Battle of Leningrad: A DVD review

BATTLE OF LENINGRAD was recently released on DVD, having been given a cinematic release on 27th January 2019, just days before the 75th anniversary of the end of the siege.

Before I go any further, I think that it is important to note that the film's original title was SAVING LENINGRAD (Russian: Спасти Ленинград), and that it deals with a specific event during the early days of the siege. This was the voyage of Barge 752 across Lake Ladoga on 16th to 17th September 1941, during which a dumb (i.e. unpowered) barge, loaded with approximately 1,500 people, was supposed to be towed by a tug from Leningrad to the relative safety of the Russian-occupied eastern shore of the lake. It was done to show that civilians could be evacuated from the city, and soldiers and supplies brought in.

In reality, it was a disaster. The barge set off when the water was calm, but overnight a storm hit the lake, and the barge, which was heavily overloaded, began to suffer damage and take in water. On the morning of 17th September, it came under air attack, as a result of which it sank, and over 1,000 passengers were killed or drowned. Amongst those that died were:

• 433 military cadets, including a whole class of cadets from the Leningrad Military School of Engineering
• 132 graduates of the Military Medical Academy
• 8 junior officers
• 36 officers
• At least 46 women
• A number of children
• 30 civilian workers and members of the Naval Medical Academy and the Navy's Hydrographic Administration

The film is a fictionalised telling of the story. It concentrates on a few main characters:

• Anastasiya Alexandrovna Tkachyova ('Nastya'), a schoolgirl in Leningrad.
• Konstantin Nikolaevich Gorelov ('Kostya') a cadet attending the Leningrad Artillery School and Nastya's boyfriend
• Vadim Petruchik, an NKVD investigator who helped imprison Nastya's father
• Mariya Nikolaevna Tkachyova, Nastya's mother
• Alexandr Naumovich Tkachyov, Nastya's father
• Captain (First Rank) Nikolai Gorelov, Kostya's father

As with almost all recent Russian war films, the quality of the special effects is superb, and the battle scenes are horrific ... and I suspect quite accurate in that Russian human-wave tactics using barely-trained troops only ever seem to succeed at the price of huge numbers of lives lost.

This is as much a love story as it is a war film, but above all else, it is a film about people trying to survive against all the odds.

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BATTLE OF LENINGRAD/SAVING LENINGRAD was written, directed, and produced by Aleksey Kozlov & Arkady Fateev, made by Studio AVK, and released on 27th January 2019. The DVD is in Russian and German with English subtitles.