Courtesy of occasional reader Edward, a fascinating photo essay of historical St. Petersburg overlaid with the present day city.
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Targets of Opportunityblog advertising is good for you Credo"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra" "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche "A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier "Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas "Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex Amazon AssociateFor the Effort!Winnar! Subscribe CategoriesPagesTagsacademy
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Ahhh..St. Leninburg. Nice city. Great ice cream. Really crummy water that induces a rather unique brand of gastro-intestinal distress. Church of the Savior on Blood is my favorite building to visit, it kind of sticks out onto the street due the fact they built where Alexander II was killed. It is cool to see these ancient Russian women stop, genuflect and cross themselves three times as they pass the church.
This is the 2nd set of the pictures featuring the Leningrad Siege photos overlaid with the today’s St.Pete that I’ve seen and every time it makes me cry… My paternal grandparents survived the first the worst winter of the Siege and when they were able to evacuate in the Spring of 1942, my tall strong grandfather had to be pulled on the children sleigh to the collection point… It took 2 years of recuperating in the relative “prosperity” of the small Ural town before my father, their first child, was born…
)
Yes, James, the Leningrad ice cream is the best, and you see inordinate amount of people eating it in the streets, in deep winter
I would say that Moscow tap water was even worse than in St.Pete, I could not drink it at all in Moscow…
The Church of the Savior on Blood was finally renovated many years after I left – I remember it always in scaffolds and nobody could get inside. My American friends visited St.Pete in 2006 and brought me the pictures of outside and inside of the Church…
Thanks for the pictures, Lex, and Merry Christmas!
Reminds me, in varying ways, of Budapest in the Fall of ’89. Gray and bleak with so much promise of the beauty that would be reborn in the Spring; not talking so much about weather, either. Haven’t been back since, but since beloved Auntie lives in Wien it would be not such a long journey to make. A wonderful history exists between the Austrians and Hungarians.
I’m so very grateful that the nations formerly behind the Iron Curtain are being restored, by degrees, to their fullness of beauty and life. I pray their past not become a harbinger of our future.
Olga, I hope you have a chance to return to St. Pete someday for a visit. So much has changed for the better in the world since those days. After 27 years, I should go back to Chile and see old friends…and the changes there.
I had almost posted a link here to the young lady that did a motorcycle tour of Chernobyl. Fortunately a sufficient number of brain cells kicked in and I remembered that you had already done so -about five years ago.
Still think of that trip and what it represented of Russian/Eastern European history.
Our country, for all the challenges and shortcomings, has been blessed.
Were I to live in anywhere around Russia I would still be concerned.
OT though of interest I think.
Sometimes Newt is a bit erratic, on occasion too willing to compromise with the Socialist/Democrats. Sometimes I don’t know where the heck he is coming from, and there are those personal moral/ethical issues regarding marriage (his). However, like him or not, this was an excellent speech. http://bit.ly/6mrZCj Not an event the Rotary Club is likely to forget.
Separately, Nebraska’s Governor Heineman telling Senator Nelson to give his bribe money back to Congress (i.e. the taxpayer) appears to reflect a serious movement by the State to repudiate the Senator and his payoff from BHO for the Senator’s vote. Apropos to a previous post by Lex, we know what Nelson is, we just did not know what his price was. Nebraska- who’d a thunk?
Several years ago, I read about a film entitled “Bullet to Beijing” which featured Michael Caine as the British spy in The Ipcress File 30-40 years later, after he’d been ‘let go’. We ordered it, since we are great fans of Michael Caine. It was never in general distribution here, as far as I could determine, but it is a great little thriller film, shot in St. Petersburg and in the Russian countryside. Kind of a classic thriller, very exciting. The views of St. Petersburg today were beautiful, the sequences on a Russian commercial airplane were amusing [my husband, who has traveled in Russia by aircraft assured me that the plane, battered, overcrowded, with damaged instruments, was authentic], although his planes were not forced down by lack of fuel. There’s an amusing night club sequence with [very] scantily clad dancing girls who sing flat, a train rushing across the land toward China with a dangerous cargo. In short, just about everything that makes a good old-fashioned thriller good.
If anyone is interested, I suspect that one could obtain it through Netflix or some similar organization. Meanwhile, since we own it on video, we continue to enjoy it.
St. Petersburg is a beautiful city from a grander time.
Marianne
Used DVDs begin @ $2.87 on amazon.com
-SJS
Lex,
The breadth of your readership always surprises. You attract a wider audience than those who are or were in any of our military services. Most just read, but when you post something that strikes a cord they enter a reply. Olga is a wonderful example, and her personal story reminds us of how easy we have it here.
A good, thoughtful blog attracts a (ugh, how the word has become loaded with PC meaning, but still is a good English word) diverse readership.
St. Petersburg, also known as Leningrad. I know nothing of the city itself, have never been there and likely will never be, nor do I know anybody from the area.
During the siege of World War 2, if memory serves, the only road for supplies was across the river after it had froze. The citizens of Leningrad were eating bread made of sawdust and plaster, the dead were stacked like firewood, and yet they continued to do what they could such as making munitions in their bombed and half-destroyed factories.
More people died of starvation during the siege than died at Hiroshima. Let that sink in. For two and a half years Leningrad the city had little to no incoming supplies like food or fuel. During that time over 1.5 million people perished. And of those who survived, they continued working until liberation. After liberation they rebuilt.
At one point over a thousand new bodies were being dropped off per day, the ground too frozen to give burials until the spring thaw. The city landmarks were bombed into rubble, the public works one expects in a city like water and sewer and gas nonexistent.
And they held. They not only held they worked.
Makes a guy wonder, can we import those folks and trade for them the residents of Detroit or Berkeley?
– Max
Max, unfortunately, after 1985 it came to public light that during the siege the NKVD (now KGB) “worked,” too, and the city party “leaders” had full supply of food…
And no, you cannot import those folks because Leningrad was a literal ghost town after the end of the Siege and WWII and was re-populated mostly by the people from other areas of the country… Both Hitler AND Stalin hated the city and wanted to destroy it, one physically, another spiritually… While one did not succeed, the other almost got his wish come true…
The old wallpaper is all gone because they were reduced to eating the paste under the wallpaper….well, a great many gave it to their children and died of starvation themselves. Horrific time.
Thank you lex. The photo essay was indeed fascinating.
We Americans are so very fortunate (and thus perhaps spoiled) that we have no history and experience of our towns and farms burned, citizens murdered, women raped then killed, and a 900-day siege where all the rats in one of our major cities disappeared… because they were being eaten by the remaining living but starving and dying wretches in Leningrad. (Revolutionary War, 1812, and the ‘fight against ourselves’ doesn’t come even close to the Eastern Front carnage.)
Unlike the US, Russia has a long history of foreign invasion with massive numbers of death, military and civilian. And it has made them paranoid, understandably. As horrific as our 9/11 was, it would be only a lost minor footnote compared to the atrocities the Nazis put upon the Russian people. In fact, over 4,000 citizens – not troops – died in Lenningrad on Christmas Day, 1941! Just one day; a holy day. Say a prayer for them. Eventually, 642,000 citizens of that city died during the siege, and over a million Russian troops died also.
We have never had any experience like that ever. Thus we cannot understand it. And we go on ignorant, not understanding the magnitude of these photos. It is a dangerous ignorance.
Pick a major city of the world. They most all have suffered severely from foreign armies and invaders, resulting in many thousands if not millions of civilian deaths. Those countries have a history, and a psyche tempered by that history. [Most of them have better health-care too... sorry] We as Americans, really do not.
MaxD above understands it as I think I do too. Unfortunately, he and I seem to arrive at different conclusions.
Flit-
Maybe ‘our fights’ don’t come close to the carnage of the Eastern Front, but, then, why would they need to? We still suffered and learned a tremendous amount from those times, and established ourselves in a way that such carnage would never take place here; 9/11 notwithstanding. Your comparing numbers of dead is like one individual saying to another “My thirty years of military service compared to your sixteen years leaves you with a deficit.” IMO, to say that not having had the exact experience of another is to lack an understanding of it is obtuse.
There are millions in our midst who lived those experiences, and have shared them with us. In my case it was my mother and her family. We have hundreds of thousands who have served in those climes and places, and who have shared their experiences with us. Those shared experiences have had a profound effect on the American people, and have, to a large extent, shaped our foreign and domestic policies. Empathy and compassion are not the least of our traits.
As for the photos, I daresay you presume much to know my perception of them. You are not in my mind, you do not know my thoughts, let alone the thoughts of others. Let each speak for himself/herself.
No, Flit, the health care in the USSR/Russia is NOT better than what we have here. While I did not have to pay directly for my ability to go to the doctor or have a surgery done, if I wanted to have a real specialist to examine me, I needed to pay either directly to the doctor (some were holding private practice, at least in Leningrad and Moscow) or under the table to the administrators or doctor in the state owned polyclinic/institute. If I wanted to survive the surgery, I had to pay under the table to the surgeon, the surgical nurse, the ICU nurse and bring my own sheets and pay to the floor nurse to launder those sheets at least once a week. If you went to a regular “free” dentist, you would have the drilling for your root canal done live and most tooth extractions were done live, too. If you wanted to have a shot before the drilling and extractions, you had to go to the “Paid” dentist clinic (there were 1 for every 3 boroughs) and pay for it. When I left in 1993, there were only 2 CAT scans in Leningrad. The wait list was 4 years or you had to pay 200,000 roubles to get ahead of the line.
A great many Americans are first generation here. My grandfather was a prisoner of war in the UK. Mom (Italian) saw the Germans march through and take everything, then the Italians, then the Yugoslavians. Adolescent boys went running when they came because they were afraid they’d be conscripted, adolescent girls hid to keep from being raped. They didn’t have any food either, but they kept their humanity for the most part. The Soviets lost theirs.
Sorry, Flit — those cities may have health care that their residents don’t pay directly for, but by no standard of measuring “health care” do they have “better”. Using public health stats such as life expectancy to mislead doesn’t measure health care efficacy, so don’t go there.
As far as suffering from “foreign armies”, I don’t think we have to go far to see cities suffering. My former hometown of Stuttgart literally built mountains on the rubble from their wreckage. But they had the determination to do it. I don’t see how our destroyed cities have the same determination.
For some reason words from the movie Luther come to mind when I look at those photos. “Have a care, Martin. You may need these butchers”.