The Oranienbaum Springboard is not a single building but a piece of ground, and once you know the story the low woods and fields south of the Gulf of Finland look entirely different. In September 1941, as German and Finnish forces closed the ring around Leningrad, a pocket of coast around Oranienbaum, today's Lomonosov, held out. It was cut off from the city by land, supplied across the water and under the guns of Kronstadt, and it never fell. In January 1944 the Second Shock Army broke out of this pocket as one jaw of the offensive that finally lifted the siege.
Riding here today, you are on quiet regional roads between Gostilitsy, Lomonosov and Petrodvorets, through mixed forest, peat bogs and small farms. The country is gently rolling, with the Izhora plateau rising to the south, and the roads are a mix of decent asphalt and rougher village stretches. Corners are few and friendly; the pleasure is in the space and the light rather than in lean angle. Watch for tractors, loose dogs and unmarked potholes, and in autumn for wet leaves on the bends under the trees.
Memorials mark the old perimeter at intervals, often a gun, a tank on a plinth or a simple obelisk with fresh flowers at its foot. Locals still come on Victory Day and on the January anniversaries. The siege cost the city something like a million civilian lives, and the soldiers who held this pocket did so in cold and hunger not much better than inside the city. It is worth stopping, switching off and simply listening; the woods are very quiet.
Nature has long since taken the trenches back. Birch and alder grow out of the shell craters, cranes cross the fields in spring and autumn, and elk are not unusual at dusk, which is a good reason to keep the speed down on forest stretches late in the day. Gostilitsy is small; for fuel, food and a proper meal, Petrodvorets and Lomonosov on the coast road are the places, each with filling stations, shops and cafes. From Lomonosov you can also see the long dam to Kronstadt across the water, the fortress island that kept this coast alive.