The Decision That Defines It
Most sieges end when the defenders can no longer hold and surrender is accepted. Leningrad is not that. The distinguishing fact of the siege, and the reason it killed on the scale it did, is that the Germans decided in advance that they would not take the city and would not accept its capitulation if it was offered.
Two documents establish this and both were entered in evidence at Nuremberg. A German naval staff directive of September 1941, titled with bureaucratic flatness as The Future of the City of Petersburg, recorded the decision to wipe the city off the face of the earth by blockade, artillery and continuous air bombardment. It stated that after the encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations were to be denied, because the problem of relocating and feeding the population could not and should not be solved by Germany.
An armed forces order of 7 October 1941, signed by Jodl, went further. A capitulation of Leningrad, or later of Moscow, was not to be accepted even if offered. No German soldier was to enter. And anyone attempting to leave the city through German lines was to be forced back by fire.
That is the whole architecture of what followed: encircle, refuse surrender, shell the city, shoot the civilians who try to escape, and let hunger do the rest. It sat within the wider German plan to starve tens of millions of Soviet civilians to feed Germany. Some historians argue the siege amounts to genocide on exactly this basis. It was prosecuted at Nuremberg as a war crime rather than as genocide, and the genocide framing is a later scholarly argument that has since also become an instrument of Russian state policy.
How the Ring Closed
Army Group North drove up through the Baltic states after June 1941. On 8 September German troops took Shlisselburg on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, cutting the last land connection. Roughly half a million people had already been evacuated or conscripted out in the preceding weeks, which left just over two and a half million civilians inside, at least four hundred thousand of them children.
Two days earlier Hitler had ordered the armour of Army Group North transferred south for the offensive against Moscow. The means to storm the city went elsewhere at almost the same moment the decision not to storm it was being put on paper.
On 8 and 10 September the Luftwaffe burned the Badayev warehouses, destroying around three thousand tonnes of flour and two and a half thousand tonnes of sugar. The fire became the emotional symbol of the famine, and it is worth being precise about why that is misleading: at the ration norms then in force, what burned was one to three days of supply. The catastrophe was not that the warehouses burned. It was that a city of two and a half million had only weeks of food inside the ring at all.
One thing the Germans did not do was close the lake. Ladoga stayed open, first to boats and then to ice, and that failure is the reason anyone survived.
125 Grams
Rations were cut five times between September and November 1941. They reached bottom on 20 November. Manual workers received 250 grams of bread a day. Everyone else, meaning office employees, dependants and children, received 125 grams: about three thin slices, with nothing else reliably available.
It was not bread in any ordinary sense. Rye flour was stretched with edible cellulose, cottonseed cake, malt flour, bran, chaff, sweepings recovered from mill floors and sacking, and sawdust. At the worst point the adulterants ran to half or sixty percent of the loaf. It came out heavy, dark and wet, and it did not contain enough to live on. Oats meant for horses were milled for people.
Beyond the ration, people ate what could be rendered edible: carpenter's glue and wallpaper paste boiled into jelly, leather belts and book bindings boiled soft, petroleum jelly, linseed cake, pine needles against scurvy. Workers in tanneries and fur works ate the flesh scraps off the skins. Rats, pigeons, cats and dogs disappeared from the city. Ration cards were stolen, and people were murdered for them.
The first increase came on 25 December 1941, made possible by the ice road: workers to 350 grams, everyone else to 200. Survivors remembered the date for the rest of their lives.
The Road of Life
The route ran across the southwestern arm of Lake Ladoga, about thirty kilometres of ice between the western shore and Kobona on the eastern side, where it met the railheads. Soviet engineers worked to thresholds: roughly ten centimetres of ice to bear a horse, twenty to bear a truck with a tonne aboard. The first supplies crossed on 19 November 1941 and the first truck convoy on the 22nd, on ice that was barely adequate.
Drivers worked at night with hooded lights or none, often with the cab door tied open so they could jump if the ice gave way. Trucks broke through, froze into drifts, and vanished in whiteouts. The Luftwaffe bombed and strafed the route and German artillery ranged parts of it, and the craters refroze into traps. Around a thousand vehicles were lost over the road's life.
It carried roughly 350,000 tonnes of cargo in that first winter, most of it food, and it was never enough. At its best the road supplied about two-thirds of the city's daily requirement. It prevented total collapse. It did not end the famine.
It also carried people out. More than half a million civilians crossed between January and April 1942 alone, and over its whole operation the route evacuated on the order of 1.3 million people, overwhelmingly women and children. Many were already too far gone, and deaths during the crossing and in the days after arrival were common and are inconsistently counted to this day.
The Winter of 1941 to 1942
Roughly half of all the siege's deaths happened in this one winter. Temperatures reached around forty below. Central heating failed and people burned furniture, floorboards, doors and finally their books in small iron stoves. Burning your library became a recognised marker of how far the winter had taken you.
The water mains and sewers froze and burst in January. People queued at holes cut in the Neva and carried water home on children's sledges, which were also what the dead were moved on. Electricity effectively ended: by late January 1942 the city was generating from a single turbine. The trams stopped. The ground was too hard to dig, so bodies accumulated in courtyards and stairwells until trench graves could be blasted open with explosives.
Contemporary estimates of the daily death rate at the peak run from around four thousand to ten thousand. Those come from the same registration system that was collapsing at the time, so they are estimates rather than measurements, which is the central problem with every number in this story.
Why Nobody Can Agree on How Many Died
The figure the Soviet Union presented at Nuremberg was 632,253 dead of hunger. The marble plaque at Piskaryovskoye cemetery says 641,803. Anna Reid puts it at seven to eight hundred thousand. The standard archival study by Bidlack and Lomagin puts civilian deaths close to a million. A St Petersburg court in 2022 fixed the figure at 1,093,842.
The most defensible statement is that at least three-quarters of a million civilians died, and that most specialists now put it at or near one million. Four things pull the true figure above the registered one:
- Registration collapsed. In the worst weeks the clerks recording deaths were themselves starving. Bodies were left in streets and stairwells or taken to mass graves uncounted.
- Refugees were invisible. Leningrad had absorbed people fleeing the German advance who held no residence permits and often no ration cards. They died outside the count entirely.
- Evacuation deaths went elsewhere. Large numbers died on the ice, on trains, and in the towns that received them, attributed to other places or to nothing.
- The low figure was policy. A precise number invited questions about why the city was so badly provisioned and why evacuation was so slow. The archives did not open until the early 1990s.
One figure to avoid: 1.5 million civilian deaths. That number circulates widely and conflates civilians with military deaths and with the surrounding region. And the 2022 court figure, while now the official Russian one, was produced in support of a genocide finding rather than as an independent scholarly result. It should be reported as what it is.
What People Wrote Down
The siege is unusually well documented from the inside, because a great many Leningraders kept diaries. Alexis Peri's study of a hundred and twenty-five unpublished ones found that the writing itself functioned as survival, a tangible reminder of being a person. She also found something the later heroic narrative could not accommodate: under starvation, the diarists began examining Soviet life and ideology critically. After the war those notebooks became dangerous to own.
The most famous is six pages long and was written by an eleven-year-old. Tanya Savicheva recorded six deaths in her family, each with the hour. Zhenya died on December 28th at 12 noon, 1941. Grandmother died on the 25th of January at 3 o'clock, 1942. Leka died March 17th at 5 o'clock in the morning, 1942. Uncle Vasya, Uncle Lesha, then her mother on May 13th at 7:30 in the morning. Then three separate pages: the Savichevs are dead, everyone is dead, only Tanya is left.
She was evacuated in August 1942, never recovered, and died of intestinal tuberculosis on 1 July 1944, aged fourteen. Two corrections to the story as it is usually told: her brother and sister both in fact survived, and the very widely repeated claim that her notebook was submitted as evidence at Nuremberg is almost certainly false. It does not need the embellishment.
On cannibalism, the record is specific and should be handled without either denial or relish. The NKVD had arrested around 2,105 people for it by December 1942, though the files were not published until 2004. The authorities used two categories: eating the already dead, and killing a person for flesh. The second was generally punished by shooting and the first by imprisonment. There was no offence of cannibalism in the Soviet criminal code, so prosecutions were brought under a banditry statute. The proportion matters: roughly two thousand cases against hundreds of thousands of deaths. The historian Sergey Yarov's point is the right one to carry away, that the striking thing is not that the taboo broke but how rarely it broke. Post-war Soviet authorities denied it had happened at all.
9 August 1942
Shostakovich began his Seventh Symphony in Leningrad in 1941 while serving in the conservatory fire-watch, and finished it in evacuation that December. It was premiered in Kuibyshev, then Moscow, then microfilmed and flown out via Tehran to London and New York.
Then the score was flown back in. Performing it in the besieged city fell to Karl Eliasberg and the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, the only orchestra left. The symphony needs about a hundred players. Of the orchestra's forty, fourteen or fifteen were still alive and present. Eliasberg, himself being treated for starvation, went door to door recruiting musicians out of their apartments, and military players were seconded in. In early rehearsals people collapsed after fifteen minutes. Three musicians died during preparation. They played the work through exactly once before the concert. The players wore every layer they owned against the tremors, and one of them described the orchestra as dressed like cabbages.
Two facts give the performance its force. The ninth of August 1942 was the date Hitler had designated for the celebration of Leningrad's fall, with a banquet reportedly booked at the Astoria Hotel. And the Soviet commander ordered a pre-emptive artillery bombardment of German gun positions, some three thousand shells, specifically so the concert could not be shelled and could be heard.
It was broadcast by radio and through loudspeakers turned toward the German lines. The hall was full. The ovation ran about an hour. Eliasberg later met German veterans who told him that hearing it was the moment they understood the city would not be taken.
Breaking the Blockade, and Lifting It
In January 1943 Operation Iskra drove the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts toward each other across the Shlisselburg salient. They linked up on 18 January and opened a land corridor along the Ladoga shore, eight to eleven kilometres wide, through which a railway was laid in weeks.
This broke the blockade. It did not lift the siege, and the distinction is routinely lost. The corridor stayed inside German artillery range and was shelled throughout 1943. The city was never again completely isolated, and it endured another full year of bombardment.
The offensive that finally cleared the German positions opened on 14 January 1944. On 27 January the Leningrad Front declared the siege lifted, and the city fired a salute of twenty-four volleys from 324 guns. It was the only salute of the war authorised outside Moscow.
Then They Took the Memory Away
Surviving the siege gave Leningrad's leadership enormous prestige, which was precisely the problem. In 1949 a trade fair organised by the city's senior figures was reframed as a conspiracy to build a rival party organisation. Two of them were arrested in Malenkov's own office that August. They were shot on 1 October 1950, along with others, and hundreds of Leningrad officials were purged. Khrushchev acknowledged the charges as fabrications in 1956.
The same operation erased the history. The Museum of the Defence of Leningrad had opened in 1944 and grown to some thirty-seven thousand exhibits. It was condemned as ideologically false for glorifying the endurance of Leningraders rather than the Party and Stalin, closed to the public in 1949 and liquidated by 1953. Its director was shot. Large exhibits were dispersed or destroyed and the rest was burned. It reopened only in 1989, on the anniversary of the day the ring closed, largely with objects donated by survivors and their families.
The principal burial ground is Piskaryovskoye, where roughly 420,000 civilians and 50,000 soldiers lie in 186 mass graves, each mound marked with nothing but a year. Behind the bronze Motherland figure, on the granite wall, are the poet Olga Berggolts's lines, which end: no one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten. She had broadcast from Leningrad Radio throughout the siege, and by the time the words were carved, a great deal had been very deliberately forgotten.
Knowledge Check
Did the Badayev warehouse fire cause the famine?+
No, though it became the symbol of it. The September 1941 raids destroyed roughly 3,000 tonnes of flour and 2,500 tonnes of sugar, which at the ration norms then in force was one to three days of supply. The famine was caused by a city of two and a half million holding weeks of food being sealed off by a besieger who intended it to starve.
What did the radio metronome mean?+
That the city was still alive. Leningrad Radio broadcast a metronome between programmes and through the long stretches when there was nothing to broadcast. A slow beat meant all clear; a fast beat meant an air raid. It played through street loudspeakers, and survivors described it as the city's heartbeat.
What happened on 9 August 1942?+
Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony was performed inside the besieged city, on the date Hitler had designated for Leningrad's fall, with a banquet reportedly booked at the Astoria Hotel. Only fourteen or fifteen of the radio orchestra's forty players were still alive and present; three more died during rehearsals. Soviet artillery fired a pre-emptive bombardment of German gun positions so the concert would not be shelled, and it was broadcast through loudspeakers pointed at the German lines.
Why was the siege's own history suppressed?+
Because surviving it gave the city's leadership dangerous prestige. In the Leningrad Affair of 1949 to 1950 the city's wartime leaders were arrested and shot. The Museum of the Defence of Leningrad, opened in 1944, was condemned for glorifying Leningraders rather than Stalin, closed in 1949 and liquidated by 1953; its director was shot. Serious research only became possible after the archives opened in the 1990s.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long was the siege of Leningrad?+
872 days, from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944, counting both endpoints. The figure of 900 days that appears everywhere is a Soviet-era rounding, cemented in English by the title of Harrison Salisbury's 1969 book. The arithmetic for 872 is straightforward and not in dispute.
Why didn't the Germans just capture the city?+
Because they chose not to. A German naval staff directive of September 1941 stated the intention to wipe the city off the face of the earth by blockade, shelling and bombing, and specified that requests to negotiate a surrender would be refused because the problem of feeding the population could not and should not be solved by Germany. An armed forces order signed by Jodl in October repeated that a capitulation was not to be accepted even if offered, and that anyone trying to leave through German lines was to be forced back by fire.
How many people died in the siege of Leningrad?+
The honest answer is that at least three-quarters of a million civilians died and most specialists now put it at or near a million. The Soviet figure presented at Nuremberg was 632,253, which counted registered starvation deaths only, at a time when the bureaucracy doing the registering was itself starving. Avoid the figure of 1.5 million, which conflates civilian deaths with military deaths and deaths across the surrounding region.
What was the 125-gram bread ration?+
From 20 November to 25 December 1941, non-working adults, dependants and children received 125 grams of bread a day, about three thin slices, with little else reliably available. Manual workers got 250 grams. The bread was not really bread: at its worst it was half to sixty percent adulterants, including edible cellulose, cottonseed cake, bran, chaff, sweepings from mill floors and sawdust.
What was the Road of Life?+
A supply route across the frozen southwestern arm of Lake Ladoga, roughly 30 kilometres wide, opened in November 1941 once the ice would bear a loaded truck. It brought food in and carried more than a million people out over the course of the siege. It never carried enough: at its best it supplied only about two-thirds of the city's daily requirement. It prevented total collapse rather than ending the famine.
Did Operation Iskra end the siege?+
No, and this is the most common error about the chronology. Operation Iskra in January 1943 broke the land blockade and opened a narrow corridor along the Ladoga shore, roughly eight to eleven kilometres wide. That corridor stayed within German artillery range and was shelled throughout 1943. The city endured another full year of bombardment. The siege was lifted on 27 January 1944.
Sources
- ·International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, proceedings of 19 and 22 February 1946 — documents C-123 and C-124, the German directives on Leningrad, and the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission's evidence
- ·Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941 to 1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (Yale, 2012)
- ·Alexis Peri, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Harvard, 2017)
- ·Sergey Yarov, Leningrad 1941 to 42: Morality in a City under Siege (Polity, 2017)
- ·Anna Reid, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege
- ·Noah Krasman, The Paradox of Genocide in Modern Russia, Journal of Genocide Research (2023)
- ·Presidential Library of Russia — on the lifting of the siege and the Road of Life (a Russian state source, used with that caveat)
