Hero City (Soviet Union)
According to the statute, the hero city was issued the Order of Lenin, the Gold Star medal, and the certificate of the heroic deed (gramota or hramota) from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
The statute of the title was officially introduced on May 8, 1965, by the ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of USSR, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War.
The same day ukases were issued about awarding the cities mentioned above: Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), Volgograd (former Stalingrad), Kiev, Sevastopol, and Odessa.
In the interview, he said that Baku getting the status of Hero City "would be quite fair" and that it "would be a respect to the people who lost their lives working day and night" along with being an "important socio-political act".
It was located right on the recently established border between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany drawn in the secret appendix to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
The Brest garrison, although cut off from reinforcements and having run out of food, water and ammunition, fought and counter-attacked until the very last minute.
All public transportation stopped in 1941–42 winter, but in 1942 city tramcars were relaunched (trolleys and buses were inoperable until the end of the war).
Thousands of Leningrad citizens froze or starved to death in the first winter of the siege alone, dying at home in their beds or collapsing from exhaustion in the streets.
When Lake Ladoga froze in the winter, the Road of Life was opened to the Soviet-held southern shore, with a long trail of trucks bringing food and supplies to the besieged city and evacuating citizens on their way back.
When Soviet forces eventually lifted the siege in January 1944, over one million inhabitants of Leningrad had died from starvation, exposure and German shelling.
Workers of the city's weapons factories started personally handing over arms and ammunition to the defending soldiers as the Germans closed in, and eventually continued the fight themselves.
The Red Army moved its strategic reserve from Moscow to the lower Volga and transferred all available aircraft from the entire country to the Stalingrad area.
The Germans eventually lost a quarter of their total forces deployed on the Eastern Front, and never fully recovered from the defeat.
In early August 1941, the Black Sea port of Odessa, located in present-day Ukraine, was attacked and besieged by Romanian forces fighting alongside their German allies.
The fierce battle in defense of the city lasted until October 16, when the remaining Soviet troops, as well as 15,000 civilians were evacuated by sea.
Having failed to take the city, Axis forces began a siege and heavy bombardment, with such unusual pieces of ordnance as the Mörser Karl self-propelled mortar, and the gigantic Schwerer Gustav railroad cannon.
A second Axis offensive against the city, launched in December 1941, failed as well, as the Soviet army and navy forces continued to fight fiercely.
In the freezing cold of an unusually harsh winter, Soviet forces, including well-equipped ski battalions, drove the exhausted Germans back out of reach of Moscow and consolidated their positions on January 7, 1942.
When the Germans commenced their offensive on July 7, Soviet forces concentrated in the Kiev area were ordered to stand fast, and a breakout was prohibited.
Kiev again became a battlefield when advancing Soviet forces pushed the Germans back West, liberating the city on November 6, 1943.
The city of Novorossiysk on the eastern coast of the Black Sea provided a stronghold against the German summer offensive of 1942.
Kerch, a port city in the East of the Crimean peninsula, formed a bridgehead at the strait dividing Crimea from the Southern Russian mainland.
The city of Minsk, capital of present-day Belarus, was encircled by advancing German forces in late June 1941.
The heavily fortified city held out, however, and secured the Southern flank during the Soviet defence of Moscow and the subsequent counter-offensive.
Axis forces discontinued their attacks in late October 1941, having failed to take Murmansk or to cut off the Karelian railway line.
German armoured divisions of Army Group Centre began an offensive on July 10, 1941, to encircle Soviet forces in the Smolensk area.
[14] A number of other countries also awarded their highest military decorations to cities or other territorial units in commemoration of events of World War II and other conflicts:
