Reclaiming the siege of Leningrad from the Russian state: Living Pictures reviewed

Take the Red Line north, heading out of St Petersburg, and you’ll eventually reach Courage Square on the city’s outskirts (if you pass Polytechnic you’ve gone too far). From there, it’s a brisk 20-minute walk along the birch-lined Avenue of the Unvanquished to Piskaryovskoye cemetery, home to some 186 mass graves and almost half a million civilians and soldiers who died during the 900-day siege of the ‘hero city’ during the second world war – or, as it’s known to Russians, the Great Patriotic War. Just behind the obligatory statue of Mother Russia watching over the sepulchral hush you’ll find, etched in granite, the words of the poet Olga Bergholz: ‘Know this, you who regard these stones: No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.’

The words can have an unnerving ring. Equal parts commemoration and threat, it’s obvious why the Soviet state adopted them as the official motto of blockade veneration, inscribing them in every last one of its dozens of monuments, museums and other memorial sites dotted about the city.