The Road of Life (Доро́га жи́зни, doroga zhizni) was the ice road winter transport route across the frozen Lake Ladoga, which provided the only access to the besieged city of Leningrad while the perimeter in the siege was maintained by the German Army Group North and the Finnish Defence Forces. The siege lasted for 29 months from 8 September 1941, to 27 January 1944. Over one million citizens of Leningrad died from starvation, stress, exposure and bombardments. Each winter, the Lake Ladoga ice route was reconstructed by hand, and built according to precise arithmetic calculations depending on traffic volume. In addition to transporting thousands of tons of munitions and food supplies each year, the Road of Life also served as the primary evacuation route for the millions of Soviets trapped within the starving city. The road today forms part of the World Heritage Site.
Read more about Road Of Life: Establishment, Construction, Volume of Transported Goods, After The Siege, Monuments and Memorials
Famous quotes containing the words road and/or life:
“Hail ye small sweet courtesies of life, for smooth do ye make the road of it! like grace and beauty which beget inclinations to love at first sight; ‘tis ye who open this door and let the stranger in.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)