During the war, he volunteered for active service but was turned down because of his poor eyesight; but in the 1941 siege of Leningrad by the Nazis, Shostakovich served in the fire brigade before ...

The Kremlin leader laid flowers at a monument to fallen Soviet defenders of the city, then called Leningrad, on the banks of the Neva River, and then at Piskarevskoye Cemetery, where hundreds of ...

Today is a special day. Eighty-one years ago, on 27 January 1944, the most terrible blockade in the history of mankind - the siege of Leningrad (modern-day St. Petersburg) - ended. Its importance can ...

A boy poses with a Kalashnikov gun at a weapon and military equipment exhibition during celebration of the 81st anniversary of the World War II battle that lifted the Nazi ...

In this short film Howard Goodall looks at how musicians such as Dmitri Shostakovich and Richard ... hope in the midst of the horrifying siege of Leningrad during World War Two.