[France24] The Nazis began their siege of Leningrad on September 8, 1941 — trying to starve the USSR's second-largest city into submission just a few months after launching their invasion of the country in Operation Barbarossa. For 872 days, the inhabitants of this industrial centre (now known by its original name, Saint Petersburg), went through hell as hunger, cold and bombardments killed nearly a million people. FRANCE 24 looks back at the siege, 80 years on.
The simple statements of the extraordinary 11-year-old diarist Tania Savitcheva capture best the helplessness in Leningrad: "Jenia died on December 28 at midnight. Grandma died on January 25 at three in the afternoon. Leka died on March 5 at five in the morning. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Tania is all alone."
Evacuated before the end of the siege, Savitcheva died of exhaustion on July 1, 1944. She became a symbol of this 872-day siege — the longest in modern history until that of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996 — after her elder sister Nina, who had managed to escape the surrounded city, discovered and published the diary.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.