70 Years After The Siege Of Leningrad, Russia Looks Back With Horror

[FarCenter]

Non-Russians may not appreciate the significance of the Siege of Leningrad, which ended 70 years ago today, but Michael McFaul, U.S. Ambassador to Russia, hopes to change that.

"As an ambassador and as a university professor, I would like more Americans to learn about this tragic, but heroic chapter in the history of your city," McFaul wrote in an article in Nevskoye Vremya published today, "I want to do all I can to help Americans learn more and I am proud if the fact that I have visited your wonderful history museums with my two sons."

Russians remember the siege with a sad mixture of pride in the city's resilience and horror at what that resilience led to.

...

Caught between German and Finnish troops, the Soviet army in Leningrad was besieged. Over a million citizens in the city were mobilized in June 1941 to help build fortifications. On September 7th all land connections to the city were severed by the Axis front.

Artillery bombing of the city began in September 1941 and continued for 872 days. The destruction wrought on the city has been called the largest loss of life in any modern city. It is thought that 750,000 civilians and the same amount of soldiers died during the siege. Books were burnt for heat and zoo animals were eaten for meat — some even resorted to cannibalism.

The siege was finally broken on 27 January 1944, but its legacy went on.

Before the siege the city contained around 3 million people. It did not reach those levels of population again until the 1960s. Russia President Vladimir Putin, born in 1952, was one of the people who grew up in the shell of the city that had been there before, and his elder brother had died of diphtheria during the siege itself.

"Once [during the Siege], my mother lost consciousness and people around thought that she died," Putin revealed in his book Ot Pervogo Litsa. "She was even put together with dead bodies. It was fortunate that the mother came to her senses in time and moaned. In general, she stayed alive by a miracle."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-siege-of-leningrad-70-years-later-2014-1

Some supplies were provided by boats across Lake Ladoga in the summer and by truck in the winter, but this route was under constant German aerial attack.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

1. A great movie about this is The Enemy at the Gates.

[rafeh1]

2. enemy at the gates was about stalingrad

Stalingrad is more than a 1000 miles south and is now called Volgograd.

[FarCenter]

3. According to imdb, "The Enemey at the Gates" is about the seige of Stalingrad

"The Battle for Stalingrad", by Marshall Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov, commander of the Soviet 62nd Army, is a wonderful account of that battle. Stalingrad was a relatively short siege with continuous attacks and counterattacks over a few months. Leningrad was a 2 1/2 year horror of defense and starvation.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

7. Oops! Still a good movie.

[GRACIEBIRD]

8. The Russian movie, Stalingrad (2013)

is infinitely better.

[Brickbat]

5. When it comes to the mixture of pride and horror, IME it's much more of the former than the latter.

[former9thward]

6. This is a photo I took at the entrance to Piskaryovskoye Cemetery.

About 1 million of the siege victims are buried there in mass graves.

http://imgur.com/QunXI7a