The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days, from 8 September 1941, when German forces cut the city off by land, to 27 January 1944, when the blockade was officially declared lifted. The Soviet government gave an official toll of 632,253 civilian deaths, but historians' estimates run from about 700,000 to more than one million, most of them dead from hunger in the winter of 1941 to 1942.
On 8 September 1941 German Army Group North took Shlisselburg, the small town where the Neva flows out of Lake Ladoga, and Leningrad was sealed off by land. Finland's army closed the ring on the northern side. For the next 872 days the Soviet Union's second city lived under blockade, shellfire and air raids, and in its first winter it suffered one of the worst famines ever endured by a modern city.
This is not mainly a story of generals and maps, although they matter. It is the story of a city that kept working, teaching, playing music and writing diaries while its people starved, told through the things they left behind: ration cards, a child's notebook, a symphony score and the long rows of mass graves.
The ring closes, September 1941
The destruction of Leningrad was one of Hitler's aims in the war against the Soviet Union, and the German command chose to starve the city rather than storm it street by street. On the day Shlisselburg fell, Germany launched its first massive air attack on the city1. Stalin sent Georgy Zhukov to take command of the Leningrad Front that September, and the line in front of the southern suburbs held, only a few miles from the city.
Holding a line, however, is not the same as feeding a city. Food stocks had not been built up before the ring closed, and with the land routes gone the only way in was across Lake Ladoga: by boat in the autumn, over the ice in the winter.
125 grams: the first winter
Rations were cut again and again through the autumn. Between 20 November and 25 December 1941 the daily bread ration for most Leningraders fell to its lowest level: 125 grams1, about three thin slices. Manual workers received more, but dependants, office staff and children got the minimum, and the bread was padded out with inedible fillers such as sawdust1 to make the portions look larger.
Then the cold came. Power was sharply cut in early December, trams stopped, water pipes froze, and in late January the temperature fell to about minus 40. People fetched water from the Neva and the canals and took their dead to the cemeteries on sledges. Most of the siege's civilian victims died in that one winter. Anna Reid, whose history draws on dozens of siege diaries, puts the total death toll at between 700,000 and 800,0002 by January 1944, one in every three or four of the city's pre-siege population.
The Road of Life over Lake Ladoga
The city's only lifeline ran east across Lake Ladoga, to the shore the Red Army still held. When the ice grew thick enough in late November 1941, horse-drawn sledges and then lorries began to cross it on a marked route that Leningraders called the Road of Life. The drivers worked through blizzards and air attacks, and some lorries broke through the ice and were lost with their crews.
The road carried flour in and people out. Over that first winter some 600,000 emaciated Leningraders were evacuated1 across the frozen lake, and in summer the route continued by boat. It did not end the famine at once, but without it the city could hardly have survived.
Tanya Savicheva's notebook
Tanya Savicheva was eleven when the siege began, the youngest child of a Leningrad family; her father, a baker, had died when she was six. In the winter of 1941 to 1942 she began to use a small notebook that had belonged to her sister Nina, with a letter of the alphabet at the head of each page. Under the letter for each name she wrote down, in a few words, when members of her family died. The first entry records that her sister Zhenya died on 28 December 19413, and notes the hour, as every entry does. Her grandmother followed in January, her brother Leka in March, two uncles in April and May, and her mother on 13 May 1942.
On three more pages she wrote her last entries, in translation: "The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.3" She was wrong, though she never knew it: Nina had been evacuated across Lake Ladoga without being able to send word, their brother Misha, cut off outside the city, had also survived, and it was Nina, back in Leningrad in 1945, who recovered the notebook. Tanya was evacuated to an orphanage, fell ill and died of tuberculosis on 1 July 1944, aged fourteen3.
Her notebook is often said to have been shown at the Nuremberg trials; that is probably a myth3. It needs no embellishment. A few pencilled pages became the best-known private document of the siege, and Tanya is remembered by a memorial on the Road of Life.
The Seventh Symphony, 9 August 1942
Dmitri Shostakovich began his Seventh Symphony in Leningrad in the first weeks of the siege, before he was evacuated, and dedicated it to the city. On 9 August 1942 it was performed in Leningrad itself, in the Philharmonic hall, by the Radio Orchestra conducted by Karl Eliasberg4.
The famine had gutted the orchestra, and Eliasberg had to assemble players from wherever he could find them, including military bands. The concert was relayed by radio and loudspeakers across the city and, according to many accounts, towards the German lines. For the people listening in the streets it was proof that their city was still alive.
Breaking the ring: Iskra and January 1944
The Red Army tried repeatedly to break through in 1942 and failed. In January 1943, in Operation Iskra5 ("Spark"), troops of the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts attacking towards each other met south of Lake Ladoga and opened a narrow land corridor along its southern shore. A railway was laid through it, and the first train from the mainland reached the city on 7 February 19431. The corridor was within range of German guns, and Leningrad stayed under siege and shellfire for another year.
The end came in January 1944, when a major Soviet offensive drove Army Group North back from the city, and on 27 January 1944 the blockade was officially declared lifted5, marked by an artillery salute over the Neva. By then the great battles of the Eastern Front were rolling west, but no city had paid a higher price to stay in the war.
How many people died in the siege of Leningrad?
No one knows exactly, and estimates vary widely. At the Nuremberg trials the Soviet government cited a figure of 632,253 civilian deaths6, a number Reid calls spuriously precise. Other estimates are higher: one scholarly summary concludes that roughly one million civilians died within the city, and close to two million Soviet citizens in Leningrad or on the nearby fronts between 1941 and 1944.
The differences come from what is counted: registered deaths or all deaths, the city or its suburbs, those who died in the city or soon after evacuation, civilians only or soldiers too. Whatever the exact figure, most of the dead died of hunger, and most of them in a single winter. Hundreds of thousands lie in mass graves at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery.
Why the siege of Leningrad still matters
Leningrad is a reminder that in modern war a city's people can be the target, and that hunger can be used as deliberately as artillery. It is also a record of what people do when almost everything is taken from them: the public library stayed open, schools held lessons, an orchestra played. The Soviet state later turned the siege into a story of unbroken heroism and kept its failures quiet; historians since the 1990s have restored the darker parts, from the missing food stocks to the crimes that hunger drove some people to. The truth is harder and more human than the legend, and a child's few pencilled lines still say it better than any monument.