The Second World War was a conflict of mobility and machinery, of great innovation in the seemingly endless desire of humans to find more powerful ways to subjugate and kill other humans. Tanks and trucks; bombers and fighters; rockets and ultimately ballistic missiles; submarines and aircraft carriers; jet engines; and in the end, industrialised genocide and the atomic bomb.
Yet for nearly 900 days of this complex war, which featured such a rapid development of technology, one of the great cities of Europe was almost entirely cut off from the rest of the continent, and starved – reminiscent of medieval siege tactics. Leningrad, formerly St Petersburg and Petrograd, was the second-largest city in the Soviet Union and home to much of its heavy industry. Built by Peter the Great in a large region of swamps and muddy islands in the Neva estuary, it developed at a remarkable pace through the 18th and 19th centuries and even before the death of its creator it had become the capital of Russia. It was renamed Petrograd to
