City of the dead

Russian officials today, much like the Soviet authorities of a past generation, encourage a cult of the Great Patriotic War.

In the national narrative, this was their Finest Hour, still invoked on significant anniversary days as an example of heroism and sacrifice by politicians such as Vladimir Putin.

For Russians the most painful trauma in that conflict was the three-year-long siege of Leningrad. As Anna Reid points out in this masterly and beautifully written account, the deadliest blockade of any city in history has received little attention in the West. Antony Beevor has been followed by a few historians who focused on the nightmare of the Eastern Front, where most of the fighting and dying against Nazism took place — Tim Snyder’s Bloodlands for example. But by and large British and American historians have concentrated on the war in the West.