The history of the siege of Leningrad will be told by the living voices of its witnesses.

At these moments, in the St. Petersburg Manege, the installation of an exhibition about the siege of Leningrad is finishing. Tomorrow, January 27, marks the 80th anniversary of the complete liberation of the city. In the evening, the exhibition will be visited by Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova, and tomorrow it will open to the general public. The MK observer managed to see a poignant story about how to preserve a person in oneself in the most difficult, inhumane times, before others.

St. Petersburg remembers its history. On the 80th anniversary of the lifting of the blockade, flags and posters were feared on the streets, reminiscent of those nine hundred days that Leningrad was under occupation, was a city-sign – on the brink of life and death. This painful story is told as a living human drama, through five destinies of real people – a boy who lost all his relatives, a kindergarten teacher, a young scientist who came up with ways to escape dysentery and grew dandelions and nettles to feed the inhabitants, and his beloved artist who helped evacuate paintings from the Hermitage. And also a violinist who continued to play with cold fingers and took part in the legendary concert – the premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, the score of which was miraculously dropped into the besieged city by a military plane. Together with five characters – and these are, on the one hand, very specific people, on the other, collective images – the viewer goes through a drama that millions of people have experienced or not experienced. The exhibition is designed as a total installation, where we, together with the heroes, overcome the path from the beginning to the end of the siege.

At the beginning it seemed that, despite the blockade, life could still be normal. People went to the cinema. The first hall, where the exhibition begins, has been turned into a cinema hall, where posters of films that were shown in 1941 hang: “The Little Humpbacked Horse”, “Anton Ivanovich is Angry”, “Frontline Girlfriends”. At the same time, they showed short films with instructions on how to extinguish incendiary bombs – they need to be covered with sand, filled with water, or used a fire extinguisher. Every child mastered this science in the first days of the blockade. At this moment, the viewer gets acquainted with the heroes of the story, which intertwines their destinies. This interweaving of fates is already a work of fiction, but very figurative. All five will end up in the same room and will save each other, but not all will survive.

The exhibition takes us along a long historical corridor, where there are objects that preserve the memory of those strange times, there are replicas and atmospheric installations that convey the climate in the besieged city. This is the road where death, hunger and destruction become everyday occurrences. Where one mother has to choose, with the help of a coin, which of her two children should be given rations, which means saving lives, and which one should die. And another sews throughout her pregnancy for her child, embroidering flowers, so that he can be born in the cold winter and lose him after 24 days.

Where people are ready to eat anything, be it a dead sparrow, a cat, hogweed or dandelions. Where a boy can take the last piece of bread from an old woman, and when he is caught, he will lie face down in the snow and eat while the women who come running to the old woman’s scream beat him. But where, despite everything, they love, get married, have compassion, play music and read books. Where the bride is in a dress made from a nightgown, and the banquet table is painted on plates like a real one. Where exhibitions are held and there are people who trade bread for theater tickets, and there are those who are ready to give up their last item, be it a piano, a painting by Aivazovsky or jewelry, for a spoonful of flour. Where in the Hermitage they give tours through empty halls, talking about the paintings as if they were still on the walls.

“This project, like a child, was born for 9 months. We thought for a long time about the presentation formula, taking into account the fact that not all items could be brought from museums. However, we have unique exhibits. Like, for example, a child’s dress made from bandages,” says Manege director Anna Yalova.

The exhibition is divided into seven sections and ends with Shostakovich’s symphony, which was presented using the same score next to the instruments. The installation, of course, does not convey the full scale of the legendary concert at the Leningrad Philharmonic, but it leaves the impression of history coming to life.

There are even live weeds at the exhibition that grow next to recipes invented by siege survivors: hogweed soup, nettle or dandelion salad. During the preparation process, several dandelions even bloomed.

The exhibition includes more than 600 objects, original and replicas, which create a poignant story about people who preserved themselves in the most difficult times.