A LIVING WALL

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 70, 19 September 1941, Page 5

A LIVING WALL

DEFENCE OF LENINGRAD

A REDOUBTABLE PEOPLE

Since the Finnish war Leningrad, being a border city, has always been ahead of Moscow in A.R.P. consciousness and organisation, states the Moscow correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph". Old professors, some of whom fought the Japanese in 1903, have taken up arms again side by side with their students and laboratory attendants. Members of the famous Pavlovsjs Medical Institute have issued a statement declaring: "We professors, teachers, and doctors, and all our students with us, will do our duty to the very last and give our all to defend our fatherland and our own city—our lives, too, if they are wanted." Thousands of such resolutions swearing never to let the enemy into Lenin's city were voted by workmen, - clerks, schoolboys, and schoolgirls the moment Marshal Voroshilov's appeal reached them. These were not the old resolutions of peacetime, which had become something Of a habit. They were carried by shouting crowds. Leningrad is Russia's second greatest industrial area. She is completely equipped from her own munition plants, which her citizens claim are bigger and better than,, for instance, the immense Putiloff plant in Moscow. In the supply of weapons she is selfsufficing. EVERY FACTORY A BASTION. Incidentally, some of these works form1 immensely strong points for defence. • "Every Leningrad factory is a powerful bastion in the defence system of our beloved city,": stated a Leningrad man, telling the story of how his beloved city—that adjective } appears time after time in all messages—is be-J coming "a terrific armed camp." "The Leningradzi," he adds, "are inflexibly determined to defend her with their breasts." In this surge of nearly 3,000,000 people to defend their city there is a redoubtable blend of civic pride. Leningrad has been one of the world's great capitals. Great events have in the past centred in the city, including the Russian Revolution. "Leningrad goes into action," "Leningrad can take it"—these are the city's slogans. Then there is the old Rtissian tradition of "opolchenie," or mobilising the people. This has been built up through centuries against the invader., in a land without strong geographical frontiers and leavened by an instinctive pride in being so numerous and so great a nation. Again, whereas Moscow has never had an enemy at her gates since Napoleon in 1812, the citizens of Leningrad actually fought in their own suburbs against the White Russian army of Yudenitch just over 20 years ago.