History surrounds many battles with the aura of legend: Thermopylae, Cannae, Hastings, Verdun, the Bulge. Few of them can match in intensity and fury, or in the significance of their results, the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, when the long thrust of Hitler's armies into Russia was halted and reversed. This week the 720,000 people of Volgograd—as Stalingrad was renamed in 1961 during Khrushchev's destalinization campaign—mark the 25th anniversary of the end of the furious battle on the Volga's west bank, in which about 300,000 soldiers and civilians lost their lives. For its...
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