Yesterday I came across this collection of nostalgic photographs that bring back memories from the USSR times. I was too young to see some of those images in real life, but they still have meaning to me. Most though are as they were back then.
Yet, these are staged photographs of some every day items. Today I came across something much more real and something much more dramatic. It is again a collection of images, but in a video form. The video shows the staggering difference between the modern day Saint Petersburg and Leningrad (as it was called back then) during the Siege. As Wikipedia puts it: “It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history and one of the most costly in terms of human casualties”. It lasted for 872 days and it took lives of millions of people. As per Wikipedia: 1,017,881 were killed, captured, or missing and 2,418,18 wounded or sick from the Red Army forces. Civilian casualties are in the numbers of 642,000 during the siege and 400,000 at evacuations. These are only those numbers that were verified. In reality that was much more.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ9LGdamU20]