A 900-day siege tried to starve a city into surrender instead of storming it

From September 1941 to January 1944, German and Finnish forces encircled Leningrad and cut off its supplies rather than fight through it. Daily bread rations fell to as little as 125 grams, residents burned furniture and boiled wallpaper paste for food, and roughly 750,000 to 1 million civilians died, most from starvation. Supplies crossing frozen Lake Ladoga in winter kept the city alive, and it never fell.

— Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 — Walker & Company, 2011
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