing heroism over suffering. After 1991 diaries and archives gave a fuller picture: hunger, crime and cannibalism, and the decisions of the party leadership. Historians still dispute the numbers of dead, with the Soviet figure of about 632,000 civilians often treated as too low. There has also been debate about whether the city could have been surrendered or declared open, a question that caused a public storm in Russia in 2014.