'One of my favourite historians' Dan SnowBuilt by slave labour in the early years of the eighteenth century, Saint Petersburg was Peter the Great-s so-called -window on to Europe-, a city that would outdo all of Europe in its splendour. But a window works both ways, and as bestselling historian Sinclair McKay writes, St Petersburg has always been a city that has drawn Westerners who wanted to see into Russia. It is also a city where much has happened. It was St Petersburg until 1917, Petrograd after the revolution, Leningrad after Lenin-s death in 1924, and St Petersburg once again from 1991. This biography of a city stretches from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, who was born and made in St Petersburg. The story centres the -900 days and nights- of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-44. Unlike Paris or Prague, the Nazis weren-t trying to take over, they wanted to wipe it off the map. According to some, this siege of 1.5 million people - including Putin-s mother - was an attempted genocide
