Word: baku
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...Hitler or Stalin, writes Alan Bullock, the Oxford University historian, "a suggestion that he would play a major role in twentieth-century history would have appeared incredible." At 30, Hitler was a street-corner speechmaker in Munich, and Stalin was in prison for plotting an oil workers' strike in Baku...
...also worth remembering that those first two world-transforming events, the conflagrations of 1914-18 and 1939-45, resulted in the loss of approximately 60 million lives. The political miracle of 1989-91 has also had its victims: scores were killed in the crackdowns in Tbilisi, Baku, Vilnius and Riga, and three young men were martyred in the August coup. But large- scale outbreaks of violence have been fairly isolated everywhere except in the ethnic conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. By and large, the Soviet Union has given up the ghost of the totalitarian idea with...
...food. The Russian counteroffensive that began on Dec. 5, 1941, also relieved pressure on the city. By early 1942, though the blockade was not broken, the Germans could not hope to advance without a terrible fight. Besides, Hitler was turning his attention toward the Volga River and oil-rich Baku by the Caspian Sea. There a titanic struggle soon developed over the city that stood in his way: Stalingrad...
...street battles. By the beginning of July, the city collapsed. The fall of Rostov-on-Don, the so-called gateway to the Caucasus, was even more ominous. The siege was embarrassingly brief, and whole Soviet units reportedly fled in panic. Suddenly the way south to the oil fields of Baku was open. With German armies simultaneously dashing to cut off the Soviet supply line along the Volga, Stalin issued a stern "not a step back" decree to the Red Army. Deserters were to be shot on sight...
...Stalin himself, who gave it his name. The Russians knew that if they did not tie down the Germans at Stalingrad, the war would virtually be lost. Not only would the huge cities of the north be bereft of supplies from the fertile south, but the oil fields of Baku that fueled the Russian war machine would fall to the Wehrmacht...