Marking the 80th anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Leningrad: Exhibition “Spark of Hope” to open at the Victory Museum in Moscow

On January 18, 2023, the exhibition Spark of Hope will open at the Victory Museum (Moscow). The new exposition is timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Leningrad.

The exhibition will tell about the stages of the unique military offensive operation Iskra and about the heroic feats of the battle’s participants. “The preparation for the operation was conducted in a very short time, in an atmosphere of extreme secrecy. All engineering work was carried out only at night, or in non-flying weather. To prepare the fighters, training camps that recreated German defensive positions in a swampy area were built”, the curator of the exhibition Elizaveta Goloshchapova said.

The exposition will feature about 100 authentic rarities from the Victory Museum’s collections, as well as from the holdings of school museums, and private collections of the commanders’ descendants.

Guests will have an opportunity to see uniforms of soldiers and officers of the Red Army, weapons, awards, documents, posters, drawings by front-line artists. The exhibits include personal belongings of the commanders and participants of Operation Iskra – Marshals Leonid Govorov, Kirill Meretskov and Georgy Zhukov, Colonel General of engineering troops Arkady Khrenov, and others. Visitors will see plans for the course of military operations of the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts in the winter of 1943, letters of the heroes of the breakthrough, objects found at the battlefields on Nevsky Pyatachok, etc.