I was a bit overwhelmed to be in St Petersburg, a humble untraveled American, here at this classic Soviet monument built to honor unimaginable suffering and sacrifice. It was the summer of 1993, the year of our big college choir tour to Sweden, Russia, and Estonia. One of our tourist forays brought our bus to this edifice on the southern edge of the city, erected near the German Army’s farthest point of advance in World War II. This is where citizens of the Soviet Union held back the Nazi juggernaut.
Events transpired to suppress what little good sense I may have had as an overly dramatic twenty-two-year-old. Having recently read Harrison Salisbury’s “The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad,” I felt I was more keenly aware than my fellow students of the significance of this tribute site and the events that inspired its construction. Was I slightly miffed that my peers seemed a bit light-hearted that day? If you ever feel the tug to lecture but you’re not a professor in a classroom, consider suppressing that urge. (A truism I should more frequently honor)
The tour bus was equipped with a public address system, so after I snapped this picture, I availed myself of the opportunity to commandeer the microphone and launch into an impromptu lecture on the stunning sacrifice of the Russian people in this place, commemorated by this very monument. “You all need to understand how really terrible this was. Almost a million people died in and around this city.”
I don’t really know what I expected to accomplish—was I trying to shame my friends? My diatribe complete, I waited for a respectful response. What I got was a nervous, “Um, thank you,” from our Russian tour guide as she gingerly repossessed the microphone. My sermon flopped, my reputation as a bit of a weirdo enhanced— “What’s his problem?”
In a (hopefully) more guarded tone than that of my 30-year-ago self … regardless of current politics, the conflicts of this generation, and the unjust invasion of Ukraine, it is not wrong to occasionally pause for a respectful moment to consider the sacrifices made by millions around the globe to defeat evil some eighty years ago.
