After the war, the Soviet government admitted mass starvation, citing a spuriously precise death toll of 632,253 at the Nuremberg war crime trials. Honest public description of its horrors, however, remained off-limits, as did all debate over why the German armies had been allowed to get so far, and why food supplies had not been laid in, nor more civilians evacuated, before the siege ring closed. The boundaries narrowed even further with the onset of the Cold War and with Stalin’s launch, in 1949, of two new purges. The first, carried out in secret, swept up Leningrad’s war leadership and Party organisation; the second, against ‘cosmopolitanism’ — codeword for Jewishness or any sort of perceived Western leaning — hundreds of its academics and professionals. The same year one of Stalin’s cronies, Georgi Malenkov, visited the popular Museum of the Defence of Leningrad, which housed home-made lamps and a mock-up of a wartime ration station (complete with two thin slices of adulterated bread) as well as quantities of trophy ordnance. Striding furiously through the halls, he is said to have brandished a guidebook and shouted: ‘This pretends that Leningrad suffered a special “blockade” fate! It minimizes the role of the great Stalin!’, before ordering the museum’s closure. Its director was accused of ‘amassing ammunition in preparation for terrorist acts’ and sentenced to twenty-five years in the Gulag.6

With Stalin’s death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power, it finally became possible to focus on aspects of the war other than the Great Leader’s military genius. As well as Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin’s Party purges, and the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the ‘Thaw’ saw the opening, in 1960, of the first memorial complex to Leningrad’s civilian war dead. The site chosen was the Piskarevskoye cemetery in the city’s north-eastern suburbs, site of the largest wartime mass graves.