Welcome to Russian History Retold, Episode 222, the Siege of Leningrad, Part 1.

Last time we covered the 12 most important battles in pre-Soviet history.

Today we begin a new four-part series on one of the most tragic stories in Russian history, the Siege of Leningrad.

One of the reasons I want to do this is what's going on in Ukraine right now

and there's a number of Sieges going on and people are suffering.

And this four-part series will show you the kind of suffering that people went through in Leningrad and are now going through in Ukraine.

The Siege of Leningrad is a historical event, a tragedy that has been pushed aside by many.

It was an atrocity committed by the Nazis that rivals any other that they perpetrated during World War II.

The suffering, mainly by women and children, is something that should never be forgotten.

I hope in this series to commemorate the sacrifices made by over 750,000 souls who lost their lives during the 900 days beginning in 1941 and ending in 1944.

My main sources for this episode includes the classic work The 900 Days, The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison E. Salisbury, and the remarkable book and when I highly recommend Leningrad, Tragedy of the City, Under Siege, 1941 to 1944 by Anna Reed.

To put the carnage that we're going to cover in this series, let's put the Siege of Leningrad into perspective.

Anna Reed puts it this way, quote, with the fall of communism 20 years ago, it regained its old name.

But for the older inhabitants, it is still Leningrad.

Not so much for Lening, as in honor of the approximately three-quarters of millions of billions, who starved to death during the almost 900 days.

From September 1941 to January 1944, during which the city was besieged by Nazi Germany.

Other modern Sieges, those of Madrid and Sarajevo, lasted longer but none killed even a tenth as many people.

Around 35 times died in Leningrad, then in London's blitz, four times more than in the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima put together.

To understand how hard what was about to happen to the people of Leningrad is that anyone over the age of 30, at that time, would have already lived through three wars.

World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the Winter War with Finland.

They also would have endured two famines, one during the Civil War, and the other during the collectivization period of 1932 to 1933.

To top it off, they lived through two Stalin-led terrors, which took countless lives with many being sent to the Gulags.

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