The Frozen Hell of Leningrad: A City Under Siege
In the frigid, snow-covered streets of Leningrad, families hauled deceased loved ones – rendered almost mummy-like by brutal sub-zero temperatures plummeting to minus 43 degrees Celsius – down the stairwells of darkened apartment buildings.
Some were struck by the surprising lightness of these bodies, emaciated by hunger, as they loaded them onto sleds and dragged them along roads, resembling sacks of refuse, towards mass burial sites.
Mass Graves for the Countless Dead
Weakened gravediggers lacked the physical strength to penetrate the frozen winter earth. Consequently, mechanical excavators were employed to create enormous, gaping trenches, final resting places for thousands of unidentified corpses.
The sheer volume of fatalities across the city within mere weeks meant the dead had to queue for burial, their bodies stacked like timber.
A Mother’s Miraculous Survival
Among the countless victims was a dignified, handsome woman in her thirties. It was presumed she had perished from starvation, a common fate for many.
Her name: Maria Ivanovna Shelomova Putina – Vladimir Putin’s mother.
Yet, according to one account from that silent street lined with towering 19th-century apartment blocks, beneath an inky night sky, neighbors detected faint moans emanating from the pile of the deceased.
A pair of shoes protruding from the heap of still flesh were observed to twitch. Incredibly, after enduring months of starvation rations, Putin’s mother was not dead. Neighbors rescued her from the surrounding corpses.
The Siege of Leningrad: A Historical Atrocity
An estimated 1.5 million soldiers and civilians perished in the agonizing cataclysm of the Siege of Leningrad – history’s most lethal blockade.
This World War II siege, spanning approximately 900 days from 1941 to 1944, showcased humanity’s fortitude when confronted with extreme deprivation and suffering. For many within the city, including the Putins, it fundamentally altered their understanding of human nature. The specter of this immense suffering continues to cast a long shadow over Russia, and indeed, the global landscape.
Echoes of the Past in Modern Conflict
Consider the horrific landscapes of war in Ukraine, where forces engage in relentless combat for every inch of ground, and the vast scale of devastation inflicted by Putin and his military upon the civilian population.
Leningrad’s agonizing trial commenced weeks after Hitler’s forces invaded Russia in the summer of 1941.
Life Before the Blockade: Culture and Repression
Before the war, Vladimir Putin’s parents enjoyed attending the theater in the late 1930s, particularly to see Arkady Raikin, a beloved comedian in the city – a rare figure in Russia seemingly permitted to satirize Soviet bureaucracy.
The city, with its magnificent baroque palaces, gold-domed churches, and intricate canals, was conceived by Tsar Peter the Great as Russia’s “window on the West,” forged from frozen marshland at the Baltic Sea’s edge in 1703.
St. Petersburg quickly gained international renown for its ballet, rich poetic tradition, and exquisite music. This cultural vibrancy persisted even after the 1917 Russian Revolution when it was renamed Leningrad.
Even amidst the terror of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s – a period when countless innocents were forcibly removed from their homes and subjected to slave labor camps or outright execution – remarkably, lively comedy still found an audience.
Leningrad’s Wartime Transformation: From Culture to Catastrophe
By World War II, however, Leningrad had also become a pivotal center for the Soviet Union’s expansive armaments production. Factories resembled vast cathedrals of industry, assembling tanks and aircraft. Hitler initially intended to conquer Leningrad, but he ultimately resolved that the city and its inhabitants should be eradicated.
The Wehrmacht forces encircling the city severed all supply routes – roads and railways – effectively isolating it from the rest of Russia.
Daily, the Luftwaffe unleashed devastating bombing raids, obliterating apartment buildings and factories, leaving residents in a state of perpetual disorientation and sleeplessness.
The Onset of Starvation
A particularly destructive bombing raid in September 1941 annihilated the enormous timber warehouses containing the city’s reserves of non-perishable food – provisions ranging from pasta and lentils to sugar.
From that moment onward, widespread hunger gripped Leningrad.
The winter of starvation, still commemorated annually in St. Petersburg and by Vladimir Putin himself with grand ceremonies, remains almost incomprehensible in its severity.
Daily Struggle for Survival
As the dark winter days of December 1941 descended, meager daily rations consisted of heavy, dark bread: a small portion for factory workers, even less for other citizens.
These rations dwindled further as weeks passed – some individuals receiving a portion no larger than a playing card to sustain them for an entire 24-hour period.
To obtain this minuscule daily ration, citizens had to begin queuing at bakeries as early as 4:30 AM. Lines stretched down streets long before dawn.
Desperation and Degradation
Occasional rumors circulated about black market horse meat, igniting desperate mass brawls.
Families once united by love, confined to communal apartments shared with other families, devolved into hostile adversaries, marked by screaming and profanity.
Toddlers instinctively searched between floorboards with tiny fingers, hoping to find stray grains of rice.
Children and parents alike harbored suspicions of each other, each believing others were taking more than their allotted share of food.
Winter’s Cruelty and Physical Deterioration
Snow arrived, and following Nazi bombings that crippled power stations, the city descended into intermittent darkness. People resorted to dismantling furniture and banisters for fuel.
The psychological consequences of starvation were compounded by grotesque physical transformations.
Despite hunger, abdomens became distended (a condition known as edema, where the body loses its ability to process fluids, causing them to accumulate around organs).
Skin blotched with dark patches, as if blood itself was too sluggish to circulate adequately. Some developed a yellow pallor, others purple, and some even turned a sickly mint green.
Horrific Physical Manifestations of Starvation
Gums receded and bled.
Eyes appeared to enlarge in their sockets.
Then there were “the ants” – a disturbing sensation of insects crawling beneath the skin, the unsettling result of the body consuming its own tissues.
Adults catching glimpses of their reflections recoiled in horror.
Maternal Agony and Child Separation
Mothers with infants endured the agonizing inability to produce milk. One mother even resorted to cutting her arm to allow her baby to suck blood.
In numerous instances, with fathers absent fighting and infirm mothers compelled to fill factory jobs, young children were taken into state care.
Maria Putina, with her husband Vladimir Spiridonovich serving in the Red Army outside the city (and later wounded by a grenade), was one such mother who had her child taken away.
A prevailing but ultimately false belief held that the Communist state could provide more consistent sustenance in special institutions.
Loss and Unimaginable Hardship
In early 1942, the Putins received the devastating news that their young son Viktor had succumbed to diphtheria.
In the vast majority of cases, starvation was the cause of death.
Little Viktor, Vladimir Putin’s older brother, was one of countless infants interred in those mass graves.
Desperate Measures for Survival
Elsewhere, with only meager supplies entering the city via cargo aircraft (the Luftwaffe controlled the skies), Leningrad’s scientists desperately sought ways to extend bread supplies using edible cattle feed.
People boiled leather belts and briefcases, drinking the resulting broth. They scraped wallpaper paste from walls for sustenance.
Families began to view domestic pets in a new, desperate light.
Children would return home to discover beloved Irish setters – a breed popularized by Tsar Alexander II – had been slaughtered for stew. One family captured and cooked their pet cat.
“It was very tasty,” their young son confessed. At night, men ventured into the frozen darkness to hunt rats: their blood was warm, they possessed flesh. Fried rat became a sought-after meal.
Refugees and Cannibalism
Refugees from the countryside, who had fled into the city ahead of the advancing Nazi forces, faced the most dire circumstances. Without ration cards, they were denied access to food, effectively a death sentence.
Bodies occasionally began to disappear. Some who stole corpses, or excised human flesh from the numerous cadavers littering the streets, were mothers driven by the primal urge to keep their children alive.
But grimmer stories emerged from some apartment buildings: tales of murderers stalking victims in the snow, stabbing them, dismembering their bodies, and consuming their flesh.
Such instances would later be suppressed and hushed up.
The Road of Life: A Beacon of Hope
Yet, the siege also revealed another aspect of human nature: extraordinary ingenuity. The city was situated near Lake Ladoga, a vast freshwater lake. In the depths of that brutal winter, it froze thick enough to allow convoys of trucks to traverse the ice from unoccupied territories to the east.
Navigating the featureless expanse of the frozen lake was made possible by young women who stood holding red flags at regular intervals, marking the route.
These convoys transported vital provisions across a 35-mile ice road that became known as “The Road of Life,” and on their return journeys, they evacuated civilians.
Turning the Tide
By spring, Red Army counteroffensives improved some of the city’s supply routes.
Ruthless Wehrmacht bombings and shelling persisted, but many thousands of the most vulnerable residents were evacuated, and rations for those remaining were increased to levels sufficient for survival.
Artistic Defiance Amidst Devastation
By the summer of 1942, the city’s Philharmonic orchestra was prepared to astound the world with an incredible display of resilience.
Dmitri Shostakovich, a St. Petersburg composer, had composed his Seventh Symphony specifically for the besieged city. Musicians, weakened and exhausted from winter starvation, performed with astonishing passion.
The symphony was broadcast worldwide via radio and even reached Wehrmacht soldiers encamped around the city.
Years later, two of these soldiers, then citizens of East Germany, confessed to conductor Karl Eliasberg their disbelief that such profound beauty could emerge from a city so brutalized.
The End of the Siege and Lingering Scars
The siege continued for another 18 months, but the war’s momentum had shifted. In January 1944, the Red Army finally drove the Wehrmacht into retreat.
With a million civilians dead in Leningrad, the survivors faced an arduous path to peace.
A New Beginning, Shadows of the Past
In 1952, Maria Shelomova Putina, 41, and her husband Vladimir, now a railway worker, welcomed a new son, Vladimir Putin Jr. He was born into a city permeated with mass graves, and he never discovered the burial place of his older brother.
At a commemoration service at a St. Petersburg cemetery some years ago, Putin recounted, “I don’t know where my own brother is buried, whom I never saw, never knew.” He spoke of how his mother had been “laid out with the corpses.”
The Enduring Puzzle of Putin’s Character
While we cannot definitively ascertain how his worldview, particularly his perspective on war, was shaped, it is impossible not to ponder the influence of these experiences.
It is crucial to remember that millions of his fellow St. Petersburg residents did not become autocratic warmongers.
In fact, some subsequent psychological research indicated that siege survivors – Blokadniki – displayed unusually high levels of empathy.
However, the siege undeniably solidified an element of paranoia within Putin’s comprehension of the world and history.
The question persists: how could a man with such intimate knowledge of what Wilfred Owen, the First World War poet, called ‘the pity of war,’ proceed to inflict such a horrific ordeal upon so many women and children in Ukraine?