Based largely on formerly top-secret Soviet archival documents (including 66 reproduced documents and 70 illustrations), this book portrays the inner workings of the communist party and secret police during Germany's horrific 1941–44 siege of Leningrad, during which close to one million citizens perished. It shows how the city's inhabitants responded to the extraordinary demands placed upon them, encompassing both the activities of the political, security, and military elite as well as the actions and attitudes of ordinary Leningraders.

Chronicles the three year siege of Leningrad during World War II, focusing on the city's inhabitants, the inner workings of the Communist Party and secret police, and the people's will to survive.

Based on an unparalleled access to Russian archival sources and going far beyond the military aspects of other historical works, Glantz's book is a testament to the nearly two million Russians who lost their lives during the battle for Leningrad. 90 illustrations. 16 maps.

Nazi Germany's siege of Leningrad is one of world history's epic chapters. For nearly three years, the people of this industrial port city withstood everything the surrounding German Army could throw at them -- and their resistance sounded a crucial death knell for Hitler's ambitions to rule Europe. This compelling narrative explains the increasingly drastic methods employed by the Wehrmacht to reduce the city's defenses and break the morale of its citizens, while also examining Leningrad's political symbolism, the Red Army's frantic counteroffensives, and the hardships faced by Leningraders -- 4,000 citizens starved to death on Christmas Day 1941 alone, for example. Previously unpublished photographs, detailed maps, and firsthand accounts are supplemented by an overview of the roles played by Soviet leaders and the heroism of the city as a whole.

Wartime Suffering and Survival explores how average people survive in the face of incredible odds. Using diaries, recollections, police records, interviews, and state documents from the Blockade of Leningrad in World War II, he shows how average Leningraders coped with the nightmares of war, starvation, and extreme uncertainty. Hass not only shares Leningraders' stories to uncover a little-told side of Russian/Soviet history, but also to reveal the humancondition--who we really are when our backs are against the wall.

From 1941-1944 Leningrad saw by far the largest-scale famine ever to occur in a developed society. This book examines the nature and consequences of the extreme conditions created by the German blockade of Leningrad between September 1941 and January 1944. Using declassified documents from Party and State archives in Moscow and St Petersburg and interviews with survivors, the authors have produced the most informed and detailed analysis to date of the impact of the siege on the lives and health of the people of Leningrad.

On September 8, 1941, eleven weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a million Leningraders had died of starvation. Anna Reid's Leningrad is a gripping, authoritative narrative history of this dramatic moment in the twentieth century, interwoven with indelible personal accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists on both sides. They reveal the Nazis' deliberate decision to starve Leningrad into surrender and Hitler's messianic miscalculation, the incompetence and cruelty of the Soviet war leadership, the horrors experienced by soldiers on the front lines, and, above all, the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the relentless search for food and water; the withering of emotions and family ties; looting, murder, and cannibalism- and at the same time, extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice. Stripping away decades of Soviet propaganda, and drawing on newly available diaries and government records, Leningrad also tackles a raft of unanswered questions: Was the size of the death toll as much the fault of Stalin as of Hitler? Why didn't the Germans capture the city? Why didn't it collapse into anarchy? What decided who lived and who died? Impressive in its originality and literary style, Leningrad gives voice to the dead and will rival Anthony Beevor's classic Stalingrad in its impact.