The Siege of Leningrad: 872 Days of Defiance
The Siege of Leningrad lasted from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944 — 872 days during which the German Wehrmacht and Finnish forces encircled the Soviet Union's second-largest city, cutting it off from virtually all supplies. What followed was one of the longest, most devastating sieges in human history. An estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million civilians died, primarily from starvation, making it the deadliest siege in recorded history — more lethal than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Hitler's Plan
Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was a prize of immense strategic, industrial, and symbolic value. It was the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution, home to major armaments factories, and the Soviet Union's primary Baltic naval base. Hitler explicitly intended not to capture the city but to obliterate it.
A German directive from September 1941 stated: "The Führer has decided to erase the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia there will be not the slightest reason for the further existence of this large city." The plan was to encircle Leningrad, starve its population into submission, and then demolish whatever remained. Surrender would not be accepted.
"Death had become so much a part of our life that we simply stopped noticing it." — Leningrad siege survivor
The Encirclement
The German Army Group North, commanded by Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, advanced rapidly toward Leningrad in the summer of 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa. Finnish forces, seeking to recover territory lost in the 1939–1940 Winter War, attacked from the north.
By September 8, 1941, German forces had cut the last land route into the city by capturing Shlisselburg on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. Leningrad was encircled. Inside were approximately 2.5 million civilians (including 400,000 children) and several hundred thousand soldiers. The city's food reserves were shockingly inadequate — enough for perhaps one to two months.
Starvation
The winter of 1941–1942 was the most horrific period. Daily bread rations fell to catastrophic levels:
- Workers: 250 grams (about 8.8 ounces) per day
- Office workers, dependents, and children: 125 grams (about 4.4 ounces) per day
This bread was not the kind found in any bakery. It was made partly of flour and partly of sawdust, cellulose, and other fillers. It provided roughly 400–500 calories per day — far below the minimum needed to sustain life, especially in temperatures that plummeted to minus 40 degrees Celsius.
People ate everything they could find. Wallpaper paste (made with potato starch) was scraped off walls and consumed. Leather belts and shoes were boiled. Joiner's glue was melted into jelly. Pets disappeared. Pigeons and rats were hunted to extinction within the city. There were documented cases of cannibalism — the NKVD (Soviet secret police) arrested over 2,000 people for cannibalism during the siege.
The dead were everywhere. Bodies lay frozen in the streets, on stairways, in apartments. Many people died in their beds, too weak to move. The ground was frozen too hard to dig graves, so corpses accumulated in courtyards and public spaces. Mass graves were eventually dug using explosives.
The Road of Life
The city's only lifeline was Lake Ladoga. In autumn and spring, supplies were brought by barge across the lake under constant German aerial bombardment. In winter, when the lake froze, a route was established across the ice — the legendary "Road of Life" (Doroga Zhizni).
Trucks drove across the frozen lake, delivering food and evacuating civilians. The route was dangerous — trucks broke through the ice, German planes strafed the convoys, and drivers navigated in darkness and blizzards. Despite these hazards, the Road of Life brought in roughly 800,000 tons of supplies and evacuated over one million civilians over the course of the siege.
Beginning in January 1942, the daily bread ration was gradually increased, though it remained desperately inadequate. The death rate, which peaked in January–February 1942 (an estimated 100,000 people died in January alone), gradually declined but remained horrifically high throughout 1942.
Resistance and Resilience
Despite the unimaginable suffering, Leningrad did not surrender. Factories continued producing weapons — including tanks and ammunition — even as workers collapsed from starvation at their machines. The city's defenses held against repeated German assaults.
Cultural life continued with extraordinary defiance. The most famous example is the performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony ("Leningrad") on August 9, 1942, by the surviving members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra. The musicians were so weakened by starvation that three had died during rehearsals. The performance was broadcast by loudspeakers to both the city's defenders and the German lines — a deliberate act of cultural resistance.
The siege also produced remarkable works of literature and documentation. The most famous is the diary of Tanya Savicheva, an 11-year-old girl who recorded the deaths of her family members, one by one, in a small notebook. The final entries read: "Savichevs died. Everyone died. Only Tanya is left." Tanya herself died of intestinal tuberculosis during evacuation in 1944.
The Breaking of the Siege
On January 18, 1943, Soviet forces launched Operation Iskra and managed to open a narrow land corridor to the city along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga — a strip just 5 to 6 miles wide, under constant German fire. A railroad was built through this corridor (called the "Corridor of Death"), allowing more supplies to reach the city.
The full lifting of the siege came on January 27, 1944, when a massive Soviet offensive (Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive) drove the German forces back and restored full land communications with the rest of the Soviet Union. The city erupted in celebration. Artillery salvos were fired in triumph — the only time during the war that a salute was fired not from Moscow but from the liberated city itself.
Legacy
The Siege of Leningrad is one of the defining tragedies of World War II and of the 20th century. The death toll — likely exceeding one million civilians — represents a scale of suffering almost beyond comprehension. The siege demonstrated both the worst of human cruelty (Hitler's deliberate policy of starvation) and the most extraordinary resilience of the human spirit.
In Russia, the siege remains a sacred event, central to the national narrative of sacrifice and victory in the Great Patriotic War. The Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, where nearly 500,000 siege victims are buried in mass graves, is one of the most visited memorial sites in Russia. The memory of Leningrad is a reminder that the Second World War was not only fought on battlefields but in the kitchens, hospitals, and frozen streets of a besieged city.
