For nearly 900 days the city withstood bombardment and starvation as Nazi Germany attempted to conquer it. But why, in a conflict that saw the emergence of the jet and the advent of the atomic age, was such a brutal, even medieval strategy deployed?
The Second World War was a conflict of mobility and machinery, of great innovation in the seemingly endless desire of humans to find more powerful ways to subjugate and kill other humans. Tanks and trucks; bombers and fighters; rockets and ultimately ballistic missiles; submarines and aircraft carriers; jet engines; and in the end, industrialised genocide and the atomic bomb.
Yet for nearly 900 days of this complex war, which featured such a rapid development of technology, one of the great cities of Europe was almost entirely cut off from the rest of the continent, and starved – reminiscent of medieval siege tactics. Leningrad, formerly St Petersburg and Petrograd, was the secondlargest city in the Soviet Union and home to much of its heavy industry. Built by Peter the Great in a large region of swamps and muddy islands in the Neva estuary, it developed at a remarkable pace through the 18th and 19th centuries and even before the death of its creator it had become the capital of Russia. It was renamed Petrograd to remove the Germanicsounding name of St Petersburg in 1914, and just three years later it was convulsed by two revolutions, one that removed the Romanov dynasty from power and a second that brought Lenin’s Bolsheviks into the limelight.
At first glance, the attempts by the Germans to isolate and then subdue the city seem to owe more to conflicts of earlier centuries than the middle of the 20th century, with siege lines that barely moved and specialist heavy artillery to bombard the city into subjugation. Outside the siege ring, relieving armies struggled towards the beleaguered population and garrison, just as armies had attempted to lift sieges in the medieval era. Even the nature of the fighting, largely on foot in inhospitable terrain, seemed closer to the battles of earlier wars.
But closer analysis shows that the Siege of Leningrad was entirely in keeping with the darker side of the new, modern way of war. From the outset, the German invasion of the Soviet Union was a genocidal project. This was not a war to gain territory or to impose a more pliant government upon the defeated nation; it was to eliminate that nation completely, in every sense. The Soviet Union would cease to exist and its European territory would be resettled by Germans; the rich agricultural lands of Ukraine and southern Russia would be harnessed to feed the rest of Europ
