[ilya_m]

> That reads like ww2 german propaganda. What did you expect. People in moscow to starve also? "Lashings of caviar"? Give me a break.

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.)