More than half a million civilians perished during the Nazi-led Siege of Leningrad as starvation was used as a weapon of war.
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The blockaded former capital of the Russian Empire, now named St Petersburg, held fast against the threat of invasion for two and a half years as residents starved to death.
"The biggest risk was malnutrition," said 86-year-old Natalia Khatuntseva, who survived the siege. "Shelling and bomb raids, albeit scary, never threatened my family in comparison with the food shortage."
Khatuntseva was a young girl when Nazi and Finnish forces surrounded the city of her birth. Her father succumbed to malnutrition within half a year of the siege.
As Axis forces pushed into the Soviet Union, the Finns, in a loose alliance, sought to reclaim territory taken in the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland. Leningrad was on the border of that territory.
Sunday marks three-quarters of a century since the siege of 1941 to 1944 ended as the tide of World War II turned in the Allies' favour.
The siege was "one of the worst tragedies of humankind in the last century," said Ivan Kurilla, a history professor at the European University in St Petersburg.
"People starved, died of hunger, and there were awful stories about eating corpses and cannibalism," Kurilla said.
Supplies were brought by aircraft and across the often bombarded Lake Ladoga, east of the city, including when it was frozen over. The perilous route, also used to evacuate civilians, was called the Road of Life.
"Starvation is terrifying," said Marina Kulagina, whose mother survived the siege in its entirety. When it ended, "there were completely no pets left."
The Soviet Union suffered a total of more than 20 million casualties during the war.
Eight in 10 Russians see the Allied victory of 1945 as an enduring source of national pride, Russia's largest independent pollster, Levada Centre, said last week, presenting the results of a nationwide survery.
"Many talented people died," said Kurilla, the historian. "My country could be very different if those people had lived their whole lives. This is a big sorrow about that war."
Australian Associated Press
