The Russians made enormous sacrifices and lost over 20,000,000 dead in WW II. Yet due to their heroism and stubborn resistance, the very best units of the German army were destroyed. American casualties would have been much higher if the US had to face the best of the German army to retake Europe. Many Americans exist today because their forefathers were able to survive WW II and later procreate thanks to those Russian sacrifices.
Stalin was always suspicious of Russia’s former capital. Its huge cultural, scientific and economic importance, its historical role as the cradle of the 1917 Revolution, its pre-eminent position in the history of the Russian intelligentsia - all produced a dangerous spirit of independence when viewed from the Kremlin.
Stalin was well aware of the distinctive ethos that three years of relative autonomy from Moscow had fostered in Leningrad; and his suspicions were fed by two of the main contenders for power, Lavrentii Beria and Georgii Malenkov.
In 1946 Stalin gave Zhdanov the task of denouncing two of Leningrad’s leading writers, Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, as part of a vicious campaign against ‘bourgeois formalism’ in Soviet culture known, unfairly, to history as the Zhdanovshchina.
In spring 1948 his son, a Central Committee official, was severely criticised for ideological errors. There were signs that Zhdanov himself was falling from favour, when in August he suffered a massive heart attack and died.
This tipped the balance in the Kremlin power struggle. Deprived of Zhdanov’s protection, Kuznetsov, Voznesensky, Leningrad’s current leaders, PS Popkov and YF Lazutin, and former Leningrad officials including MI Rodionov, prime minister of the Russian Republic, were arrested on trumped-up charges in 1949.
After long interrogations and brief secret trials, they were shot in October 1950. The Leningrad party organisation was purged, and some 2,000 people imprisoned or exiled.
The siege museum was closed, to be reopened 40 years later. For many years Leningrad’s tragic and heroic wartime history would be barely acknowledged, and important aspects of what happened remain unknown to this day.