Would it not have been the people besieging the city who were responsible?
The article mentions it below even:
> The betrayal came from the top. Stalin, neglecting the relevant intelligence and then focusing on Moscow, all but abandoned Leningrad, while his apparatchiks appeared at public baths milky and fat in their privilege. The man in charge of the city, Andrei Zhdanov, enjoyed butter on his bread and lashings of caviar while those in his care ate their pets, sometimes their neighbours, and fashioned tagliatelle out of slow-boiled strips of leather. Nor did the Soviets acknowledge the extent of the suffering.
They "chose" to abandon it? Weren't they forced to retreat by the german army who encircled it and chose to starve out the population rather than directly attack the city?
> The article mentions it below even:
That reads like ww2 german propaganda. What did you expect. People in moscow to starve also? "Lashings of caviar"? Give me a break.
Also, once the soviets repelled the german attack on moscow, didn't the soviets liberate leningrad? If the soviets were as cruel as you claim, why would they even bother? Not only that, it's known the soviets tried to get food into the city even before they liberated the city.
> Nor did the Soviets acknowledge the extent of the suffering.
Is this a joke? The soviets took every opportunity to paint the germans as barbaric. The starvation of leningrad isn't some secret nobody knew about.
The easiest way to tell if some historical anecdote is true or not is how cartoonish the caricature becomes. Both on the positive/heroic and negative/villain side of the history.
For better or worse, anecdotes of the caviar delivered by the crates to the top party officials appear in many Russian sources. I don't know whether independent historians confirmed these stories but they are believed by many. For very good reasons, since this is what the party did all along - it's the brutal conditions outside the party HQ in Leningrad that make these anecdotes especially poignant.
> Also, once the soviets repelled the german attack on moscow, didn't the soviets liberate leningrad?
Not until more than two years later. (It was not for the lack of trying - in 1942 an unsuccessful operation led to a complete loss of two full armies.)
You didn't read the article, did you?