Dan Snow's History Hit - Saint Petersburg: Putin's Hometown

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

Founded by Peter the Great, the city of Saint Petersburg was built to rival the majesty of any capital in Europe. Its splendour made it a hub of Russian culture, and its geography made it a focal point for industry. It's factories would jump-start the revolutions that ushered in the Soviet era, and in the wake of a devastating Nazi siege, the recovering city would birth the man who lead Russia into the 21st century - Vladimir Putin.Joining us is Sinclair McKay, author of 'Saint Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler'. He takes us through the turbulent history of this magnificent city, from its founding right up to the present day.Warning: this episode contains graphic descriptions that some listeners may find disturbing.Produced and edited by James Hickmann.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here - https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In May 1703, Peter, Tsar of all Russia, drove the Swedish out of this particular corner of Ingria,

a territory that you could say today, I suppose, would be Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and the parts of Russia that border on the Baltic Sea. The key fortress there, the key Swedish fortress, Nijen Shantz, Peter captured that. And with that came, finally, Russian imperial access, defensible access to the Baltic, down the River Neva into the Gulf of Finland.

It was a big moment in the expansion of Russia. Peter didn't waste any time at all. Like I say, in a matter of days, he'd laid the foundations of the first building to take shape in what he wanted to be a new city, a northern powerhouse. Tellingly, that first building was military. It was the Peter and Paul Fortress. And then, as soon as they could be hired, German and Dutch engineers were brought to Russia to drain the swampy ground, and soon city blocks started to appear. The buildings that would be

constructed there were inspired by the Baroque architectural fashions of Europe. There would be canals with beetling boats carrying people to and fro, a deliberate echo of Venice and Amsterdam. His own enormous palace in his new city, naturally an homage to Versailles. The conditions there were savage. Freezing winters, mosquito-ridden summers. Peter ordered that there should be a yearly round-up of 40,000 serfs. So every dozen or so households would have to contribute one person. They had to provide their own tools, they had to provide their own food for a journey of hundreds of miles, on foot, sometimes chained together in gangs guarded by the military to prevent desertion, and they would then arrive and work themselves,

often to death, on Peter's new infrastructure project. His glorious city, St. Petersburg, rested on a bed of human bones, and the bones of the builders wouldn't be the last. This is the story of Peter's great city, the city in which Vladimir Putin was born after another great war was fought for mastery of this region. It's a story of city and empire building, and it's also a story of Russia's obsession and also competition with the West. To help us understand St. Petersburg,

tell the story of its rise, its revolutions, its near-complete destruction, and its rebirth, here is Sinclair Mackay he's been on the podcast many times before he's written a beautiful book about the firebombing of Dresden we heard from him on the pod earlier this year talking about that the anniversary and he's back now with a new book Saint Petersburg sacrifice and redemption in the city that defied Hitler he's going to take us through that long history. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Sinclair, great to have you back on the pod. Oh, great to be asked back.

Very, very nice to be back. Thank you. Let's start with the geography. Let's start with the stuff beneath our feet. The area we now know is St. Petersburg. What did that look like for the vast, vast majority of geological time? Gosh, well, in geological time, it's kind of frozen marshland. It's extraordinarily kind of inhospitable territory to plant a beautiful city.

This was what Peter the Great came back from London in 1703. And as the poet Alexander Pushkin put it, he who with a will unbounded a city on the marshlands founded. Here is a realm of lakes and sphagnum moss just on the edge of the Baltic. So we're up at the very, very northwestern corner of Russia, where it borders Finland and borders the Baltic states. It was a frozen marshland, but it did have that critical access to the sea. Indeed so, yes. So what about the political geography? Is it comfortably Russian, or are there neighbouring nations, powers, enemies nearby?

There's a constant of conflict with Sweden and Poland, Lithuania. So it's never a particularly easy region. And in terms of geography, the site that is now St. Petersburg lies on a series of strange borderlands, really. Now, famously, in 1703, it was envisaged for Peter the Great as being Russia's window onto the West. But a window, obviously, maybe gazed through in either direction. And you do wonder, here is a city that sprang to being, a lot of it on slave labour. You know, a lot of St. Petersburg has the bones buried into its structure of slave labour who died in the course of the construction of it.

So it was a city partly kind of founded in this darkness, but it was a city that's almost extravagantly, opulently European from the start, as opposed to perhaps a lot of other places deeper in Russia. Because you have immediately this, throughout the 18th century, just a whole Italian architecture, wild baroque constructions, neoclassical constructions everywhere. So there's Italian architects, and then with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, you get a whole bunch of Scottish engineers. From the start, it's an incredibly polyglot kind of place. It's an architectural and political statement, right? Yes. So Peter the Great,

we should probably tell people, Peter the Great is this extraordinary, in all sense of the word, figure, a giant of a man. He's a Russian czar, but is he the first of the czars to really become obsessed by what's going on further Western Europe and to try and sort of Europeanize Russia? Absolutely so. He's the first of the Tsars with a real kind of worldview. At a time when this was a new kind of age of empire, the end of the 17th century, the beginning of the 18th century, a whole new empire started to be formed. And he was very conscious of that. He was, actually, funny enough, where I live in London, I'm not too far away from a statue of Peter the Great that overlooks the River Thames

down in Deptford because he lived in Deptford for a while when it was part of the naval dockyards. He rented a house off Sir John Evelyn who reported back

that he was a terrible tenant. He apparently left the place trashed. But the point is that Peter the Great was fascinated by witnessing Britain's expansion, pulsing kind of outwards as exemplified by these dockyards, but also fascinated by the science of Greenwich Observatory

and the new growing science of astronomy. So he was bringing in all sorts of European influences, bringing European influences back with him to the city that he was determined to summon. These palaces of stone summoned from this extraordinarily inhospitable terrain. But as you say, just at the mouth of the Baltic, which is a fantastic place for these huge shipyards, which he also founded. When we think of St. Petersburg now, it's such a city of the imagination. We all have these images of these extraordinary spires and domes and cathedrals and wild palaces with their extraordinary

colour. And you're going to think, well, it must have been there forever, but it's only been there for 300 years or so. It's a very young city. And Russia, we should quick, just again, quick bit of background here. Russia had grown from the Principality of Moscow, it's one of the most amazing stories really in world history. The Principality of Moscow, one of a dizzying number of little statelets across Eurasia, like Brandenburg or something. And it just goes on this, one of the great imperial expansions of all time. And they go north first. So is the first Russian port Archangel, effectively? People will be familiar, perhaps, from the Second World War, the Arctic convoys. So that northern coast of Russia, which is on the Arctic.

Yes. And with that, certainly through the 19th century, you get Russia's increasing influence within what we know as Finland, before Finland was an independent state. It was a grand duchy of the Tsars. So that was, in essence, a kind of imperial possession. Right, and that's not a great port because it's frozen up. No, that's frozen up. The distinction here is the northern ports do freeze up. They always needed the warm water ports further south too.

Lovely warm Baltic. Yeah, great. Yes, yes. And the Black Sea is not conquered until after Peter. And he's got these neighbours, the mighty Swedish Empire, and he's got the mighty Polish Empire. So if he wants to reach out and connect with the rest of Europe and trade and bring in military engineers and whatever else, he's got to do it through this little tiny little bit of access to the Baltic. And St. Petersburg's the logical place to do it. It's fascinating. Yes, yes, no, it is. But what is also doubly fascinating on top of that is you imagine a kind of port city. And what you don't usually link up with port cities is an exuberance of aesthetic beauty. This seemed to be the case with St. Petersburg. It was also very prone to flooding, incidentally, as well. There

was a terrible flood in 1824 in which the city was half submerged. And again, there was always this sense with Petersburg from the start that they existed on this borderline. They were neither quite European nor quite Russian. Then, of course, there was the borderline that dissolved between night and day. You've got the famous white nights in the midsummer when the sun never really sets beneath the horizon, producing this faintly uncanny atmosphere. In the winter, the daylight rarely comes. And then there was the border between land and seas.

There were a lot of Petersburgers who wanted the city to be like an Old Testament ark, floating on sometimes hostile waters. Not for nothing is it sometimes called the Venice of the North. Yeah, yeah. But yes, but then on top of that, it was also always rooted in this grubby reality so you have the exuberance of these palaces and churches but then on top of that you have an

extraordinary fast growing industry first the naval dockhouse but then the the putilov works as i mentioned previously scottish engineers being involved in bringing industrial might to st petersburg these huge huge citadels of industry which started springing up at the start of the 19th century creating special rails to bring railways to Russia. Quite a different proposition to railways in Britain. Peter, from the beginning, you mentioned this architectural exuberance. Did he insist on that? Yes, yes, yes. Because as a Brit, we're so used to laissez-faire government. Well, yes, him and his successors. It became an implanted tradition in a city that was still only a few years old. You see it now under the Peterhof, the Catherine Palace, these amazing architectural fantasias,

but fantasias not of Russia, but of Europe. It's still the case, actually, with St. Petersburg now. I've got a few Russian friends who are not from either St. Petersburg or Moscow. They're from deeper within the country, Samara. And they said that all the way through the history of St. Petersburg or Moscow, they're from deeper within the country, Samara. And they said that there's, all the way through the history of St. Petersburg, there's been this lurking resentment from a lot of other Russians towards St. Petersburg, because here was a city that also was consciously set up

as this kind of, a self-consciously literary city, a self-consciously artistic city, as Peter the Great who brought ballet to St. Petersburg for the delight of the workers, as well as the aristocrats. And there is a sense elsewhere within Russia, just a suspicion that possibly the city that Peter founded was just that shade too European. Talk about coastal elites. I mean, this is the original, and it's constructed with the blood

and the sweat and the tears of thousands of effectively enslaved people. Effectively enslaved people, a lot of prisoners of war, a lot of Swedish prisoners of war. But yes, effectively enslaved people. And of course, Russia itself was a system of serfs. It was essentially an empire of slavery. You might argue that all empires have an element of slavery about them. But yes, it's a city that's founded on the bones and the blood of so many. And they're digging out drainage ditches, they're trying to drain the land, and then they're banging piles in so you can build these huge edifices above in miserable conditions yes i mean the winters in st petersburg well as you would expect in the north uh particularly to brutal and severe so yes you know as alexander pushkin put it in that

poem when he said with will unbounded i mean there is certainly an element of truth and because the city does seem to be as a conscious effort of will and just to keep it there seems conscious of effort of will too and it works in it there seems conscious of effort of will too. And it works in some terms because it becomes one of the great European cities. Noble families move there. It's all very fancy. It's high culture. And I learned from your book, within two decades, it's handling 90% of Russia's foreign trade. So it is this window on the rest of the world. Absolutely. And it's very open to that world as well. As I say, it's a very polyglot city. Huge numbers of Germans come to settle in St. Petersburg over the decades, particularly through the 19th century. But you also get huge numbers of people from the Baltic states, huge numbers of people coming up from Ukraine, an extraordinary

range of religions too implanted in the city. I can't remember exactly when the first mosque opened, but certainly the city central mosque still stands. There were always a certain number of Muslim people, very large Jewish population from quite early on. And unlike the rest of Russia, Russia, the river had torn these hideous pogroms in the Tsarist times, terrible, terrible, terrible firestorms of antisemitism. Intriguingly, in St. Petersburg, there was always an undercurrent of antisemitism. There was always kind of anti-Jewish feeling, but it never could of erupted onto the streets. And so as a result, the Jewish population of St. Petersburg were much more, I hate the term, but assimilated than they were perhaps in other places in Russia. That together with the dizzyingly fast expansion of industry

and the huge number of country folk flooding into the city through the 19th century makes it, I suppose, goes a little way towards explaining how it so quickly became a kind of cradle of revolution too. Yes, so it's interesting because not only is it an aristocratic playground, but it also becomes Russia's leading industrial city and with all of the class-based politics that that brings. Indeed so, yes. But on the one hand, you have Tolstoy's War and Peace, where, as you said, the aristocrats are going to the grand balls and the extraordinary palaces night after night. But then on the other side of the southern side of the city, you have, as I said, these extraordinary citadels of industry and

extraordinary early housing projects, very, very rudimentary to, to house the huge numbers of people who are needed to, to work. And as a result, it's St. Petersburg where the great milestones of revolution are all seem to all take place. Let's talk about the first,

well, there's, there's been many, we can spend a long time talking about instability in the late Tsarist regime, but let's talk about the first one that was a revolution in the 20th century, 1905. Did that start in St. Petersburg? It did, yes. And it had been brewing for some years beforehand. Throughout the 19th century, there have been, I suppose, secret hermetic societies of radicals who had been forming a meeting in St. Petersburg and moving among the industrial workers secretly, trying to radicalise

the industrial workers. Among them was Lenin's older brother, who was then hanged for sedition. The czarist regime policing itself fearsomely with the Ocrana, terrifying some secret police. And then you have Lenin himself. You have Lenin's wife-to-be educating the workers with special Sunday evening classes. But these were the opposite of religious Sunday evening classes. Instead of teaching the gospel, she was teaching Marx. But she was also teaching these workers literacy and numeracy and all sorts of other subjects they were desperate to know about, everything from geography to evolution and whether it was possible for this new world to outgrow its old god. So those seeds of revolution were being sowed quite a way before. And then in 1881, we have the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in St. Petersburg, an extraordinary moment of terrifying political violence carried out by a group called Narodnaya Volya, the People's Will.

Again, one of these secret, hermetic St. Petersburg societies of revolutionaries, young revolutionaries, some of them aristocrats. And this was, in essence, I think, one of the world's first suicide bombs. A young student who threw a bomb down at the Tsar's feet or the Tsar's carriage. It caught the Tsar. It obviously caught the bomber, too. And this led, in turn, the shock of the assassination of Alexander II led to even more oppression from the regime, even more cracking down on perceived seditious elements within that industry. So by the time you get to 1905, when you get to the hunger caused by the Russo-Japanese War, you get all sorts of discontent

in the factories. These are people being made to work some 13, 14 hour shifts, 15 hour shifts. The demands of the 1905 petitioners actually is not too madly unreasonable. They're calling for a working day of 11 and a half hours in some cases just to improve some of the conditions, but also to bring about some kind of constitutional monarchy to try and end absolutist rule. What happens on that winter's day, it's January 1905, is a peaceful march on the Winter Palace. Thousands and thousands of people marching through the streets in order to present this petition led by this charismatic Orthodox priest, Father Gapon. And what happens is the troops open fire on them and they start cutting them to pieces with sabres and there is a nightmare massacre unfolds in the streets of St. Petersburg. On the same day, incidentally, the wealthier shoppers and the Nevsky Prospect going to the

fashionable stores of Nevsky Prospect, the furriers, the furniture stores, that side of the city is still carrying on, while just around the corner near the Winter Palace, people have been cut down in their hundreds. It's a nightmare scene. Then huge unrest, which spread from there right the way across the country. There's strikes. The new electricity has shut down. Railways jutted to a halt. The end result of it was the establishment of a constitutional monarchy,

an establishment of the Duma, which the regime would then have rode back on. But it was the start. It was the first flickering flame of the larger revolution that was to come. And so let's move to 1917. You've got an even greater, I mean, the Russo-Japanese War was a disaster. By 1917, the Russian war effort in the First War is a catastrophe. Yes, yeah. Vast, vast losses. Even more ramping up of industrial production. So I imagine tough, very tough times,

not just on the front line, but in the factories, hunger. Oh, yes. Terrible times in the factories, yes. And I mean, you know, the Russian winter is not that fun anyway, at the very best of times, I imagine. So in February, you're probably feeling a bit grumpy. Again, this famous, infamous revolution, again, it starts in St. Petersburg, doesn't it?

Yes, it starts in St. Petersburg. As you say, there is the war that's been grinding on, families losing loved ones in their millions. I mean, the Russian casualty figures are just absolutely terrified. And on top of this, as you say, you have hunger too. There's the most ferocious rationing in Petersburg, or Petrograd, as it was then, because Petersburg was deemed too German by then. So Petrograd sees terrible, terrible hunger,

gaunt workers who are being madly overworked anyway, who can barely stand up, who are still being forced into these production houses. So yes, the discontent is growing and growing and growing, and the flame is growing and growing. It can't be held back. Even then, with St. Petersburg, I'm always interested in how... Famously, there is the story of Rasputin in 1916, the holy fool of the Tsar and his wife, this extraordinary kind of wild-eyed mendicant who's actually neither mad nor a monk,

but always going to do all that sort of... And just that, I suppose, the uncanny symbolism of the scandal of the perception of this extraordinary, drunken, lecherous holy man and his influence on the Russian royal family, and the fear that it's actually a figure like him, this slightly uncanny shaman, could tip the balance so far that the royal family would be brought down by him. And so that's the reason why Rasputin had to be assassinated by a group of aristocrats. But that in turn, the city always had a very

strong sense of itself, and a strong sense of itself in terms of stories, and that was a story that quickly picked up. Here is almost a self-perpetuating revolutionary moment, but as we say, it's long in the making. There are many, many, many elements and strands in all of this. But the city also

as a cradle of revolution, as a cradle of industry and aesthetics, the city always had an innate sense of revolution, as a cradle of industry and aesthetics, the city always had an innate sense of its own, in the wake of theatricality as well. There was performance in it. This was a performance when revolution came that was self-consciously for the world. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. There's more to come.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. The Tsarist regime was unable to keep order in St. Petersburg, partly because it had sent many of its finest units to go and fight in Ukraine, interestingly, where they had been badly mauled. What happened in 1917?

In 1905, the Tsar was able to claw back his own power, but in 1917, did they even try? Did the streets of St. Petersburg run red with blood, or was the Tsar just able to claw back his own power. But in 1917, did they even try? Did the streets of St. Petersburg run red with blood, or was the Tsar just toppled? Nothing, I suppose, dissolves so fast as power. It vanishes like a ghost, and that seemed to be the case in St. Petersburg. It's not so much that the streets were running red with blood. It was, even though there were outbreaks of an of anarchy there were snipers on roofs there were kind of a lot of war damaged veterans too with guns who could have been firing

randomly that could have wasn't it it was more just the the consciousness that a new age had could have come into being so obviously it's propelled enormously by the charnel house of the war in which so many of the citizens had been thrown into this dreadful war and the sense that it couldn't be sustained anymore but also here yes i mean here petersburg understood itself and understood the world has changed so fast that it was it was a moment of modernism actually in a curious way i mean it's more than a revolution politically it's a revolution philosophically and religiously too. It's the most extraordinary, instant kind of sea chain. Sinclair has often said in the end that the Tsar lacked the sort of brutal, callous willingness to just shoot vast numbers of his own people that the Soviets would

later go on to show in spades. The Tsar says, doesn't he, to his generals, don't go in there and start murdering vast numbers of people. Well, I mean, this comes after decades of Tsarist oppression through the means of the Okhrana, the secret police. St. Petersburg had been extraordinarily repressive and ruled by terror, in essence. Any hint of sedition or dissent would be dealt with in the most merciless way. But I suppose 1916, 1917, you have a Tsar who is, Tsar Nicholas II is a recognisable human being. He's quite sensitive in some ways. And also when you have a city and a nation

that's been suffering so terribly in this nightmare conflict, the likes of which has never been seen before, it's not an element of mercy on his part. It's also just an element of realism, really. How do you turn the guns on the one and a half million, two million people? Do you destroy an entire city for the sake of maintaining your own regime? I mean, you can't. You can't, in the end, fight the world and St. Petersburgers at that time. In a way, kind of emblematic of the world and of a new age, that's the technology, the spreadings of electricity, chemical works. The czarist world is kind of

very much a pre-modern one. And he can't fight, you know, rather like St. Petersburg can't fight the tides of flood, the czar can't fight the tides of history. So the crowds just take over the key public buildings in St. Petersburg. And as you say, a provisional government, the bit of the Russian Revolution lots of people might not remember. There are then months of quite exciting political and social upheaval, people trying to debate, work out what's the future for the Russian Empire. This provisional government decide to continue the war against the Germans quite wholeheartedly. And then you get the growing power of Lenin and his communists. And again, that is St. Petersburg-led. It is very much. It's the very presence of Lenin and his return to St. Petersburg that then becomes

one of those emblematic moments, the arrival at the Finland station. There was that wonderful painting of Lenin getting off the train, which Stalin then had himself added into later. So you see Stalin behind Lenin in the railway carriage with a rather jaunty cat and again it's it's here is one of those moments where the pendulum absolutely decisively kind of swings as i say again there are so many millions of strands involved in the story because you're talking about a city of sums of two and a half million three million people by this stage it's incredibly kind of populous uh but and you would expect in such a revolution huge amounts of violence and all that but actually at the start uh there isn't there's the storming of the winter Palace, which then they grab hold of,

the Smalley Institute, which the American journalist John Reed was nipping in and out of, his eyewitness account of those extraordinary moments of passion with various Bolshevik deputies, industrial configures, workers, soldiers, all trying to work out what the contours of this new world are, and also, I suppose, the contours, the repercussions of what it is that they're doing, because they know that the entire world is looking in on them. They know that the entire world is both fascinated and aghast and in awe of what's taking place in St. Petersburg.

And amid this extraordinary kind of 18th century architecture, too, which gives it a further kind of element of, I suppose, incongruity, as I say, the Bolshevik takeover of the Smolny Institute, which they then held on to for years and years and years afterwards. The Smolny Institute was originally an academy for young ladies built in the 18th century. This fantastically dainty building, marigold yellow, and here are the ideas and the passions that are going to roll across the world like a tsunami and change the entire 20th century is extraordinary. And this is what I find so extraordinary, Sinclair, is that Russia, the largest country on earth,

and yet what seems to happen in its little tiny northwest corner of it in St. Petersburg, just that does seem to set the agenda for this vast empire. Obviously, the Soviets had to fight a civil war and it was not a simple not a simple thing to sovietize the russian empire but it really matters who's sitting in in those buildings in st petersburg it does become yes because even though lenin is quite quick to move the capital from st petersburg to moscow uh so under the czars the st petersburg have been not just the capital of russia but also the seat of an empire and it's lenin who who moves it very quickly, the capital of Moscow. But St. Petersburg remains absolutely kind of key, both to the political thinking, but also to the philosophy of Bolshevism too.

It's always intriguing, the figures who are appointed to rule over St. Petersburg, in effect, the first party secretaries. You have Sergei Kirov in the late 1920s, early 1930s, who was very close to Stalin, possibly too close for his own good. I'll explain the first party secretary of Leningrad, because what you have here in the city is this extraordinary industrial capacity for producing military equipment. It's basically one of the armaments hubs of Russia, and that gives it terrific strategics of importance. So, as I say, you have Sergei Kirov in charge of the city.

Sergei Kirov, in December 1934, was sitting in his paneled office in the Smolny Institute, which I mentioned earlier. And there was a chap who managed to get into the building, somehow managed to get past security, and fire a revolver at Kirov, killing him instantly. Kirov was assassinated, shot in the head. His assassin tried to shoot himself, somehow failed. The gun must have slipped from his hand or the enormity of what he had done must have sunk him. He was arrested, but that was the start then of a series of accusations and counter-accusations which started themselves to spread like a firestorm. In essence, the assassination of Kirov was the start of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. That moment in 1934, when the ruling party officials turned on so-called Mensheviks, people who had been in rival factions to Stalin in the 1920s, that nightmare of terror, of

the purges, which stretched through every single level of russian society started in st peter's boat leningrad thousands upon thousands of victims party of officials were being dragged out of their flats in the in the darkness of the night either then just to be immediately executed or to be sent off to the deathly wildernesses of the of the various labor camps you know the purges are almost, they're still beyond rationality and they're still the subject of so much academic debate because Stalinist history is like a mirror maze. The more lurid conspiracy theories are suddenly discovered to be, in fact, lurid reality and vice versa. But again, it's in St. Petersburg where the spark starts,

this terrible storm that then races right the way across the country, destroying not only countless civilians, but also destroying huge numbers of key military personnel, which will then be a factor that Hitler will take very close attention to. Well, let's move forward to the Second World War now. Hitler is paying close attention to the purges and the poor performance of the Soviet Red Army in Finland, for example. It encourages him to invade. Now he invades, he splits his troops in 1941, doesn't he? Because he's got Leningrad, he's got Moscow, and he's got the breadbasket and the oil of the South and Ukraine. He decides to go for them all, doesn't he? But he gets pretty close to Leningrad. He gets very, very close to Leningrad too. Well, indeed, he gets very close to Moscow too,

Governor. At some stage, they're within about 15 miles of Moscow. They can certainly see it through their binoculars. I mean, Operation Barbarossa, the scale of it still is absolutely beyond comprehension. Here you are in June 1941. Two years previously, there had been the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression between Germany and Russia, an extraordinary cynical move which takes the world completely aback, leaving Hitler free to continue his deathly march across western europe and leaving stalin and the bolsheviks under the sense of illusion that uh they they're kind of out of it but you mentioned earlier the winter war in 1939 with finland and this is absolutely key for what happens to leningrad in the siege in the Second World War. In late 1939, just after Hitler and Stalin's Russia between them

had grabbed Poland against a carnage, bloodshed, mad, horrible oppression on both sides through the Baltic states too. The Stalinists were leaning very, very heavily on the Baltic states. Stalin decided that he had to go for Finland as well. He had to possess Finland. Part of it was paranoia about Hitler. He was worried that Hitler would team up with the Finns. But part of it was just that ancients of ironic communist imperialist twitch. They just simply cannot help themselves, those old imperialist instincts. And in the autumn of 1939, Stalin's

convinced that the Red Army could simply march into Finland and take Helsinki within two or three days. A tiny population of five million, how could they possibly stand against it? What then transpired was an extraordinarily bloody, bitter conflict held in the Karelian forests. These forests of birch and lakes and some reindeer, no good for modern tanks. The senior Soviet commander spotted instantly. Oh, right. Okay. And on top of this, Finland's Mannerheim had established the most extraordinary defense over the previous few years because Finland had always been worried about Starnum. In essence, the Winter War isn't very long. The Red Army, with its huge numbers, prevails in the end, but only at the most amazing cost. I think they lose

something like 750,000 people to a tiny Finnish army that's basically operating with skis and reindeers, but extraordinarily agile. They can't maintain it in the end. Obviously, they can't. But in that crucial moment, Hitler is looking on and seeing a Red Army that's completely confused, incredibly ill-equipped. This makes the prospect of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 a terrible, terrible possibility. But as I've mentioned earlier, the scale of Operation Barbarossa, you imagine it's a thousand miles

from the Baltic Sea in the north to the back sea in the south, ranged right the way in this line down Eastern Europe, three million troops, most of them German, some of them Romanian, some from the Spanish Blue Division

that the Wehrmacht has been joined by all sorts of people. This extraordinary kind of fighting force just roaring across Eastern Europe in three kind of spear points. Army Group centres heading towards Moscow, you've got the oil fields of Caucasus, and it's Army Group North who are heading towards Leningrad. Leningrad is still at that stage perceived to be a crucial target because it's in Leningrad where these huge citizens of this industry are producing tanks and airplanes. Here is where the Red Army and the Red Air Force is basically being equipped. If the

Nazis could capture Leningrad, they would strangle Russia's ability to fight from that point onwards. And throughout that summer of 1941, as they just blaze across Eastern Europe, Estonia, Lithuania, absolutely dissolving their weight, they get within about 18 miles of Leningrad. The Wehrmacht is essentially parked around the extraordinary palaces that you find in the suburb, Sarko-Sida, Pushkin, as it later became known, the Pitov Palace, Catherine Palace, these are all the night's possessions and

they can see the spires and the domes of Leningrad in the distance. What happens next is one of those great

historical what-ifs. Why didn't they then push into Leningrad? Why didn't they conquer the city by the winter of

1941? You listen to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come. This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Well, how did the Soviets manage to keep the hammer and sickle flying over that city? It's an extraordinary story in many ways. There was a reluctance on, after that amazing German advance, after the velocity of the Wehrmacht through those northern lands, the Red Army at last started to organise some form of resistance after the initial terrible, terrible shock. So by the autumn of 1941, you do have a much more determined resistance from the Red Army.

On top of that, the Germans under von Meeb are looking at Leningrad and there's some reluctance to fight within the city because it would involve basically house-to-house fighting, snipers, a lot of asymmetric warfare I suppose we call it now. And there's a point where as the Wehrmacht stops outside Leningrad and sets itself up in the smaller towns like Gatina and various other small towns around, turns them into garrisons, there's suddenly a sense of the momentum has gone and at that point Hitler, who has no patience really for Leningrad, no sense of a feel of the city's history or anything that might even really be of use to the Nazis in the end, decides instead simply to condemn the city to death. It's decided that the city will be encircled by the Wehrmacht instead and the people within, no supplies will be able to get in. The people will just be literally starved to death. There was in fact a bureaucratic memo that came out of Berlin at some point in 1941, where a civil servant noting

down the minutes of a meeting with various sort of senior Nazi officials said, it's expected that in the city of Leningrad, X million will die. And they couldn't even bother to fill in what the number with the X was. It was just, that's how incredibly dismissive they were. Leningrad was simply going to just be forgotten, while the wider conquest of Moscow was the aim. And that siege had gone for 872 days. It began in the autumn of 1941, where the city's veins and arteries were essentially cut off. The road links, all the rail links. There had been an attempt to evacuate a number of children and women from the city in that late summer. And the

civilians had built the most extraordinary defences around the city. I mean, there was a civilian operation. There were millions of tank traps and trenches and shelters. But huge numbers of evacuated children were brought back to the city because the Germans had taken over so much of the Russian countryside they were trying to get them to. And so by the winter of 1940 well even just by the autumn of 1941 they understood suddenly that they were trapped they understood suddenly that leningrad was alone and essentially cut off from the rest of russia uh it was a city could have been solitary confinement there were a number of terrible bombing raids because the luftwaffe had mastery of the skies they were dropping bombs on the city just absolutely relentlessly

day and night so people were half crazed with with sleep deprivation and there was one terrible night september the 8th 1941 where a series of timber-based warehouses the badaev warehouses close to the center of the city uh which had been used to contain huge amounts of non-perishable foodstuffs for the city. Everything from pasta to dried fish to all the supplies that the city would have for a month went up in flames in the space of one night. Leningrad is puzzled by the extraordinary odour in the air of burning sugar.

Couldn't quite place what it was. Then the realisation of what it was, what the Germans had managed to hit. Basically, their food supplies, which would have seen them through not a huge amount of time for the next few weeks, but still would have been a lifeline all up in smoke and that's the moment when the citizens of Leningrad realize the full horror of what they're facing is not just the nightly bombing is not just the incessant shelling of factories is the fact that their rations their

daily rations of bread are now coming down to 200 grams, maybe 300 grams. They're working in heavy industry. But suddenly, all anyone can think about is food, because suddenly there's no food anymore. There are aeroplanes that are managing to get past the Luftwaffe and drop in some supplies. For a city of one and a half million, two million people, it's not even going to scratch the surface. And so the desperate hunger begins very quickly. As the winter, it's a very cold winter, isn't it? But the small bit of good news that brings is that they can make ice roads across Lake Ladoga, can't they?

So some supplies can get in across the frozen ice. They can. Well, it has to be pointed out, though, before they get to that stage, it was one of the hardest winters, actually, for decades and decades. The temperatures started falling to minus 20, minus 30, and then to minus 43 by december 1941 now these were people who were already could have emaciated who were living in apartments with shattered windows because the bombs of shattered windows

no way of patching them up electricity was faltering water supplies were faltering because the germans had attacked so much of the infrastructure you had to queue for the bakery at something like 4.30 in the morning in order to join the queue at a reasonable pace. You then had to spend hours in the snow, which was falling incessantly, waiting for a piece of bread, which is not a great deal larger than a playing card. That would be your lot for the day. Or a weird little ration of cocoa powder.

You would get some odd random things, maybe a dried apricot, but then you'd have to take that back to your family. Cut it up incredibly carefully so that everyone got an incredibly fair share. People's dreams at night filled with hot meat dripping and buttery

potatoes and the torture of hunger. And all the Leningraders understand what they're going through. The families who were once incredibly loving families turning on each other like snarling enemies because they're paranoid they believe they're stealing food from each other and then in the midst of the darkness people's faces if people with particularly pale skin textures suddenly noticed their flesh was starting to darken in patches because it was almost as if their blood was too apathetic to move properly then with the hunger you also got the swelling bellies,

which was a result of the water retention. People reported getting a sensation called the ants, which was like insects burrowing under the flesh and moving around under the flesh. This was the body in desperation starting to consume itself. And Leningraders all understood this. They became frightened to look in mirrors because what stared back at the mirrors was not recognisably their own features.

There were so many diarists at the time and people were encouraged to keep diaries. These civilians were writing of walking along incredibly silent, deserted, snowy streets and watching people around them simply sink to their knees and collapse in the snow. They couldn't go on. There were people just literally dying in the snow they couldn't go on there were people just literally sort of dying in the street there were people out in those streets who were starting to hunt rats because the cats and the dogs were family pets had to be eaten quite quickly those were the measures of desperation that people were going to and the dead had to queue to be buried the enormous numbers of bodies could have piling up but there was no one to bury them the gravediggers didn't have the strength to to dig into the frozen earth and they were going to need mass burial pits in any case,

a mass crematoria. And it was at that point that a few people in the furthest, darkest edges of desperation started to take bodies, which had been stacked like logs and crematoriums, because there was at least the possibility of human meat, which became a black market resource in some of the markets. It is the most extraordinary story of the very, very limits of human nature and what it could be stretched to. And the story also of other Leningraders, who people largely who were driven to that desperation were refugees who didn't have ration cards because they fell out of the official kind of right of the city. If you didn't have a ration card, that was it, you were dead. There was no possibility of bread or anything these were the people who were taking the bodies and there was incredibly a measure of some

compassion from some doctors and city authorities about this the intelligence with which Leningrad has faced this ordeal uh is one of the most remarkable things about the story but yes you mentioned Lake Ladoga there's an incredibly huge lake as one of the biggest uh freshwater lakes certainly in the north of the world. In the summer months, in the warmer months, it's a huge shipping lane. As the winter comes, it all starts to freeze up. You've got these extraordinary ice flows creaking and shrieking in the northern darkness. And then come December, it's completely frozen over.

And it was the city authorities, again, with that kind of keen intelligence, who looked at this and thought, right, we're going to try some experiments using hydrographers they got scientists out there to test the ice to test what the ice could bear they started sending horses and sleighs over to see if they could transport supplies that way and then it was determined that the ice was thick enough to bear motorized vehicles what you then have is the most extraordinary spectacle there are photographs of it which cannot capture the amazing feat the The ice road, the road of life across Lake Lidochia, which starts sometimes on January 1942, it gets going properly, where motorised convoys moving across this steel grey featureless landscape of ice and snow. The navigation is provided by young women, the white angels they were called, who are stationed at certain points along the ice across something like 35 miles, set up with semi-supermanent teepees on the ice to give them shelter.

There were wavings of literally red flags. That was the only way that the motorized convoys could navigate across this trackless, featureless prospect. So from the shores on the east, they were starting to be able to get supplies in to the city of the basic foodstuffs but they're also then able to start taking people out a proper evacuation began there's mothers with very tiny children in open trucks in temperatures of minus 43 being driven i still can't possibly imagine it actually the blankness of this landscape the air above droning with the Luftwaffe who are watching this convoy dropping bombs smashing the ice as they do so and the ice is suddenly opening up in any case sometimes beneath vehicles uh mothers desperately

trying to hold on to wriggling babies in the midst of this so it's an ordeal in its own right but for the survivors who did make it back across, who were then greeted with hot chocolate and some fresh food, and kindness and smiles, something they hadn't seen for a very, very long time. No, it's measurably haunting. The ingenuity with which Leningrad set about saving itself, but then the extraordinary strength that came in the following spring of 1942. The city was still very much encircled. The sea was still very much on. The bombing and the shelling were absolutely incessant. But now, with just a vein of supply lines open again,

livable living rations starting to come through again, something new sparks in the city. Suddenly, the citizens of Leningrad are involved in the most extraordinary clear-up, perhaps a million deaths, just absolutely unfathomable, for which they have to use a mass grave, but also on top of that, the cleanup of the city that has to take place. Again, it's a huge civilian operation. And it's here that we start to see more of the parents of Vladimir Putin. Putin answers the story. Putin's mother and father are Leningraders. They came to work in the city. Now, Putin's father, at the time of the war, is out with the Red Army. Putin's mother and father, Leningraders, they came to work in the city. Now, Putin's father at the time of the war is out with the Red Army. Putin's mother is living in the city with the

firstborn, Viktor, Viktor Putin, who is a toddler. The story is horrible, hideous. Like so many other small children, Viktor fell victim to starvation. There's nothing his mother could do, absolutely nothing Putin's mother could do to save Viktor. She herself was so close to death that she was actually mistaken for a corpse at one point, and almost on the point of being loaded onto one of the sleds that they took the body away. It was found just in time that she was alive. So as if Putin would have had an older brother, Viktor, were it not for the fact that Viktor died aged two and was then consigned, along with so many others, to a mass grave in the city. Putin still goes back every year for commemorative ceremonies. And on these occasions, his anger

kind of burns bright and it's unfamed. I mean, you absolutely see it. But this is a city where by 1942, as I say, still encircled, still besieged, but Shostakovich and his symphony, the Leningrad Symphony, which would ring out across the world as a symbol of Russian endurance and Russian creativity, gets its premiere in Leningrad in August 1942. As I say, it's broadcast across the world and it becomes a symbol of regeneration. By this time, even more supply lines have been brought in. The Red Army is beginning to fight back properly against the occupying German forces. And so even though the city is still besieged, there are now proper supplies of food coming in. So what you get in

the rest of the siege is just regeneration and renewal on the most amazing kind of scale. There are beautiful photographs of children holding huge group of cabbages, which have been grown in the shadow of St. Isaac's Cathedral. By 1944, January 1944, a brilliant general, Leonid Govorov, an artillery expert, has found the lateral means by which finally, finally chasing off the last of the Germans. And as I say, the Germans, the Wehrmacht, who'd seemed so absolutely immovable, vanished like ghosts. Again, the dissolution of power is so, so, so fast. And the Red Army start chasing back across Eastern Europe. Leningrad, in the meantime, the speed of the regeneration is just absolutely astounding. Its life is restored,

even though it endures a fresh round of purges with the death of the city's party secretary, Andrei Zhdanov, who had been a close friend of Stalin. He died, but then the people around him suddenly fell victim to purges because they were distrusted by Beria and Milenkov. But after this fresh round of purges through the 50s and 60s, even during the darkest years of the Cold War, where the Soviet regime now has dominion over Eastern Europe, but Leningrad still remains this kind of outward facing city. By the 1950s, by the 1960s, it's accepting all sorts of school trips because of what we would now call soft power, I suppose,

the ballet, the extraordinary kind of rich life of the poets. I didn't even mention the poets of the city declaiming their poetry during the siege to lift people's hearts. But here is a city where poetry changes living reality. And that carries on in the 1960s and 70s too. Now Putin himself, born in 1952, by this stage, his father, I think, is working at the railways, I think. His mother teaches him to read and write and arithmetic very, very early. Putin is an ill-behaved horror in primary school, even from the start. But he's picking on some older kids. But Leningrad is also the crucible for Putin, because even though he and his family are

living in a communal apartment, there's still communal apartments at this stage, where they're sharing with three or four other families. There's very little in the way of indoor plumbing. If you want a bath, you have to go to the local sauna. So life is not rich, but it's not poor either. There are books in this household. As I say, his parents are intelligent. They're not doing too badly. But Putin determines that he sees the aristocrats of Leningrad. The old monarchy went in 1917. They were killed in 1918. But a new form of monarchy took place, party officials, people like Andrei Zhdanov. And Putin could see the striations of Leningrad

society. It's more sensibility than money, but it's still there. And he determines that the way to rise in the society is through espionage. That's what really grabs his imagination. And it's Putin who determines that he's going to join the KGB, which is the unworthy successor to the Ekrana, the Cheka, the NKVD. And this he does. It's Putin we see in 1980s in Dresden as a KGB officer at the point when the Soviet system collapses. Look at photographs of Putin from then. He's actually a little tubby. He's going tubby on the Dresden beer. It's Putin who returns to St. Petersburg, becomes its deputy mayor in the 1990s, and in essence then becomes one of the city's aristocrats.

Here is a city that's just honeycomb with corruption and backhanders and all the rest of it. But it's a city still with a sense of kind of exceptionalism, a sense of pride. That was always St. Petersburg's founding city. The name Leningrad is dropped quite quickly after the Soviet regime collapses. The people of St. Petersburg is going back to St. Petersburg. That's what it is, and that's what it shall remain. And that city's kind of old spirit, you know, the ballet is still going, the National Library and

all its rare works are still very much part of the centre of the city. But now we have its most famous son, Putin. It's impossible not to wonder how much his own mental landscape has been, I suppose, malformed by, you might say, generational trauma. I mean, the suffering that his parents went through, the suffering that so many Leningraders went through. There's no excuse because millions of people suffered and they did not turn into despotic tyrants. So it's not in any way to either excuse or explain. But as I say, it's impossible not to wonder. I mean, if you look at footage now of Putin giving those speeches at the sites of mass graves, where he refers to his brother and says that it can't even be known where his brother is, there can be no possibility of a headstone. And as I say, the anger is real. Maybe the

paranoia is real. Maybe those who've been invaded do have a different sensibility to those who've never known invasion. As I say, it's speculation like that that's kind of fruitless. a different sensibility to those who've never known invasion. As I say, it's speculation like that is kind of fruitless. But the city from which he came still has this, in a way it's difficult to see him as being totally part of it because there is this kind of exceptionalism about St. Petersburg, a sense that it's still slightly different from the rest of Russia. My Russian friends say that even now going to St. Petersburg,

there is the sense that not so much that it's going to up itself, but just a sense of intellectual superiority, which is slightly resented by a lot of other Russians and still remains a theme to this day. Sinclair, thank you. That's a terrific place to end it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what the new book is called. And the new book is called St. Petersburg, Sacrifice and Redemption in the City that Defied Hitler. Well, Sinclair Mackay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you. This is History's Heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.