John Barber, lecturer in politics at King’s College, Cambridge, has been going to Russia for 30 years. "I first went there as a research student in 1969, and I’ve gone back every year since. I’ve seen the eras of Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin. And it is only recently, with the lessening of ideological taboos about the Soviet past, the opening of government and party archives and the declassification of official documents, that scientific analysis of major events in Russia’s past – such as the siege of Leningrad – has really begun."

The siege of Leningrad is an event of massive significance in twentieth-century Russian history. The use of starvation for military purposes is as old as civilisation. But the siege of Leningrad stands out as the death toll – some 800 000 people – was the worst there has ever been in one city, and it became the largest-scale famine ever seen in the industrialised world. Even in a conflict as brutal as World War II, the siege of Leningrad was an appalling event.

Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 under the codename ‘Operation Barbarossa’. Two months later, German troops were already approaching Leningrad. Now known by its original name St Petersburg, Leningrad was in many ways the heart of Russia. Although the capital had been moved to Moscow during the civil war, St Petersburg had been the home of both the Tsars and the revolutionaries. It was the great Russian city.

By 8 September 1941, however, the Red Army had been outflanked, and the Germans fully encircled Leningrad. The siege – the blokada – had begun, and was to last for 900 days, until the Germans were forced to begin their retreat in 1944.

Cultural memories

Dr Barber has spent the last three years, funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust’s History of Medicine Programme, studying the medico-social history of the siege. He leads a team of Russian scholars (see below), some of whom are themselves survivors of the blockade, who will for the first time be able to place the reality of this famine in a global historical context.

Estimates of the numbers who died vary quite widely – given the chaos of the time, it is hardly surprising that some records are incomplete – but Dr Barber and his colleagues reckon on a figure of 800 000. "It is a horrendous number," says Dr Barber. "The Germans were bombing and shelling the city throughout the blockade – but we estimate that 50 000 people were killed through direct military action, and 750 000 died as a result of hunger or related diseases."

On the eve of World War II, Leningrad had an excellent health system. A welfare state had been created in the 1930s as part of Stalin’s modernisation drive. Leningrad was in many ways the model city of the new Soviet state. The city had some 20 medical institutes and a sophisticated civic and public health infrastructure. It is this infrastructure that enables such detailed pictures of the events of 1941–4 to be uncovered.

Nadezhda Cherepnina, head of department at the central state archive of St Petersburg, has undertaken a long review of the evidence of mortality rates. Statistics from the official registry, which recorded births, marriages and deaths, form the basis of the evidence. Remarkably, this registry office kept reliable statistics throughout the siege, apart from the months between December 1941 and April 1942 – the ‘hungry winter’ when starvation was at its height. During this time records become more patchy – the statisticians and officials were dying, and relatives were too ill to be able to report deaths.

Statistics relating to ration cards issued by the city authorities provide good evidence of population numbers. It is not infallible, however, because inevitably some of the ration cards of those who died came to be used by the living.

The picture is further complicated by the presence in the city of several thousand refugees, who were not entitled to ration cards. As the Germans advanced through the Baltic states and western Russia, many inhabitants fled east to Leningrad. The authorities did not have the resources to cope with this refugee influx, and feared infiltration by German spies, so prohibited displaced people from entering the city. But many got through, and lived a marginal, unrecognised existence in the besieged city.

The coordinator of the St Petersburg team, Andrei Dzeniskevich, fellow of the Institute of Russian History, has conducted research on cannibalism during the siege. "During the hungry winter," says Dr Barber, "the authorities were very afraid of cannibalism – not only the eating of those who starved or died of natural causes, but also murder for the consumption of human meat. Over 300 people were shot for committing this crime, and the statistics show that by far the largest numbers of those caught for this offence were the rationless refugees." More than a thousand others were imprisoned.

The records of inhabitants’ rations put what seem like awful crimes into some kind of perspective. The city had been besieged since September 1941, and had looked like it may fall. Research by Svetlana Magaeva has revealed physiological symptoms of stress in the population at this time: medical records show a massive increase in high blood pressure, and many women stopped menstruating.

Rations reached their lowest levels in November. They consisted of 700 calories a day for manual workers – a minimum healthy norm would be about 3500. Non-manual workers and dependants were allowed 473 calories a day – a healthy norm would be approximately 3000. Children received 423 calories a day, less than a quarter of even an infant’s normal requirement.

This period of starvation lasted from the end of November 1941 to March 1942. Rations were increased significantly in March, in part because there were fewer people to feed, and in part because some supplies began to come in via the ‘road of life’ – Doroga Zhizni. This was a highway across the frozen Lake Ladoga, which, though under German bombardment, ferried out evacuees and brought in supplies. But this was already too late for many of the city’s people.

Famine-related disease

The Russians coined the term ‘alimentary dystrophy’ to describe the effects of starvation. Despite the appalling conditions, research was conducted into its various forms, and trainee doctors were taught how to recognise and treat its victims (a film made for this purpose in 1943 is in the Wellcome Library). The symptoms were progressive loss of body weight and muscular strength, weakening of the heart, exhaustion and lethargy. Mid-December saw the first deaths from starvation, which peaked in March and went on well into the summer of 1942.

The most common actual cause of death was failure of the heart or other organs. One of the most remarkable aspects of the siege is that there were no epidemics of disease. There was no running water, sanitation, light or heating. At one point 20 000 unburied bodies were piled in the Piskariovskoye cemetery alone. At this time, 3500 people were dying every day. Yet while pneumonia and tuberculosis did increase, the incidence of typhoid and dysentery was remarkably low.

"This was partly because of the weather," suggests Dr Barber. "It reached 40 degrees below freezing that winter. The corpses were frozen, and contagion was prevented to some extent. Also the authorities did manage a remarkable degree of control. You can see films of the great ‘clean-up’ of the city in the spring thaw. People who are themselves no more than skeletons shovel dirt and refuse, transport corpses."

Dr Magaeva, who herself survived the siege, has researched the coping mechanisms used in the face of extreme starvation. A remarkable number of people survived what seemed to be insufferable deprivations. According to Dr Magaeva, people’s bodies gradually adapted by reducing basic functions, limiting the expenditure of energy to adopt a sort of ‘hibernating’ state.

Dr Barber and the St Petersburg team have more than 1000 direct or indirect testimonies of survivors of the siege, plus unparalleled official archives. They have drawn together some of the initial findings in a book, edited by Dr Barber and Dr Dzeniskevich, which will be published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the siege. A conference in St Petersburg in April helped to disseminate information to the wider history of medicine community.

"This famine was so unique, and so important to historians of medicine," says Dr Barber, "because it took place in a modern city with a developed administrative structure and developed health services. Health records therefore allow us profound insights into the effect of famine on large populations. Now that the political taboos have been lifted, the contribution of this information to famine studies is absolutely huge, and a great deal remains to be discovered."

Russian scholars: St Petersburg team

Rashid Bakhtiarov, Nadezhda Cherepnina, Andrei Dzeniskevich, Mikhail Frolov, Igor Kozlov and Alla Samsonova.

See also

• History of Medicine grants: Scheme details

External links

• Dr John Barber: Research interests of the politics lecturer at King’s College Cambridge
• Central State Historical Archive of St Petersburg: Contact details

Further reading

Barber J, Harrison M. The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London, 1991).

Dando W. The Geography of Famines: Chapter 9, ‘A Millennium of Russian Famines’ (London, 1980).

Moskoff W. The Bread of Affliction (Cambridge, 1990).

Salisbury H. The 900 Days (London, 1986).