-Caveat Lector-
From: "Rick Rozoff" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: "We fought
for Stalingrad, not Volgograd"
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/02/03/1044122320411.html
The Age (Australia)
February 4, 2003
(New York Times)
Stalingrad heroes fight for a name
Isai Bramnik, 83, returned on Sunday to "this
beautiful city", as he put
it, "which was reborn out
of ashes".
Although slowed by age, he
managed to climb the hill
to the enormous statue that looms over the city
symbolising the tenacious defence of this place, once
called Stalingrad.
On Sunday, the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union's
victory at
Stalingrad, Russia honoured the veterans of
one of the grisliest and most
pivotal battles of World
War II with wreathes, speeches, a military parade
and
a special payment of 1500 rubles, about $A80, to each
veteran.
But what many veterans said they really wanted was not
the honours
or the rubles - they wanted the old name
back. "We fought for Stalingrad,
not Volgograd," said
Mr Bramnik, a commissar for a sapper unit during the
war. He travelled from Novorossisk, on the Black Sea,
for the
anniversary.
Nostalgic for a glorious past, inspired! by the
dwindling ranks of veterans and motivated, some say,
by politics, a
determined group of lawmakers has
started a campaign to restore the name
that came to
symbolise the Soviet Union's stunning reversal of
fortune
in what is known here as the Great Patriotic
War.
The campaign,
which may soon head to the Russian
federal legislature, is the latest
manifestation of an
awkward, emotionally charged debate about which parts
of the Soviet Union's history are safe to celebrate as
Russia's.
Stalingrad has had an almost mythic place in Soviet
and now Russian
history. It was the scene of an epic
200-day battle that came to represent
the Soviets'
determination to stand fast against the German army's
thrust to the Volga River.
After more than a year of defeat after
defeat, the Red
Army desperately held the remnants of the city through
the autumn of 1942, sometimes only a few hundred
metres f! rom the
river, before mounting a daring
offensive in November that encircled the
German force
and ultimately tore it to shreds. German commander
Field
Marshal Friedrich von Paulus surrendered on
January 31.
More than a
million Soviet soldiers and civilians and
several hundred thousand Germans
died in the battle.
Its legacy is an ambiguous one, not only because of
its association with Stalin but also because
historians agree that
Stalin's policies and purges
prolonged the suffering of the nation during
the war,
including his notorious order to troops not to
retreat.
It was that legacy, along with the terrors of Stalin's
rule, that
prompted Nikita Khrushchev, himself a
veteran of the battle, to have the
city's name changed
in 1961 to one that means simply "city on the Volga".
Among the ageing veterans gathered here on Sunday
support for the
idea of restoring the name was all but
unanimo! us.
President
Vladimir Putin, a cautious, sometimes coy
politician, appeared to dash their
hopes saying that a
change now "would generate some sort of suspicions
that we are returning to the times of Stalinism".
Appearing in
Volgograd on Sunday evening, Mr Putin
heaped praise on the veterans, saying
they affirmed
Russia's determination to unite itself against a
common
enemy.
Significantly, or not, he closed his remarks by
referring to
the veterans as "Stalingraders".
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