The Siege of Leningrad

About the tour

On 8 September 1941 German forces took Shlisselburg and closed the ring: the city was left without a land link to the rest of the country. The siege lasted 872 days, until 27 January 1944. The ring was partly broken on 18 January 1943, but for another year the city remained a front line.

The first winter was the worst. From 20 November 1941 the bread ration for office workers, dependants and children was 125 grams a day — nearly half of it made up of fillers. Officially more than 632,000 people died of hunger, by other estimates as many as 750,000; a further 17,000 or so were killed by shelling and bombing. The only link to the mainland was the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga: by water in summer, over the ice in winter, under shellfire and bombs throughout.

This tour is not about military operations but about a city and its people: how they lived, worked, studied and buried their dead here, and why Leningrad did not surrender. Four hours by car with a guide, through the places that speak to it.

What you will see

• The Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad on Victory Square — the principal memorial to the defence of the city, unveiled for the thirtieth anniversary of victory. It was built with money raised by the city’s own people and by the hands of sixty thousand volunteers. A broken ring, an obelisk, figures of soldiers, and an underground memorial hall with mosaics and a metronome.

• The Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery — 186 mass graves holding around half a million people: victims of the siege and soldiers of the Leningrad Front. The memorial opened on 9 May 1960. At its centre stands a six-metre Motherland figure, and behind her, on a granite wall, the lines of Olga Berggolts, who lived through the siege in the city: “No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.”

• The marks of the siege in the centre — the inscription on Nevsky Prospect warning that this side of the street is the more dangerous during shelling, splinter scars on walls and columns, memorial plaques and markers that passers-by walk past without looking.

• The places of daily life under siege — where people queued for water, where the factories worked, and where on 9 August 1942 Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was performed in the Great Hall of the Philharmonic and broadcast through loudspeakers across the whole city and out towards the enemy positions.

Why go with a guide

The siege left almost no visible ruins: the city was rebuilt, and today you have to know how to read it. A guide shows you where to look for the traces and links scattered monuments into a single chronology — from the first bombing raids and the fire at the Badayev warehouses to the breaking of the ring and the salute of 27 January 1944.

And then what matters more than the facts: Tanya Savicheva’s diary, the metronome on the radio, the theatres and schools that worked throughout, the evacuation of the museum collections, the vegetable plots on the Field of Mars and St Isaac’s Square. People, not dates.

The tour is private, for your party only, with your own guide and driver. We adjust the pace and the depth of the account to you — including if you are travelling with children.