70th anniversary of Stalingrad: my Volgograd photos

[Adam Carr]

Seventy years ago today, on 2 February 1943, the last German forces in Stalingrad surrendered to the Red Army, ending a six-month battle which had cost about one million lives. In September last year I visited Volgograd, the southern Russian city once known as Stalingrad, scene of this decisive battle of World War II. Volgograd is not a very impressive city. Almost totally destroyed in the six months of fighting, it was rebuilt after the war as a city of grey concrete apartment blocks, which now show all the effects of 60 years of neglect. Unlike booming Moscow and St Petersburg, it is still a poor city, full of derelict Soviet-era factories, with crumbling facades, cracked pavements and ancient trolley-buses. The sign on the airport terminal building says “VOLGOGRAD: HERO CITY”, but it doesn’t look very heroic close up.

[Adam Carr]

This is my hotel, the Volgograd, on Peace Street (Ulitsa Mira), one of the very few prewar buildings thought worthy of restoration after the war. This is apparently because Stalin stayed at the hotel when he visited in 1925, at the time Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad.

[Adam Carr]

Round the corner from the hotel is the Avenue of Heroes (Ulitsa Alleya Geroyev), a pleasant tree-lined street with some quite good cafes. In the centre is this memorial – one of many in Volgograd – with an eternal flame. As with all the war memorials I saw in Russia (which is quite a lot) there were freshly laid wreaths and flowers. World War II is not ancient history for the Russians.

[Adam Carr]

The Avenue of Heroes leads down to the bank of the mighty Volga, where it ends in this rather pompous classical monument. I was told that this marks the spot where Marshal Chuikov had his headquarters dug into the river embankment, but my map doesn’t seem to confirm this.

[Adam Carr]

On the pillars of the monument are inscribed the names of all the Red Army men who were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union for their deeds during the battle of Stalingrad – a very large number.

[Adam Carr]

Also not far from my hotel, on Fallen Warriors Square (Ploshchad Pavshikh Bortsov) is the Univermag Department Store, which has been rebuilt since the war. Field Marshal Paulus had his final headquarters in the basement of the store, as is recorded on this plaque.

[Adam Carr]

The distinctive curved facade of the prewar Univermag still exists, however, now concealed behind the postwar store and the Intourist Hotel. It’s visible from the loading bay of the postwar store. Apparently the ruined building was patched up immediately after the war, but when the street plan was changed it disappeared behind the new buildings.

[Adam Carr]

This photo in the Defence of Stalingrad Museum shows the Univermag as it looked before the war. It will be seen that the postwar facade is missing the top floor. My surmise is that this was damaged beyond repair and was not reconstructed after the war.

[Adam Carr]

On the façade of this hospital we see the Soviet pantheon still in place, 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. From left: Marx, Engels, Lenin and… who was in the fourth panel? Stalin, of course, but his face and name have been removed from city since Khrushchev denounced him in 1956.

[Adam Carr]

Volgograd is strung out along the west bank of the Volga on an axis roughly south-west to north-east. The main street, Lenin Prospect (Leninski Prospekt), runs most of the length of the city. Almost nothing is left of the pre-war city, and the new city has been built in a very unlovely Soviet utilitarian style. This is the city library, named for the Soviet novelist and Stalin toady Maxim Gorki.

[Adam Carr]

Heading north-east from the city centre brings one to Pavlov’s House. This was a small apartment block which a group of Red Army men led by Sergeant Pavlov defended against successive German attacks for several weeks. Marshal Chuikov later said that the Germans suffered more casualties taking this one building than they did taking Paris. The current building is a postwar reconstruction and the brick memorial a recent addition.

[Adam Carr]

Opposite Pavlov’s House is the white concrete cylinder of the Defence of Stalingrad Museum. Next to it is the empty shell of the pre-war flour mill (ironically, originally built by a German company), which has been preserved as a reminder of what the whole city looked like in 1943.

[Adam Carr]

Along the river embankment in front of the museum are parked T-34 tanks, which one sees all over Russia mounted on plinths or just standing in parks as memorials.

[Adam Carr]

This is the main entrance to the museum.

[Adam Carr]

Inside the museum can be seen troupes of Russian school kids being taught the official Russian version of history.