Mark Solonin is the author of several best-selling books in Russian in which he freshly analyses the history of the Second World War (the Soviet Great Patriotic War) by a carefully logical review of the various flavours of fact that we have at our disposal. Weaving through and evaluating the undisputed and the disputed, the underplayed and the overplayed, he sorts out the honest from the dishonest and exposes the barefaced lies drummed into the minds of all too many.

In this short work, Solonin examines one of the major chapters of the USSR's Second World War, the Siege of Leningrad, and naturally begins at the very beginning by questioning the term itself.

A single glance at the map on the cover of this book shows that throughout the whole duration of the siege, Leningrad had access to two waterways by which it could maintain links with the outside world-a route west into the Baltic and a short route east to 'mainland' USSR over Lake Ladoga. One cannot but ask if a town with not one, but two, points of entry/exit can even be said to be in a state of siege.

With this startlingly obvious and true fact as his starting point, Mr. Solonin sees no other course of action but to trawl though the historical records and in the process collate evidence that ineluctably paints a quite different picture of this historical event.