Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing. To make matters worse, the food shortages that first sparked the revolution during
the war continued well afterwards. Fuel was also in short supply - homes went un-
heated, factory gates stayed shut and city services were stopped.
The new regime needed a new identity. The old aristocratic labels would not do.
The city underwent a name-changing mania - streets, squares and bridges were given
more appropriate socialist sobriquets. Once known as Orlov Sq, the plaza fronting
Smolny Institute was renamed after the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Znamenskaya
Sq, named after a nearby church, became Uprising Sq (pl Vosstaniya). The city itself
was rechristened Leningrad in 1924, to honour the scourge of the old empire. The
change ran much deeper: make no mistake, the old aristocratic world was gone. 'For
centuries, our grandfathers and fathers have had to clean up their shit,' railed Trotsky.
'Now it is time they clean up ours.' Noble pedigree became a marker for discrimina-
tion and exploitation. Family mansions were expropriated; art treasures were seized;
churches were closed.
Leningrad was eventually revived with a proletarian transfusion. At the beginning
of the 1930s the socialist state launched an intensive campaign of economic develop-
ment, which reinvigorated the city's industrial sector. New scientific and military re-
search institutes were fitted upon the city's strong higher-education foundations. On
the eve of WWII, the population climbed to over three million. Public works projects
for the people were undertaken - polished underground metro stations, colossal sports
complexes and streamlined constructivist buildings muscled in next to the peeling
pastels and cracked baroque of the misty past.
BONES OF CONTENTION
What happened to the last members of the royal family - even after their execu-
tion in 1918 - is a mixture of the macabre, the mysterious and the just plain
messy.
The Romanov remains resurfaced in 1976, when a group of local scientists
discovered them near Yekaterinburg. So politically sensitive was this issue that
the discovery was kept secret until the remains were finally fully excavated in
1991. The bones of nine people were tentatively identified as Tsar Nicholas II,
