Word: leningraders
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Salisbury obviously loves Leningrad and its people. Much of the background that he feels called upon to paint in deals with the city's illustrious history as St. Petersburg (Russia's capital until the honor was ceded to Moscow in 1918) and its cosmopolitan, cultural effervescence, which stirred not only Adolf Hitler's ire but the enduring suspicions of a xenophobic Georgian peasant, Joseph Stalin. The Paris of the Baltic, the city of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Leningrad stood, in Salisbury's words, as "the invisible barrier between the end of Russia and the beginning of Europe...
...time, Hitler openly savored the prospect of humiliating Russia by reviewing his triumphant soldiers from a stand in Leningrad's Palace Square. But three months after the invasion of Russia began and the prospects of quickly subduing Leningrad began to fade, he grew angry. The German high command declared: "The Führer has decided to raze the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth...
...carrying out that objective. Beyond all reason, Stalin had rejected overwhelming evidence that the Nazis were preparing an attack; not even the movement of 4,200,000 troops to Russia's borders convinced him. As a result, Nazi infantry and panzer divisions smashed to the outskirts of Leningrad. The unprepared, disorganized Russians sustained unimaginable losses; 28 of their front-line divisions were obliterated. By the time the Germans were finally stopped, the city was surrounded. Its only open access lay to the northeast, across Lake Ladoga, toward Finland...
...dogs swiftly disappeared. Any stray horse was likely to be set upon and butchered on the hoof by starving citizens. In the final stages of the famine, parents kept a close eye on their children lest they be kidnaped; the "meat patties" that were sold in the Haymarket, Leningrad's slum quarter, sometimes contained human flesh. Salisbury describes how Red Army soldiers, after gunning down two suspected cannibals, found the hocks of five human beings hanging from hooks in their apartment...
...Hell Machine." For a time, Stalin thought of abandoning the city. Then, rather than let the Germans occupy it whole, he ordered that Leningrad's giant Kirov works, its railroad viaducts, its bridges, its ports, and all its historic buildings be mined for pushbutton destruction. But the button on what Leningraders referred to as Stalin's "hell machine" was never pushed. Nazi troops were drained off to other fronts, and enough Red Army units and citizen volunteers remained to keep the besiegers out. The Germans settled in, hoping to starve and shell the city to death. That they...