Vintage Siege of Leningrad postcards

[strannik01]

Yesterday marked the 72nd anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad. The Siege was partially lifted a year before, but it wasn't until January 27, 1944 that the Nazis fully, completely pushed out

Comments

[benicek]

I visited there in 1989 and found it difficult to believe such an event had happened. It seemed such a pristine city compared with crumbling Soviet Moscow.

[strannik01]

Was Moscow really that much worse than then-Leningrad? Granted, I was only 4 at the time, and I've never been to Moscow, but that still seems...weird.

(But I defer to people who are actually old enough to remember what things were like back then. I remember some things, but they are limited, because, you know, I was 4. I only saw so much and didn't have context for a lot of things)

Also - when I was growing up, it seemed like every single museum in St. Peterburg and the surrounding region had at least one exhibit showing how damaged (or not quite as damaged) it was during the war, and what it took to restore it. There are also mass graves, and remains of military installations, but those are are in the parts of the city that aren't exactly touristy.

[benicek]

It seemed worse to us, but maybe that was because we saw more of the suburbs of Moscow, whereas the centre of Leningrad was all gilded domes and baroque splendour. Everything in Moscow seemed to be falling apart. Our hotel looked like it had been built by amateurs. You couldn't open the bathroom doors properly because the toilet was in the way. The whole place seemed a joke. We were disappointed, I think, because we had grown up believing the propaganda on both sides, that the Soviet Union was this super-power with advanced technology. We expected to be impressed. We met some Russian students in a youth club who had learned English and they told us "if you think it is bad now you should have seen it a few years ago".

This is a 17-year-old me in our hotel:

[strannik01]

Oh, Soviet hotels from around that time period were legendary for their terribleness. When the condition of the hotels during the 2014 Olympics made the news, half of the Russians made "back in he USSR" jokes (and the other half complained about slander).