(2 of 3)
Zhdanov's Bailiwick at present is a region of 55,500 square miles bordering on Estonia, Latvia and Finland. To the west it is a land of vast fields; to the east, of dense forests. Its principal crops, besides forests, are flax and fodder; its resources are peat, quartz and bauxite. It manufactures aluminum, cellulose, paper, fertilizers, glass and wood articles. It contains 7,000,000 people.
More than 3,000,000 of them live in Leningrad itself, where beats the pulse of all northwestern Russia. Into Leningrad funnel five railroads. Largest industrial centre of the U. S. S. R., Leningrad was its industrial kindergarten, where was built the first Russian tractor, first dynamo, first blooming mill; today it is the aristocrat of Russian manufacturing centres, specializing in finishing processes, in machine tools, chemical goods (including explosives), shipbuilding; in making watches, binoculars, electric bulbs, hosiery, shoes, rubber goods, electrical appliances, locomotives, tractors, motorcycles. In 1937 Leningrad produced 9,000,000,000 rubles ($1,800,000,000) worth of goods.
This was the plant that Stalin, Zhdanov and Molotov sought to protect against aggression by the wild & woolly Finns. But Leningrad is worth far more to the rulers of Russia than its industrial plant. Strategically it is the gateway to & from Russia. And culturally it is the one heritage left from the rule of the Tsars. Although Soviet Russians are proletarians and Moscow is their proletarian capital, they are also, like all parvenus, snobs; and in Leningrad, though it is self-consciously proletarianized, they have carefully and religiously preserved all the monuments and landmarks of their oppressors.
Peter the Great built his European capital on islands and marshes at bargain-counter rates in human lives. The city grew in all directions from the wooden Admiralty, built in 1703. Later rulers drained the swamps, threw bridges across the Neva, laid out parks. In the mid-18th Century Rastrelli designed a series of baroque buildings, including the Winter Palace (scene of the 1905 massacre) and the Smolny Monastery, next door to the Smolny Institute (where Nikolai Lenin historically observed: "We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist orders"). Under Catherine II classicism replaced the baroque. Alexander I introduced "architectural landscapes" and the city took on the low-lying appearance it still has, with church towers and the slender, gilded spire of the new Admiralty pointing gracefully at the sky.