Memories of the siege of Leningrad to be available in the Breakthrough 80 online project

A new project Breakthrough 80 was launched on the eve of the anniversary date of breakthrough of the siege of Leningrad. The project has been organized by the Administration of Leningrad Region and the Presidential Library.

Residents of Leningrad Region, as well as other regions, have an opportunity to record a video with fragments of memories of participants of the war years and post it on their pages on social networks.

To record a video, one can use different sources - materials from family archives, memories of relatives and friends, or can take a quote from a selection prepared by the Presidential Library’s specialists.

The digital collection of documents Defence and Siege of Leningrad, which is being formed by the library, provides a complete picture of the siege of the city on the Neva. The collection includes official documents, periodicals, leaflets, bread cards, memos, newsreel, TASS news in pictures. A large part is made up of memoirs, diaries and letters from the personal archives of the residents of the besieged city. More than 4,000 documents were transferred to the Presidential Library for digitization by Leningraders themselves, their children and grandchildren, as part of a major project announced by the library in 2019 on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi siege.

For the Breakthrough 80 online project, which is being implemented in Leningrad Region, employees of the Presidential Library, one of the largest electronic library centers in Russia, selected quotes from memoirs, diaries and letters from residents of besieged Leningrad, which reflected the life of the besieged city, evacuation, correspondence of Leningraders with evacuated relatives and fighters defending the city, as well as a breakthrough and lifting of the siege.

The online relay will run until January 18, 2023. Videos with the hashtag #proryv80 will be collected from the personal pages of the online relay participants in the largest publics in the region. Then, based on them, commemorative almanac videos marking the 80th anniversary of the breakthrough of the siege of Leningrad will be formed.

The memoirs of siege survivors, stored in the Presidential Library, are available by the link.