People across St. Petersburg turned off their lights and placed candles in their windows on Wednesday evening to mark the 66th anniversary of the lifting of a devastating WWII siege by Nazi forces.
The final land link to Leningrad, as the one-time capital was known for much of the Soviet era, was severed on September 8, 1941 when the German military completed their encirclement of the city.
It would be almost 900 days before Soviet forces finally managed to completely free the "Venice of the North," by which time over 600,000 civilians had died, the majority of starvation.
City governor Valentina Matviyenko was among thousands who braved minus 20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) temperatures to pay tribute to the dead at the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, where some 500,000 victims of the siege are buried in mass graves.
"No matter how many years pass, for us, this day will always remain the most sacred," Matviyenko told veterans and siege survivors later in the day at a ceremony to present them with free apartments and medals.
In January 1942, in the midst of an unusually cold winter, as Adolf Hitler's forces tightened their grip on the home of the Bolshevik Revolution, the city's food rations reached an all time low of only 125 grams (about 1/4 of a pound) of bread per person a day. In just two months, 200,000 people died in Leningrad of cold and starvation.
Russian media carried interviews with survivors of the siege throughout the day. One of those who told her story was Ada Ivanova, who was just three years old when she went down with scurvy in the beleaguered city.
"I was sick, and our neighbor told my mum, 'She's done for. Use her ration card or you won't survive yourself," she told the Rossiya 24 TV channel, a scarf pulled over her face against the bitter cold. "'But how will I be able to live if I abandon her?' my mother asked. And she pulled me through."
As evening fell, loudspeakers throughout St. Petersburg began to broadcast the sound of a metronome. In under-siege Leningrad, with the radio off the air, a metronome informed the city's residents of incoming attacks and all-clears.
ST. PETERSBURG, January 27 (RIA Novosti)
