Leningrad “Road of Victory”: how the first train from the mainland came to the besieged city

Late in the evening of January 18, 1943 a message from the Soviet Information Bureau was presented on the airwaves.

Leningraders were waiting for this hour, they knew that it would come. The atmosphere of those days was conveyed by the journalist and founder of the correspondent point of the All-Union Radio in the besieged city, Matvey Frolov. His radio reports are available on the Presidential Library’s portal, including those recorded on the fortieth anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Leningrad, January 18, 1983, during ceremonial events at the S. M. Kirov Leningrad Academic Opera and Ballet Theater (Mariinsky Theatre). It was in this theater in the victorious year of 1945 that the city was awarded the highest state award of the USSR - the Order of Lenin - “for the outstanding services of the working people of Leningrad to the Motherland, for the courage and heroism, discipline and fortitude shown in the fight against the German invaders in the difficult conditions of the enemy siege”.

In 1941, the last train arrived in Leningrad on August 27. The enemy cut the October Railway, reached the immediate approaches, and the city was completely blocked for 17 long months. The only thread connecting Leningrad with the mainland - by water and ice - was the Ladoga Road of Life. After breaking the siege on January 18, 1943, according to Frolov, “a window appeared”, which means it was possible “to organize communications with the entire country across the land, across our Soviet land”.

Almost immediately, builders, railway workers, and thousands of residents of the besieged city came to the land taken from the enemy. In the shortest possible time - there are roads every day - it was necessary to build a 33 km long railway line from the Polyany station to Shlisselburg in the cut corridor. The area was mostly swampy; all that was there at that time was just a dilapidated narrow-gauge railway, along which peat was once delivered. Every meter of land was filled with mines and unexploded ordnance that had to be cleared. To lay a pile-ice crossing 1300 m long, it was necessary to drive more than 2.5 thousand piles at a very high current speed and a six-meter depth of the Neva in this place.

All construction work, which was allotted less than three weeks, was supervised by Ivan Georgievich Zubkov, before the war he was the head of Construction № 5 of the People's Commissariat of Railways (now Metrostroy). Now it seems incredible, but the road was completed on February 5, several days ahead of schedule.

The Presidential Library’s portal provides an interview between Matvey Frolov and Voldemar Matveevich Virolainen, who headed the Volkhovstroevsky railway junction. It was under his leadership that work was carried out to prepare for the departure of the first train to besieged Leningrad.

Back in April 1942, Virolainen promised the military commander of the Leningrad Front, Pavel Luknitsky: no matter what happens, he will be on the first train that goes to besieged Leningrad, and they will definitely meet “on the other bank of the Neva”. And so it happened.

On the morning of February 7, the first direct train from the mainland approached the platform of the Finland Station, filled with crowds of jubilant people. The locomotive was decorated with pine branches and posters.

The first train that departed from the besieged city to the mainland was loaded with castings of gun barrels. This scheme continued: trains carried food, fuel, and medicines to the besieged city, which saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and sent them back loaded with products from defene enterprises - this is how Leningrad contributed to the fight against the enemy on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War and prepared for a decisive battle for complete liberation from the Nazi siege.

Despite the fact that German troops destroyed the railway track 1,200 times, the front line operated uninterruptedly until the complete defeat of the Nazis under the walls of Leningrad in January 1944 and the restoration of sections of the railways liberated from German troops. More than 6 thousand trains passed along it, and each flight was a feat. In 1943, those who, under shelling and bombing, created and defended the railway line leading to Leningrad, who drove trains along it, called it the “corridor of death”. Later, those who survived thanks to this highway and met the day of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi siege, will call it the Victory Road...

A complete picture of the events of almost 900 terrible days of the siege of the city on the Neva, breaking through the enemy ring and the complete liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi siege is available in the special digital collection of the Presidential Library Defence and Siege of Leningrad. It includes official documents, photographs, newsreels, testimonies of participants in military battles, personal diaries and memories of siege survivors and other materials.