Cats, dogs and even rats began to disappear as starving Russians turned to cannibalism

FROM its earliest days, the great city on the Neva River has been the subject of myth-making. When Tsar Peter the Great created his new capital, the official legend was that St Petersburg was built on previously uninhabited land, thus removing the originally Swedish settlement of Nyenskans from history.

- By Prit Buttar

As the imperial capital, it became Petrograd in the First World War to remove any taint of its Germanic name, and was the cradle of the revolution. Again, mythology took a hand.

Sergei Eisenstein's great movie Ten Days That Shook The World, describing the October Revolution of 1917, showed Red Guards marching on and heroically storming the Winter Palace. The truth was rather more prosaic. The only determined defenders of the palace were the members of a female "battalion of death". The Red Guards simply climbed through undefended windows before getting riotously drunk on the contents of the wine cellars.

But it was not the last time myth-making for political purposes would play a role. After the First World War, the city became Leningrad. Unlike most other major cities, it lacked an agricultural hinterland, meaning food had to be brought considerable distances, mainly by rail, and the chaotic early years of Soviet rule brought repeated famines. Stalin had persistent suspicions about this argumentative, restless city, and it suffered badly in his purges of the 1930s.

But famines and purges were merely preludes to Leningrad's greatest trial.

In 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, Leningrad was a primary objective. It was a major industrial centre and the capture of the birthplace of the Bolshevik state would deal a huge blow to Soviet morale.

But there was another motive. From the outset, the German invasion was a genocidal project. The intention was to create large agricultural surpluses for consumption in Germany. This would require millions of Soviet citizens to starve to death.