Russians Refuse to Forget! St. Petersburg Commemorates End of 900 Day Siege of City
January 27, is the day that the Leningrad Siege was lifted. In St. Petersburg, lights were lit on the rostral columns in memory of those almost 900 days. Events in memory of thousands of victims were held on Nevsky Prospect, Piskarevsky Cemetery, where the Federation Council speaker, senator from St. Petersburg Valentina Matvienko arrived. Many people lined up to the new museum called The Breakthrough. Its opening took place today. The exposition recreates a fight near the village of Arbuzovo in the south of the Nevsky Pyatachok. It's impressive.
Our correspondent in St. Petersburg, Dimity Peshchukhin, prepared a historical sketch about the last day of the Leningrad Siege.
Vera Rogova is attentively watching the news footage trying to find familiar faces. In winter of 1942, she was a traffic controller on the lifeline route. Drivers lovingly called those fragile women who pointed the way to 1,5-ton trucks "goddesses". But even they weren't almighty.
Vera Rogova: "A car was passing once, and the ice broke. And the driver sunk together with the car. But the light stayed on for a long time. Just imagine, the lights were on under the water for a long time. We stood on the ice and cried so hard".
She's 98, but her stubborn memory preserves bloodcurdling siege stories. She remembers cold, hunger, and the lack of sleep that was hard to bear when it was so cold.
Vera Rogova: “We knew that Leningrad was behind us. Its residents who were dying of hunger.”
Hundreds of trucks sunk in the first week after the route was opened. Scientists suggested that it was the resonance effect that caused the tragedies. And then scientists from Moscow PhysTech came up with an unusual equipment, which measured the ice fluctuations.
“This thing moved this way and the pencil wrote down the amplitude.”
A cast iron base, a line with a weight, and plotting paper bobbins. That's what the flexometer is made of. The name suited its purpose. It measures how the ice inflexed under the weight of the trucks.
"It made some movements because of the wind and the water movements. It determined its frequency. A moving car could create its own resonance frequency that could destroy the ice".
The flexometer helped to determine the maximum speed and the distance between the cars. But there was another problem — how to speed up the ice freezing? No miracle, just physics, as explained to us by the granddaughter of professor Boris Vainberg, a legendary Leningrad scientist who developed the artificial freezing system.
Galya Ostrovskaya: "All peasants knew this from the ancient times. The idea is the following. You need to make holes in the ice and drive on top of it. The car pushes the ice, and the water comes out from the holes. And it freezes on top".
In incredible conditions, under constant shooting and bombardment, scientists continued working in laboratories. An absolutely unbelievable project was planned to be launched on Ladoga in the beginning of 1943. To launch trains over the ice.
Irina Trunova, Central Railway Museum employee: "It was a great deed of the railway workers, that they managed to build a line in such short terms. It was done to increase the supply for the city".
The railway connecting Leningrad was called the corridor of death. Few people remember this now, as well as the fact that there was one more lifeline route in the city. A small one.
In the winter of 1941, there was a small lifeline route where the dam is now. The ice of the Gulf of Finland connected Kronshtadt and Oranienbaum with the mainland. Leningrad suburbs were double-sieged. They had the enemy on one side and the harsh Baltic Sea on the other. This unconquered piece of land is twice as small as tiny Luxembourg, but in 2,5 years, the Germans never managed to overcome its resistance. People seemed to be doomed. The bread portion was 50 grams less than in Leningrad. Every second resident of Kronshtadt and Oranienbaum died of hunger, cold, and shooting. But people continued fighting, suffocating in the German pot.
Yakov Mitnik, sieged Leningrad resident: "When the German planes passed by, we knew they were the enemy. And we fired from our toy guns. But my father told me not to point at them, as they could see and drop a bomb on our house".
The fact that the main attack against German troops would come from Oranienbaum contradicted any logic. No sieged town liberated itself before. It was called Operation January Thunder. One more thunder lightened the sky over the Neva, the 24-volley fireworks. This day left a mark in history as the day of the Leningrad Victory.
Dmitry Peshchukhin, Yevgeny Kostin, Alexander Burushkov, and Galina Orlova, Vesti News of Saturday, Hero-City Leningrad.