The Cat Trains: How Leningrad Was Saved by Its Smallest Allies

There are chapters of history that endure not because they are grand, but because they are unexpectedly gentle.The Siege of Leningrad—one of the darkest episodes of the 20th century—is remembered for its brutality: 872 days of hunger, cold and silence, a city fighting for breath. Yet within that devastation lives a quieter story, one shaped not by armies or ideology, but by animals.

During the siege, Leningrad’s cats vanished. Hunger, desperation and relentless winter erased them from courtyards, stairwells and kitchens. And with their disappearance came another enemy: rats. They multiplied in abandoned apartments, poured into granaries, gnawed through precious sacks of grain. In a city already starving, they threatened the little food that remained—and the public health needed to hold on. When the blockade finally loosened and trains began to reach the city again, the authorities recognized a truth residents already understood: if Leningrad was to recover, it first needed to restore its natural guardians.

Thus began what later became known, almost affectionately, as the “cat trains.” From Yaroslavl, Tyumen, Siberia and other regions untouched by famine, cats were gathered—barn cats, village mousers, strays strong enough to work—and loaded into wooden crates padded with hay. They arrived not as mascots but as reinforcements, dispatched to reclaim a city overrun by hunger and rodents. People greeted them with a kind of restrained relief. After years of loss, the sight of a living creature stepping onto the platform carried a quiet promise: that life, in all its small forms, could return.

The cats went to work immediately.They took over cellars, storerooms and kitchens, hunting with an instinct sharpened by generations of survival. Slowly, the rats retreated. Food reserves were no longer devoured in the night. Epidemics were averted. In ways both practical and profound, these cats helped safeguard the fragile beginnings of recovery.

They did not know they were saving a city.They were simply being cats—yet that was enough.

Today, St. Petersburg remembers them with tenderness. On Malaya Sadovaya Street, two bronze cats, Elisey and Vasilisa, watch from opposite sides of the pedestrian avenue. Passersby toss coins to them, but their real purpose is deeper: they are memorials to the animals that helped protect the city’s survival. Inside the Hermitage, the museum’s famous cats—descendants of those wartime reinforcements—still patrol the basement tunnels. They are cared for, named, and honored not for being charming, but for belonging to a lineage of genuine service. Visitors smile when they spot them, often unaware that these creatures once formed an essential defense against hunger and disease. The story of Leningrad’s cats is not a footnote; it is a reminder.A reminder that survival is sometimes safeguarded by unlikely allies. That in moments of crisis, life often returns first in small shapes. That gratitude, when honest, can take the form of a bronze sculpture or a warm bed in a museum’s basement.

After nearly three years of isolation and starvation, the arrival of those cats meant something simple and profound:the city could begin again. They came by train, in wooden crates lined with hay, without ceremony or understanding.But their presence helped tip the balance between despair and continuity. History is full of heroes.These were the quiet ones.