Oh absolutely. I think any “whole story” Russian WW2 history would have to begin with the purge of his officer corps in the late 30’s. From there you’d have to pick out ten sub-stories. My ancestry is Russian, and I worked on a cruise ship for a while in 2005 and we visited St. Pete 7 times, all overnight stays (VERY unusual for a cruise ship, ordinarily you are in any given port for 2-5 hours) and I wandered around relentlessly. What an amazing combination of 1750, 1850, and 1950 it was. Utterly fascinating.
There’s no question that the battle for St. Pete was one of the great titanic struggles of all time, yet that was but one sub-story of Russian involvement in WW2.
Stalin hated “Leningrad”, to the point where I really don’t think he would have shed a tear if Hitler eliminated it from the face of the Earth. He always felt they were too “independent” from Moscow.
He had many of the “Heroes of Leningrad” shot after the war.