The Red Army's Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive drove German forces back from the city, ending a siege that had begun in September 1941. Roughly 1.1 million civilians and soldiers died, most from starvation during the brutal winters, in what remains one of the deadliest sieges in human history. Leningrad marked the anniversary with fireworks and artillery salutes over the Neva River, a defiant echo of the shells that had once terrorized the city.
For 872 days, Leningrad's roughly 2.5 million residents endured a blockade so severe that the daily bread ration at its worst dropped to 125 grams, cut with sawdust and cellulose. People ate wallpaper paste for its edible glue, boiled leather, and, in the most horrifying documented cases, resorted to cannibalism. The only lifeline in winter was the 'Road of Life,' a route across the frozen Lake Ladoga that trucks used to bring in supplies and evacuate the weakest residents, often under German fire and through ice that sometimes gave way.
Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Seventh Symphony, the 'Leningrad,' partly during the siege, and its performance by a starving, skeletal orchestra in August 1942, broadcast on loudspeakers toward German lines, became a legendary act of cultural defiance.
When Soviet marshal Leonid Govorov's forces finally pushed the German Army Group North back on January 27, 1944, the city celebrated with a 24-salvo artillery salute, the same guns that had once meant death now firing in celebration. The siege remains a defining trauma of Russian collective memory, commemorated every year with wreaths laid at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, where mass graves hold hundreds of thousands of victims.
Key people: Leonid Govorov, Dmitri Shostakovich