LENINGRAD IN DECAY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 10 September 1925, Page 10

LENINGRAD IN DECAY.

GHOST OF ITS OLD SELF

DROP IN POPULATION. No city in Russia has been more profoundly affected by the revolution and its attermath than Leningrad, the o.d capital. Once ti.e “head” of Russia, as Moscow was its “heart,” the old St. Petersburg seems to have lost its intellectual supremacy and its artistic prestige. Tne city is merely a decaying monument of the past. The removal of the capital to Moscow would inevitably have spelled Leningrad’s doom as a political centre, but the metropolis which Peter the Great built more than 200 years ago has greatly deteriorated in . other respects. Most of its great buildings* and private mansions are falling into rain for lack of money with which to repair them. All the fine ioreign embassy buildings, including that [formerly occupied by the Americans, show the ravages of time, weather, and neglect. 'Phe Winter Palace, the Admiralty, all the elegant edifices along the Neva, the palaces of the nobles, v.ear a dull, drab dress, as if mourning for the past. The population has decreased from 1,600,CO!) to 650,000. The foreign visitor expresses wonder how even this reduced number can support themselves. for the city has few' industries, and there is much unemployment. The business life of the city is confined almost entirely to halting retail trade.

Tiie famous Nevsky Prospect, the ‘•Broadway” of Leningrad, is only a ghost of its former splendour, gaiety, and pictuiesquenessv The small retail stores, bazaars, arcades, confectioners, emporiums, and bookshops that once made the broad thoroughfare vie with Fifth Avenue in New York, have given place to unattractive co-operative and State stores, cheap cinema theatres, and Communist centres.

Ail credit, however, must be given the Bolsheviks for having, on their slender means, kept the public,museums, picture galleries, parks and other places un to their former standards. As in the days of the Czars, the Hermitage Fine Aits Museum retains its plaie as one of the finest in all Europe. Its collection of Rembrandt, Van Dyck Murillo, Velasquez, Snyders, and Wmiverman paintings is said to be superior to that of the Metropolitan M use'll in in New York.

Tlie Bolsheviks appear to have shown th" same indifference and lack of sentiment towards Leningrad as a political centre as the Turks have manifested towards Constantinople. In removing tli© seat of government from Leningrad to Moscow, tlie Bolsheviks, like the” Turkish Nationalists, who transferied their capital to Angora, were actuated by reasons of 'security. They believed the site which Peter the Great chose for the national capital on the shores of the Gulf of Finland exposed them too much to the danger of foreign attack. There was nothing, they sad, to prevent any of the European navies irom sweeping across the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland an:l invading Russia’s shores.

Moreover, there are few railroad highways out of Leningrad by which the Bolsheviks could flee in the event •>f foreign attack, while in Moscow there arc many convenient exits if ti e Government should ever be pressed to leave the capital in a hurry. Moscow is 400 mils inland from the nearest body of water to which a foreign foe would have access, which gives the Bolsheviks immunity from foreign incursion