Leningrad

Leningrad was the name of Saint Petersburg, Russia, from 1924 to 1991, years in which Moscow was the capital. In the Second World War the city was besieged from September 1941 to January 1944, and an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million civilians died, most of them from starvation. Two religious figures tied to the city suffered under Soviet rule. The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, settled here in 1924 and was arrested and sentenced to death in 1927; the sentence was commuted to internal exile, and he was then allowed to leave for Riga. In 1937 the Russian Orthodox priest and thinker Pavel Florensky was shot in a forest near the city.

1 teacher