Every day we go on to the streets, dying at his defenders who thought about us. About us, that they were not destined to see. But we can remember!

And imagine that the horror that the people was to survive.

WWII era Photographs, I assume, of Leningrad combined with current photographs. This era has also recently been portrayed effectively by David Benioff in his novel City of Thieves. Found the pictures via Warren Ellis who thinks the photographer may be Sergei Larenkov.
posted by zzazazz on Jan 29, 2009 - 16 comments

The skyline of St. Petersburg, Russia will be radically altered for the first time in 300 years. "Gazprom City, a proposed complex of stylish modern buildings that evoke, among other things, a gas-fueled flame, a strand of DNA and a lady’s high-heeled shoe, would sit on a historic site on the Neva River." Though the designs are truly something to behold, many who live in the historic city aren't having it.
posted by bukharin on Nov 28, 2006 - 25 comments

Belomorkanal. The history of the canal between the White Sea and Leningrad, constructed using penal labour and opened 'in Stalin's name' in 1933.
From the International Institute of Social History's collections. Of related interest :- Photo Album Van Marken ('one of the first Dutch entrepreneurs who took care of the social welfare of his employees.'); the William Morris Archive; Zo d'Axa ('Adventurer, traveller, anti-militarist, individualist, satirist, journalist, founder of two of the most legendary French magazines of the 1890s'); Auguste Fabre's 'Les Sky Scratchers', an optimistic vision from the 1890s; Sylvain Maréchal, who 'proposed a new calendar replacing the names of the Saints with those of the "benefactors of humanity" '. More inside.
posted by plep on Oct 2, 2003 - 7 comments

Afterwards, it was still a city under siege, but I knew it would live. Music is life, after all ... what is life without music? Ed Vulliamy on the terrible siege of Leningrad and how Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony spurred the resistance to the Nazis.
posted by Grangousier on Nov 27, 2001 - 2 comments