This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
I came to this new book with the hope that a historian of the calibre of Sinclair McKay (who to my mind wrote the definitive narrative of Bletchley Park) would do justice to this great port city founded by Tsar Peter the Great in 1703. As a teenage student, I was fortunate to visit in 1981, when it bore the name of the Bolshevik leader Lenin. Back then, Leningrad still remained trapped in time from the great siege by Hitler’s armies in the Second World War four decades before.
I recall the busy avenues and streets along the city’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, and the impressive Tsarist buildings sited in the more prestigious streets, such as Malaya Sadovaya. But what surprised me more than anything at that time were the many American-made trucks from the war that were still in use.
When one thinks of Saint Petersburg, the obvious period to marvel at is the years running up to and during the Second World War. A time of immense persecution from within inflicted by Stalin’s Great Terror that began in 1934 and the death and sacrifice that millions more suffered at the hands of the German invasion of the country in June 1941.
Through a vast array of official records, personal testimonies and diaries, McKay’s Saint Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler reveals what life was like for ordinary Leningraders to survive both political oppression and the external threat of annihilation.
With its face set to the west, as Peter the Great had intended, this enlightened city would be built on toil, sweat and blood. That legacy would come to define it through the bitter years of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent brutal civil war where it was renamed Petrograd by its new Bolshevik masters.
When the city’s name changed once more upon the death of Lenin himself in 1924, it was instigated by the man scheming to replace him, Joseph Stalin. Into the 1930s, he established ruthless control of every aspect of Russian life. As McKay recounts brilliantly, Leningrad would serve as an example of this brutality.
McKay captivates the reader with his insightful vignettes of those Leningraders who fell into the meatgrinder of Stalin’s purges, collectively known as the Great Terror. His victims were guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nevertheless, caught in the maelstrom of denunciations and show trials, their fate was to disappear at the hands of Stalin’s security services. The horror would be nothing compared to what was coming.
Once war broke out in June 1941, Stalin was prepared to give up Leningrad to Hitler’s advancing armies to buy time to shore up the defence of Moscow. Unlike Leningrad’s political leaders (my favourite is Stalin’s alcoholic henchman Andrei Zhdanov), it would be the citizens themselves who remained to put backbone into its defence. Over three million Russians were now trapped and would remain so for 872 days.
Hitler wanted the city erased completely, and its population liquidated. To achieve this, with the Russian winter coming on, he used famine as his weapon of choice. Almost a million Leningraders would perish in that first year as their food and heating reserves dwindled, resupply proved inadequate and the temperature dropped to minus 40 degrees.
Mckay’s research for eyewitness testimonies of the siege is impressive. He quotes extensively from diaries and letters written by the city’s inhabitants, always a bounty to the historian, and in this case archived by the Soviet authorities themselves who encouraged such activity to maintain the morale of the besieged. McKay showcases the thoughts, hopes and fears of soldiers away from the front line, of bakers, manual labourers, dancers, sailors and, naturally, poets.
He describes the Orwellian nature of political life before the war and the hellish landscape of a frozen city in survival mode, where thousands simply collapsed to die in the street from hunger and disease or were killed and maimed by enemy artillery bombardments and air raids.
But the city would not be taken. In our present time of uncertainty in Eastern Europe, it seems odd to celebrate a city that spawned a modern tyrant like Vladimir Putin, whose own older brother died in the wartime siege. Yet that should not detract from what is an excellent story told with aplomb.
