Siege of Leningrad
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Search complete. 18 mentions across 10 episodes found for "Siege of Leningrad".
Oct 15, 2026
BillyHOST
Control your harvest, control your land, your seed supplies, all that stuff, and once again, have your caches.
BillyHOST
Now, since I'm on the subject of Russia, the Siege of Leningrad.
BillyHOST
Now, boy, they really put them through something.
BillyHOST
Now I, I talk about that one often.
JoeHOST
it is.
JoeHOST
I mean, this potentially isn't even the deadliest conflict happening at the same time because at the Siege of Leningrad, much further north, there is another s- well, a siege rather more than a battle that is taking place that lasts for three years, where it's predicted potentially between one and four million people die, mostly civilians.
JoeHOST
And it's actually there that Vladimir, uh, Putin's parents are during the war.
JoeHOST
Uh-
JosieHOST
And returned to the city in her teenage years to "defend her homeland," quote.
JosieHOST
And during the Siege of Leningrad, which is a real thing that happened, it was a h- massive siege in the Soviet Union, and they were besieged by Germany and Finland for almost 900 days, but they never captured the city.
JosieHOST
Huge, huge deal.
JosieHOST
It was a horrible, tragic event.
Mark PainterHOST
Usually that's an important figure like Franklin Roosevelt.
Mark PainterHOST
Sometimes it is an obscure figure like Yuri Ryabinkin, the teenage boy who kept a diary of the siege of Leningrad.
Mark PainterHOST
Recounting the life of a person who lived in a certain time and place is a great way to give listeners a fuller picture of what life was like at the time.
Mark PainterHOST
And this, like politics and culture and music and science and all the rest, is also essential to truly understanding the period.
Mark PainterHOST
So those are the two characteristics I look for in a source, interdisciplinarianism and attention to personal stories.
Mark PainterHOST
To give you an example, since I already mentioned Yuri, here's how I might go about approaching a topic.
Mark PainterHOST
I knew I needed to do an episode on the siege of Leningrad.
Mark PainterHOST
The first stop is usually Wikipedia for an overview of the subject and a bibliography.
JohnHOST
Yeah, yeah.
LinneaHOST
Or Siege of Leningrad.
LinneaHOST
That was also-
JohnHOST
Oh
JohnHOST
Love it.
LinneaHOST
Um-
JohnHOST
Siege of Leningrad.
JohnHOST
Is that...
speaker_3HOST
It really is.
speaker_3HOST
And City of Thieves is a historical fiction novel set during the 1942 Siege of Leningrad.
speaker_3HOST
The Collider article points out that it was incredibly successful, and interestingly enough, it actually served as a primary inspiration for the tone and structure of the phenomenal video game The Last of Us.
speaker_2HOST
Now, just for some context for you listening, uh, the Siege of Leningrad is about as grim a historical setting as a writer can possibly choose.
speaker_3HOST
It's horrific.
speaker_2HOST
We are talking about brutal, systemic starvation, freezing temperatures, the absolute devastation of a populace during World War II.
Stephen SatkiewiczHOST
My next guest is Brit Putar, and we will be discussing his book Into the Reich, The Red Army's Advance to the Odor in 1945, published by Osprey Publishing in 2025.
Stephen SatkiewiczHOST
Brit Kutar is an established expert on the Eastern Front in 20th century military history, and his previous books include the critically acclaimed two-volume series On the Siege of Leningrad, To Besiege a City, published by Osprey in 2023 and previously featured on the New Books Network, and Hero City, also published by Osprey in 2024.
Stephen SatkiewiczHOST
He now lives in France.
Stephen SatkiewiczHOST
Prit Putar, welcome back to the New Books Network.
speaker_1HOST
It's something much darker
speaker_0HOST
It is the thinly veiled, agonizing, chilling truth of what their mother actually survived during the Siege of Leningrad in World War II
speaker_1HOST
If we connect this to the bigger picture of literary history and sociology, this book is an absolute masterstroke.
speaker_1HOST
Hannah is utilizing the ancient mechanism of folklore here
speaker_0HOST
Wow, cultural technologies.
speaker_0HOST
I love that
speaker_1HOST
For a woman who has survived the horrors of the Siege of Leningrad, uh, where we are talking about years of freezing temperatures, eating wallpaper paste to survive, stepping over bodies in the street, unimaginable loss, stating those facts plainly might be psychologically fatal to her
speaker_0HOST
Like the trauma is too big to just speak out loud
Brian PierceHOST
However, Finland maintained an independent stance.
Brian PierceHOST
It refused to cut diplomatic ties with the Western Allies, declined to participate in the Siege of Leningrad, and never formally joined the Axis powers, signing their own separate armistice with the Soviets in September 1944.
Brian PierceHOST
What makes it even more confusing to present-day people is what the Finns painted on the sides of their Brewsters.
Brian PierceHOST
Check it out on the Patreon page.
CameronHOST
They were all into it.
CameronHOST
I've been watching this BBC documentary on Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad Symphony, which he composed during the Siege of Leningrad.
CameronHOST
And there's interviews with survivors of the Siege of Leningrad that went on for nearly three years, 800 days long.
CameronHOST
Population of 3 million people, 1.5 million died mostly of starvation.
CameronHOST
Absolutely brutal.