The Leningrad siege contained nothing like the heroic or dramatic elements of the battle for Stalingrad; it was mainly a dour chronicle of civilian endurance, in which for nearly three-and-a-half years the population of the city was ringed by three German armies and suffered cold, hunger, fear as well as constant aerial and ground bombardment. Not until January 1944 was the cordon broken, and by then half of the city's population was dead. The political infighting - in-built in Soviet life under Stalin - during and after the siege ensured that both the credit and the blame often went to the wrong people, and it is only recently that the full story has come to light. Harrison Salisbury has written a valuable, densely researched account, though the very density of his detail occasionally overweighs his narrative and tends rather to blur the overall picture.
"On December 29th Luknitsky noted in his diary that ten days earlier he had been told that six thousand persons a day were dying of starvation. `Now, of course, many more,' he observed . . . `To take someone who has died to the cemetery,' Luknitsky said, `is an affair so laborious that it exhausts the last vestiges of strength in the survivors, and the living, fulfilling their duty to the dead, are brought to the brink of death themselves.'
From The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, by Harrison Salisbury.