SERGEI MEDVEDEV ⟩ Russia has forfeited the right to speak of the Siege of Leningrad and the victory of 1945.

2026-02-11 - 10:17

In the spring of 1933 my grandmother, then 19 years old, travelled with her husband from Moscow to the seaside town of Novorossiysk, where the family owned a fenced summer house near Gelendzhik. The train went through Kharkiv, and the young couple saw from the window something my grandmother would still speak of in a whisper many years later. At stops between stations and at small stations themselves, there crawled up to the train exhausted, ragged people – living skeletons – who stretched their bony hands towards the carriages, begging for food, writes writer and historian Sergei Medvedev in his recent essay.