The Presidential Library will tell the bus passengers about a beginning of the Siege of Leningrad

From the 5th to the 15th of September, for the first time ever, the fragments of chronicle of the Presidential Library about The defense of Leningrad. The Siege of Leningrad” will be screened in the salons of 250 buses of “Passengeravtotrans” circuiting along the city and oblast routes.

By the 76th anniversary of the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad, which is being remembered on September 8, 2017, the Presidential Library presented a part of its electronic documentary evidences of the Leningrad Blockade over the screens of the navigation system installed in the buses of “Passengeravtotrans” — the St. Petersburg State Unitary Enterprise of Public Bus Transportations.

The newsreels reflect the tragic course of events: the bread queues, people taking water from the river’s ice-hole, a gloomy bomb shelter’s slit trench among the ruins of the house… The movie shows the realities of the terrible winter of 1942-1943: the ice-covered near a terminal Aurora, a ruined roof of an industrial plant, the Road of Life — this only connection along which food and ammunition supplies were delivered to the encircled city. In the frame are winding over the ice surface of Lake Ladoga, trying to survive an artillery shelling trucks, shellfire toward a column moving over icy lake. And finally, the breakthrough of the blockade begins: the guns are firing, the machine-gunners in white camouflage uniforms are running, a military-grade is looking through binoculars; a documentary camera recorded a meeting of soldiers of the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts, the fighters kissing and hugging each other, hoisting passed with them through the battles banner. In subtitles is said: “Leningrad was encircled for more than a year and a half. Tough and insidious enemy conceived a horrific crime: strangle with a hunger, wipe out from the face of the Earth Nevsky stronghold. But nothing could break the bravery and determination of Soviet people. Everyone became a fighter.”

Opposing the preponderance of forces and overwhelmed predicting forecasts of Wehrmacht analysts, at the very first stage of the battle for Leningrad, a mighty German military machine was stopped. There were 900 days of blockade ahead.

The Presidential Library pays much attention to the historical significance of the victory of the USSR over fascism. There are the declassified official documents, memoirs, diaries, materials from personal archives, periodicals, newsreels, photo chronicles, cards, leaflets, memoirs and other sources in its stock, gathered in the Memory of the Great Victory collection, in which a significant space belongs to “the blockade” array of documents.