Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kiev, Kursk (The World At War -- Part 11)

"Visitors in search of the city [of London] as it was in wartime can find no better place to begin their quest than the Imperial War Museum. It is, perhaps, appropriate that a museum dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge concerning mankind’s worst folly should be housed in a former mental institution. The building of the Royal Bethlehem Hospital or "Bedlam" was completed in 1815. The displays focus not only on the horrors and heroics of the battlefield but also on effects of modern warfare upon society at large. The Blitz Experience, a reconstruction of an air raid shelter and bombed streetfront, stirs the consciousness with the terrible sights, sounds and smells of the city under attack."

Richard Doody worldatwar.net

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Last night we watched Thames Television's "The World At War" Part 11 -- Red Star: The Soviet Union (1941 - 1943) documenting the Soviet Army's breaking of the seige of Leningrad, and the retaking from the Nazi's of such cities as Kiev and Kursk. 20 million Soviet men, women, and children were killed in the Slavic peoples', and their Soviet-era neighbors', "Great Patriotic War". Every Soviet-era family lost members in this defensive war against the Nazis. (N. lost an uncle in the Battle of Kursk.) During the "Great Patriotic War", Stalin allowed for the revival of Russian Orthodoxy and pre-Soviet forms of social behavior in order to boost national morale.



















The Kursk Icon of the Mother of God