Even before the 872-day long siege ended, both survivors and onlookers had already begun to refer to Leningrad – formerly and currently known as St Petersburg – as a city of heroes. Tales of bravery and self-sacrifice were enshrined in memorials, histories and memoirs, which between 1945 and 1991 were published in the Soviet Union at an average rate of one per day. But heroism is, of course, only a partial description of life within the starving city where theft, murder, betrayal and a million smaller acts of self-interest were just as prevalent as acts of valour. The idea that Leningrad was a city of heroes was in part a ploy to enable the living to carry on alongside their survivors’ guilt, sometimes inside apartments they had taken from the newly dead.
Yet, as Prit Buttar, a former British Army doctor, draws out in a dense, ambitious and military-focused book, Leningrad endured, despite its institutional abandonment by Moscow, a dispirited and often outclassed Red Army and the near total breakdown of supply chains. The city prevailed, despite Hitler’s desperation to surround this major centre of intellectual and artistic endeavour, and, as he once put it to Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, ‘starve it into submission’.
The first winter of the siege, which has been covered by Buttar in an earlier companion work, was its most dramatic and tragic. German shells, food shortages and freezing temperatures – as if the weather had joined the Nazis in their assault on the city – precipitated mass death. Many of those who survived did so by engaging in previously unthinkable acts, such as eating their pets or, in rare cases, their neighbours.
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