Two approaches have been used to estimate the total number of civilian deaths during the siege of Leningrad.
The first is based on official death registrations. Using data from the city’s central labour agency, the fifteen municipal districts and from local authorities in outlying Kronshtadt and Kolpino, a ‘Commission to Investigate Atrocities Committed by the Fascist Occupiers’, set up in 1943, arrived at a total of 649,000 civilian deaths during the siege, 632,253 of them from starvation and associated illnesses, the remaining16,747 caused by bombing and shelling. These numbers were cited by the Soviet government at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and have been widely quoted since. They are also within the same order of magnitude as figures from Leningrad’s Burial Trust, the government agency responsible for cemeteries. The Trust’s records show it disposing of around 460,000 corpses in the fourteen months from the beginning of November 1941, to which should be added another 228,263 buried by the civil defence organisation (MPVO) making 688,263 burials in total.
This 650,000–690,000 range for the death toll is, however, almost certainly a substantial under-estimate. Many siege deaths were never registered (‘a negligible proportion of the population went to the registry offices’, according to the Leningrad Municipal Services Department) or registered long after they occurred. The Commission was still receiving new wartime registrations as late as 1959. The Burial Trust numbers are similarly dubious, as evidenced by chaotic scenes in cemeteries and mortuaries, and by the fact that the Trust could not produce daily figures for deliveries and burials when ordered to do so by the city soviet at the end of December 1941.
Historians have also tried to calculate the death toll from the top down, by looking at the drop in Leningrad’s population from the beginning of the siege to its end, and assuming that all absences not otherwise accounted for were due to starvation or bombardment. When the siege ring closed in early September 1941 the city’s civilian population was about 2.5m, including roughly 100,000 newly-arrived refugees. By the end of 1943, on the eve of liberation, it had decreased by at least 1.9m, to no more than 600,000. In that time about one million Leningraders had been evacuated across Ladoga, and another 100,000 been sent to the front, which leaves assumed deaths from starvation at no less than 800,000.
The demographer Nadezhda Cherepenina recently reworked this calculation, based on the number of Leningrad residency permits extant over time. Her death-toll estimate — of 700,000 — is lower in part because it excludes the city’s illegal, unregistered underclass, as well as unregistered peasant refugees. Lastly, none of the above calculations includes deaths in rural areas within the siege ring, nor the tens of thousands who perished on the Ice Road and beyond. The best, therefore, that one can safely say is that the siege’s civilian death-toll was not less than 650,000 and not much more than 800,000. If a single figure must be given it should probably be about 750,000, or between one in three and one in four of Leningrad’s immediate pre-siege population.
*V.M. Kovalchuk and G.L. Sobelev ‘Leningradsky “Rekviyem”: o zhertvakh naseleniya v Leningrade v gody voiny i blokady’
The Neva embankment, summer 1941
Newsboard outside the offices of
Rally at the Kirov Works, June 1941
September 1941: bomb damage, and peasant refugees outside the Hermitage
October 1941: courtyard of the Young People’s Theatre, after shelling
St Isaac’s Cathedral and Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great, boarded and covered with earth
Listening horns on the walls of the Peter and Paul fortress
Washing clothes at a broken pipe, and scavenging meat from a horse killed by shelling
A ‘well-fed type’ and a ‘dystrophic’; Ligovsky Prospekt, December 1941
The Nikitin family, January 1942. Nikolai Nikitin, a railway engineer, died of starvation related illness in April 1942, as did his mother, seated left. His wife and children survived and were evacuated from the city the following December. Th e picture was taken by Nikolai’s brother Aleksandr, who disappeared without trace during the winter of 1942–3.
February 1942, the peak of the mass death. In January, February and March 1942 at least 100,000 Leningraders died of starvation each month.
Evacuees on the Ice Road across Lake Ladoga, April 1942
