The Russian city of Volgograd was renamed Stalingrad for the day on Saturday and pictures of Josef Stalin's face were put on buses, as Russia remembered the epic battle that turned the tide of the Second World War in the city that bore the dictator's name.
President Vladimir Putin was expected for a military parade to mark 70 years since the German surrender after the six-month Battle of Stalingrad, which became a symbol for Russians of patriotic sacrifice and unity.
He will tap a vein of sentiment that harks back to before the collapse of Moscow's Soviet empire. The city was renamed Volgograd after the war when the Communist heirs of the Soviet dictator disowned Stalin as a genocidal tyrant. But the defeat of Hitler remains a source of deep national pride in Russia.
On the river Volga, 600 miles south of Moscow, it was Tsaritsyn before the revolution, and was named after Stalin in 1925, when it was transformed into an important industrial centre.
Nikita Khrushchev, his successor as Russian leader, launched a campaign of "de-Stalinisation" afte he took power in 1953, easing repression and erasing the late dictator's name; the "hero city" became Volgograd in 1961.
The battle, however, in which up to two million died, remains immortalised as Stalingrad.
"It was our victory, the people of the Soviet Union, the people of Russia, who won this victory," Volgograd regional governor Sergei Bazhenov said in a television interview. "The most important thing is to maintain this patriotic mood."
For 200 days, Germans and Russians fought hand to hand, street by street and from room to room, battling the winter cold at the end and, for the Germans, starvation too. Surrounded in the ruins, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus defied Hitler's final fight-to-the-death order and surrendered, on February 2, 1943.
The Telegraph, 02 Feb 2013
