It was 70 years ago that Nazi Germany suffered its defeat to the USSR in the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet Union was the country that suffered most in that war. Such large cities as Leningrad (present-day St.Petersburg), Kiev, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Smolensk, Kursk, and many others, were severely damaged and some of them, such as Minsk, Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd), Rostov-on-Don were completely destroyed. After the war, the restoration of the affected cities and monuments was started. In this special project TASS has gathered file photos of the war years and modern images of the same places 70 years later.