Message from Charles Aulds

[Russian President] Vladimir Putin grew up in Leningrad, a city more deeply scarred by the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War, as Russians usually call it, than any outsider can begin to comprehend. For Americans in particular, whose country has never been invaded by a hostile power, and even for Western Europeans, who saw cities like Coventry, Dresden and Warsaw reduced to rubble, it is hard to grasp the enormity of what happened during the [872 day] Leningrad blockade. After Hitler's troops surrounded the city in September 1941, with orders not to occupy it but to let the population starve, three quarters of a million Leningraders perished, most of them in the famine winter of 1941-2, when Putin's brother, Viktor, died, and the ration for dependants was reduced to a few ounces of ersatz bread a day. 

That was four times the death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and 35 times more than in the London Blitz. In this one Russian city, more people died than all the Americans who have died in every foreign war the United States has ever fought.

Within 24 hours of the German invasion, at 4 a.m. on June 22, 1941, a hundred thousand Leningraders had signed up at recruitment centres.
___
excerpt from Putin: His Life and Times, by Philip Short (Pub. 2022)