Word: leningrad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DORMITORY NUMBER six, where we lived during our four-month stay in Leningrad, stands on the right bank of the River Neva almost directly opposite the Winter Palace of the Tsars. In pre-revolutionary times "6" served as a "public house" where public women offered their services to the Tsar's officers. We used to joke that the plumbing probably hadn't been fixed since that time and that when the women left they probably took the toilet seats and hot water with them...
Soviet education seems to have advanced little during the last few decades. There are still no copying machines or advanced audio-visual equipment. While Leningrad State University is the second largest and most prestigious university in the country, there is no course catalogue. Students must look on bulletin boards in each department to find the offerings...
Upon graduation most students are placed in jobs in regions where it is hard for the government to maintain a skilled labor force. Jobs in the major cities--Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Minsk--are sought after because of these cities' vastly superior material situation and cultural life...
...Leningrad is a city dominated by its namesake. The sign which appears on buildings that "Lenin is more alive than the living" is not an exaggeration. Lenin is very much the Soviet national icon. One can buy literally hundreds of different lapel pins or "znatchki" with Lenin's profile. Buildings, theaters, factories, ships, trains and squares are named after him. His name is invoked to justify all political actions and his ideas and actions are acknowledged for all positive achievements of the Soviet State. Even people who dream of emigrating consider him to have been a great man. They often...
...World War II. It is difficult for an American to understand the war's impact on the Soviet Union. The "Great Patriotic War" cost the Soviet people twenty million lives and probably twice that number in wounded. During the Nazi blockade, 770,000 people starved to death in Leningrad alone--a figure greater than the total battle casualty count of the United States and Great Britain combined. Because roughly three times more men died in the conflict than women, there currently exists nearly an entire generation of elderly women who never married and whose presence is felt throughout Soviet society...