Leningrad. Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941-44

When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, he planned to capture Leningrad before turning on Moscow. Stubborn Soviet resistance forced him to change tactics: with his forward troops only thirty kilometres away, he decided to surround the city and starve it out. Over the next two and a half years, three quarters of a million Leningraders - almost a third of its civilian population - died of cold and hunger. To blame, Anna Reid argues, were the Soviet regime's brutality and incompetence, as well as Nazi contempt for human life. Using newly available diaries and government records, Reid describes a city's descent into hell, but also extraordinary individual endurance and self-sacrifice.