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Siege of Leningrad: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday (October 13) warned Israel regarding the siege of the Gaza Strip. He compared it to Nazi Germany’s siege of Leningrad. The Russian city of St. Petersburg was earlier known as Leningrad. Its siege is known as one of the most deadly sieges in history. In this siege that lasted from 1941 to 1944, 15 lakh people died, in which most of the common people were included.
Whenever historians talk about the Leningrad siege, they call it a ‘genocide’ carried out by the Nazis. The reason for this is that Nazi Germany’s dictator Adolf Hitler deliberately allowed people here to die of starvation and left the city in ruins. Let us tell you today about the siege that took place in Leningrad. Let us also tell you that Putin also has a sad connection with this, which he has mentioned publicly.
What is the story of the Leningrad siege?
Actually, the story of the Leningrad siege began in 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Under ‘Operation Barbarossa’, Hitler attacked his ally the Soviet Union. Hitler wanted to target Leningrad, the former capital of Russia. This was the reason why Soviet authorities evacuated more than 10 lakh people to safe places before the arrival of Nazi Germany’s army and deployed 2 lakh soldiers of the Red Army of the Soviet Union.
When Nazi Germany realized that it would be difficult for them to conquer the city, they laid siege to it. This siege started on September 8, 1941, and ended on January 27, 1944. The Nazis surrounded the city of Leningrad for 872 days. The city was continuously shelled by the Nazi army and now a famine-like situation had arisen there. On top of that, people were also troubled by the cold. In 1942, 6.5 lakh people died in Leningrad alone.
With the onset of winter, as the temperature dropped, people started dying. In February 1942, 1 lakh people were being killed every month in Leningrad. By the time the Red Army broke the siege, 1.5 million people had lost their lives in the siege of Leningrad. Half of them died while running away from here. Approximately 470,000 civilians and soldiers were buried in mass graves at the Piskarivskoye Cemetery in St. Petersburg alone.
The atrocities of the Nazis turned people into cannibals!
People lost their lives on such a large scale in Leningrad that even America and Britain together suffered losses in the Second World War. The Nazis put people on the brink of starvation under a system. Nazi Germany did not allow supplies to reach Leningrad. The conditions of the city had deteriorated so much that people had to become cannibals. Thousands of people started eating dead bodies to survive.
What is Putin’s connection with the Leningrad siege?
Russian President Vladimir Putin also has personal connections to the Leningrad siege. Although Putin was born six years after the siege ended, he lost his brother in this incident. Putin, who went to remember people at the Piskariyavskoye cemetery, once said, ‘My brother, whom I neither know nor have seen, is buried in this cemetery. I don’t even know where he is buried.
Actually, Putin’s brother’s name was Victor Putin, who died in 1942 at the age of just two years. It is said that Victor died due to extreme cold and starvation. In his book titled First Person (2000), Putin told that his mother was on the verge of death due to starvation. She was also kept with the dead bodies, but somehow she survived.
Also read: Dead bodies are being loaded into ice cream trucks in Gaza, Israel announced attack from three sides… Read 10 big updates related to the war.
