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Volgograd
Stalingrad.
It is a name with special resonance in the history of the 20th Century.
Today
they call it Volgograd, but to many people it will always be Stalingrad.
Not
because they have any love for the Soviet dictator, but because of the
titanic
WWII battle that bears the city's name.
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Americans
learn about Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima. In Britain, they learn about
Dunkirk and
Normandy. But these battles do not hold the same weight of relevance for
Russians as does the Battle of Stalingrad. During the bitter winter of
1942,
the streets and buildings of this city became a place for a vicious,
pitiless
struggle with appalling cruelty on both sides. “One of our weekend
excursions was to the city of Volgograd - the site of Battle of
Stalingrad. To
remind future generations of what the city looked like after the war,
the
Russians left one of the bombed-out factories standing near the town's
center.
While the shell of the old factory is itself a testament to the
destruction of
the city, we were incredulous to learn that the factory was one of the
least-destroyed buildings in the city. Seeing the pictures of the total
destruction
of Volgograd after the war and hearing stories about the million people
who
died in this one battle alone, we began to understand why World War II
still
plays such a prominent role in the Russian psyche”. (Erica Lally
’08)
To find more information about Stalingrad battle, go to http://battle.volgadmin.ru/ and read about it in English or in Russian.
To read more about very soviet town and what to see and to do there, go to http://www.mnweekly.ru/travel/20080221/55311281.html, http://english.vvolgograd.ru/city/index.html (in English and in Russian).
To read about Volga-Don Shipping Canal, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga-Don_Canal and http://premier.gov.ru/eng/visits/ru/44/info/289.html (in English)
If you want to keep track of what is happening in Volgograd, go to http://www.volgadmin.ru/ru/ (in Russian) or http://www.volgograd.ru/ (in Russian) or http://webvolgograd.ru/ (in Russian).
To see the map of the city, go to http://map.volgadmin.ru/