Day of Full Liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi Blockade in newsreels of the Presidential Library

Shortly before revered by all and especially by St. Petersburg-Leningrad local residents Day of Full Liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi Blockade, the Presidential Library is featuring the newsreels of the war years, which tell about the life in the besieged city, its defenders and the fighting.

At the time the blockade newsreels have figured as evidences at the Nuremberg trials and has become one of the key accusations of fascism.

Here is an image of Leningrad in the 1942-1943 years The defense of Leningrad. The siege of Leningrad chronicle: newsreel footage has captured the frost-bound, yet not surrendering city of the first blockade winter. Black hole is gaping in the midst of the ruined factory’s roof, frosted “Aurora” cruiser, the exhausted people slowly, with there last strength, taking water from an ice-hole, - but finally, the screen images of running on the attack machine gunners in white camouflage smocks wiggled, and here it is – a long waited meeting of the soldiers of the Leningrad and the Volkhov fronts, they firmly embracing and hoisting the flag right on the parapet of just retaken from the enemy trenches!

Off screen narration: “Leningrad remained in the ring of blockade for more than one and a half years. Strong and insidious enemy has devised a monstrous crime: to strangle with a hunger, to wipe out the Neva stronghold. But nothing could break the courage and determination of the Soviet people. Everyone became a fighter. Workers operated at their machines, preparing ammunition. The road of life was laid over the Ladoga Lake’s ice. Under enemy’s fire and bombing, over this only thread food and weapons were delivering to the surrounded city.”

Newsreel documentary by Sergei Loznitsa entitled Blockade traveled across all the most famous film festivals of the world, winning prizes and awards. A level of its exactness is almost the absolute - a look at the life of the besieged Leningrad is precise and ascetic, because the movie is cut out of archival chronicles of the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) Documentary Film Studios. No editing has been applied - an authentic old film remains as is. Sound is nearly missing - it is restored only in some places. The operators of Leningrad Documentary Studios on Kryukov Canal (including Yefim Uchitel, Nahum Golod, Roman Karmen) filmed the siege chronicle - half of the filmmakers did not make it to the blockade lifting in January 1944.

Yes, this movie has almost four-dozen operators, nearly three million characters and a director, who is such master of film editing that the selected frame-by-frame sights of the besieged city life look “seamless,” as if they were shot by only operator… And that is a truthful testimony of how life in besieged Leningrad is getting squeezed, making room for fear, fading out for death; yet a gradual ascent of the ordinary people, city residents to the heights of the spirit is also in the movie. Demonstrating intentionally dispassionate look at the realities of the besieged city, giving a voiceover and music up (even a victory salute from the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island in Loznitsa’s movie is almost soundless), the author expects that the audience itself will draw conclusions about what they saw.

Both of the reviewed above movies are from the collection of the Presidential Library The Defense and Blockade of Leningrad, which is also completed with electronic copies of documents, photographs, non-fiction and fiction, as well as the digital images of monuments and memorials dedicated to the Leningrad Blockade.