When Army Group North closed the last land route into Leningrad on 8 September 1941, the German High Command made a deliberate choice. They would not storm the city. They would not accept its surrender. A 21 September 1941 order ruled out occupation "because it would make us responsible for food supply," and resolved instead to lay the city under siege and bombardment, starving its population. Hitler's directive of 22 September stated bluntly that "Saint Petersburg must be erased from the face of the Earth." In a Munich speech on 8 November 1941, he repeated it more plainly: "Leningrad must die of starvation." The German scientists who advised the campaign had calculated that the city of three million would reach starvation in a few weeks. They were close. By that first winter, the daily bread ration had fallen to 125 grams per person, of which more than half was sawdust and other fillers.

Temperatures in January and February 1942 fell to the lowest ever recorded in the city. The water froze. The trams stopped. The pipes burst. People walked miles to draw water from holes hammered through the ice of the Neva, and many of them did not walk back. Deaths peaked at one hundred thousand per month, almost all from starvation. Bodies were laid in the snow because the ground was too hard to break. NKVD records, finally opened in 2004, document the cannibalism that everyone whispered about: 2,105 arrests by December 1942, most of them desperate, illiterate, unsupported women trying to keep dependent children alive. The far more common crime was murder for ration cards. Yet given the scale of starvation, most Leningraders held to ordinary morality through the worst of it. Diaries from that winter record people sharing portions, reading aloud to neighbors who could no longer rise from bed, and standing in line for hours to bury strangers.

Once Lake Ladoga froze in November 1941, a highway was built across it. Trucks crept out onto ice that flexed beneath their wheels, sometimes breaking through, often shelled by German aircraft, drivers leaving their doors open so they could jump if the ice gave way. They brought in flour, ammunition, mail, and they took out children, the wounded, factory workers needed elsewhere. Between 29 June 1941 and 31 March 1943, the Road of Life evacuated more than 1.7 million people, including 414,148 children. Many died on the trip. At Kokkorevo on the lake's shore stands Konstantin Simun's 1966 monument to the road, a great bronze ring broken open at the point where the convoys crossed. It was raised, in the sculptor's words, "not only to the lives saved via the frozen Ladoga, but also the many lives broken by the siege."

Dmitri Shostakovich began his Seventh Symphony in Leningrad in the autumn of 1941. By August 1942, he had finished it elsewhere and a microfilmed score had been flown back into the city. The Leningrad Radio Orchestra had nearly disappeared. Its conductor, Karl Eliasberg, was being treated for dystrophy himself. He went door to door to find his musicians; the first rehearsal in March 1942 had to be stopped after fifteen minutes because the players were too weak to lift their instruments. Brass players collapsed during practice. Soldiers were ordered out of the trenches to fill empty chairs. On 9 August 1942, Eliasberg lifted his baton in the Bolshoy Philharmonic Hall and the symphony was performed and broadcast through loudspeakers across the city and out toward the German lines. The Soviet artillery had been ordered to silence the German guns for the duration. The orchestra was emaciated, the audience as well, and the performance lasted seventy minutes.

On 18 January 1943, Operation Iskra opened a narrow eight-mile land corridor along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. The siege was not lifted until 27 January 1944, when the Leningrad–Novgorod offensive finally pushed the Wehrmacht back. By then more than a million civilians and soldiers had died from hunger, freezing, and bombardment. The Wehrmacht, retreating, deliberately destroyed the imperial palaces around the city: Catherine Palace, Peterhof, Gatchina, Strelna. Today the dead lie in mass trenches at Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, where about 470,000 of them are buried under low grass mounds, each marked only with a year. A bronze figure of the Motherland stands at the head of the rows. On 27 January each year, a parade crosses Palace Square to mark the lifting of the siege, and at Piskaryovskoye, families still arrive carrying flowers for relatives whose individual graves no one can find.