Word: leningraders
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...your illuminating review of Harrison Salisbury's The 900 Days [Feb. 14], you describe the long, terrible siege of Leningrad, mentioning the famine and even cases of cannibalism. Many of your readers may not be aware that, for the people of Leningrad, this mass starvation was a repeat performance...
Exactly 20 years earlier, Leningrad (then Petrograd) was, like much of the U.S.S.R., stricken with famine. Perhaps even worse, epidemics of typhoid, smallpox and other diseases were sweeping the country. But in August, 1921, Herbert Hoover's A.R.A. (American Relief Administration) arrived in the Soviet Union and for 23 months carried on a mission of mercy to Leningrad and other Russian cities...
When our mission was completed, the entire A.R.A. staff was given a banquet in the Kremlin at which we were told that we had saved 20 million lives. Is it unreasonable to believe that many of those who defended Leningrad in 1941 were able to do so because, in 1921-23, they were saved from famine and pestilence by the Americans...
Tolstoy saw men and battles as unwitting pawns used in an inscrutable game played by history. Modest and matter-of-fact reporter Salisbury does not permit himself the luxury of such speculative indulgences. If he sees a shaping force in the tragedy of Leningrad, beyond Hitler's madness, it lies in the villainy and vanity of Joseph Stalin. For the Soviet dictator not only misjudged the course of events in 1941 and refused to arm his country adequately, he systematically falsified history and brutally suppressed the truth afterward to hide his own foolishness. Thousands of men associated with...
...Kremlin was anxious to bury the memory of Leningrad's tragic, heroic wartime stand, its citizens were not. For nearly ten years, on Stalin's orders, coats of paint covered the blue and white signs that had sprouted on the Nevsky Prospekt and other major avenues during the siege, with the warning: "Citizens: In case of shelling, this side of the street is the most dangerous." Today, the signs have been repainted as they were. Touched up every spring, they stand as reminders of a past too terrible to be buried...