Myth and tragedy at the siege of Leningrad – gallery

The siege of Leningrad, which began 70 years ago this month, was the deadliest in human history. In June 1941, Nazi Germany launched a surprise attack on its ally, Stalin's Soviet Union. By the end of August the German armies had reached the outskirts of Leningrad – formerly and now again St Petersburg, Russia's historic capital on the Baltic. On 31 August they cut the last railway line out of the city, and on 8 September the last road. Air raids began the same evening. For the next 17 months nobody could leave the city, nor any food be delivered to it, except by air or across Lake Ladoga, the inland sea to its east. By the time the siege was completely lifted, in January 1944, about three quarters of a million civilians – between a quarter and a third of the pre-siege population – had starved to death Photograph: Tsentralniy Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokunmentov Sankt-Peterburga

A person's fate depended largely on their ration status. According to the official rhetoric, food was allocated according to need. In reality, the system tended (just) to preserve those essential to the city's defence (factory workers and soldiers) but not children, old people, or the unemployed. The lowest category 'dependants' card entitled the holder to 125g of bread – three thin slices – per day. Taking into account nutrition-less 'fillers', such as cellulose, used by bakeries to bulk up their loaves, this amounted to about 300 calories daily – less than a fifth of what the average adult needs to maintain weight. The nickname for the dependant's card was the smertnik, from the word smert, or death Photograph: Tsentralniy Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokunmentov Sankt-Peterburga

The first deaths from starvation were recorded only a few weeks after the ring of the siege closed, and by midwinter it was common to see corpses lying in the streets. A dance teacher at the Mariinsky ballet school noted a dead man who leant for months against a lamppost opposite the Philharmonia: 'With his back to the post a man sits in the snow, wrapped in rags, wearing a knapsack ... For two weeks I passed him every day as I went back and forth to the hospital. He sat 1. Without his knapsack 2. Without his rags 3. In his underwear 4. Naked 5. A skeleton with ripped out entrails.' Ordinary emotions shrivelled: survivors talk about turning into 'stones' or 'wolves' Photograph: Tsentralniy Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokunmentov Sankt-Peterburga

A myth of the siege is that all Leningraders suffered equally. In fact, a substantial minority remained healthy well into the winter, while their neighbours starved. Amongst the noticeably better-fed were food shop staff, orphanage workers, the wives and girlfriends of army supply officers, and functionaries at Party headquarters (where soup, noodles, meat and cabbage were daily served for lunch). Informers recorded ordinary Leningraders' anger: 'They're stuffing their faces', one woman hissed to another in a bread queue, 'while we starve' Photograph: Tsentralniy Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokunmentov Sankt-Peterburga

In late January 1942, the Soviet leadership did what it should have done before the siege ring closed, and ordered mass evacuation, over the ice of Lake Ladoga. Travelling first by train to the lakeshore and then in open lorries over the lake itself, thousands died en route. This picture was taken at Kobona, the 'mainland' village on the Soviet-held far side of the lake. How many perished on the Ice Road altogether is unknown, but a mass grave at the railway town of Vologda, filled mainly with fleeing Leningraders, contains the remains of about 20,000 people Photograph: Tsentralniy Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokunmentov Sankt-Peterburga

When the spring thaw began the city government launched a clean-up campaign, drafting Leningraders to clear courtyards of frozen faeces – dumped out of windows when lavatories froze – and organising trucks to pick up backlogs of unburied corpses. Seven hundred and thirty were collected from a single hospital, 204 from the Finland Station, and 103 from the cellars of the Hermitage. The clean-up campaign was successful, containing though not completely preventing epidemics of typhus, typhoid and dysentery Photograph: Tsentralniy Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokunmentov Sankt-Peterburga

By late summer 1942, evacuation and starvation had reduced the city's population from 2.5 million to about 750,000. Women heavily outnumbered men, manning factories, digging allotments in the public parks, and standing fire duty on the rooftops during air raids. As rations increased and ordinary emotions began gradually to return, they found themselves changed. 'I had to study this new body and new soul,' wrote a doctor, 'and explore their hidden corners, as though I had moved into a new, unfamiliar flat' Photograph: Tsentralniy Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokunmentov Sankt-Peterburga

In January 1943, the Red Army finally cleared a narrow land corridor out through the German lines. But the siege was not fully lifted until January 1944, when the German armies began their slow general retreat. 'We brought out vodka,' a teacher wrote of the victory fireworks. 'We sang, cried and laughed. But it was sad all the same – the losses were just too big. A great work had ended, impossible deeds had been done, we all felt that ... But we also felt confusion. How should we live now?' Photograph: Tsentralniy Gosudarstvenniy Arkhiv Kinofotofonodokunmentov Sankt-Peterburga

Postwar, Stalin played down the siege, preferring to celebrate the less problematic victories at Moscow and Stalingrad. Brezhnev co-opted it into his heroic cult of the Great Patriotic War, designed to distract from political stagnation and lagging living standards. Harsher truths – dissent, arrests, murder and mugging for food, cannibalism, corruption, the pointless throwing away of soldiers' lives at the front – could only be discussed in public with Gorbachev's perestroika. Under Putin Victory Day is again a major public holiday, as here at Leningrad's (now again St Petersburg's) Piskarevskoye cemetery, site of the biggest wartime mass graves. The laying of bread as well as flowers on the graves is a new custom Photograph: Anna Reid