Residents of blockaded Leningrad leaving a bomb shelter after an all-clear signal. (RIA Novosti / Boris Kudoyarov, STF)

During 900 days of the blockade, citizens of Leningrad did not live – they tried to survive. On September 8, 1941 the city found itself cut off from the rest of Russia. During that time, the Nazi bombings hardy stopped. The hardest ordeal, however, was famine. For the first month, the only food available was 125 grams of bread per day for every worker. By 50-60 per cent of the siege, this bread consisted of sawdust and other inedible admixtures.

On September 12, the ice road transport route across the frozen Lake Ladoga dubbed the “Road of Life” started to operate, enabling supplies to be brought into the city and the evacuation of civilians to the still-Soviet-controlled opposite coast. Not everyone, however, managed to escape, recalls Svetlana Magaeva in the book of her memoirs.

“Nazi planes were constantly bombarding the trucks that carried children. They didn’t care that those were the Red Cross trucks. In winter, the headlights of those drowned trucks were glowing and glowing until they finally went off. And in summer, we often saw children’s caps in the water,” Magaeva recalled.

“I was seven when the siege started,” Zoya Silvanskaya, a veteran, told RT. “There was a possibility of escaping from the city but my mother decided it was safer to stay, because those who escaped were targeted by the Germans.”

The Soviet Army tried to break the blockade again and again, but only their fifth attempt was a success. The operation was called Spark, and for exhausted citizens it became a spark of hope.

At a firing position with an anti-aircraft machine gun during the siege of Leningrad. (RIA Novosti / Ozerskiy, STF)

“The battles were extremely fierce, because the territories the Red Army tried to win back had been in the possession of the enemy for 16 months,” says Svetlana Novichenko, a researcher at the Leningrad’s museum devoted to the Lift of the Blockade, in her interview to Golos Rossii radio station. “All that time the Nazis were strengthening their defense, so it was very hard to break through their powerful fortifications.”

Finally, on January 18, 1943, the blockade was broken. The siege was lifted only a year after, during the operation called January Thunder, when the Nazi Army Group North was pushed 60−100 km away from Leningrad.

Now, January 27 is a special day for all citizens of St Petersburg. This year, the celebrations will last till night. At Victory Square, veterans and young people have sent 900 red balloons into the sky to commemorate the 900 days and nights of the blockade. In the Peter and Paul Fortress, every year people listen to the metronome which served as an alarm during the Blockade, a quick rhythm meaning an air-raid alert and a slow one a retreat.