The Siege of Leningrad: History in an Hour

by Rupert Colley

The Führer has decided to wipe the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia there is no interest in the further existence of this large inhabited area. Adolf Hitler

The number of deaths in Leningrad exceeded those who died from the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and constitutes the largest death toll ever recorded in a single city.

over one million died in Leningrad from German bombs and artillery, or from disease, the cold or starvation.

Stalin was no fan of Leningrad – he resented its reputation as the cradle of the Russian Revolution, in which he played only a minor part. 30,000 Leningraders would fall during the Great Purge of the 1930s, arrested, exiled, or executed, labelled as enemies of the people.

40,000 Red Army personnel, deemed politically out of step, were purged.

Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, wrote in his memoirs, ‘There is no question that we would have repelled the Fascist invasion much more easily if the upper echelons of the Red Army command hadn’t been wiped out. They had been men of considerable expertise and experience.’

a war of annihilation. For Hitler, the city of Leningrad held great symbolism, being the birthplace of Bolshevism; his objective was to raze it to the ground and render it uninhabitable.

Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s man in Leningrad, issued orders for the mobilization of the city’s population to bolster its defences.

One woman of fifty-seven years of age, wrote of eighteen-day shifts, twelve hours a day hacking at ground ‘as hard as rock’.

Up to half a million civilians turned out to various points on the outskirts of the city to construct three fortified rings – the furthest, 70 miles west of the city, ran along the River Luga. Their efforts produced 650 miles of trenches, 430 miles of anti-tank ditches, over 5,000 concrete gun emplacements (or pillboxes), and 370 miles of barbed-wire entanglements.

Zhdanov announced the formation of a ‘People’s Volunteers’ Militia’ within Leningrad.

The volunteers received precious little training and were, if lucky, equipped only with out-of-date weapons – old rifles, grenades and instructions on how to make petrol bombs, colloquially known as Molotov cocktails.

Women and children were advised that if the Germans broke into the city, they should pelt them with stones or throw boiling water over them.

Privately owned radios were confiscated, lest civilians were adversely influenced by enemy propaganda.

They were allowed instead to have small loudspeakers within their homes, wired to the city’s public address system, which routinely broadcast patriotic messages and warned against defeatism or cowardice.

Posters, leaflets, noticeboards and newspapers sprung up, all reinforcing the correct message.

The propaganda warned constantly of the enemy within and whipped up a frenzy of spy mania.

Almost 12 per cent of Leningrad’s 1941 population was of German, Finnish or Baltic descent, and many were interned for the duration of the war.

On 18 July, food rationing was introduced. People were given ration cards which expired after one month. Even the issuing of ration cards was designed to keep the population in check and on message. There were four categories, with the highest category allocated the largest ration, so it was in the interest of these people to remain in a position so as not to be relegated to a lower category. Working hard in a manner that was recognized and informing on unreliable elements were two ways of maintaining one’s top category. To begin with, food, if not plentiful, was still available but prices shot up making it unavailable for all unless you were deemed worthy enough of being in the top category. Those working in factories were also allocated an extra ration, which provided a strong incentive for workers to remain at their posts, however weak and malnourished they became.

Factories were urged to increase output, targeting each individual employee to work harder. Notices were posted by each machine, extolling greater effort, ‘Worker, what have you done for the defence of Leningrad?’ Graphs were displayed each day showing the output of every worker. Those who worked hardest were awarded with a little red flag next to their machine, while those who worked less efficiently were shamed into greater effort and, for the repeat offenders, occasionally subjected to a mock trial. In July 1941, the city began to evacuate its industrial output. Factories were dismantled and re-erected as far to the east as Siberia and along with the machinery, much of the skilled workforce went with it.

evacuation was declared compulsory for all children under the age of fourteen.

others wanted to stay in order to welcome in the Germans as liberators.

Throughout the war, there was an underlying sense that life under the Germans could be no worse than under the current regime.

By the end of August over 630,000 civilians had been evacuated. But the city population remained constant as increasing number of refugees, fleeing from the German advance to the west, entered the city. More evacuations were planned, up to 30,000 a day, but when, on 30 August, the town of Mga, 30 miles from Leningrad, was taken by the Germans, the encirclement of the city was virtually complete. There would be no more evacuations. Estimates vary, due to the uncertain number of refugees present in the city, but up to three and a half million Leningraders remained trapped inside. Yet there was only enough food for another three weeks.

When the Germans captured the town of Mga, Leningrad lost its last railway station and its link to the rest of the country was severed.

Leningrad was now virtually an island, cut off from the rest of the country; its people sealed within. It only remained for Hitler to give the order and the city was there for the taking. But Hitler changed tack and decided not to attack the city but to bomb it instead and starve its inhabitants to death.

The German soldier was under strict orders – anyone caught trying to escape the city, man, woman, or child, was to be shot. However, the German command, aware that shooting unarmed women and children could be detrimental to the mental health of the German soldier, ordered the use of artillery which could be applied from a safer distance.

To the east of the city a small corridor of land, a tiny chink, remained in Soviet hands between the Finns on one side and the Germans on the other; a corridor that was to prove a lifeline for the besieged Leningraders.

The men in charge of the defence of Leningrad were Andrei Zhdanov and sixty-year-old Kliment Voroshilov, one of Stalin’s old favourites. Voroshilov had been criticized for his incompetent leadership during the Winter War against Finland and had been dismissed only to be reinstated to save Leningrad. Stalin, aware of Voroshilov’s failings, realized that under such pressure Leningraders would question the regime and his leadership in particular. He needed a man of utter political reliability to instil in Leningrad the right political thinking. And Voroshilov was that man.

With a shortage of weapons, Voroshilov ordered that they should be ‘armed with hunting guns, homemade explosives, sabres and daggers from Leningrad’s museums.’

Stalin had had enough of Voroshilov’s incompetence. He dispatched one of his ablest generals, Georgi Zhukov, a bull-necked, tough commander, to save the situation. Zhukov was flown into Leningrad from Moscow under the cover of cloud but as the clouds dispersed two Messerschmitts pursued his plane. Zhukov landed, was taken to the Smolny Institute, headquarters of Leningrad’s leadership, and arrived still white of face. Zhukov’s first task was to hand Voroshilov an envelope. In it, Voroshilov received his instructions to return to Moscow immediately. Humiliated and probably very afraid, he did so. Whilst Hitler sacked his generals, Stalin had them shot. Voroshilov, accused of ‘serious mistakes made defending Leningrad’, was transferred to a post in the rear where he could do no more harm, but he was saved the executioner’s bullet.

Pet owners were viewed with envy and within a few months hardly a single cat, dog or caged bird could be found anywhere in the city. One writer described the collapse of a cab driver’s horse, ‘People ran up to it with hatchets and knives and hacked off pieces of the horse and carried them home.’

Once even the alternative sources of food had been devoured, people, in their despair, turned to the inedible, including cattle feed, linseed oil and leather belts. Soon the belts, which people ate out of desperation, were considered a luxury. Furniture glue and wallpaper paste, both of which contained animal fat, were scrapped off and boiled. People ate the soil from around the Badayev warehouses for the traces of charred sugar found within.

1,500 people were arrested for cannibalism, 300 of them shot, many of them refugees not entitled to ration books. Corpses lay in the street with strips of flesh cut away, women with their breasts hacked off. One housing administrator entered a flat to find its occupant boiling a stew on her stove. Upon lifting the lid she found inside a child’s hand. Children were the most vulnerable, being so trusting of a kind-sounding stranger and their flesh being the most tender. Parents forbade their children to venture out alone, and, unless accompanied, everyone was frightened of being out in the dark, which during the height of winter meant a self-imposed 24-hour curfew. Some, driven so insane by hunger, cut strips off their own buttocks. One diarist described a corpse propped up against a lamppost where the man had sat down and never got up again:

Water became a scarcity, either because of frozen pipes or bomb-damaged mains. With the lack of water, toilets didn’t flush and taps dried up. The sewage system stopped working. People simply used buckets and threw the sewage out into the streets. People, desperate for water, would dig holes through the ice into the river Neva and pull out buckets of water. Without water, the bakeries were unable to produce bread.

Feet and hands swelled and stomachs bloated, skin became increasingly taut over faces, eyes hollowed, gums bled, teeth enlarged by hunger, skin covered in sores.

Hunger stripped the young of their youth. Children, made orphans overnight, wandered the streets, listlessly, scavenging for food. With the terrible hunger and the numbing cold, people lost all energy. They became weakened and dizzy, and every movement caused pain. Even the process of chewing could prove too much.

But the death of a loved one, especially if it occurred at the beginning of the month, had its morally perverse compensations – their ration card would still hold good until the end of the month, so no one was in any hurry to report the death of a spouse or family member. Someone on the verge of death at the end of the month would be urged to hold on for a few days more.

Someone with a gallows sense of humour stuck a cigarette in the mouth of a corpse and lifted its frozen arm pointing the way to the nearest cemetery.

Soviet attention now turned to the slim corridor that linked Leningrad to the rest of the country, and specifically to Lake Ladoga. Supplies, such as they were, arrived by train at the town of Tikhvin, then delivered by the last remaining rail link to the western shore of the lake, from where they could be shipped into the city. It was vital to hold onto Tikhvin but, on 8 November 1941, the Germans captured the town. The city’s last trickle of supply had been cut. The city had no choice but to try and build a road circumventing Tikhvin to railway stations further east. Using coerced or forced labour, a road was constructed from massive logs through snow-laden forests and over frozen swamps. It cost several thousand lives, all hastily buried beneath the logs, but the road, over 200 miles long was somehow completed on 6 December. The Red Army recaptured Tikhvin on 8 December. Within two days the road was redundant. The loss of Tikhvin was Germany’s first reversal in the Soviet Union. Strategically, it was only a minor setback – but it was the first.

By the end of December 1941, the Ice Road was bringing in 700 tons of food and fuel every day. It wasn’t enough but the thinness of the ice obliged the trucks to come in half-loaded. By the end of January, the ice froze to a depth of 3ft, allowing a daily the supply of almost 2,000 tons. Still

The spring of 1942 brought a thaw and an end to the usefulness of the Ice Road. The milder days presented a new concern: disease. The piles of corpses and the mounds of human excrement, which until now had remained frozen, began to decompose as the thaw set in. Without running water or a sewage system, dysentery, smallpox and typhus quickly took hold and spread throughout the city, inflicting the already weakened population. Those who suffered from what was called ‘starvation diarrhoea’ knew that death would soon follow.

The spread of epidemics looked set to wipe out the already decimated population when, in March 1942, people grouped together and with mutual encouragement began a huge clear-up operation. The effort for these malnourished people was superhuman, but together they found a shared sense of purpose and determination. Using improvized tools and sledges for removing the debris, the work was slowly, very slowly done, and it was carried out with immense pride. Vera Inber wrote of her greatest fear, ‘Not the bombing, not the shells, not the hunger – but a spiritual exhaustion.’ The effort – and final success – in cleaning up the city proved to be the beginning of a collective spiritual reawakening.

The biggest contribution to the city’s spiritual reawakening was yet to come. Something that proved Leningraders had survived the worse and, however long it took, their city, along with its self-respect, would survive. It was down to one man, a native Leningrader, who loved his city and happened to be a musical genius.

On 17 September 1941, the composer, Dmitry Shostakovich, made a radio announcement in which he said, ‘Just an hour ago, I completed the score of two movements of my new, large symphonic work.’ This new work was his Seventh Symphony, later to be called the Leningrad.