Word: viipuri
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...these servants of a "classless" society dare ask their officers. They preferred to ask me, a foreigner. Most revealing of all was the view from the train's windows. On the Russian side of the border, I saw ruined, largely unrestored towns that had been part of Finland. Viipuri was ghostlike and still in the morning sun. The people were in rags. They were still living in dugouts and log houses. Few of the fields were plowed. Everything seemed static...
...Finland from the Arctic, restore the Tsarist frontier with Norway. Instead of their lease on Hangö, commanding the Gulf of Finland, Russia took a 50-year lease on the Porkkala Peninsula for a naval base. This brought the Russians within twelve miles of Helsinki. Russia also got back Viipuri, Finland's fourth biggest city. Parts of timber-rich Karelia were lost...
...Germans signalized their coup in Finland by parading third-rate troops around Helsinki, actually sent one armored division and a few planes to the wavering front between fallen Viipuri and Helsinki. The Russians, having retaken a 150-mile enemy-held stretch of the Murmansk-Leningrad railroad between Lakes Ladoga and Onega, were now shipping seaborne supplies direct from Murmansk to Leningrad on this line. On the Karelian front the Red armies were patently able to do their will...
Peter the Great once called Viipuri the solid shutters of his window on Europe. When the shutters collapsed last week and Viipuri fell, the way to Helsinki, 140 miles away, lay open. Finland, by military judgment, was all but out of the war (see FOREIGN NEWS). The newspaper Suomen Sosialidemokraati said that "the whole nation hopes that the present abnormal situation can be eliminated . . . so that it can get back to peaceful ways...
...second nightfall, the breach was 25 miles wide and 15 to 25 miles deep. The gulf fortress of Viipuri now lay only 40 miles away...