Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Saint Petersburg: Putin's Hometown About this episode Founded by Peter the Great, the city of Saint Petersburg was built to rival the majesty of any capital in Europe. Its splendour made it a hub of Russian culture, and its geography made it a focal point for industry. It's factories would jump-start the revolutions that ushered in the Soviet era, and in the wake of a devastating Nazi siege, the recovering city would birth the man who lead Russia into the 21st century - Vladimir Putin.
Joining us is Sinclair McKay, author of 'Saint Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler'. He takes us through the turbulent history of this magnificent city, from its founding right up to the present day.
Warning: this episode contains graphic descriptions that some listeners may find disturbing.
Produced and edited by James Hickmann.
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Transcript 10,978 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:25 Dan Snow? Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In May 1703, Peter, Tsar of all Russia, drove the Swedish out of this particular corner of Inghria, a territory that you could say today, I suppose, would be Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and the parts of Russia that border on the Baltic Sea. The key fortress there, the key Swedish fortress, Nyanshants, Peter captured that. And with that came, finally, Russian imperial access, defensible access to the Baltic, down the river Dnieva, into the Gulf of Finland. It was a big moment in the expansion of Russia. Peter didn't waste any time at all. Like I say, in a matter of days, he'd laid the foundations of the first building to
3:10 Dan Snow? take shape in what he wanted to be a new city, a northern powerhouse. Tellingly, that first building was military, it was the Peter and Paul Fortress. And then, as soon as they could be hired, German and Dutch engineers were brought to Russia to drain the swampy ground, and soon city blocks started to appear. The buildings that would be constructed there were inspired by the Baroque architectural fashions of Europe. There would be canals with beetling boats carrying people to and fro, a deliberate echo of Venice and Amsterdam. His own enormous palace in his new city, naturally, an homage to Versailles. The conditions there were savage: freezing winters, mosquito-ridden summers.
3:55 Dan Snow? Peter ordered that there should be a yearly roundup of 40,000 serfs, so every dozen or so households would have to contribute one person. They had to provide their own tools, they had to provide their own food for a journey of hundreds of miles, on foot, sometimes chained together in gangs guarded by the military to prevent desertion. And they would then arrive and work themselves, often, to death on Peter's new infrastructure project. His glorious city, St Petersburg, rested on a bed of human bones. And the bones of the builders wouldn't be the last. This is the story of Peter's great city, the city in which Vladimir Putin was born
4:39 Dan Snow? after another great war was fought for mastery of this region. It's a story of city and empire building, and it's also a story of Russia's obsession, and also competition with the West. To help us understand St Petersburg, tell the story of its rise, its revolutions, its near-complete destruction, and its rebirth, here is Sinclair McKay. He's been on the podcast many times before. He's written a beautiful book about the firebombing of Dresden. We heard from him on the pod earlier this year, talking about that, the anniversary. And he's back now with a new book, St Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler. He's going to take us through that long history. Enjoy.
5:37 Dan Snow? Sinclair, great to have you back on the pod.
5:39 Speaker 04 Oh, great to be asked back. Very, very nice to be back. Thank you.
5:42 Dan Snow? Let's start with the geography. Let's start with the stuff beneath our feet. The area we now know is St Petersburg. What did that look like for the vast, vast majority of geological time?
5:52 Speaker 04 Gosh, well, in geological time, it's kind of frozen marshland. It's extraordinarily inhospitable territory to plant a beautiful city. This was what Peter the Great came back from London, 1703. And as the poet Alexander Pushkin put it, "He who with a will unbounded, a city on the marshlands founded." Here is a realm of lakes and swagnum moss just on the edge of the Baltic. So we're up at the very, very northwestern corner of Russia, where it borders Finland and borders the Baltic States.
6:23 Dan Snow? It was a frozen marshland, but it did have that critical access to the sea.
6:28 Speaker 04 Indeed so, yes.
6:29 Dan Snow? So what about the political geography? Is it comfortably Russian or are there neighbouring nations, powers, enemies nearby?
6:35 Speaker 04 There's a constant of conflict with Sweden and what, Compendium, and Poland-Lithuania. So it's never a particularly easy region. And in terms of geography, the site that is now St Petersburg lies on a series of strange borderlands, really. Now, famously, in 1703, it was envisaged for Peter the Great as being, you know, Russia's window on to the West. But a window, obviously, may be gazed through in either direction. And you do, you do want to hear as a city that comes spang to being a lot of it on slave labour. You know, a lot of St Petersburg has the bones buried into its structure of slave labour who died in the course of the construction of it.
7:14 Speaker 04 So it's a city partly kind of founded in this darkness, but it is a city that's almost extravagantly opulately European from the start, as opposed to perhaps a lot of other places deeper in Russia. Because you have immediately this throughout the 18th century, just a whole Italian architecture, wild Baroque constructions, neoclassical constructions everywhere, it says Italian architects. And then with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, you get a whole bunch of Scottish engineers. From the start, it's an incredibly polyglot kind of place.
7:44 Dan Snow? It's an architectural and political statement, right?
7:47 Speaker 04 Yes.
7:47 Dan Snow? So Peter the Great, we should probably tell people, Peter the Great is this extraordinary in all sense of the word figure, a giant of a man. He's a Russian Tsar, but you see, the first of the Tsars to really become obsessed by what's going on further Western Europe and to try and sort of Europeanise Russia.
8:02 Speaker 04 Absolutely so. He's the first of the Tsars with a real kind of worldview at a time when this was a new kind of age of empire, the end of the 17th century, the beginning of the 18th century. A whole new empire started to be formed and he was very conscious of that. He was, actually funny enough, where I live in London, I'm not too far away from a statue of Peter the Great that overlooks the River Thames down in Deptford, because he lived in Deptford for a while when it was a part of the naval dockyards. He rented a house off Sir John Evelyn, who reported back that he was a terrible tenant. He apparently left the place trashed. But the point is that Peter the Great was fascinated by witnessing Britain's expansion. Pulsing kind of outwards as exemplified by these dockyards, but also fascinated by the science of Greenwich Observatory.
8:44 Speaker 04 And the new growing science of astronomy. So he was bringing in all sorts of European influences, bringing European influences back with him to the the city that he was determined to summon. This these palaces of stone summoned from this extraordinarily inhospitable terrain. But as you say, just at the mouth of the Baltic, which is a fantastic place for these huge shipyards, which he also founded. When we think of St Petersburg now, it's out of the city of imagination. We all have these images of these extraordinary spires and domes and cathedrals and wild palaces with their extraordinary colour. And you're going to think, well, it must have been there forever, but it's it's only been there for for three hundred years or so. It's a very young city.
9:21 Dan Snow? And Russia, we should quit just again, quick bit of background here. Russia had grown from the Principality of Moscow. It's one of the most amazing stories really in world history. The Principality of Moscow, whatever dizzying number of little statelets across Eurasia, you know, like Brandenburg or something. And it just goes on this one of the great imperial expansions of all time. And they go north first. So so is the first Russian port. Archangel, effectively, people will be familiar perhaps from the Second World War, the Arctic convoys. So that northern coast of Russia, which is on the Arctic.
9:55 Speaker 04 Yes, and with that, certainly through the nineteenth century, you get Russia's increasing kind of influence within what we know as Finland. Before Finland was an independent state, it was a grand duchy of the Tsars. So that was, in essence, a kind of imperial possession.
10:09 Dan Snow? Right. And and that's not a great port because it's frozen up.
10:11 Speaker 04 No, that's frozen up. The distinction here is the northern ports do freeze up. You know, they always needed the warm water ports further south too.
10:18 Dan Snow? Lovely warm Baltic. Yeah, great.
10:19 Speaker 04 Yes, yes.
10:21 Dan Snow? And the Black Sea is not conquered until after Peter. And he's got these neighbours, the mighty Swedish Empire, and he's got the mighty Polish Empire. So if he wants to sort of reach out and connect with the rest of Europe and trade and bring in military engineers and whatever else. He's got to do it through this little tiny little bit of access to the Baltic. And St Petersburg is the logical place to do it. It's fascinating.
10:41 Speaker 04 Yes, yes, no, it is. But what is also doubly fascinating on top of that is you imagine a kind of port city and you what you don't usually. Link up with port cities is an exuberance of aesthetic beauty. This seemed to be the case, but it was also very prone to flooding incidentally as well. There was a terrible flood in eighteen twenty four in which the city was half submerged. And again, there's always this sense with Petersburg from the start that they existed on this borderline. They were not quite European nor quite Russian. Then, of course, there was the borderline that dissolved between night and day. You've got the famous White Nights in the midsummer when the sun never really sets beneath the horizon, producing this faintly uncanny kind of atmosphere in the winter, the daylight rarely comes.
11:21 Speaker 04 And then there was the border between land and seas. There were a lot of Petersburgers who wanted the city to be a kind of like an Old Testament ark, sort of floating on sometimes hostile waters.
11:31 Dan Snow? Not for nothing, it's sometimes called the Venice of the North.
11:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. But yes, but then on top of that, there is also always rooted in this grubby reality. So you have the exuberance of these palaces and churches. But then on top of that, you have an extraordinary fast growing industry, first the naval dockyards, but then the putrefaction works. As I mentioned previously, Scottish engineers being involved in bringing industrial night to St Petersburg. These huge, huge citadels of industry which started springing up at the start of the nineteenth century, creating special rails to bring railways to Russia, quite a different proposition to railways in Britain.
12:04 Dan Snow? Did Peter, from the beginning, you mentioned this architectural exuberance. Did he insist on that?
12:09 Speaker 04 Yes, yes, yes, yes.
12:10 Dan Snow? Because as a Brit, we're so used to laissez faire government and people.
12:13 Speaker 04 Well, yes, him and his successors, it became an implant of tradition in a city that was still only a few years old. You see it now under the Peterhoff, the Catherine Palace, these amazing architectural fantasias. But fantasias not of Russia but of Europe. It's still the case actually with St Petersburg now. I've got a few Russian friends who are not from either St Petersburg or Moscow. They're from deeper within the country, Samara. And they said that there's all the way through the history of St Petersburg, there's been a sort of lurking resentment from a lot of other Russians towards St Petersburg. Because here was a city that also was constantly set up as this kind of a self-consciously literary city, a self-consciously artistic city. As Peter the Great would port ballet to St Petersburg for the delight of the workers as well as the aristocrats.
12:56 Speaker 04 And there is a sense elsewhere with Russia, just a suspicion that possibly the city that Peter founded was just that shade too European.
13:02 Dan Snow? Talk about coastal elites. I mean, this is the original, and it's constructed with the blood and the sweat and the tears of thousands of effectively enslaved people.
13:13 Speaker 04 Effectively enslaved people, a lot of prisoners of war, a lot of Swedish prisoners of war. But yes, effectively enslaved people. And of course, Russia itself with the system of serfs, it was essentially an empire of slavery. I mean, you might argue that all empires have an element of slavery about them. But yes, it's a city that's founded on the bones and the blood of so many.
13:31 Dan Snow? And they're digging out drainage ditches, they're trying to drain the land, and then they're banging piles in so you can build these huge edifices above in miserable conditions.
13:39 Speaker 04 Yes, but the winters in St Petersburg, well, as you would expect in the north, particularly to brutal and severe. So yes, as Alexander Pushkin put it in that poem, when he said, "with will unbounded", I mean, there is certainly an element of truth there. Because a city does seem to be of conscious effort of will. And just to keep it there seems conscious of effort of will, too.
13:59 Dan Snow? And it works in some terms because it becomes one of the great European cities. Noble families move there, it's all very fancy, it's high culture. And I learned from your book, within two decades, it's handling 90% of Russia's foreign trade. So it is this window on the rest of the world.
14:16 Speaker 04 Absolutely. And it's very open to that world as well. As I say, it's very a polyglot city. Huge numbers of Germans come to settle in St Petersburg over the decades, particularly through the 19th century. But you also get huge numbers of people from the Baltic States, huge numbers of people coming up from Ukraine, and an extraordinary range of religions, too, implanted in the city. I can't remember exactly when the first mosque opened, but certainly the city central mosque still stands. There were always a certain number of Muslim people, very large Jewish population from quite early on. And unlike the rest of Russia, Russia, driven and torn with these hideous pogroms in the Tsarist times, terrible, terrible, terrible firestorms of antisemitism. Intriguingly, in St Petersburg, there was always an undercurrent of antisemitism, there was always kind of
14:58 Speaker 04 anti-Jewish feeling, but it never could have erupted onto the streets. And so, as a result, the Jewish population of St Petersburg were much more, I hate the term, but assimilated than they were perhaps in other places in Russia. That, together with the dizzying fast expansion of industry and the huge number of country folk flooding into the city through the 19th century, makes it, I suppose, goes a little way towards explaining how it so quickly became a kind of cradle of revolution, too.
15:27 Dan Snow? Yes, so it's interesting because not only is it an aristocratic playground, but it also becomes Russia's leading industrial city and with all of the class-based politics that that brings.
15:38 Speaker 04 Indeed so, yes. But on the one hand, you have Tolstoy's War and Peace, where, as you say, the aristocrats are going to the grand balls and the extraordinary of palaces night after night. But then, on the other side, the southern side of the city, you have, as I said, these extraordinary citadels of industry and extraordinary early kind of housing products, very, uh, products very, very rudimentary, to, to house the huge numbers of people who are needed to, to work.
16:04 Dan Snow? And as a result, it's St Petersburg where the great milestones of revolution are all, seem to all take place. Let's talk about the first, well, there's, there's been many. We could spend a long time talking about instability in the late Tsarist regime, but let's talk about the first one that was a revolution in the 20th century, 1905. Did that start in St Petersburg?
16:23 Speaker 04 It did, yes. And it had been brewing for some years beforehand. Throughout the 19th century, there have been, I suppose, secret hermetic societies of radicals who had been forming a meeting in St Petersburg and moving among the industrial workers secretly, trying to radicalise the industrial workers. Among them was Lenin's older brother, who was then hanged for sedition. The Tsarist regime policing itself fiercely with the Okhrana, terrifying some secret police. But then you have Lenin himself, you have Lenin's wife-to-be educating the workers with special Sunday evening classes. But these were the opposite of religious Sunday evening classes. Instead of teaching gospel, she was teaching Marx. But she was also teaching these workers literacy and numeracy and all sorts of other subjects they were desperate to know about. Everything from geography to kind of evolution
17:06 Speaker 04 and whether it was possible for this new world to outgrow its old god. So those seeds of revolution were being sowed quite a way before. And then in 1881, we have the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg, an extraordinary moment of terrifying political violence, carried out by a group called Narodnaya Volja, the People's Will. Again, one of these secret, hermetic St Petersburg societies of revolutionaries, young revolutionaries, some of the aristocrats. And this was, in essence, I think, one of the world's first suicide models. A young student who threw a bomb down at the Tsar's feet, or the Tsar's carriage. It caught the Tsar, it obviously caught the bomber too.
17:45 Speaker 04 And this led in turn, the shock of the assassination of Alexander the Second led to even more oppression from the regime, even more cracking down on perceived seditious elements within that industry. So by the time you get to nineteen oh five, and you get to the hunger caused by the Russo-Japanese War, you get all sorts of discontent in the factories. These are people being made to work for thirteen, fourteen hour shifts, fifteen hour shifts. The demands of the nineteen oh five petitioners actually is not too madly unreasonable. They're calling for a working day of eleven and a half hours in some cases, just to improve some of the conditions, but also to bring about some kind of constitutional monarchy, to try and end absolutist rule. What happens on that winter's day, is January nineteen oh five, is a peaceful march on the
18:30 Speaker 04 Winter Palace, thousands and thousands of people marching through the streets in order to present this petition led by this charismatic Orthodox priest, Father Geppon. And what happens is the troops open fire on them and they start cutting them to pieces with sabers and there is a nightmare massacre unfolds in the streets of St. Petersburg. On the same day, incidentally, the wealthier shoppers in the Nevsky Prospect going to the fashionable stores of Nevsky Prospect, the furriers, the furniture stores, that side of the city is still carrying on while just around the corner, near the Winter Palace, people have been cut down into their hundreds, nightmare scene. Then huge unrest, which spread from there right the way across the country, the strikes, the new electricities have shut down, railways jutted to a halt.
19:14 Speaker 04 The end result of it was the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and the establishment of the duma, which the regime then rode back on, but it was the start, it was the first flickering flame of the larger revolution that was to come.
19:28 Dan Snow? And so let's move to 1917. You've got an even greater, I mean, the Russo-Japanese War was a disaster. By 1917, the Russian war effort in the First War was a catastrophe.
19:37 Speaker 04 Yes, yeah.
19:38 Dan Snow? Vast, vast losses, even more ramping up of industrial production. So I imagine tough, very tough times, not just on the front line, but in the factories, hunger.
19:46 Speaker 04 Oh, yes, terrible times in the factories, yes.
19:48 Dan Snow? And I mean, you know, the Russian winter's not that fun anyway, at the very best of times, I imagine. So in February, you're probably feeling a bit grumpy. Again, this famous revolution, again, it starts in St Petersburg, doesn't it?
20:00 Speaker 04 Yes, it starts in St Petersburg. As you say, there is the war that's been grinding on, families losing loved ones in their millions. I mean, the Russian casualty figures are just absolutely terrifying. And on top of this, as you say, you have hunger too. There's the most ferocious rationing in Petersburg, or Petrograd, as it was then, because Petersburg was deemed too German by then. So Petrograd sees terrible, terrible hunger, gaunt workers who are being madly overworked anyway, who can barely stand up, who are still being forced into these productions. So yes, the discontent is growing and growing and growing, and the flame is growing and growing. It can't be held back. Even then, with St Petersburg, I'm always interested in how, famously, there is the story of Rasputin in 1916, the
20:44 Speaker 04 holy fool of the Tsar and his wife, this extraordinary, wild-eyed mendicant, who was actually neither mad nor a monk, but always going on that sort of, and just that, I suppose, the uncanny symbolism of the scandal, of the perception of this extraordinary drunken, lecherous, holy man and his influence on the Russian royal family, and the fear that it's actually a figure like him, this slightly uncanny charman, could tip the balance so far that the royal family would be brought down by him. And so that's the reason why Rasputin had to be assassinated by a group of Ashkars. But that in turn, the city always had a very strong sense of itself, and a strong sense of itself in terms of stories. And that was a story that was quickly could have picked up. Here is almost a self-perpetuating
21:27 Speaker 04 of revolutionary moment, but as we say, is long, long in the making. There are many, many, many elements and strands in all of this. But the city also, as a cradle of revolutions, a cradle of industry and aesthetics, the city always had an innate sense of its own, in a wake of theatricality as well. There was performance in it. This was a performance when revolution came that was self-consciously for the world.
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24:40 Dan Snow? The Tsarist regime was unable to keep order in St Petersburg, partly because it's had sent many of its finest units to go and fight in Ukraine. Interestingly, where they had been badly mauled. What happened in 1917? In 1905, the Tsar was able to claw back his own power. But in 1917, did they, did they even try? Did the streets of St Petersburg run red with blood? Or was it, was the Tsar just toppled?
25:05 Speaker 04 Nothing, I suppose, dissolves so fast as power. It vanishes like a ghost. And that seemed to be the case in St Petersburg. It's not so much that the streets were running red with blood. It was, even though there were kind of outbreaks of anarchy, there were kind of snipers on roofs. There were kind of a lot of war damaged veterans too with guns who were kind of firing randomly. That kind of wasn't it. It was more just the, the consciousness that a new age had kind of come into being. So obviously it's propelled enormously by the charnel house of the war, in which so many of the citizens had been thrown into this dreadful war. And a sense that it couldn't be sustainable. But also here, yes, I mean, here Petersburg understood itself and understood the world has changed so fast.
25:50 Speaker 04 There was, it was a moment of modernism, actually, in a curious way. I mean, it's more than revolution politically. It's a revolution philosophically and religiously too. It's the most extraordinary, instant kind of sea change.
26:01 Dan Snow? Sinclair has often said in the end that the Tsar lacked the sort of brutal. Callous willingness to just shoot vast numbers of his own people that the Soviets would later go on to show in spades. The Tsar says, doesn't he, to his generals, "Don't go in there and start murdering vast numbers of people."
26:22 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, this is, this comes after decades of Tsarist oppression through the means of the Okhrana, the secret police. St Petersburg had been extraordinarily repressive and ruled by terror in essence. Any hint of sedition or dissent would be dealt with in the most merciless way. But I suppose 1916, 1917, you have a Tsar who is Tsar Nicholas II, is a recognizable human being. He's quite sensitive in some ways. And also, when you have a city and a nation that's been suffering so terribly in this nightmare conflict, the likes of which has never been seen before, it's not an element of mercy on his part, it's also just an element of realism, really. And how do you turn the guns on the one and a half million, two million people? Do you destroy an entire city for the sake of maintaining
27:05 Speaker 04 your own regime? I mean, you can't. You can't, in the end, fight the world. And St Petersburg was, at that time, in a way, emblematic of the world and of a new age, that's the technology, the spreadings of electricity, chemical works. The Tsarist world is very much a pre-modern one. And he can't fight, you know, rather like St Petersburg can't fight the tides of flood, the Tsar can't fight the tides of history.
27:29 Dan Snow? So the crowds just take over the key public buildings in St Petersburg. And as you say, provisional government, the bit of the Russian Revolution lots of people might not remember. There are then months of quite exciting political and social upheaval, people trying to debate, work out what's the future for the Russian Empire. This provisional government decided to continue the war against the Germans quite wholeheartedly. And then you get the growing power of Lenin and his communists. And again, that is St Petersburg-led.
27:59 Speaker 04 It is very much. It's the very presence of Lenin and his return to St Petersburg that then becomes one of those emblematic moments, the arrival at the Finland Station. There was that wonderful painting of Lenin getting off the train, which Stalin then had himself added into later. So you see Stalin behind Lenin in the railway carriage with a rather jaunty cap. And again, it's, it's, it's, here is one of those moments where the pendulum absolutely decisively swings. As I say, again, there are so many millions of strands involved in the story, because you're talking about a city of some sort of two and a half million, three million people by the stage. It's incredibly populous, but you would expect in such a revolution, huge amounts of violence and all this. But actually, at the start, there isn't. There's the storming of the Winter Palace, which then they grab hold of,
28:42 Speaker 04 the Smolny Institute, which the American journalist John Reed was nipping in and out of. His eyewitness account of those extraordinary moments of passion with various Bolshevik deputies, industrial figures, workers, soldiers, all trying to work out what the contours of this new world were. And also, I suppose, the conscience, the repercussions of what it is that they're doing, because they know that the entire world is looking in on them. They know that the entire world is both fascinated and aghast and in awe of what's taking place in St Petersburg and amid this extraordinary 18th century architecture too, which gives it as a further kind of element of, I suppose, incongruity. As I say, the Bolshevik takeover of the Smolny Institute, which they then held on to for years and years and years
29:25 Speaker 04 afterwards. The Smolny Institute was originally an academy for young ladies built in the 18th century. That's fantastically dainty building, marigold yellow. And here are the ideas and the passions that are going to roll across the world like a tsunami and change the entire 20th century. It's extraordinary.
29:40 Dan Snow? And this is what I find so extraordinary, Sinclair, is Russia the largest country on earth? And yet, what seems to happen in its little tiny northwest corner of it, in St Petersburg, just that does seem to set the agenda for this vast empire. Obviously, the Soviets have to fight a civil war and it would be, was not a simple thing to Sovietize the Russian Empire, but
30:01 Speaker 04 No, no.
30:02 Dan Snow? it really matters who's sitting in those buildings in St Petersburg.
30:06 Speaker 04 It does become yes, because even though Lenin is quite quick to move the capital from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, so under the Tsars, Saint Petersburg had been not just the capital of Russia, but also the seat of an empire. And it's Lenin who moves it very quickly, the capital to Moscow. But Saint Petersburg remains absolutely kind of key, both to the political thinking, but also to the philosophy of Bolshevism too. It's always intriguing, the figures that who are appointed to rule over Saint Petersburg, in effect, the first party secretaries. You have Sergey Kirov in the late 1920s, early 1930s, who was very close to Stalin, possibly too close for his own good. And explained, the first party secretary of Leningrad, because what you have here in the city is
30:51 Speaker 04 this extraordinary kind of industrial capacity for producing military equipment. It's basically one of the armaments hubs of Russia. And that gives it terrific strategics of importance. So, as I say, you have Sergey Kirov in charge of the city. Sergey Kirov, in December 1934, was sitting in his panelled office in the Smolny Institute, which I mentioned earlier. And there was a chap who managed to get into the building, somehow managed to get past security, and fire a revolver at Kirov, killing him instantly. Kirov was assassinated, shot in the head. His assassin tried to shoot himself, somehow failed, the gun must have slipped from his hand, or the enormity of what he had done must have sunk him. He
31:31 Speaker 04 was arrested, but that was the start then of a series of accusations and counter accusations, which started themselves to spread like a firestorm. In essence, the assassination of Kirov was the start of Stalin's purges of the 1930s. That moment in 1934, when the ruling party officials turned on so-called Mensheviks, people who had been in rival factions to Stalin in the 1920s, that nightmare of terror of the purges, which stretched through every single level of Russian society, started in Saint Petersburg, Leningrad. Thousands upon thousands of victims, party officials were being dragged out of their flats in the darkness of the night, either then just to be immediately executed, or to be sent off to the deathly wildernesses.
32:16 Speaker 04 Of the of the the various labour camps, you know, the purges are almost, they're still kind of beyond rationality and they're still the subject of so much kind of academic debate because Stalinist history is like a mirror maze. You know, the more lurid conspiracy theories is suddenly discovered to be in fact lurid reality and vice versa. But again, it's in St Petersburg where the the the spark starts, this terrible storm that then races right the way across the country, destroying not only countless civilians, but also destroying huge numbers of key military personnel, which will then be a factor that Hitler will take very close attention to.
32:51 Dan Snow? Well, let's move forward to the Second World War now. Hitler is paying close attention to the purges and the poor performance of the Soviet Red Army in Finland, for example. It encourages him to invade. Now he invades, he splits his troops in nineteen forty one, doesn't he? Because he's got Leningrad, he's got Moscow and he's got the breadbasket and the oil of the South and Ukraine. He decides to go for them all, doesn't he? But he gets pretty close to Leningrad.
33:14 Speaker 04 He gets very, very close to Leningrad and indeed, well, indeed, he gets very close to Moscow too, I mean, at some stage, they're within about fifteen miles of Moscow. They can certainly see it through their binoculars. I mean, Operation Barbarossa, the scale of it still is absolutely beyond comprehension. Here you are in June nineteen forty one. Two years previously, there had been the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression between Germany and Russia. This extraordinary cynical move, which takes the world completely aback, leaving Hitler free to continue his deathly march across Western Europe and leaving Stalin and the Bolsheviks under the sense of illusion that they they're kind of out of it by the time they. But you mentioned earlier the Winter War in nineteen thirty nine with Finland. This is absolutely key for what happens to Leningrad in the siege in the Second World War.
33:59 Speaker 04 In late nineteen thirty nine, just after Hitler and Stalin's Russia between them had grabbed Poland against a carnage, bloodshed, mad, horrible oppression on both sides through the Baltic States too. The Stalinists is leaning very, very heavily on the Baltic States. Stalin decided that he had to go for Finland as well. He really, he had to possess Finland. Part of it was paranoia about Hitler. He was worried that Hitler would team up with the Finns. But part of it was just that ancients of ironic communist imperialist twitch, they just simply cannot help themselves, those old imperialist instincts. And in the autumn of 1939, Stalin is convinced that the Red Army could simply march into Finland and take Helsinki within two or three days.
34:42 Speaker 04 A tiny population of five million, how can they possibly stand against it? What then transpired was an extraordinarily bloody bitter conflict held in the in the Karelian forests, these forests of birch and lakes and some reindeer, no good for modern tanks. The senior Soviet commander spotted instantly, oh, right, okay. And on top of this, Finland's Mannheim had established the most extraordinary defence over the previous few years because Finland had always been worried about Stalin. In essence, the winter war isn't very long, the Red Army with its huge numbers prevails in the end, but only at the most amazing cost. I think they lose something like 750,000 people to a tiny Finnish army that's basically operating with skis and reindeers, but extraordinarily agile.
35:27 Speaker 04 They can't maintain it in the end, obviously they can't. But in that crucial moment, Hitler is looking on and seeing a Red Army that's completely confused, incredibly ill-equipped. This makes the prospect for Operation Barbarossa in 1941 a terrible, terrible possibility. As I've mentioned earlier, the scale of Operation Barbarossa, you imagine it, a thousand miles from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Back Sea in the south, ranged right the way in this line down Eastern Europe, three million troops, most of them German, some of them remaining, some some from the Spanish Blue Division, that the Wehrmacht has been joined by all sorts of people. This extraordinary kind of fighting force just roaring across Eastern Europe in three kind of spear points, army group centres heading towards Moscow, you've got the south,
36:12 Speaker 04 the oilfields of Caucasus, and it's army group north who are heading towards Leningrad. Leningrad is still at that stage perceived to be a crucial target because it's in Leningrad where these huge city cells of this industry are producing tanks, airplanes. Here is where the Red Army and the Red Air Force is basically being equipped. If the Nazis could capture Leningrad, they would strangle. Russia's ability to fight from that point onwards. And throughout that summer of 1941, as they just blaze across Eastern Europe, Estonia, Lithuania, absolutely dissolving their way. They get within about 18 miles of Leningrad. The Wehrmacht is essentially parked around the extraordinary palaces that you find in
36:56 Speaker 04 the suburbs, Sarko Selers of Pushkin, as it later been known, the Petov Palace, Catherine Palace. These are all of the Nazis' possessions and they can see the spires and the domes of Leningrad in the distance. What happens next is one of those great historical what ifs. You know, why didn't they then push into Leningrad? Why didn't they conquer the city by the winter of 1941?
37:16 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come.
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38:58 Dan Snow? Well, how did the Soviets manage to keep the hammer and sickle flying over that city?
39:02 Speaker 04 It's an extraordinary story in many ways. There was a reluctance on, after that amazing German advance, after the velocity of the Wehrmacht through those northern lands, the Red Army at last started to organise some form of resistance after the initial terrible, terrible shocks. By the autumn of 1941, you do have a much more determined resistance from the Red Army. On top of that, the Germans, under Volby, looking at Leningrad, and there's some reluctance to fight within the city because it would involve basically house-to-house fighting, snipers, a lot of asymmetric warfare, I suppose we'd call it now. And there's a point where, as the Wehrmacht stops outside Leningrad and sets itself up in the smaller towns like Gatchina and various other small towns around, turns them into good garrisons, there's suddenly a sense the momentum has gone. And at that point, Hitler, who has
39:47 Speaker 04 no patience really for Leningrad, no sense of a feel of the city's history or anything that might even really be of use to the Nazis in the end, decides instead simply to condemn the city to death. He's decided that the city will be encircled by the Wehrmacht instead, and the people within, no supplies will be able to get in, the people will just be literally starved to death. There was in fact a bureaucratic memo that came out of Berlin at some point in 1941, where a civil servant noting down the minutes of a meeting with various senior Nazi officials said, "It's expected that in the city of Leningrad, X million will die." They couldn't even bother to fill in what the number with the X was. It was just, that's how incredibly dismissive they were. Leningrad was simply going to just be forgotten, while the wider conquest of Moscow was the aim.
40:32 Dan Snow? And that siege would have gone for 872 days.
40:35 Speaker 04 It began in the autumn of 1941, where the city's veins and arteries were essentially cut off, the road links, all the rail links. There had been an attempt to evacuate a number of children and women from the city in that late summer. And the civilians had built the most extraordinary defences around the city. There was a civilian operation, millions of tank traps and trenches and shelters, but huge numbers of evacuated children were brought back to the city. Because the Germans had taken over so much of the Russian countryside, they were trying to get them to. Uh. And so by the winter of nineteen forty, well, even just by the autumn of nineteen forty one, they understood suddenly that they were trapped. They understood suddenly that Leningrad was alone and essentially cut off from the rest of Russia.
41:20 Speaker 04 Uh. It was a city could have been solitary confinement. There were a number of terrible bombing raids because the Luftwaffe had mastery of the skies. They were dropping bombs on the city just absolutely relentlessly, uh, day and night. So people were half crazed with with sleep deprivation. And there was one terrible night, September the eighth nineteen forty one, where a series of timber-based warehouses, the Badyav warehouses, close to the centre of the city, uh, which had been used to contain huge amounts of non-perishable foodstuffs for the city, everything from pasta to dried fish, to all the supplies that the city would have for a month, went up in flames in the space of one night. Leningrad is puzzled by the extraordinary odor in the air of burning sugar, couldn't quite place what it was. Then the realization of what it was, that what the Germans have managed to hit.
42:05 Speaker 04 Uh. Basically, their food supplies, which would have seen them through not a huge amount of time, for the next few weeks, but it still would have been a lifeline. All up in smoke. And that's the moment when the citizens of Leningrad realized the full horror of what they're facing. It's not just the nightly bombing, it's not just the incessant shelling of factories, it's the fact that their rations, their daily rations of bread are now coming down to two hundred grams, maybe three hundred grams, they're working in heavy industry. But suddenly, all anyone can think about is food, because suddenly there's no food anymore. Uh. There are aeroplanes that are managing to get past the Luftwaffe and drop in some supplies. For a city of one and a half million, two million people, it's not even going to scratch the surface. And so the desperate hunger begins very quickly.
42:50 Dan Snow? Yeah, as the winter, it's a very cold winter, isn't it? But the small bit of good news that brings is that they can make ice roads across Lake Ladoga, can't they? So some supplies can get in across the frozen ice.
43:00 Speaker 04 They can. Well, it has to be pointed out, though, before they get to that stage. It was one of the hardest winters, actually, for decades and decades. The temperatures started falling to minus twenty, minus thirty, and then to minus forty-three by December nineteen forty-one. Now, these were people who were already could have emaciated, who were living in apartments with shattered windows, because the bombs have shattered windows. No way of patching them up. Electricity was faltering, water supplies were faltering because the Germans had attacked so much of the infrastructure. You had to queue for the bakery at something like it's a four thirty in the morning. Uh, in order to join the queue at a reasonable pace, you then had to spend hours in the snow, which was falling incessantly. Waiting for a piece of bread, which is not a great deal larger than a playing card, that would be your lot for the day.
43:43 Speaker 04 Or a weird little ration of cocoa powder, they'll get you get some odd random things, maybe a dried apricot. But then you'd have to take that back to your family, cut it up incredibly carefully, so everyone got an incredibly, so fair share. People's dreams at night filled with hot meat dripping and buttery potatoes and the torture of hunger. And they all, all the Leningraders understand what they're going through. The families who were once incredibly loving families, turning on each other like snarling enemies. Because they're paranoid, they believe they're stealing food from each other. And then in the midst of the darkness, people's faces, if people with particularly pale skin textures. Suddenly noticed their flesh was starting to darken in patches. Because it was almost as if their blood was too apathetic to move properly.
44:28 Speaker 04 Then with the hunger, you also got the sweating bellies, which is a result of the water retention. Uh, people reported getting a sensation called the ants, which was like insects. Burrowing under the flesh and moving around under the flesh. This was the body in desperation, starting to consume itself. And Leningraders all understood this, they became frightened to look in mirrors, because what stared back of the mirrors was not recognizably their own features. There were so many diarists at the time, and people were encouraged to keep diaries. These civilians were writing of walking along incredibly silent, deserted, snowy streets. And watching people around them simply sink to their knees and collapse in the snow. They couldn't go on, there were people just literally so dying.
45:09 Speaker 04 In the street, there were people out in the streets who were starting to hunt rats because the cats and the dogs were family pets, had to be eaten quite quickly. Those were the measures of desperation that people were going to. And the dead had to queue to be buried. The enormous numbers of bodies could have piling up, but there was no one to bury them. The gravediggers didn't have the strength to to dig into the frozen earth, and they were going to need mass burial pits, in any case, a mass of crematoria. And it was at that point that a few people in the the furthest, darkest edges of desperation started to take bodies, uh, which had been stacked like logs and crematoriums, because there was at least a possibility of human meat, which became a black market resource in some of the markets. It is the most extraordinary story of the very, very limits of human
45:52 Speaker 04 nature and what it could be stretched to. And the story also of other Leningraders, who, uh, the people largely who were driven to that desperation were refugees who didn't have ration cards because they fell out of the official kind of, uh, wrath of the city. If you didn't have a ration card, that was it, you were dead. There was no possibility of bread or anything. These were the people who were taking the bodies. And there was incredibly a measure of some compassion from some doctors and city authorities about this. The intelligence with which Leningraders faced this ordeal, uh, is one of the most remarkable things about the story. But yes, you mentioned Lake Ladoga, is incredibly huge lake, as one of the biggest, uh, freshwater lakes, certainly in the north of the world. In the summer months and the warmer months, it's a huge shipping lane. As the winter
46:34 Speaker 04 comes, it all starts to freeze up. You've got these extraordinary ice floes creaking and shrieking in the northern darkness. And then come December, it's completely could have frozen over. And it was the city authorities, again, with that kind of keen intelligence, who looked at this and thought, right, we're going to try some experiments using hydrographers. They got scientists out there to test the ice, to test, uh, what the ice could bear. They started sending horses and sleighs over to see if they could transport supplies that way. And then it was determined that the ice was thick enough to bear motorized vehicles. What you then have is the most extraordinary spectacle. There are photographs of it, which cannot capture the amazing feat, the ice road, the road of life across Lake Ladoga, which starts, uh, sometimes on January, uh, nineteen forty-two, it gets going properly, where motorized convoys moving
47:19 Speaker 04 Across this steel gray, featureless landscape of ice and snow. The navigation is provided by young women, the White Angels, they were called, who were stationed at certain points along the ice across some of the thirty five miles, set up with semis of permanent teepees on the ice to give them shelter. There were waving of literally some red flags. That was the only way that the motorized convoys could navigate across this trackless, featureless prospect. So from the shores on the east, they were starting to be able to get supplies in to the city of the the basic foodstuffs. But they're also then able to start taking people out. A proper evacuation began. There's mothers with very tiny children
48:00 Speaker 04 in open trucks in temperatures of minus forty three being driven. I still can't possibly imagine it actually. The blankness of this landscape, the air above droning with Luftwaffe who are watching this convoy, dropping bombs, smashing the ice as they do so, and the ice just suddenly opening up in any case, sometimes beneath vehicles. Mothers desperately trying to hold on to wriggling babies in the midst of this. So it's an ordeal in its own right, but for the survivors who did make it back across, who were then greeted with some hot chocolate and some fresh food and kindness and smiles, something they hadn't seen for a very, very long time. No, it's kind of measuredly haunting, the ingenuity with which Leningrad set about saving itself.
48:44 Speaker 04 But then the extraordinary strength that came in the following spring of nineteen forty two, the city still very much encircled. The seed's still very much on, the bombing and the shelling absolutely incessant. But now with these, just a vein of supply lines open again, livable, living rations starting to come through again, something new sparks in the city. Suddenly, the citizens of Leningrad are involved in the most extraordinary clear up, perhaps a million deaths, just absolutely unfathomable, for which afterwards a mass graves, but also on top of that, the cleanup of the city that has to take place. Again, it's a huge civilian operation. And it's here that we start to see more of the parents of Vladimir Putin.
49:23 Dan Snow? Aha.
49:23 Speaker 04 Putin enters the story. Putin's mother and father, Leningraders, they came to work in the city. Now Putin's father. At the time of war is is out with the Red Army. Putin's mother is living in the city with the firstborn Viktor, Viktor Putin, who who is a toddler. The story is horrible, hideous, like so many other small children. Viktor fell victim to starvation. There's nothing his mother could do, absolutely nothing Putin's mother could do to save Viktor. She herself was so close to death, she was actually mistaken for a corpse at one point and almost on the point of being loaded onto one of the sleds that they took the bodies away. It was found just in time that she was alive. So as Putin would have had an older brother, Viktor, were it not for the fact that Viktor
50:04 Speaker 04 died aged two and was then consigned along with so many others to a mass grave in the city. Putin still goes back every year for for commemorative ceremonies. And on these occasions, his anger could have burned bright and it's unfeigned. I mean, you you you you absolutely see it. But this is a city where by 1942, as I say, still encircled, still besieged, but Shostakovich and his symphony, the Leningrad Symphony, which would ring out across the world as a symbol of Russian endurance and Russian creativity, gets its premiere in Leningrad in August 1942. As I say, it's broadcast across the world and it becomes a symbol of regeneration. By this time, even more supply lines have been brought in.
50:49 Speaker 04 The Red Army is beginning to fight back properly against the occupying German forces. And so even though the city is still besieged, there are now proper supplies of food coming in. So what you get in the rest of the siege is just regeneration and renewal on the most amazing kind of scale, the beautiful photographs of children holding huge capuchins, which have been grown in the shadows of Saint Isid's cathedral. By 1944, January 1944, a brilliant general, Leonid Goverov, an artillery expert, has found the lateral means by which finally, finally chasing off the last of the Germans. And as I say, the Germans at the Wehrmacht, who'd seemed so absolutely immovable, vanished like ghosts. Again, the dissolution of power is so, so, so fast. And the Red Army start chasing them back across Eastern Europe. Leningrad, in the meantime, the speed of the regeneration is just absolutely astounding.
51:33 Speaker 04 It can, its life is restored, even though it endures a fresh round of purges with the death of the city's party secretary. Andrey Zidanov, who had been a close friend of Stalin, he died, but then the people around him suddenly fell victim to the purges because they were distrusted by Beria and Malenko. But after this fresh round of purges through the 50s and 60s, even during the darkest years of the Cold War, where the Soviet regime now has dominion over Eastern Europe. But Leningrad still remains this kind of outward facing city. By the 1950s, by the 1960s, it's accepting all sorts of school trips. Because of what we would now call soft power, I suppose, the ballet, the extraordinary kind of rich life of the poets. I didn't even mention the poets of the city declaiming their poetry during the siege to lift people's hearts.
52:18 Speaker 04 But here is a city where poetry changes living reality. And it carries on in the 1960s and 70s too. Now Putin himself, born in 1952. By this stage, his father, I think is working at the railways, I think. His mother teaches him to to read and write and arithmetic very, very early. Putin is an ill behaved horror in primary school, even from the start, but he's picking us as older kids. But Leningrad is also the crucible for Putin. Because even though he and his family are living in a communal apartment, there's still communal apartments at this stage where they're sharing with three or four other families. There's very little in the way of indoor plumbing. If you want a bath, you have to go to the local sauna. So life is is not rich, but it's not poor either. There are books in this household. As his parents are intelligent, they're not doing too badly.
53:01 Speaker 04 But Putin determines, he sees the aristocrats of Leningrad. The old monarchy went in 1917, they were killed in 1918. But a new form of monarchy took place, party officials, people like Andrey Zidanov. And Putin could see the striations of Leningrad's society. It's more sensibility than money, but it's still there. And he determines that the way to rise in the society is through espionage. That's what really grabs his imagination. And it's Putin who determines that he's going to join the KGB, which is the the unworthy successor to the Okhrana, the Cheka, the NKVD. And and this he does. It's Putin we see in 1980s in Dresden as a KGB officer at the point when the Soviet system collapses.
53:44 Speaker 04 You look at photographs of Putin from then, he's actually a little tubby. He's got a tubby on the Dresden beer. Putin who returns to St. Petersburg, becomes its deputy mayor in the 1990s. And in essence, then becomes one of the city's aristocrats. Here is a city that's just honey curbed with corruption and backhanders and all the rest of it.
54:03 Speaker 04 It's a city still with a sense of kind of exceptionalism, a sense of pride. That was always St Petersburg's founding sin. The name Leningrad has dropped quite quickly after the Soviet regime collapses. The people of St Petersburg is going back to St Petersburg. That's what it is and that's what it shall remain. And that city's kind of old spirit. You know, the ballet is still going, the National Library and all its rare works are still very much part of the centre of the city. But now we have its most famous son, Putin. It's impossible not to wonder how much his own mental landscape has been, I suppose, malformed by, you might say, generational trauma. I mean, the suffering that his parents went through, the suffering that so many Leningraders went through, because millions of people suffered and they did not turn into despotic tyrants. So it's not in any way to either excuse or explain. But as I say, it's impossible not to wonder. I mean,
54:48 Speaker 04 if you look at footage now of Putin giving those speeches at the sites of mass graves, where he refers to his brother and says that it can't even be known where his brother is. There can be no possibility of a headstand. And as I say, the anger is real, maybe the paranoia is real. Maybe, you know, those who've been invaded do have a different sensibility to those who've never known invasion. As I say, it's speculation like that is kind of fruitless. But the city from which he came still has this, I mean, in a way, it's difficult to see him as being totally part of it, because there is this kind of exceptionalism about St Petersburg, a sense that it's still slightly different from the rest of Russia. My Russian friends say that even now, going to St Petersburg, there is this sense that, not so much that it's kind of up itself, but just a sense that, a sense of intellectual
55:32 Speaker 04 superiority, which is slightly resented by a lot of other Russians, and still remains a theme to this day.
55:37 Dan Snow? Sinclair, thank you. That's a terrific place to end it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what the new book is called.
55:45 Speaker 04 And the new book is called St Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler.
55:51 Dan Snow? Well, Sinclair McKay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
55:53 Speaker 04 Thank you very much. Thank you.
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