Sputnik Adventures

I’m safe and sound in Ufa, the cloak and dagger about police and scams notwithstanding. However, one more weird thing happened at the Volgograd train station before I left–I was laying low near the underpass to the train platforms when a woman approached me and said, ‘What train are you going on?’ ‘Ufa’, I blurt brightly. She strode off. All my paranoia that there was some fix in to fine this Yankee for some infraction was instantly renewed. I hot-footed it to the platform and skulked behind the stairway until the train pulled up and I hopped on board. I was just not made for these cat and mouse games.

A bit on Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad)–a fine city in its current incarnation, entirely built after WWII. The city is justifiably proud of its courage and incredible sacrifice during the war. After the battle of Stalingrad not one stone was left atop another. Months of withering bombardment by advancing German forces had left over half a million Red Army dead before the German retreat. The Germans needed Volgograd badly to gain access to Russian oil further down the Volga and Caspian at Baku; to deny it to the Russians and to control the Volga would have been a near-fatal blow to the Soviet front. Stalin recognized the importance of Stalingrad both strategically and psychologically, and dedicated every possible shred of manpower and materiel to its defense. The result was untold destruction and loss of life, but with the Germans turned away after months of bitter fighting the battle proved to be the turning point against Axis powers.

Today renamed Volgograd, I found a quiet city center with a lively park on the Volga banks. It’s an industrial town, and material wealth visible on the street seemed to be inching up, as elsewhere in Russia. Volograd is all about remembering the past, and has an excellent museum dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad. Far more moving, though, is the memorial Mamaev Kurgan with a triumphant statue of Mother Russia wielding a huge sword. This is a Statue of Liberty-sized monument, and approaching it is moving not just for its magnificence. Mamaev Kurgan stands at the top of a hill that saw the abolute worst horrors of battle. No man’s land was a handful of yards between enemy lines, and continuous shelling was matched by waves of soldiers sent to certain doom, to claim a few steps’ advance. The hill was so ravaged by battle that for years nothing would grow on it. No one at the monument the sunny day I saw it was unmindful of the scene before them, and one old man walking slowly behind me keeping repeating, ‘Smyert, smyert’ (‘the death, the death’).

Sorry to leave it on that note today sputniki. Russia paid a terrible price against fascism and then some, and for that we, to this day, owe it a debt of gratitude.

Sputnik Lee

Details on Crimea, cave cities and Bashkiria to come.

Tags: Russia, Tarricone, Travel, Travel, Volgograd

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