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Like Moscow, the city had been surprised by the speed of the Nazi blitzkrieg. Three weeks after the invasion, German forces were already 125 miles south of Leningrad. But where many Muscovites panicked, residents of the old imperial capital resolutely began building a network of barricades outside the city -- a million volunteers in a city of almost 3 million; many died as they labored, killed by Nazi bombs and machine-gun attacks. But in July and August they produced 340 miles of antitank ditches, 15,875 miles of open trenches, 400 miles of barbed-wire fences, 5,000 pillboxes and gun emplacements. These could not stop the Nazi juggernaut, but they did slow it down.
Most Leningraders volunteered not for love of Stalin. It was their city they were defending -- the cultural center of traditional Russia, home of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Anna Akhmatova. The ordeal, however, required more than pride, certainly more than courage. The supply of food was erratic, and plummeted during the darkest moments of the war. On Dec. 23, 1941, for example, the whole city had just two days' supply of flour. At one point, rations were 1,087 calories for workers who had to man the city's strategic munitions plants, 581 calories for office workers, 684 calories for children. In reality, far less food was available -- and proper nutrition in cold weather requires about 3,000 calories a day for a man. The official report of deaths for December was 53,000, and the winter would take an even greater toll.
By then people were stripping glue off walls for protein. Tons of rotting sheep guts were boiled down into a rancid jelly and handed out as the meat ration. It was not uncommon to see people collapse from hunger while walking home through the snow, dying on the street. Some would remain covered beneath the snow until the spring. A factory chief remembers a worker asking him a final favor. "I know that today or tomorrow I will die," he said. "My family are in a very poor way -- very weak . . . Will you be a friend and have a coffin made for me?"
No other major city in the war would suffer as many civilian deaths as Leningrad. Not Dresden, which was virtually flattened by bombers and where 30,000 died in one night of air raids. Not even Hiroshima, where about 100,000 were killed by a single bomb. In Leningrad the official Soviet death toll for the two-winter-long siege was 632,253, mostly of starvation. Other sources put the figure at more than 1 million.
Leningrad was almost completely isolated: to the west was the Baltic Sea, to the east Lake Ladoga, to the south the advancing Wehrmacht, to the north the Finns, who, while not formally allied with Germany, were fighting their own war with the Soviet Union. But the city's defenders kept the enemy at bay and, again, winter helped. Lake Ladoga froze to a thickness that would support an escape route for hundreds of thousands of refugees -- and a way in for food. The Russian counteroffensive that began on Dec. 5, 1941, also relieved pressure on the city. By early 1942, though the blockade was not broken, the Germans could not hope to advance without a terrible fight. Besides, Hitler was turning his attention toward the Volga River and oil-rich Baku by the Caspian Sea. There a titanic struggle soon developed over the city that stood in his way: Stalingrad.