Siege of Leningrad

Why did the city become a target in the northern war?

On 18 December 1940, Leningrad was not an ordinary rear-area city. With about 3.2 million inhabitants, it was the Soviet Union's second city and the principal base of the Baltic Fleet. In 1939 it produced roughly 11 percent of Soviet industrial output. The Kirov and other shipbuilding and engineering plants made tanks, artillery, and warships. The city was also the former capital where the 1917 Revolution had begun, making it a political symbol of what Nazi leaders called Bolshevism. Seizing Leningrad would therefore remove industry and a fleet base while striking at the memory of the revolution.

Its geography magnified the pressure. Leningrad lay between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, while railways and waterways connecting it to the Soviet interior depended on a limited number of routes. The northern frontier had already become a battlefield during the Winter War of 1939. The Soviet government regarded the border, only a few dozen kilometres from the city, as dangerous and sought to push it away; Finland experienced the demand as an assault on its territory. Under the peace treaty of 12 March 1940, the Soviet Union gained the Karelian Isthmus and Viipuri, but Finnish society retained the goal of recovering the lost lands. Finland's participation in the 1941 war therefore cannot be explained as identical to Germany's total-war purpose. Finnish leaders, including Mannerheim, emphasised restoring the pre-Winter War frontier, yet that choice combined with the German advance from the south and made pressure from the north possible.

The German-Soviet non-aggression pact did not remove this conflict, but postponed it. Its secret protocol of August 1939 divided spheres of influence in eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and parts of Romania in 1940. Hitler treated the pact as a temporary manoeuvre. After France's defeat, Germany decided to crush the Soviet Union in a quick campaign even before the war with Britain had ended. Directive No. 21 named Leningrad as the key northern objective and anticipated that Finland would operate in coordination with Germany's northern army group to tie down Soviet forces. The document reveals more than a plan for a frontier war. Germany did not primarily imagine the city as a population to govern, but as a place to isolate and destroy, eliminating its Baltic base while avoiding responsibility for feeding its inhabitants. At the end of 1940, Leningrad's defence had not yet begun, but the city's industrial value and revolutionary symbolism, the border conflict left by the Winter War, and Germany's project of a war of annihilation were already converging into the conditions of a siege.