On January 27 at 20:00 a reconstruction of the Leningrad fireworks display of 1944 will be held on the Champ de Mars, and then at 21:00 the first salvos will be fired at the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress. According to tradition, the festive event for the Day of Complete Liberation from the Nazi Siege will end with fireworks: at 21:00 an artillery salute will thunder at the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the sky above the city will be painted with thousands of bright sparks.
A salute in honor of the 74th anniversary of the complete liberation of the hero city of Leningrad from the fascist blockade will be given by artillerymen of the Western Military District (WMD) on January 27 from four points in St. Petersburg, Colonel Igor Muginov, head of the press service of the Western Military District, told RIA Novosti on Wednesday.
According to him, more than 500 military personnel of the district, twelve 85-mm D-44 guns of the St. Petersburg Mikhailovsky Military Artillery Academy and 20 salute installations of the Moscow Guards Division of the Western Military District will be involved in the artillery salute.
Anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad in 2018: The siege of Leningrad, which began on September 8, 1941, lasted almost 900 days
After breaking the blockade on January 18, 1943, the siege of the city continued for another year. In January–February, Soviet troops carried out the Leningrad-Novgorod operation, as a result of which the enemy was thrown back more than 200 km from the city. On January 27, 1944, the blockade of Leningrad was completely lifted.
St. Petersburg State University will host a solemn celebration of the 74th anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad by Soviet troops from the siege of its fascist German troops.
Program
13:00 Opening of an exhibition dedicated to the activities of the St. Petersburg State University search team “Ingria”
13:00–14:00 Registration of participants and distribution of gifts
14:00 Laying flowers at the Memorial
14:00 Gala concert
Anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad in 2018: 75 years ago, Soviet troops liberated Leningrad
The only route ─ the “Road of Life” along which food was delivered to the city was laid along the ice of Lake Ladoga. The blockade was broken on January 18, 1943, but Leningraders had to wait another whole year before it was completely lifted ─ January 27, 1944. During the years of the blockade, according to various sources, from 400 thousand to 1.5 million people died. At the Nuremberg trials, the number of 632 thousand people appeared. Only 3% of them died from bombing and shelling, the rest died of starvation.
The siege of Leningrad began on September 8, 1941. The city was surrounded by German, Finnish and Spanish troops, supported by volunteers from Europe, Italy and North Africa. Leningrad was not ready for a long siege - the city did not have sufficient supplies of food and fuel.
Lake Ladoga remained the only route of communication with Leningrad, but the capacity of this transport route, the famous “Road of Life,” was not enough to satisfy the needs of the city.
Due to frosty winters, water pipes froze and houses were left without water. There was a catastrophic shortage of fuel. There was no time to bury people - and the corpses lay right on the street.
At the very beginning of the blockade, the Badayevsky warehouses, where the city’s food supplies were stored, burned down. Residents of Leningrad, cut off from the rest of the world by German troops, could only count on a modest ration, consisting of practically nothing but bread, which was issued by ration cards. During the 872 days of the siege, more than a million people died, mostly from starvation.
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January 27, the day the siege of Leningrad was lifted, is special in the history of our country. Today, on this date, Military Glory Day is celebrated annually. The city of Leningrad itself (now St. Petersburg) received the title of hero city on May 1, 1945. On May 8, 1965, the northern capital was awarded the Golden Star medal and the Medal for Leningrad was also received by 1.496 million residents of this city.
"Leningrad under siege" - a project dedicated to the events of that time
The country has preserved the memory of these heroic events to this day. January 27 (the day the siege of Leningrad was lifted) in 2014 is already the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the city. The Archival Committee of St. Petersburg presented a project called “Leningrad under siege.” A virtual exhibition of various archival documents relating to the history of this city during the siege was created on the Internet portal "Archives of St. Petersburg". About 300 historical originals of that time were published. These documents are combined into ten different sections, each of which is accompanied by expert comments. All of them reflect different aspects of life in Leningrad during the siege.
Reconstruction of the wartime situation
Today it is not easy to imagine for young St. Petersburg residents that the magnificent city-museum in which they live was sentenced to complete destruction by the Germans in 1941. However, he did not capitulate when he was surrounded by Finnish and German divisions, and managed to win, although he was seemingly doomed to death. In order for the current generation of city residents to have an idea of what their great-grandfathers and grandfathers had to endure in those years (which the surviving residents of besieged Leningrad remember as the most terrible time), one of the modern streets of the city, Italian, as well as Manezhnaya The area was "returned" to the 70th anniversary in the winter of 1941-1944. This project was called "Street of Life".
In the above-mentioned places of St. Petersburg there are various cultural institutions, as well as theaters, which did not stop their activities even during those difficult blockade years. Here, the windows of the houses were covered with crosses, as was done at that time in Leningrad to protect against air raids, barricades made of sandbags on the pavements were reconstructed, anti-aircraft guns and military trucks were brought in to completely reproduce the situation of that time. This is how the seventieth anniversary of the siege of Leningrad was celebrated. According to estimates, approximately 3 thousand buildings were destroyed by shells during the events of those years, and more than 7 thousand were significantly damaged. Residents of besieged Leningrad erected various defensive structures to protect themselves from artillery shelling. They built about 4 thousand bunkers and pillboxes, equipped about 22 thousand different firing points in buildings, and also erected 35 kilometers of anti-tank obstacles and barricades on the city streets.
Siege of Leningrad: main events and figures
The defense of the city, which began in 1941 on September 8, lasted about 900 days and ended in 1944. January 27 - All these years, the only route along which the necessary products were delivered to the besieged city, as well as the seriously wounded and children were taken out, was carried out in winter along the ice of Lake Ladoga. This was the Road of Life of besieged Leningrad. We will talk about it in more detail in our article.
The blockade was broken on January 18, 1943, and Leningrad was completely cleared on January 27. And this happened only the next year - in 1944. Thus, residents had to wait a long time before the blockade of the city of Leningrad was finally lifted. According to various sources, from 400 thousand to 1.5 million inhabitants died during this period. The following number appeared at the Nuremberg trials - 632 thousand dead. Only 3% of them are from shelling and bombing. The rest of the inhabitants died of hunger.
The beginning of events
Today, military historians believe that not a single city on earth in the entire history of warfare has given as many lives for the Victory as Leningrad did at that time. On the day (1941, June 22), martial law was immediately introduced in this city, as well as throughout the region. On the night of June 22-23, Nazi aviation attempted to carry out a raid on Leningrad for the first time. This attempt ended unsuccessfully. Not a single enemy aircraft was allowed to approach the city.
The next day, June 24, the Leningrad Military District was transformed into the Northern Front. Kronstadt covered the city from the sea. This was one of the bases located in the Baltic Sea at that time. With the advance of enemy troops into the region on July 10, a heroic defense began, of which the history of Leningrad can be proud. On September 6, the first fascist bombs were dropped on the city, after which it began to be systematically subjected to air raids. In just three months, from September to November 1941, the air raid warning was announced 251 times.
Loudspeakers and the famous metronome
However, the stronger the threat faced the hero city, the more united the inhabitants of Leningrad opposed the enemy. To warn Leningraders about ongoing air raids, about 1,500 loudspeakers were installed on the streets in the first months. The population was notified by the radio network about the air raid warning. The famous metronome, which went down in history as a cultural monument of the time of resistance, was broadcast through this network. Its fast rhythm meant that a military alert had been announced, and its slow rhythm meant the all clear. Mikhail Melaned, the announcer, announced the alarm. There was not a single area in the city that an enemy shell could not reach. Therefore, the streets and areas where the risk of being hit was greatest were calculated. Here people hung signs or wrote with paint that this place was the most dangerous during shelling.
According to Adolf Hitler's plan, the city was to be completely destroyed, and the troops defending it were to be destroyed. The Germans, having failed in a number of attempts to break through the defenses of Leningrad, decided to starve it out.
The first shelling of the city
Every resident, including the elderly and children, became a defender of Leningrad. A special army was created in which thousands of people rallied into partisan detachments and fought the enemy at the fronts, participating in the construction of defensive lines. The evacuation of the population from the city, as well as cultural treasures of various museums and industrial equipment, began already in the first months of hostilities. On August 20, enemy troops occupied the city of Chudovo, blocking the railway in the Leningrad-Moscow direction.
However, the army divisions called “North” failed to break into Leningrad on the move, although the front approached close to the city. Systematic shelling began on September 4. Four days later, the enemy captured the city of Shlisselburg, as a result of which land communications with the mainland of Leningrad were stopped.
This event marked the beginning of the blockade of the city. It had over 2.5 million inhabitants, including 400 thousand children. At the beginning of the blockade, the city did not have the necessary food supplies. As of September 12, they were designed for only 30-35 days (bread), 45 days (cereals) and 60 days (meat). Even with the strictest savings, coal could only last until November, and liquid fuel only until the end of the current year. The food standards that were introduced under the rationing system began to gradually decline.
Hunger and cold
The situation was aggravated by the fact that the winter of 1941 was early in Russia, and in Leningrad it was very severe. Often the thermometer dropped to -32 degrees. Thousands of people died from hunger and cold. The peak of mortality was from November 20 to December 25 of this difficult year of 1941. During this period, the norms for the distribution of bread to soldiers were significantly reduced - to 500 grams per day. For those who worked in hot shops, they were only 375 grams, and for other workers and engineers - 250. For other segments of the population (children, dependents and employees) - only 125 grams. There were practically no other products. More than 4 thousand people died from hunger every day. This figure was 100 times higher than pre-war mortality rates. Male mortality significantly prevailed over female mortality. By the end of the war, representatives of the fairer sex made up the bulk of the inhabitants of Leningrad.
The role of the Road of Life in Victory
The connection with the country was provided, as already mentioned, by the Road of Life of besieged Leningrad, passing through Ladoga. This was the only highway that existed in the period from September 1941 to March 1943. It was along this road that the evacuation of industrial equipment and the population from Leningrad took place, the supply of food to the city, as well as weapons, ammunition, reinforcements and fuel. In total, more than 1,615,000 tons of cargo were delivered to Leningrad along this route, and about 1.37 million people were evacuated. Moreover, in the first winter, about 360 thousand tons of cargo arrived, and 539.4 thousand residents were evacuated. A pipeline was laid along the bottom of the lake to supply petroleum products.
Protection of the Road of Life
Hitler's troops constantly bombed and shelled the Road of Life in order to paralyze this only path of salvation. To protect it from air strikes, as well as ensure uninterrupted operation, the country's air defense assets and forces were mobilized. In various memorial ensembles and monuments today, the heroism of the people who made uninterrupted movement along it possible was immortalized. The main place among them is occupied by “The Broken Ring” - a composition on Lake Ladoga, as well as an ensemble called “Rumbolovskaya Mountain”, located in Vsevolzhsk; in the village of Kovalevo), which is dedicated to the children who lived in Leningrad in those years, as well as a memorial complex installed in a village called Chernaya Rechka, where the soldiers who died on the Ladoga road rested in a mass grave.
Lifting the blockade of Leningrad
The blockade of Leningrad was first broken, as we have already said, in 1943, on January 18. This was carried out by the forces of the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts together with the Baltic Fleet. The Germans were driven back. Operation Iskra took place during the general offensive of the Soviet Army, which expanded widely in the winter of 1942-1943 after enemy troops were surrounded at Stalingrad. Army "North" acted against Soviet troops. On January 12, the troops of the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts went on the offensive, and six days later they united. On January 18, the city of Shlisselburg was liberated, and the southern coast of the strategically important Lake Ladoga was cleared of the enemy. A corridor was formed between it and the front line, the width of which was 8-11 km. Within 17 days (just think about this period!), highways and railways were built through it. After this, the city's supply improved dramatically. The blockade was completely lifted on January 27. The day of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad was marked with fireworks that lit up the sky of this city.
The siege of Leningrad became the most brutal in the history of mankind. Most of the residents who died at that time are buried today at the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery. The defense lasted, to be exact, 872 days. Leningrad of the pre-war period no longer existed after that. The city has changed a lot; many buildings had to be restored, some had to be built anew.
Diary of Tanya Savicheva
There is a lot of evidence left from the terrible events of those years. One of them is Tanya's diary. The Leningrad girl started teaching it at the age of 12. It was not published because it consists of only nine terrible records about how members of this girl’s family consistently died in Leningrad at that time. Tanya herself also failed to survive. This notebook was presented at the Nuremberg trials as an argument accusing fascism.
This document is located today in the museum of the history of the hero city, and a copy is stored in the display case of the memorial of the above-mentioned Piskarevsky cemetery, where 570 thousand Leningraders were buried, who died of hunger or bombing during the siege from 1941 to 1943, as well as in Moscow on Poklonnaya Hill .
The hand, losing strength due to hunger, wrote sparingly and unevenly. The child's soul, stricken by suffering, was no longer capable of living emotions. The girl only recorded the terrible events of her life - “visits of death” to her family’s house. Tanya wrote that all the Savichevs died. However, she never found out that not everyone died, their family continued. Sister Nina was rescued and taken out of the city. She returned in 1945 to Leningrad, to her home, and found Tanya’s notebook among the plaster, fragments and bare walls. Brother Misha also recovered from a serious wound received at the front. The girl herself was discovered by employees of the sanitary teams who were going around the houses of the city. She fainted from hunger. She, barely alive, was evacuated to the village of Shatki. Here, many orphans grew stronger, but Tanya never recovered. For two years, doctors fought for her life, but the girl still died. She died in 1944, on July 1.
St. PETERSBURG, January 27 ─ RIA Novosti. Commemorative events dedicated to the 74th anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the siege during the Great Patriotic War will be held on Saturday in the Northern capital.
In the morning, flowers will be laid at the memorial plaque “Citizens! During shelling, this side of the street is the most dangerous” on Nevsky Prospekt, 14. At 11.00 at the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of Leningraders and defenders of the city were buried during the siege, a solemn funeral laying ceremony will begin wreaths and flowers. Also, wreath and flower laying ceremonies will take place at the Serafimovskoye, Smolenskoye and Bogoslovskoye cemeteries, the Nevsky military cemetery "Cranes", at the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad on Victory Square, at the Triumphal Arch of Victory on the Military Glory Square in Krasnoe Selo, at the Krasnaya Sloboda memorial.
In memory of the days of the siege, from 10.00 to 13.00 and from 19.00 to 22.00 torches will be lit on the Rostral columns on the spit of Vasilievsky Island.
A youth patriotic event “Muse of the Blockade” will take place near the memorial sign to Olga Berggolts on Italianskaya Street. Throughout the day, poems about the siege, excerpts from stories about the war by Leningrad writers, and excerpts from the siege diaries performed by the city’s youth, poets, actors, and government officials will be heard from the stage. In the open area, the atmosphere of besieged Leningrad will be recreated, memorabilia and models of weapons will be presented.
On Saturday afternoon there will be a concert in the large Oktyabrsky concert hall, dedicated to the 74th anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the fascist blockade.
A large-scale cultural and historical zone will open on the Champ de Mars. The exhibition areas will be divided into thematic zones: anti-tank defense of Leningrad, the fight of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army against enemy artillery, local air defense of Leningrad. There will also be a platform dedicated to women defenders of the Leningrad sky and an interactive exhibition of trophies. Everyone will be able to see the reception and training point for recruits, a field medical center, a military field communication point with authentic exhibits of soldiers’ life during the war. A field kitchen with hot soldier’s porridge will be organized here for guests and spectators. In the evening, a theatrical historical performance will take place here: a presentation of the life of besieged Leningrad on the eve of complete liberation on January 27, 1944.
In the evening, a youth memorial event “900 days and nights” will take place in the courtyard of the State Academic Chapel. The atmosphere of life in besieged Leningrad will be recreated here - artillery pieces and anti-tank barriers will be displayed. A stage will also be installed in the courtyard from which young St. Petersburg residents will read poems about the war.
On this day, two concerts will be held in the chapel hall: the soloists, choir and Symphony Orchestra of the chapel under the direction of People's Artist of the USSR Vladislav Chernushenko will perform songs by Georgy Sviridov, Valery Gavrilin, Isaac Dunaevsky and Gennady Gladkov. The second concert, especially for blockade survivors, was prepared by the House of Folk Art and Leisure.
In the evening, a concert dedicated to the Day of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the siege will also take place in St. Isaac's Cathedral. The St. Petersburg Concert Choir, conducted by Vladimir Begletsov, will perform songs from the war years, songs dedicated to the war, songs about peace and the homeland. A special block will be composed of works by Vladimir Vysotsky, who would have turned 80 on January 25 (he did not return from the battle, “Who said that the earth died...”, “Save our souls” and other tragic ballads). The poetic outline of the concert will be composed of poems by Anna Akhmatova, Olga Berggolts and Boris Pasternak performed by Honored Artist of Russia Vitaly Gordienko.
In the evening, St. Petersburg students will launch 900 white and 900 black balloons into the sky, symbolizing the 900 days and nights of the siege, and will honor the heroic feat with a minute of silence.
In honor of the significant date, at 21.00 a festive artillery salute will be given from four points: the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Victory Park, the Park of the 300th Anniversary of St. Petersburg and Piskarevsky Park.
The siege of Leningrad, which began on September 8, 1941, lasted almost 900 days. The only route, the “Road of Life,” along which food was delivered to the city, was laid along the ice of Lake Ladoga. The blockade was broken on January 18, 1943, but Leningraders had to wait another whole year before it was completely lifted ─ January 27, 1944. During the years of the blockade, according to various sources, from 400 thousand to 1.5 million people died. So, at the Nuremberg trials the number of 632 thousand people appeared. Only 3% of them died from bombing and shelling, the rest died of starvation.
On the 8th of September the mournful anniversary is celebrated - 75 years old from the start date Siege of Leningrad- one of the most terrible crimes of World War II committed by Nazi Germany and its allies.
It is believed that the Siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days. However, in reality there were 872 days of blockade - from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944. According to historians today, based on the latest data, the Siege of Leningrad claimed the lives of about one and a half million people, 97% of the victims died of starvation.
Key dates associated with the Siege of Leningrad
- September 8, 1941 - The day the blockade began;
- January 18, 1943 - Day of breaking the blockade;
- January 27, 1944 - Day of complete lifting of the blockade;
- June 5, 1946 - Day of breaking through the naval mine blockade of Leningrad.
Beginning of the blockade
The beginning of the blockade is considered to be September 8, 1941, when the land connection between Leningrad and the rest of the USSR was interrupted. However, in fact, the blockade began two weeks earlier - on August 27, the city’s railway connection with the mainland was interrupted; by this time, tens of thousands of people had accumulated at train stations and in the suburbs of Leningrad, trying to escape to the east. Also in the city at that time there were already more than 300 thousand refugees from the western regions of the USSR and the Baltic republics captured by the Nazis.
Hunger
Leningrad entered the war with the usual supply of food. Food cards were introduced in the city on July 17, but food was not particularly saved, the norms were large, and there was no shortage of food before the blockade began.
However, by the beginning of the blockade it turned out that the city did not have sufficient supplies of food and fuel, and the only link connecting Leningrad with the mainland was the famous Road of Life, which ran along Lake Ladoga and was within the reach of enemy artillery and aircraft.
The catastrophic food situation for the besieged city became clear on September 12, when inspections of food warehouses were completed. Not only were losses due to the famous Babaev warehouses bombed during the first air raids, where a significant amount of food was concentrated, but also errors in the distribution of food in the first two months of the war had an impact. The first sharp reduction in food distribution standards occurred on September 15. After this, the norms decreased until December, standing at a minimum level of the famous 125 blockade grams, which were due to children and dependents.
In addition, from September 1, the free sale of food was prohibited (this measure was in effect until mid-1944). The official sale of products in so-called commercial stores at market prices was also prohibited. At the same time, on the black market, which operated in Leningrad throughout the war and the blockade, food, fuel, medicine, etc. could be exchanged for valuables.
In October, city residents already felt a clear shortage of food, and in November real famine began. It was especially scary when, before ice was established on Ladoga, food was delivered to the city only by air. Only with the beginning of winter did the Road of Life begin to operate at full capacity, but the products delivered along it, naturally, were not enough. At the same time, all transport communications were under constant enemy fire.
The harsh winter of 1941-42 aggravated the horrors of mass starvation, which led to huge casualties in the first winter of the siege.
Victims of the blockade
During the years of the blockade, according to various sources, from 600 thousand to one and a half million people died. At the Nuremberg trials, they talked about 632 thousand dead, but later this number was repeatedly revised, alas, upward. Only 3% of the dead were victims of bombing and shelling, the remaining 97% died of starvation.
Citizens! During shelling, this side of the street is the most dangerous!
In the first months of the blockade, despite the meager standards for the distribution of bread, death from hunger had not yet become a mass phenomenon, and most of the dead were victims of bombing and artillery shelling.
It was then that the famous inscriptions appeared on the walls of some houses: “Citizens! During shelling, this side of the street is the most dangerous.”
Inscriptions were made on houses on the northern and northeastern sides of the streets, since the Nazis were shelling the city from the south and southwest - from long-range guns installed on the Pulkovo Heights and in Strelna.
This is due to the fact that the shelling of Leningrad was carried out only from territories occupied by German troops; the Finnish units closing the blockade from the north almost did not shell the city. In Kronstadt, such inscriptions were painted on the southwestern sides of the streets, as the Germans were shelling from the direction of occupied Peterhof.
The most famous inscription on the even “sunny” side of Nevsky Prospekt was made in the summer of 1943 by two girls - fighters of the Local Air Defense (LAD) Tatyana Kotova and Lyubov Gerasimova.
Alas, the actual inscriptions on the walls have not been preserved, but in the 1960-1970s, some of them were recreated as a sign of memory of the heroism of Leningraders.
Currently, the inscriptions “Citizens! During shelling, this side of the street is the most dangerous” are stored at the following addresses:
- Nevsky Prospekt, building 14;
- Lesnoy prospect, house 61;
- 22 line of Vasilievsky Island, building 7;
- Posadskaya street in Kronstadt, house 17/14;
- Ammerman Street in Kronstadt, house 25.
All inscriptions are accompanied by marble plaques.
The feat of Leningrad was noted even before the end of the war. By order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of May 1, 1945, Leningrad was named a hero city for the heroism and courage shown by the city's residents during the siege. Along with Leningrad, three more cities were awarded this title - Stalingrad, Sevastopol and Odessa.
January 18, 1943 is a very important date for the residents of St. Petersburg. On this day, during Operation Iskra, troops of the Volkhov and Leningrad fronts broke through the blockade ring. The connection between the besieged city and the mainland was restored. By this day, about 800 thousand people remained in the city. According to historians, it claimed the lives of about one and a half million people. The vast majority died not from bombing and shelling, but from starvation. As eyewitnesses said, the blockade was as terrible as the fiercest battles. And although the blockade ring was completely lifted only on January 27, 1944, this day in the future fate of the city is difficult to overestimate.
“We had three children, but my older sister died of illness before the war. We lived in a two-story apartment building on the Vyborg side, opposite the Svetlana plant. When the war began, dad went to the front, and the five of us stayed at home - me, my sister, my mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother,” recalls Tatyana Mavrosovvidi, a native of Leningrad.
At first there was nothing, there were supplies at home, bread was given on ration cards, but in 1942 it became really hard, says a survivor of the blockade. “The Germans wrote about beans because at one time they gave us them instead of bread. People had already stopped hiding from the bombings, they simply covered the windows with mattresses and did not run away - they had no strength,” says Tatyana Mavrosovvidi.
Dad didn’t fight at the front for long, he caught pneumonia, in the hospital he got worse and worse and was discharged. “And there was hunger at home, and he began to die. By that time he was only 27 years old, and his mother was 25, the woman recalls. On top of everything else, my mother was deceived by some swindlers - they came up on the street and said, “We’ll buy bread for your child now, wait for us here.” She didn’t have the strength to walk with me to the store, and she believed me and gave them the cards,” recalls the siege survivor.
“And we were left completely without food. I stopped walking from hunger. One day, a grandmother comes into the apartment after work and sees the following picture: her daughter and son-in-law are lying exhausted from hunger on the bed, the son-in-law has already begun to stretch out, as happens before death, and I am crawling under the table, collecting specks from the floor and eating, thinking they were bread crumbs. The grandmother rushed back to the hospital, where she begged for a handful of turanda - a kind of black flour with all sorts of impurities. She dissolved this flour in water and gave it to her son-in-law first, then to us,” says the Leningrad native.
After some time, the parents were able to open their eyes, the siege survivor recalls. “True, dad died in 1942, he was buried at the Bogoslav cemetery - this is one of the places of mass graves of blockade survivors. And again the five of us were left,” says Tatyana Mavrosovvidi.
“One day, our neighbor’s sister came from the front; he was also terribly hungry. She brought him stewed meat, all kinds of canned food - front-line rations. She laid out food on the table in front of him and said, let’s eat. But he couldn’t take his eyes off her: “Oh, how plump and good you are, I wish I could eat you...” The sister got scared, quickly packed her things and let’s run away from there. The man's mind was clearly clouded. I don’t know what happened to him afterwards, he probably died. There were many stories - one more terrible than the other,” says the siege survivor.
And Tatyana was saved by her grandmother. When she completely stopped not only walking, but also crawling, she took her to her tuberculosis hospital. “The children lay there tied to their beds, their bones were destroyed, and they could not move. I, too, was tied like everyone else, but I was so weak that I did not resist. But they gave me at least some food,” she recalls.
“My uncle, my mother’s brother, worked at one of the Leningrad defense factories. He was evacuated to Bashkiria at the beginning of the war. My uncle petitioned for the evacuation of our families as well. In 1943, we were evacuated by boat across Lake Ladoga, my uncle’s family got on the first boat, and we on the second. There was a third one behind us, and then the second and third boats swapped places, and the one in front of us was hit by a bomb. My uncle's relatives saw from the first boat how “our” ship sank. In Ufa, they told our relatives that we had died. So, when we got to Ufa, they couldn’t believe their eyes,” says Tatyana Mavrosovvidi.
We traveled on the train to Ufa for a month, the siege survivor recalls. “On the road, mother and grandmother wrapped the wet diapers of their younger sister Nina around their bodies and dried them on themselves. I still didn’t go hungry even though I was four years old. My mother and grandmother’s legs began to swell greatly, and they began to develop thrombophlebitis,” the woman recalls.
“We were settled in Chernikovka in barracks located on the Northern Market. In each of the barracks lived about a dozen families - three families per room. In Ufa, I fell ill with scrofula - I was all stiff, my eyes couldn’t see, my head was covered with sores like a hat. They thought I would remain bald, but it’s okay - I’ve recovered,” says Tatyana.
“My first impression of Chernikovka was that my grandmother saw on the street that someone had thrown cabbage leaves and potato peelings into the trash. He comes home and says to his son, our uncle, what a disgrace, people are throwing away food, we need to go collect it all and cook it for dinner. The uncle started crying and said: “Mom, what are you talking about! We buy food here, not collect it from garbage dumps,” recalls a survivor of the siege.
“Grandma couldn’t switch her mind for a long time. She and her mother said that at first they walked around like crazy, but then, of course, they recovered. Grandmother lived to be 92 years old, read without glasses and was in absolutely sane mind until her last days. Our great-grandmother passed away before everyone else - two years after the evacuation, while we were still living in the barracks. I don’t remember how old she was, but she was well over eighty.”
