When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, he planned to capture Leningrad before turning on Moscow. Stubborn Soviet resistance forced him to change tactics: with his forward troops only thirty kilometres away, he decided to surround the city and starve it out. Over the next two and a half years, three quarters of a million Leningraders - almost a third of its civilian population - died of cold and hunger. To blame, Anna Reid argues, were the Soviet regime`s brutality and incompetence, as well as Nazi contempt for human life. Using newly available diaries and government records, Reid describes a city`s descent into hell, but also extraordinary individual endurance and self-sacrifice.