RUSSIA: The people of St Petersburg endured a 900-day siege in defiance of Hitler. People who survived it recall their experiences to Dan McLaughlin.
Yuri Kolosov was 14 years old on the summer's day in 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
He was watching his father take on the country's best marksmen in a competition at one of the dozens of elegant tsarist estates outside Leningrad.
"They heard the news, got round in a circle and decided to head for the front," Mr Kolosov, now 76, said in his flat in the city that is once more called St Petersburg.
"They said they had to defend the motherland - and me and my friends went after them - but none of us really knew what was in store."
Ahead of them lay one of the Second World War's most gruesome chapters, a siege that lasted almost 900 days and forced residents of the bomb-shattered city to endure grinding starvation and bitter cold under relentless Nazi bombardment.
Mr Kolosov, a leading historian on a blockade that ended 60 years ago today, says more than a million soldiers and civilians died in and around Leningrad, a city of 3.5 million whose resistance helped break the Third Reich's plans to dominate Europe.
Their victory came at a high price: starvation unparalleled in a modern European city; disease that still cripples many survivors; and memories of death stalking every street and families resorting to cannibalism to survive.
Josef Stalin's Red Army was totally unprepared for invasion, and the Germans had Leningrad surrounded by September 1941.
They bombed the city's main food store and severed road and rail links to the rest of the country and, by October, firebombs devastated Leningrad and hunger gripped its people.
"I got 250g of bread a day because I was part of the local air defence force. My brother and sister got the standard 150g a day," said Mr Kolosov.
"Our house got flattened by a bomb, but cold and hunger were the worst feelings," he said. "I've never felt colder than the winter of 1942." Temperatures fell to below -35C, in a city without heating, light or sanitation.
People ate anything with even the faintest suggestion of nutrition: glue from the back of wallpaper; soup from potato peelings and boiled leather belts; bread conjured from sawdust and a little flour; dirt from around the razed food warehouse, where locals said Nazi bombs had melted sacks of sugar into the ground.
And some Leningraders ate the bodies of the dead, as people began to expire in the ice-bound streets and slip away silently in their sleep.
"Yes, it happened," said Mr Kolosov. "Not in many places, but it did. And people were shot for it too."
But even as Hitler vowed to force the city to submit, life, of a sort, went on.
Some 20 cinemas continued to show films, 22 libraries stayed open, theatres put on performances and meeting halls offered lectures on music and literature most evenings.
More than 1,500 new books were published during the siege and, in August 1942, Dmitry Shostakovich conducted his 7th - "Leningrad" - Symphony - for the first time at the city's Philharmonia concert hall.
Leningrad's massive war industry - including major tank and rocket factories - was dismantled, transported east and rebuilt in the Ural mountains, where it was soon once more supplying the Red Army in its battle with the Third Reich.
While about two million soldiers were defending Leningrad, some supplies made it in, and women and children made it out across the "Road of Life", a route across frozen Lake Ladoga to the north of the city.
"I was only young but I remember that fear so clearly, in the back of the truck with my mum and brother, looking down at the ice on the lake," said Ms Zoya Dunayeva, who was six years old when the siege ended. "Trucks sank, people drowned." She says the malnourishment and disease of those years have left most survivors of the blockade with health problems even now, as they struggle on a pension of about $75 a month.
But the blokadniki are fiercely proud of having survived that dark time in their city's history.
A Red Army counterattack finally forced the Germans back in January 1944, and Leningraders could survey the fearsome damage done to their city.
"Leningrad and its people saved the country and Europe with their own bodies and lives," Mr Kolosov said, arguing that the siege tied up German men and arms that could have overrun Moscow and seized the powerful Baltic Fleet, so tipping the war in Hitler's favour.
He says people "hugged, laughed and wept,' when the Nazis retreated. "But why did we win?" he asks. "Because we loved our city and, despite everything, our spirit was stronger than the enemy."