In the freezing, snow-laden streets of Leningrad, families carried dead relatives – almost mummified by brutal temperatures of minus 43C – down the stairs of darkened tenement blocks.
Some noticed just how light these corpses, ravaged by hunger, were as they loaded them on sleds and dragged them along the road like bin bags to mass collection points.
Starving gravediggers did not have the strength to break the frozen winter ground and so mechanical diggers created vast gaping pits, accommodation for thousands of anonymous cadavers.
There had been so many fatalities throughout the city in the space of weeks that the dead had to queue up to be buried, their bodies stacked like logs.
One such body was that of a handsome, dignified woman in her 30s. It was assumed that she had, like so many others, died of starvation.
Her name was Maria Ivanovna Shelomova Putina – the mother of Vladimir Putin.
Yet – according to one account – on that silent street of tall 19th century terraced apartment buildings, under a dark indigo sky, neighbours heard the faintest of moans coming from among the dead.
A pair of shoes poking out from the pile of motionless flesh were seen to twitch. Miraculously, after surviving on starvation rations for months, Putin’s mother was not dead and neighbours pulled her clear of the surrounding bodies.
An estimated 1.5million soldiers and civilians alike died in the hellish apocalypse that was the Siege of Leningrad – the most murderous blockade in history. Vladimir Putin’s mother survived the siege after narrowly avoiding being buried alive. Pictured: Putin aged five with his mother Maria Ivanovna
This Second World War siege, which lasted some 900 days, from 1941 to 1944, illustrated how resilient humankind can be when faced with the darkest extremes of want and suffering. Indeed, for many inside the city – including the Putins – it changed their understanding of human nature itself. And, in some ways, the spectre of all that suffering casts its shadow over Russia, and the wider world, to this day
Just look at the nightmare landscapes of war in Ukraine as troops fight to the death over every inch of territory and the scale of the suffering that Putin and his forces have inflicted upon the civilian population, writes Sinclair McKay
Pictured: Vladimir Putin as a toddler on the lap of his mother Maria Shelomovam and his grandmother
Maria Putina was one of the lucky ones.
An estimated 1.5million soldiers and civilians alike died in the hellish apocalypse that was the Siege of Leningrad – the most murderous blockade in history.
This Second World War siege, which lasted some 900 days, from 1941 to 1944, illustrated how resilient humankind can be when faced with the darkest extremes of want and suffering.
Indeed, for many inside the city – including the Putins – it changed their understanding of human nature itself.
And, in some ways, the spectre of all that suffering casts its shadow over Russia, and the wider world, to this day.
Just look at the nightmare landscapes of war in Ukraine as troops fight to the death over every inch of territory and the scale of the suffering that Putin and his forces have inflicted upon the civilian population.
Leningrad’s ordeal began weeks after Hitler’s forces invaded Russia in the summer of 1941.
That winter of starvation – still commemorated by the city and Vladimir Putin every year in huge ceremonies – remains almost beyond comprehension. Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin lays flowers at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery during a ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of a breakthrough in the siege of Leningrad
Valdimir Putin’s mother and father enjoyed going to the theatre in the late 1930s to see the city’s much-loved comedian Arkady Raikin – the one man in Russia with an apparent licence to poke fun at Soviet officialdom. Pictured: Vladimir Putin, right, poses for a photograph with his parents Maria and Vladimir Putin in 1985
During the siege of Leningrad mothers with infants suffered the agony of not even being able to express milk: one was even driven to cut her arm open to let her baby suck the blood. In some cases – with fathers away fighting, and their sickly mothers forced to fill the vacancies in factories – young children were adopted by the authorities. Pictured: Maria Shelomova 17 October 1911 – 6 July 1998
As the three million troops assembled for Operation Barbarossa rampaged across the steppes of eastern Europe – burning, maiming and slaughtering as they went – hundreds of thousands of German soldiers in Army Group North encircled the proud, beautiful city that we now once more know as St Petersburg.
The city – with its amazingly colourful baroque palaces, churches with golden domes and winding canals – was a product of the vision of Tsar Peter the Great, who had it hewn from frozen marshlands at the tip of the Baltic Sea in 1703.
It was intended to be Russia’s ‘window on the West’.
St Petersburg was soon famed internationally for its ballet, rich poetry, and exquisite music.
This remained the case after the 1917 Russian revolution, when it was renamed Leningrad.
And even through the terror of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s – when thousands of innocents were wrenched from their homes in the dead of night and consigned to slave labour camps, or simply murdered – there was also, incredibly, boisterous comedy.
With her husband, Vladimir Spiridonovich (pictured) , fighting with the Red Army outside the city who eventually sustained injuries from a grenade blast to his legs, Maria Putina was one such mother who had her child removed. Pictured: Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin 23 February 1911 – 2 August 1999
Valdimir Putin’s mother and father, incidentally, enjoyed going to the theatre in the late 1930s to see the city’s much-loved comedian Arkady Raikin – the one man in Russia with an apparent licence to poke fun at Soviet officialdom.
But by the Second World War, the city was also one of the centres of the Soviet Union’s vast armaments industry: tanks and planes were assembled in vast cathedrals of manufacturing. Hitler at first planned to conquer Leningrad.
But then he decided it would be better if the city – and its people – were simply wiped out.
The Wehrmacht occupiers in the countryside that surrounded it cut off all the supply routes that served as St Petersburg’s veins and arteries – the roads and the railways – thus isolating it from the rest of Russia.
Every night, the Luftwaffe launched terrible bombing attacks that devastated apartment blocks and factories, leaving citizens disorientated with sleeplessness.
At a commemoration service at a St Petersburg cemetery a few years ago, Putin said: ‘I don’t know where my own brother is buried, whom I never saw, never knew.’ He spoke of how his mother had been ‘laid out with the corpses’. Pictured: Destruction caused by Russian bomb strikes on Kostiantynivka on March 21
One such bombing raid in September 1941 destroyed the vast timber-framed warehouses that held the city’s stockpiles of non-perishable food: everything from pasta to lentils to sugar.
From that point onwards, the hunger began.
That winter of starvation – still commemorated by the city and Vladimir Putin every year in huge ceremonies – remains almost beyond comprehension.
As the dark days of December arrived in 1941, such daily rations as there were involved heavy black bread: little more than a handful for factory workers, less for other citizens.
These rations shrank as the weeks wore on – some receiving a portion the size of a playing card to see them through 24 hours.
In order to secure that tiny daily ration, citizens had to start queueing at bakeries at 4.30am. The lines were already snaking down the streets.
We cannot make any assumptions about how his mental landscape of the world, and of war, was formed, although it is impossible not to wonder, writes Sinclair McKay. Pictured: Ukrainian firefighters put out the fire at a storehouse following a Russian attack in Odesa on March 21, 2025
Occasionally there were whispered rumours of black market horse-meat: desperate mass brawls would break out.
Once loving families, in communal apartments shared with other families, became snarling enemies: screaming and swearing.
Toddlers scrabbled instinctively between floorboards with tiny fingers in the hope of finding dropped dry grains of rice.
Children and parents alike suspected each other of taking more than their fair shares.
The snows came and, after the Nazis bombed the power stations, the city was plunged into stuttering darkness. The people had to break up furniture and bannisters for fuel to burn.
The mental changes – caused by brains slowly being starved – were accompanied by what seemed the most uncanny transformations.
Despite the hunger, bellies swelled (a condition known as oedema, where the body can no longer process waste fluid, and it builds up around the organs).
Flesh would darken in patches; as if the blood itself was too apathetic to move properly. Some people became yellow, others purple; some turned mint green.
How could a man with such an intimate knowledge of what the First World War poet Wilfred Owen called ‘the pity of war’ go on to inflict such a nightmare upon so many women and little children in Ukraine?, asks Sinclair McKay. Pictured: Residents stand in front of a damaged residential building following bomb strikes on the city of Kostiantynivka on March 21
Gums would recede and bleed.
Eyes would appear to become larger.
Then there were ‘the ants’; this was the alarming sensation that there were insects moving around beneath the flesh: the quivering results of the body beginning to consume itself.
Adults caught sight of themselves in mirrors and recoiled with horror.
Mothers with infants suffered the agony of not even being able to express milk: one was even driven to cut her arm open to let her baby suck the blood.
In some cases – with fathers away fighting, and their sickly mothers forced to fill the vacancies in factories – young children were adopted by the authorities.
With her husband, Vladimir Spiridonovich, fighting with the Red Army outside the city who eventually sustained injuries from a grenade blast to his legs, Maria Putina was one such mother who had her child removed.
There was a belief that the Communist state could provide more regular nourishment in special institutions. It could not.
Leningrad’s ordeal began weeks after Hitler’s forces invaded Russia in the summer of 1941. This image shows damaged houses on Pushkarhaya street after a German raid during the battle of Leningrad
In early 1942, the Putins were given the tragic news that their toddler son Viktor had died of diphtheria.
In most other cases, the cause was hunger.
Little Viktor – who would have been Vladimir Putin’s older brother – was one of uncountable numbers of toddlers consigned to those mass burial pits.
Elsewhere, with only the barest scraps entering the city via cargo planes (the Luftwaffe had mastery of the skies), Leningrad’s scientists had to find a way of bulking out bread with edible cattle-feed.
People boiled leather belts and briefcases down and drank the broth. They stripped walls for the wallpaper paste.
Families were looking at domestic pets in new ways.
Children would return home to find beloved Irish setters – a breed first popularised by Tsar Akexander II – had been killed to make stew. One family caught and grilled their pet cat.
‘It was very tasty,’ confessed their young son. At night, men went out into the frozen darkness to catch rats: their blood was warm, they had flesh. They were best served fried.
In early 1942, the Putins were given the tragic news that their toddler son Viktor had died of diphtheria. Vladimir Putin Jr was born into a city of mass graves and he never did find out where his older brother was laid to rest
Most desperate were the refugees from the countryside who had raced into the city ahead of the murderous Nazi advance only to find that, without a ration card, they had no access to food.
This was a death sentence.
Bodies occasionally started going missing. Some who stole corpses – or cut human flesh off the many cadavers that lay where they had fallen in the city’s streets – were mothers whose only desire was to keep their children alive.
But in some tenement blocks, there were even darker stories. Murderers who stalked their victims through the snow, before stabbing them, hacking their bodies apart and eating their flesh.
Such instances would later be hushed up.
Yet the siege also demonstrated another facet of human nature: an extraordinary capacity for invention. The city lies close to Lake Ladoga, a vast freshwater inland sea.
And in the depths of that harsh winter, it froze over so thickly that convoys of trucks were sent across the ice from the unoccupied east of the country.
Negotiating the featureless landscape of the frozen lake was made possible by young women who stood holding red flags at regular intervals to show the way.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visits a frontline, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine in Donetsk region on March 22
Ukrainian rescuers working at the site of a drone attack in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, late 21 March 2025
The convoys brought supplies across a 35-mile ice road and on their return journeys took evacuees. Not surprisingly, it became known as ‘The Road of Life’.
Come the spring, Red Army fightbacks restored some of the city’s supply lines.
The ruthless Wehrmacht bombing and shelling continued but many thousands of the most vulnerable were evacuated and rations for those who remained were returned to levels sufficient to maintain human life.
By the summer of 1942, the city’s Philharmonic orchestra was ready to stun the world with the most amazing show of defiance.
The St Petersburg composer Dmitri Shostakovich had written his Seventh Symphony especially for the besieged city. The musicians had spent the winter starving and exhausted but they played as if their lives depended upon it.
The symphony was broadcast, via radio, around the world and was even heard by the Wehrmacht soldiers entrenched around the city.
Years later, two of them, by then East German citizens, told the conductor Karl Eliasberg that they could not believe the brutalised city could summon such beauty.
The siege continued for another 18 months but the tides of war had turned. The Red Army finally forced the Wehrmacht into retreat in January 1944.
With a million civilians killed in Leningrad, how could the survivors ever find any kind of peace?
Pictured: Ukrainian members of the armed forces listening to a concert
In 1952, Maria Shelomova Putina, 41, and her husband Vladimir, now a railway worker, welcomed a new child.
Vladimir Putin Jr was born into a city of mass graves and he never did find out where his older brother was laid to rest.
At a commemoration service at a St Petersburg cemetery a few years ago, Putin said: ‘I don’t know where my own brother is buried, whom I never saw, never knew.’ He spoke of how his mother had been ‘laid out with the corpses’.
We cannot make any assumptions about how his mental landscape of the world, and of war, was formed, although it is impossible not to wonder.
We must also remember that millions of his fellow St Petersburgers did not grow up to become despotic war-mongers.
In fact, some later psychological studies found that siege survivors – called Blokadniki – had unusual levels of empathy.
But the siege cemented an element of paranoia in Putin’s understanding of the world and history.
The puzzle remains: how could a man with such an intimate knowledge of what the First World War poet Wilfred Owen called ‘the pity of war’ go on to inflict such a nightmare upon so many women and little children in Ukraine?
