The Nazi siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944 was one of the most gruesome episodes of World War II. Nearly three million people endured it; just under half of them died. For twenty-five years the distinguished journalist and historian Harrison Salisbury pieced together this remarkable narrative of villainy and survival, in which the city had much to fear-from both Hitler and Stalin.

Harrison E. Salisbury probably knows Russia better than any other living American correspondent, having traveled widely and frequently through almost every part of the Soviet Union, including the long-sealed-off regions of Siberia, the sub-Arctic, and Central Asia as well as the Volga country and the Ukraine. He has also covered the entire periphery of China, traveling more than 25,000 miles along China's frontiers from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the bristling Siberian-Chinese border.