Word: leningraders
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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...
...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...
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...