November 1944

The homeland is free

The western Soviet border

towns were destroyed

1,710

towns were destroyed

villages were burned and destroyed

70,000+

villages were burned and destroyed

By autumn 1944 almost all Soviet territory had been liberated. People returned to burned towns and villages and started everything anew. But the war was not over: ahead lay Europe, still to be freed from Nazism.

As it retreated the enemy left a “desert zone” behind: blown-up factories, burned villages, flooded mines. People lived in dugouts, but they sowed the fields that spring, and teenagers rebuilt the schools.

After the war the damage was counted: 1,710 towns and more than 70,000 villages had been destroyed in the USSR.