![]() ![]() The fate of the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad is symbolic. Especially targeted were those state and Party officials who had played a significant role in defending the city. By 1952, over two thousand municipal officials had been fired. Subsequent trials followed, in which more than two hundred Lenigraders were convicted on trumped-up political charges. Found guilty in September 1950, six of the nine defendants were sentenced to death and immediately shot. ![]() In February 1949, the Politburo brought fabricated charges of treason against top Leningrad leaders, accusing them of attempting to establish a rival party organization. In order to keep the potentially dangerous city in check and remove any threat that might be posed by Leningrad's younger, popular leaders, Stalin endorsed the so-called "Leningrad Affair". In unendurable conditions, they had not succumbed or surrendered – and all this without assistance from Moscow. The siege had only increased this nagging suspicion: for almost 900 days, the city leaders, cut off in blockaded Leningrad, had acted autonomously and defended the city with irreproachable courage. He feared the threat posed by city's status as cradle of the Revolution and former imperial capital with its enormous cultural, scientific, and economic significance. But Stalin, smoking his pipe in Moscow, was not at ease. Facades were renovated, streets repaved, and parks replanted. The Hermitage story is emblematic of the spirit of regeneration that gripped the city itself. New Prospekt Stalina (Moskovsky Prospekt) In October 1945, these invaluable objects were shipped back to Leningrad and by 4 November, sixty-nine halls in the Hermitage had been opened to the public. Ironically, a good portion of these treasures were safely stored in the Ipatiev House, where in 1918 the last Romanov Tsar and his family had been murdered by the Bolsheviks. Many of its numerous rooms contained nothing but empty gilt frames shortly after the Nazi invasion, museum staff and volunteers had worked around the clock, packing two freight trains with over a million exhibits that were shipped to the town of Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains. Repairs to the Hermitage, which had suffered considerable damage during the bombing attacks, started even before the war ended. In the words of the Leningrad poet, Sergei Davydov: "Here lies half the city." Almost uncountable, about half a million of them were buried in 186 mass graves at the Piskarevsky Memorial Cemetery, which during the war was just an enormous empty pit into which the bodies had been dumped. Rebuilding included the arduous task of disposing of the bodies of the blockade's many victims. ![]()
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