Victory Day in Saint Petersburg

The Necropolis in Saint Petersburg has some famous inhabitants.

This is the grave below is of the composer Tchaikovsky...

You know my temperature's rising
And the jukebox's blows a fuse
My hearts beating rhythm
And my soul keeps singing the blues
Roll over Beethoven
And tell Tchaikovsky the news

Dostoyevsky is also buried here I  think I have one of his books on my Kindle as a thing on my "to do" list.

Perhaps 1,500,000 persons died during the siege of Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), by far the most casualties ever suffered by a single city...more than 10 times the death toll of Hiroshima.

Victory day parades start at 10 AM in Moscow and 5 PM in Saint Petersburg. The only reason I can see for that is to allow Putin to attend both parades. About 6 PM I thought I saw him come by wearing a white baseball cap. Maybe not?

Approximately 28 million Russians died defeating the Germans. The Victory Day parade here has hundreds of thousands of people carrying pictures of dead grandfathers and grandmothers. No military equipment.

The siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days. After the dogs, rats and crows were eaten, there were two kinds of cannibalism, those that ate people and those that ate corpses.

Many of the remaining veterans are too infirm to walk. They ride special buses or are pushed in wheelchairs.

If you win the war they give you parades. If you lose, forget it.

By December 1942, the NKVD arrested 2,105 cannibals dividing them into two legal categories: corpse-eating (trupoyedstvo) and person-eating (lyudoyedstvo). The latter were usually shot while the former were sent to prison. The Soviet Criminal Code had no provision for cannibalism so all convictions were carried out under Code Article 59—3, "special category banditry".