REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON
Leningrad – today known as St Petersburg – was a key military and industrial target in the early years of the Second World War. But the city also held a psychological attraction for the invading armies of the Third Reich in the summer of 1941. Leningrad had been the ‘cradle’ of the Russian Revolution in 1917; the birthplace of Bolshevism itself. Its capture, so Hitler believed, would therefore crush the morale of the Soviet people.
Stalin himself never much cared for the northern port city on the banks of the river Neva, built by Peter the Great at a time when the Russian empire was looking to expand its influence in Western Europe. He considered it too isolated. But as Prit Buttar points out in this book – the first of two on the 1941-1944 siege of the city – it was this very isolation that saved it from total destruction.
By the time Army Group North had arrived in the southern outskirts of the city in September 1941, they had already been worn down by an unexpectedly taxing journey across Lithuania and Latvia, having vastly underestimated the numbers of Soviet divisions they would encounter on the way. Huge lakes and dense, impassable forests throughout the region had proved challenging, too, while every day the increasingly harsh weather killed more of the draft horses on which they were so reliant. Upon reaching Leningrad, the expectation was that the Soviet Union would have already been defeated. As this was not the case, there was no real plan about what to do with the city.
