East of Saint Petersburg, the Koltushskoe highway runs through suburban sprawl and countryside toward the village of Koltushi, and it belongs to a memorial landscape that ties the whole region together: the Green Belt of Glory, a chain of monuments marking the defensive line around Leningrad during the siege of 1941 to 1944, when nearly nine hundred days of blockade cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Monuments, steles and memorials stand along the roads where the front lines and supply routes ran, including the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga.
Koltushi has another claim to fame. The physiologist Ivan Pavlov, famous for his work on conditioned reflexes, built up a scientific research station here from the late 1920s, which became known as the capital of conditioned reflexes, with laboratories, residences and a monument to his famous dogs. The Pavlov Institute still has a presence here.
The roads around Koltushi are a mix of suburban streets, new housing estates and countryside, with lakes and woods. The Koltushi heights offer views over the area. Traffic can be heavy, especially at rush hours, and surfaces vary. It is not a ride for the scenery but for the history, and the memorials along the way are moving.
It helps to stop at one of the memorials and read the names and dates. The blockade line ran in a ring round the city, and this eastern side faced the corridor toward Lake Ladoga, through which food, fuel and evacuees moved across the ice in winter and by boat in summer. In the hardest winter of 1941 to 1942 the daily bread ration fell to a tiny slice, and survivors' diaries describe people walking past the frozen dead in the streets. Families still lay flowers at the monuments on the anniversary of the lifting of the siege each January. The woods and lakes that now hold dachas and new apartment blocks were, eighty years ago, a front line, and that weight sits quietly over a ride that otherwise looks like any suburban road on the city's edge.
Fuel and services are plentiful in Koltushi and nearby Vsevolozhsk. For anyone from abroad the obstacles are bureaucratic rather than physical, with sanctions affecting payments and insurance. The riding season is short, but the June light lasts almost round the clock.