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Blokadnik interviewees are, by definition, psychological survivors, people who have adapted or come to terms with tragedy to the extent of being able to relate it on demand to a stranger with a notebook. It is nonetheless immensely touching how they tend to stress the positive — the bits of luck that came their way, the self-denial of mothers, the kindnesses of strangers. They dislike being labelled heroes — they were just children, they point out; the heroes were the adults who saved them. Irina Bogdanova, rescued from her corpse-filled flat seventy years ago, keeps saying ‘I was lucky’ and ‘I was blessed’ — blessed to have been picked up by conscientious Komsomol girls, blessed to have been adopted by the spinster sisters who became her new family. The only time tears come to her eyes is when she tells of a petty cruelty — that of the new occupants of her family’s flat, who, when she called round at the end of the war, refused to let her in. The sole personal possession she retains from childhood is a brass crucifix of her mother’s, which they handed her, wrapped in newspaper, through a crack in the door.

This reluctance to judge, this magnificent determination to focus on scant human kindness rather than abundant human callousness, is a different thing from Soviet-era pasteurisation. Ironically, it is not the siege survivors themselves but their sons and daughters — the generation currently in their sixties and seventies rather than eighties and nineties — who are most protective of the conventional Soviet narrative. Actual blokadniki are anxious to stress the siege experience’s closed, stony quality; its complete lack of redemptive value and the depth of damage done. I interviewed the historian Anzhelina Kupaigorodskaya, who lived through the first siege winter entirely alone save for occasional visits from her factory-tied father, sitting rather awkwardly on a sofa in a corridor in the Academy of Sciences. ‘All those stories’, she said, ‘of girls too weak to stand roped to lathes, clutching their dolls — they’re just post-war sentimentality.’ In reality the siege was drab, hard and horrible. No human being should have to live through such a time. As we parted she struggled to her feet, gripping my arm. Now that my questions were over this was the important thing, the point she was determined to get across.

Russians’ attitude to the Second World War in general is uncomplicated: fierce pride in having won a just war; fierce hatred of an enemy who wanted to destroy them. Other considerations — the pre-war purge of army officers, the Nazi — Soviet pact, the military blunders, the massacre of Polish POWs at Katyn, the wartime arrests and deportations — are (sometimes reluctantly) acknowledged, but beside the point.

The fact remains that Russia’s Great Patriotic War — as it is still mostly called — was won at unnecessarily huge cost. Of this the blockade of Leningrad is perhaps the most extreme example. Nazi Germany initiated the siege, with purposive and inhuman deliberation, but it was the Soviet regime that failed to evacuate the civilian population in time, to lay in food stocks, to stamp out food theft or to organise the Ice Road properly. It was also the Soviet regime that threw away thousands of young lives in the People’s Levy, and continued to imprison and execute its own humblest and most patriotic citizens even as they died of hunger. Had Russia had different leaders she might have prepared for the siege better, prevented the Germans from surrounding the city at all, or, indeed, never have been invaded in the first place.

Counter-factual history only takes one so far. This book is designed in part to correct Soviet myths, and as such, dwells on the negative. What it does not argue is that Leningrad should have been surrendered. The Nazis, too, would have let civilians starve to death, as they did in other Russian cities they occupied. All the city’s remaining Jews would have been rounded up and murdered. The 300,000 Axis troops pinned down outside Leningrad (15–20 per cent of the Eastern Front total) would have pushed further east, meaning a longer war, even greater swathes of Russia fought over and occupied, and a heavier burden on the other Allies. Finally, Leningrad would almost certainly have been physically destroyed, first by the Soviets as they abandoned it, again by the Germans as they finally retreated west. One of Europe’s most ravishing cities would today be either a Stalinist megalopolis, like Kharkov and Kaliningrad, or a patchy, artificial reconstruction, like Warsaw and Dresden.

None of the diarists most extensively quoted here is still alive. Dmitri Likhachev, the young medievalist who heard of the invasion while sunbathing on the bank of a river, enjoyed a distinguished academic career, becoming head of the university’s Ancient Russian Literature department and a leading pro-democracy activist of the glasnost era. He died in 1999, at the age of ninety-two.