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In the "white nights" of May, Leningrad is particularly beautiful, with the sky aglow from Arctic lights and the birch trees in the parks shining against the dark earth. Students study at their windows, needing no artificial light; sometimes they go out and stroll along the embankment behind the Winter Palace (now the Palace of Art), where, across the Neva, they can see the great bulk of the Peter and Paul Fortress, in which are buried many Tsars. Along the Prospect of the 25th of October (the Nevsky Prospect of Tolstoy's heroes' time) sparrows are thick in the trees. On this street is one of the world's largest libraries (5,000,000 volumes), one of 511 in Leningrad. It passes October Station, from which Bolsheviks used to leave for Siberia, and ends near the cemetery where lie the bones of Moussorgsky, Dostoevsky, Tschaikowsky and many another famed Russian artist.
Leningrad has 60 institutions of higher learning, 103 technical schools, 487 elementary and secondary schools (412,000 pupils), 25 theatres, 42 moving picture houses, 37 museums, 107 scientific research institutes, 89 hospitals, 262 dispensaries, 240 nurseries and 21 stadiums including the huge K. I. M. (Communist Youth International) stadium west of Vasilyevski Ostrov (island), Leningrad's Greenwich Village. Tsarist slums have been replaced by modern workers' houses, gutters by sewers, alleys by paved streets. In 1938 Leningrad spent 364,000,000 rubles ($72,800,000) on construction work alone. The city's total budget was 1,140,000,000 rubles ($228,000,000).
All this investment seemed safe last week to Comrade Zhdanov. If all went well, he may have told himself, Leningrad might become the capital of northern Europe. Last week the Marine War Museum in the Admiralty opened an exhibition depicting Russian naval history since Peter the Great, but Russia's naval history has never glowed too brightly. Comrade Zhdanov may just possibly have been thinking about a British fleet off Petsamo.