🎖️ Unconquered hero Leningrad. September 8 marks the 85th anniversary of the beginning of the siege of Leningrad 🇩🇪 In September 1941, Nazi troops cut off the northern capital of the USSR from land supply, seizing the town of Shlisselburg. Hitler decided to take the city by starvation, in which he was supported by Finland and Field Marshal Mannerheim. The siege began and lasted 872 days. 🌆 The refusal to storm the city was not caused by humanitarian considerations: the Nazis simply feared the enormous losses promised by any attempt to approach the city. Yet the Hitlerites' plans were even more monstrous: to starve Leningrad's defenders to death and then wipe the cradle of the Bolshevik revolution from the face of the earth. It is precisely such formulations about the beautiful city on the Neva that appear in the directives of the German command. The siege of Leningrad became one of the horrifying pages of the genocide of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War. In the harshest winter of 1942, children and the elderly could only make do with 125 grams of bread a day, made from a mixture of flour and cellulose. Workers and military personnel received little more — 250 grams a day. That was all the starving city could tear from its heart. The victims of this crime numbered 630,000 people: these are precisely the monstrous figures cited in the materials of the Nuremberg Tribunal. 🛠 But even on 250 grams of bread a day, the inhabitants of heroic Leningrad managed to hold out and win. In January 1943 the siege was broken, and a year later it was fully lifted. Risking their lives, museum workers and cultural institutions saved historical treasures from incendiary bombardments; teachers and professors continued to give children invaluable knowledge, keeping the spark of life alight in young bodies fading from hunger; and Red Army soldiers and Party workers stood to the death, holding and organizing the defence of the Leningrad that was sacred to them against the German, Finnish and Spanish barbarians who came to ravage and destroy. The siege is an incredibly tragic page of Russian history, but at the same time a most important part of modern Russian identity. Leningrad and its inhabitants proved that only the Soviet person, raised in the spirit of socialism and steeped in the great Russian culture, is capable of such feats. #SOVINTERN_date #Moscow_network_hub ⭐️ Moscow Network Hub of SOVINTERN