Siege of Leningrad

For 872 days, from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944, German and Finnish forces cut off Leningrad, today's Saint Petersburg, the second city of the Soviet Union. The Germans chose to starve and bombard the city rather than storm it. It never fell, but the blockade was one of the deadliest sieges in history: estimates of the total dead, soldiers and civilians together, range from about 1.3 million to 2 million.

Leningrad was one of the three main objectives of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of June 1941. As the former imperial capital, the cradle of the Russian Revolution, the base of the Baltic Fleet and a major centre of arms production, it carried both symbolic and military weight. Over a million civilians were mobilised to dig defences around the city. Adolf Hitler intended not to occupy Leningrad but to destroy it; in September 1941 German planners ruled out taking the city because they would then have to feed its people.

Army Group North, under Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, advanced through the Baltic states and cut the last railway into Leningrad on 30 August 1941. On 8 September its troops reached Lake Ladoga at Shlisselburg, severing the last land route. Finland, seeking to recover territory lost in the Winter War, advanced from the north to roughly its old border on the Karelian Isthmus and to the Svir River east of Lake Ladoga, but its leaders declined to join an assault on the city itself. When Leeb could not break the defences, organised in part by Georgy Zhukov, many of his tanks were sent towards Moscow and the siege settled in.

The first winter was catastrophic. Between November 1941 and February 1942 many inhabitants received only 125 grams of bread a day, much of it made of sawdust and other fillers. With no fuel, no transport and temperatures far below freezing, people died in their homes and in the streets; deaths peaked at around 100,000 a month in January and February 1942. Police records also document cases of cannibalism and many murders for ration cards. German artillery and aircraft kept up their attacks; the heaviest raid, on 19 September 1941, killed about 1,000 people.

The only link with the rest of the country ran across Lake Ladoga. Boats carried supplies in summer, and from 20 November 1941 lorries drove over the frozen lake on the ice road known as the Road of Life, bringing food in and taking evacuees out. Some 1.4 million people, mainly women and children, were evacuated during the siege. On 9 August 1942 Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony was performed in the city and broadcast by loudspeaker towards the German lines.

A Soviet offensive at Sinyavino in the late summer of 1942 failed but forced the Germans to abandon their own plan to take the city. In January 1943 Operation Iskra ("Spark") broke through south of Lake Ladoga, and on 18 January troops of the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts met, opening a narrow land corridor. The siege was finally lifted on 27 January 1944, when the Leningrad–Novgorod offensive drove the Germans from the city's southern outskirts.

The Germans looted and destroyed the imperial palaces outside the city, including the Catherine Palace and Peterhof. Harrison Salisbury estimated over a million deaths from hunger, and David Glantz gave a total of 1.6 to 2 million dead in the battle as a whole. Half a million siege victims are buried at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery. Some historians describe the deliberate starvation of the population as genocide. Economic destruction and loss of life at Leningrad exceeded those of any other single battle of the Eastern Front of World War II, including Stalingrad.

Our 1938 map shows the Soviet Union and Finland on the eve of the war, and the 1945 map shows the borders after the siege had been lifted and the war had ended.