The Siege of Leningrad

From September 1941 to January 1944 Leningrad was cut off by land for 872 days. In the first winter the bread ration fell to 125 grams a day, and officially more than 632,000 people died of hunger, with other estimates reaching 750,000. The only link to the rest of the country was the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga, by boat in summer and over the ice in winter.

The city was rebuilt so thoroughly that the Siege is hard to see today unless you know where to look. This tour is less about battles than about people: how they lived, worked, studied and buried their dead, and why the city did not surrender.

The route

Victory Square. The Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, funded by the city’s residents and built with the help of sixty thousand volunteers. A broken ring, an obelisk and figures of soldiers stand above an underground memorial hall with mosaics and the sound of a metronome.

The Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery. 186 mass graves hold around half a million victims of the Siege and soldiers of the Leningrad Front. The Motherland figure stands before a granite wall carrying Olga Berggolts’s words, “No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.”

Scars in the centre. The painted warning on Nevsky Prospect that this side of the street is more dangerous during shelling, shrapnel marks on walls and columns, and plaques most passers-by never notice.

Everyday life under siege. The places where people queued for water and factories kept working. In the Philharmonic, Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was performed on 9 August 1942 and broadcast across the city and towards the enemy lines.

Your guide links these places into one timeline, from the first air raids to the final lifting of the Siege on 27 January 1944. Along the way you hear the human stories: Tanya Savicheva’s diary, the metronome on the radio, and vegetable plots on the Field of Mars.

Good to know

• The tour lasts about four hours by car, with the start time and meeting point agreed at booking.
• The car and guide are included; meals are not.
• The tour is private. The pace and depth of the story can be adjusted, including for families with children.

Who it suits

Travellers interested in twentieth-century history, visitors with family links to the war years, and anyone who wants to understand what the city went through, not just how it looks.