What was it like for civilians during the Siege of Leningrad?
Winter is coming. It always comes to Leningrad, fierce and relentless, but in September 1941 it arrives like an executioner. The city is ringed by German and Finnish armies—almost three million souls trapped inside what will become a vast, frozen prison. The siege is not just a military campaign. It’s a slow-motion catastrophe, a war waged against hope itself.
You’re an ordinary citizen—maybe a factory worker, a student, a mother, a child. The first days bring fear, but also resolve. This is Russia, after all. Endurance is practically a birthright. You stand in lines for bread, you listen to the distant thunder of artillery. You believe, at first, that the siege can’t last. That Moscow will relieve you. That the Red Army will break through. That the world won’t let a city starve.
But the days stretch into weeks, and then into months. The food grows scarcer. Rations are cut, and then cut again. Black bread, supposed to last a day, is sometimes gone by noon. It’s not really bread anymore, but a grim mix of sawdust and floor sweepings, barely enough to keep you on your feet. The state tries to keep up appearances—cultural performances continue, and the radio still plays. But the city is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, and there are fewer people in the concert halls each week.
Then winter truly arrives. Temperatures plunge below minus 30 Celsius. Pipes freeze and burst. Fuel runs out, and there’s no way to heat the apartments. People tear up floorboards, burn furniture, smash old books and family heirlooms for a few more moments of warmth. You wrap yourself in everything you own. The cold is inside you, in your bones, in your dreams.
But the hunger—hunger is something else. It gnaws at your insides, makes you dizzy, makes you see things. People drop in the streets and no one has the strength to move them. Corpses are bundled onto sleds, sometimes stacked outside in silent, grim rows. Pets disappear. Even the rats are hunted. Children’s faces become gaunt, eyes too large for their skulls. You learn to measure your life in grams—how much flour, how much oil, how much longer you can hold out.
Every day, you make choices you never thought you’d face. A neighbor’s child begs for food. Your own child is sick. You have to decide who gets the last piece of bread, who gets to live another day. Some people can’t take it. There are suicides. There are murders over ration cards. There are rumors, whispers, about worse things. You try not to listen.
Yet somehow, the city keeps going. The factories never stop, not completely. Workers stagger in, half-starved, freezing, to make tanks and shells for the front. The city’s defenses are rebuilt. Anti-aircraft guns fill the sky with shrapnel every time the Luftwaffe returns. Bombs fall, glass shatters, buildings collapse, but the city does not surrender. The music still plays on the radio, Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony is performed right in the midst of it all, a thundering act of defiance.
Every so often, a lifeline opens: the “Road of Life,” across frozen Lake Ladoga. Trucks loaded with bread crawl across the ice at night, headlights masked, engines straining against the cold. It’s never enough. Sometimes the trucks fall through the ice and vanish with their cargo, their drivers lost in the dark. Sometimes the German artillery finds the road, and then there is only fire and smoke.
As the months grind on, you lose people—neighbors, friends, family. You lose pieces of yourself. You stop dreaming of liberation and start dreaming of food. You stop thinking in days and start thinking in hours. The calendar peels away, and the seasons blur. Spring comes, and the dead are buried at last, the thaw revealing just how many never made it.
And then—somehow—it ends. The siege is lifted. Survivors crawl from the ruins, blinking in the pale sunlight, a ghost city come back to life. You count yourself among the living, but you are not the same. Leningrad will never be the same. The world will never quite understand what happened here.
More than a million people perished in this siege—by bomb, by bullet, but mostly by hunger and cold. But those who endured, who somehow found the will to live, carry something more than scars. They carry the memory of impossible choices, of darkness survived, of a city that refused to die even when the rest of the world thought it already had.
And in the silence after, when the last cannon falls quiet, that memory is as heavy—and as precious—as gold.
What was it like to be a civilian during the firebombing of Tokyo?
The night air is thick and muggy, even in early March. Sleep comes uneasily in Tokyo. For weeks, rumors have been swirling—whispers about what happened in Dresden, Hamburg, and other cities across the world. Some say the Americans are coming with a new kind of weapon, that nowhere is safe. Most people try not to think about it. They patch up their houses, send children on errands, try to keep life moving. But in their bones, they know: Tokyo is a target.
You’re jolted awake by the distant wail of sirens. The sound grows louder, more insistent, the city’s ancient wooden bones bracing for catastrophe. It’s after midnight. You stumble into the darkness, grabbing what you can—important papers, a family photograph, a child’s hand. You join the river of people spilling into the streets, faces ghostly in the moonlight.
Then, overhead, the drone—deep, thunderous, relentless. It’s not a few planes, it’s hundreds. The city’s anti-aircraft guns open up, but it’s a gesture, not a defense. The bombers are so high, so many, they seem untouchable. And then the bombs fall.
It’s not just explosions. It’s something different. Sticks of incendiaries rain down in patterns—phosphorus and napalm—designed not just to destroy, but to ignite. The roof next door bursts into flames, the heat already radiating in waves. You run. It’s all anyone can do. Flames leap from building to building. The old city, built of wood and paper, becomes a furnace almost instantly.
The wind picks up. At first, it’s just a breeze—then a monstrous, howling gale, pulled in by the flames. The firestorm comes alive, sucking oxygen from the streets, making it impossible to breathe. The heat is unbearable. Your skin prickles, clothes start to smolder, hair singes. People stumble and fall, gasping for air. There are children crying, mothers screaming, neighbors trying to help each other. In the confusion, people are trampled, lost.
You head for the river—everyone does. Bridges are already packed, bodies pressed tight, desperate to escape the heat. Some people carry elders, some just clutch a child and pray. Flames arc over the riverbanks, sparks carried on the wind. People jump into the water, hoping it will save them, but even here, the fire pursues. The river is thick with bodies—some alive, some not.
The sky glows orange, brighter than any sunrise. Ash rains down, mixing with the acrid smoke. Your lungs burn. The world is a wall of fire, broken by the sound of collapsing houses, of shrieks and coughing and the distant, constant drone of the planes above. Every direction is blocked—alleys are choked with flame, main roads impassable. The air itself is on fire.
If you survive until dawn, the city you knew is gone. Blocks are nothing but ash and cinders. Some wander, dazed, through the ruins, looking for family, for neighbors, for anyone. The silence is thick, interrupted only by the crackle of embers and the occasional wail of the wounded. The water is slick with oil, debris, and the unthinkable.
The losses are staggering—over 100,000 dead, in a single night. In the weeks after, you see the wounds everywhere: bandaged burns, haunted eyes, neighborhoods erased. The city’s survivors are left to clear the rubble, bury the dead, and search for meaning in the ruins.
But the scars go deeper than wounds or loss of home. There is the memory of heat, the sound of sirens and screaming, the moment when everything—society, order, life itself—seemed to burn away. It’s an experience that lingers, that returns in dreams, in silence, in the smell of smoke years later. To have survived the firebombing of Tokyo is to have witnessed the end of a world and to live on as a reminder of what fire, unleashed and unrestrained, can do to a city—and to the souls within it.
What was it like for a village during The Great Leap Forward in China?
The Great Leap Forward. The words themselves sound so confident, so optimistic. For villagers scattered across the vast rural landscape of China in the late 1950s, the slogans painted on mud walls promised transformation—an end to hunger, the dawn of a new age. “Surpass Britain, catch up with America!” The Party cadres came from the city, carrying pamphlets and certainty, promising a future so bright it demanded everything, right now.
If you’re a peasant, you’ve spent your life bent over rice paddies, hands rough from seasons that don’t always cooperate, from soil that gives as much as it takes. There’s little comfort in these villages—maybe a thatched hut, a family altar, a single well for water, a hard-won plot of land to tend. Tradition and memory tie everything together: the ancestors, the festivals, the weather. Hard times are not new. Famine, after all, is a familiar ghost.
But now there’s something different in the air. Collectivization arrives with drums and flags. Overnight, land is no longer your own. Your livestock, your tools, even your cooking pots, are swept into the collective. The village is reorganized into a People’s Commune. You eat in the new canteen, standing in line as cooks ladle watery gruel into chipped bowls. Elders grumble about the waste, about food left to rot because no one “owns” it anymore. Young men and women are sent to work not just in the fields, but at backyard furnaces, melting down metal objects—bedframes, woks, ploughs—into useless, brittle pig iron. “Steel is the key to prosperity!” the loudspeakers blare.
The first few months are a blur of work and exhaustion. The harvest is overestimated, wildly so, because no one dares report bad news up the chain. Banners celebrate “abundant” yields; quotas are raised beyond reason. Grain is shipped out to the cities, to pay for Soviet machines, to prove the revolution’s success. In the village, there’s less and less left for those who grew it. People begin to whisper: “How much do we have?” “When will more come?”
Hunger creeps in. At first, it’s just grumbling stomachs, a thinning of the stew, the appearance of more weeds and wild roots on the table. The canteen’s lines get longer, the bowls smaller. Work teams are pushed harder—“More! Faster!”—but with less food, bodies grow weaker. Children stop growing. Old people disappear quietly, wrapped in blankets, buried with no ceremony. Some families, desperate, dig up hidden stores of grain, only to be denounced by neighbors, or by cadres who need scapegoats for why there isn’t enough to go around.
The winter is the worst. The cold cuts through mud-brick walls, but the hunger is colder. Fields lie barren—seeds eaten, draft animals slaughtered for one last meal. The Party still demands quotas, so villagers strip bark from trees, catch frogs, grind up grass to make something—anything—resembling food. Some stories are never spoken aloud, but everyone knows them. Parents making impossible choices. Villagers vanishing in the night, searching for food or simply to escape the gaze of others.
And through it all, the propaganda never stops. Village loudspeakers blare speeches and songs. Wall posters urge vigilance—against “hoarders,” “rightists,” “counter-revolutionaries.” Dissent is dangerous. Sometimes cadres appear, notebooks in hand, urging self-criticism sessions where neighbors denounce each other to prove their own loyalty. Fear is as omnipresent as hunger.
By the time the Great Leap runs its course, the village is transformed—but not in the way promised. There are fewer people. Fields are dotted with makeshift graves. The old ways—festivals, ancestor worship, even the village spirit—feel battered, threadbare, uncertain. There are still those who believe, or pretend to believe, that all of this was necessary, that sacrifice brings progress. Others look around at what’s left and wonder if anyone will ever understand what happened here—how an entire village could be starved, atomized, and made to sing while it disappeared.
Survival, in the end, becomes its own kind of quiet resistance. You plant a stolen seed, hide a bowl of millet, share what little you have with a neighbor. You remember the faces of those lost. You try to teach your children how to endure, to wait for a spring that may never come, or may already be on the horizon—out of sight, but desperately hoped for.
The Great Leap Forward passes into history as a campaign, a disaster, a warning. But for the villagers who lived it, it was a test of body and soul, a lesson in how quickly the future can turn, and how, in the end, survival itself can feel like the greatest, most difficult leap of all.
