Word: stalins
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...relentless march across the snow." By the time the spring thaw slowed the Russian counterattack, the Germans had been hurled entirely out of Moscow province. In the spring of 1942 they would still be close enough to threaten, but by then they had lost the battle to seize Stalin's capital...
Most Leningraders volunteered not for love of Stalin. It was their city they were defending -- the cultural center of traditional Russia, home of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Anna Akhmatova. The ordeal, however, required more than pride, certainly more than courage. The supply of food was erratic, and plummeted during the darkest moments of the war. On Dec. 23, 1941, for example, the whole city had just two days' supply of flour. At one point, rations were 1,087 calories for workers who had to man the city's strategic munitions plants, 581 calories for office workers, 684 calories for children...
...called gateway to the Caucasus, was even more ominous. The siege was embarrassingly brief, and whole Soviet units reportedly fled in panic. Suddenly the way south to the oil fields of Baku was open. With German armies simultaneously dashing to cut off the Soviet supply line along the Volga, Stalin issued a stern "not a step back" decree to the Red Army. Deserters were to be shot on sight...
Stalingrad, a great sprawl of a city on the Volga, became the focal point of the struggle. It had originally been named Tsaritsyn, and during the bloody civil war it was successfully defended against the rightist White Army by Stalin himself, who gave it his name. The Russians knew that if they did not tie down the Germans at Stalingrad, the war would virtually be lost. Not only would the huge cities of the north be bereft of supplies from the fertile south, but the oil fields of Baku that fueled the Russian war machine would fall to the Wehrmacht...
From mid-July 1942 onward, the fighting intensified as the Germans advanced along the great bend of the Don River. Hitler ordered the German Sixth Army to conquer Stalingrad by Aug. 25. Stalin ordered the city to prepare for siege...