Maestro shares memories of the Siege of Leningrad
OrchestrasThe veteran conductor Vladimir Fedoseev, 91, told a Victory Day concert audience in Moscow of his personal recollections of the Great Patriotic War:
‘I still have it all before my eyes… It’s hard to say how we survived. God helped… We lived on the outskirts of Leningrad – in the Okhta area, and we had a garden there, where dad grew flowers. We built a bomb shelter in this kindergarten.
At first we were afraid and sat in the “bomb,” but soon the shell explosions no longer meant anything to us. One became indifferent. If the siren howls, you need to close the curtains so the light is not visible – this is the only thing we did.
I remember how my mother and I extinguished high-explosive bombs by covering them with sand… The only thing we had was a loudspeaker; from morning to evening the music of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich sounded… My first impression of music was formed right then.
When Lake Ladoga was liberated, our family and all our belongings were loaded into cars, and we began to cross the ice in the direction of Murom under bombing. And at the very first station – Voybokalo – we were all loaded onto the train.
We placed our things in a freight car, and went for a walk – there were three whole hours left before departure. Then the Germans swooped in and began bombing the train. I was thrown somewhere by a blast wave and woke up in a creepy room – either in the basement or in the entrance. There were dead, shell-shocked people lying around, and I was the only one, little, with no mother, no father, no sister…
I started running, screaming, and eventually found everyone alive and well. In the evening, when we found each other again, we began to look for things. We see a fire that no longer burns, but burns out, smoldering, and all our furniture, all our belongings are in it… And on top of this charred heap stands my father’s button accordion – unharmed! We took him with us to Murom. It was, in my opinion, 1943.’
And now his country is inflicting war on a peaceful, sovereign nation that did nothing to provoke it. Does he have an opinion on that?
yes you can read about it in 80 years on SD.
Exactly! The Russians want to warm up their international image, while committing some of the most brutal genocides in recent history on a nation who just wanted peace, self-determination and the freedom of cultivating its own culture. A nation which trusted the international community that it could maintain humanitarian values of peace and respect for other humans, and give up its nuclear arsenal while relying on international security agreements.
They want us to forget that what happened in Leningrad was the direct result of Stalin’s stupidity and his earlier collaboration with Hitler, which resulted in many lost lives and murders during his earlier wars against Finland and Poland. Fedoseev obviously failed to say that the German war against Soviet Union was just like one gangster outsmarting another one with a sneaky attack.
Frankly, we really need to look at Russian culture of the last few centuries for what it has always been: a thin crust of highly sophisticated European-style culture, covering a very brutal and ruthless colonial power, which has total disregard for the basic human rights and international laws, and which has more to do with the brutal Mongol empire than with the old Kievan Rus’.
I am terrified to think what will happen if the Western elites buy Putin’s repugnant narrative wrapped in thin layer of high art and distorted history. We will see a new world where corruption and brutal force dominate international politics.
“Unprovoked” depends on how many years or decades of US-NATO-USSR-Russia relations you care to consider.
For instance, professor Jeffrey Sachs is someone who no longer appears on CNN, but youtube. Dissenters do exist.
Still, you`ll sleep better just reading “the news”.
The Russians moved troops AWAY from its border with Finland in order to support the invasion of Ukraine. They know very well there is no threat of invasion by NATO.
Russia’s paranoid delusion that new NATO members Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were plotting to invade doesn’t count as a “provocation”.
All they have is their delusion that NATO, which turns out to not even have enough shells to stock the war in Ukraine, wanted to bring ruin to Europe by starting a war with Russia.
Let’s not forget that without Russia’s help in WWII we would all be speaking German. Putin is as bad as Stalin and it’s time there was another revolution.
Without British and Commonwealth help,supplies, the Russians wouldn’t have been able to help! Look how they repay this help!
He describes the least of the horrors of the siege. Starvation was so rampant that the police had to have a special unit to deal with cannibalism. This after every dog, cat, and rat in the city had been consumed. At one point, even the rotting cowhides in a large freighter in the harbor were boiled down to a substance people could eat. I’ve read that the women of Leningrad dug so many trenches and tank traps that if put end to end they would have stretched all the way to Spain. So much misery and its happening again. Humans learn nothing.
Yes, keep making up these fake little stories. Gee, just about anything could have happened then, couldn’t it? And heaven knows, it was all so long ago. Who’s to say?
The cannibalism is a matter of historical record. Even the wiki article about the siege documents it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad#Effect_on_the_city
About one million died from hunger. With military deaths the total came to 1.3 to 1.5 million.
You shouldn´t draw conclusions from your character traits about others´`
You sentence makes no sense and I suspect you have no idea what you’re talking about.
In her autobiography, Galina Vishnevskaya referred to that cannibalism of frozen corpses she knew took place during that siege, even hinting that someone she knew had to resort to that survival tactic.
People, please. Notwithstanding what is happening now, the sacrifices and suffering undergone by the Soviet people to repel the Reich are on a scale that is unimaginable. The price they paid is almost not comprehensible. Perhaps the takeaway is the need for closer study and attention to links between collective suffering of this kind . . . and what has come after.
A rare good comment in these quarters. 27 million died in the USSR. One in every 4 soldiers including 3.3 million POWs since they were used for slave labor and were often simply starved to death.
These facts have larger implications. Americans have never experienced anything even remotely similar to WWII, and their knowledge of WWII and Russia is distorted by Cold War propaganda.
The mistaken US policies when the USSR dissolved have been a disaster and an enormous loss of opportunity, now culminating in the Russo-Ukrainian War (or whatever term one wants to use.)
A large part of these policies were created by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century co-founded by Rober Kagan and his wife, Victoria Nuland, who was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2013 to 2017 after which she became Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Her recent resignation tells us something about how the war is going and the foolishness that led to it. And the American public is being kept largely in the dark about this disaster.
Putin is a monster, so this is a disaster for both the world and Russia.
Read the correspondence between Olga Freidenberg and her cousin, Boris Pasternak. Olga was a classical philologist trapped in Leningrad at the time of the siege and writes poignantly to her cousin about the affects on her survival while keeping her dignity intact. There are, of course, many personal eyewitness accounts of the brutality of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
There’s so much butthurt judging from the comments, with few exceptions. So, Natostan is panicking after telling us that Russia had already lost. Maybe, they should stop the demonization of Putin and relearn the art of diplomacy. This is not the 1930s and the old Soviet Union was assigned to the dustbin of history. Oh, and maybe rethink the policy of regime change revolutions. It seems to annoy some global actors, and it’s undemocratic.