The President visited the Nevsky Pyatachok military-historical complex in the Leningrad Region, where he laid flowers at the Landmark Stone monument.
Nevsky Pyatachok is a small bridgehead on the left bank of the Neva River, where Soviet soldiers fought against superior enemy forces from the first days of the blockade, preventing them from advancing on Leningrad. In 1971, the Landmark Stone was unveiled at this site of fierce fighting in memory of the defenders of the Motherland who died on Nevsky Pyatachok. The stone bears an inscription of a verse by Robert Rozhdestvensky: “You who are alive, remember that we did not want to leave this land, and we have not left it. We fought to the death by the dark waters of the Neva. We have died so that you can live.”
The President also visited the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery, where he took part in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Motherland monument to commemorate the city residents and defenders laid to rest there.
About 420,000 residents of Leningrad, who died from starvation, cold and disease or perished in bombings and air raids, as well as 70,000 soldiers are buried in the 186 mass graves and 6,000 individual graves of the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery. The words of poet Olga Bergholz, “No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten,“ are carved on the memorial wall behind the Motherland monument.
The siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany lasted from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944. The city fought for survival for 872 days. By the end of the siege, only 800,000 inhabitants remained in the Northern Capital, out of the three million who had lived in Leningrad and its suburbs before the siege.