Leningrad under siege: The Second World War in St. Petersburg

In the middle of a turbulent 20th century, the Siege of Leningrad was the defining event in the recent history of St. Petersburg/Leningrad. While it wrought untold destruction and suffering on the city for over two and a half years, it also fostered a powerful sense of civic pride and communality in a city that had previously been more notable for its ostentatious displays of wealth and power and its stark social divisions.

This five-hour city tour remains within the borders of St. Petersburg and begins in the far south of the city at the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad. This grand panoramic monument was erected in 1975 and is a superb example of Soviet public art, with a soaring central obelisk and groups of hyper-realistic bronze combatants on its granite-clad pedestals. Beneath the monument is a memorial museum that focuses on the military aspects of the defense of the city, with mosaics, artifacts, and audio and visual documentation all presented in the grand ritual style of late-Soviet Modernism.

After touring the museum, the tour will make a brief diversion a few hundred meters up Moskovsky Prospekt to see the House of Soviets. This vast Stalinist building, designed to house all Leningrad's government offices, was completed just as war broke out, and became instead a regional army command post, some of the fortifications of which can still be seen.

You will then drive to the north-eastern outskirts of the city, to the Piskaryovkoye Memorial Cemetery. The burial place of over 50,000 soldiers and 400,000 civilians who died during the siege, the cemetery is an intensely moving monument to the suffering the city experienced, its monumental statuary and forbidding rows of identical graves offset by mounds of fresh flowers and other symbols of remembrance, which bear testament to St. Petersburg's ongoing mourning for those who died over sixty years ago.

For the final stop of the tour, your guide will take you back to the center of the city to visit the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad on Solyanoy Pereulok. The oldest of St. Petersburg's museums commemorating the siege, this collection was founded even before victory in the Second World War had been announced, and has played a vital role in keeping alive the memory of this awful tragedy. The extensive displays of documentary and photographic testimony, as well as numerous personal artifacts, can be fairly impenetrable for those who don't speak Russian. With the assistance of an expert guide, however, visitors will be fully able to appreciate this extraordinary insight into the horrors and anguish the siege inflicted on private citizens, and the extraordinary courage and tenacity with which they responded.

Itinerary and route details