Word: leningraders
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...Beside Leningrad, the celebrated sieges of modern times are dwarfed: the 121-day blockade of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, in which 30,000 perished; even the more famous six-month German onslaught at Stalingrad, where almost half a million were killed. In Leningrad, which had a population of about 3,000,000, some 1,500,000 men, women and children died -of starvation or under the unremitting rain of Nazi shells and bombs, which continued for 2½ years...
Memory Hole. Surprisingly, little has been written on the Leningrad tragedy. Many of the Russian records, according to Harrison Salisbury, an assistant managing editor of the New York Times, were destroyed or suppressed by Stalin, "as in Orwell's 'memory hole.' " Years of contacts in Russia, where he served six years as a reporter, and the information thaw that set in after Stalin's death, finally permitted Salisbury to accumulate the records, diaries and interviews from which he shaped this massive and horrifying account...
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...