"The double front doors were skillfully camouflaged, barred up with meter-long sheets of old partially rusted tin with inch-thick boards nailed across them. Thick curved nails (glued with epoxy resin) stuck out of wood and iron. Everything was well thought out and the scenery looked convincing. To the right of the door frame, an inhospitable wire with two bare contacts was hanging. You needed to close them to make the bell ring in the depths of the apartment. In case everyone left the workshop, there was a way to securely close the entrance. For this purpose, a strong and heavy inter-door hook and a system of levers were used. The door could be opened and closed by means of two external rope ends tied to the latch. Seeing this mechanism in action always made an indelible impression on newcomers."

"The works create new poetry, which involuntarily rivals with habitual esthetic stereotypes. For instance, we accept as a common notion to worship joyously the classic beauty of St. Petersburg, its harmony and stately grandeur. This exposition does have variations of that sort. But observe “Night Nevsky” by Parygin. Rough to the touch texture, dark abyss. In the darkness urgent lights explode. They bring forth immediate spiritual angst. One does not regard the regal magnificence of the urban landscape-it is neither cast aside, nor left behind the curtains, as dramatism of modern perception takes over. One regards not a city museum for curious crowds, but one beholds the habitat of our days where we seek, love, fight, suffer. That art defines perception."

"There is nothing better than Nevsky Prospect, at least in St. Petersburg; for him he is everything. Why this street does not shine – the beauty of our capital! I know that none of its pale and bureaucratic residents will exchange for all the benefits of Nevsky Prospect. Not only someone who is twenty-five years old, a wonderful mustache and an amazingly tailored frock coat, but even someone with white hair popping out on their chin and a head as smooth as a silver dish is delighted with Nevsky Prospect. And ladies! Oh, ladies are even more pleased with Nevsky Prospect. And who doesn't like it? As soon as you climb onto Nevsky Prospekt, it already smells of one party. At least he had some necessary, necessary business, but, having climbed on it, surely, you will forget about any business. Here is the only place where people are shown unnecessarily, where their need and mercantile interest, which embraces the whole of Petersburg, has not driven them."

"At about six in the evening we arrived safely in St. Petersburg, which has changed so much since my departure from there that I did not recognize it at all. From the very beginning we entered a long and wide alley, (a small part of the road not far from the Admiralty), and justly called the avenue, because its end is almost invisible. It was laid only in a few years and exclusively by the hands of captured Swedes. Despite the fact that the trees planted on both sides of it in three or four rows are still small, it is unusually beautiful in its enormous length and the purity in which it is kept (captured Swedes must clean it every Saturday), and it makes a wonderful appearance , which I have not seen anywhere else. On the Admiralty, a beautiful and huge building at the end of this road, there is a beautiful and rather tall spitz, which goes directly opposite the avenue."

"Comrades, it is in strenous circumstances that we are today celebrating the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution. The perfidious attack of the German brigands and the war which has been forced upon us have placed our country in jeopardy. We have temporarily lost a number of regions, the enemy has appeared at the gates of Leningrad and Moscow. The enemy reckoned that after the very first blow our army would be dispersed, and our country would be forced to its knees. But the enemy sadly miscalculated. In spite of the temporary reverses our army and navy are heroically repulsing the enemy's attacks along the whole front and inflicting heavy losses upon him, while our country - our entire country - has formed itself into one fighting camp in order, together with our Army and our Navy, to encompass the defeat of the German invaders. There were times when our country was in even more difficult straits than today. Recall the year 1918, when we celebrated the first anniversary of the October Revolution. Three-quarters of our country was at that time in the hands of foreign invaders. The Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East were temporarily lost to us. We had no allies, we had no Red Army - we had only just begun to form it; there was a shortage of food, of armaments, of clothing for the army. Fouteen states were pressing on our country. But we did not despond, we did not lose heart. In the fire of war we forged the Red Army and converted our country into a military camp. The spirit of the great Lenin animated us in the war against the invaders. And what happened? We routed the invaders, recovered all our lost territory, and achieved victory."

"The Communists’ central position was crucial to their war effort, as they had control of the vital populous centres, the industrial areas, including key arms factories around Moscow, and of leading rail nodes, notably Moscow and St Petersburg. Arms supplies were a vital element. For example, foreign troops were sent to Archangel and eventually deployed along the Northern Dvina River to prevent the Communists from seizing the sizeable amount of Western armaments originally destined for the imperial Russian army. As was to be the case in World War Two, these arms had been shipped from Britain. In control of the major cities, the Communists were able to seize and make use of dominance of the telegraph, telephone and postal services. This situation was opposite to the geo-strategy of conflict seen with the Maoist theory of war and with the guerrilla operations that characterised most (but not all) of the conflicts in the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s. In these, the revolutionaries operated from marginal areas, while their opponents controlled the cities. However, in the Russian Civil War, in contrast to the Bolsheviks, the Whites lacked manufacturing capacity."

"The beginning of October, 1941, I was in Leningrad, commanding the troops of the Leningrad Front. Those days were difficult for all of us who had been through the September fighting for Leningrad. But our forces were succeeding in thwarting the enemy's plans. Because of the unparalleled steadfastness and mass heroism of the Soviet soldiers, sailors and noncommissioned officers and the endurance of commanders and political officers, the enemy was encountering an unsurmountable defense on the approaches to the city. By the end of September pressure was noticeably relaxed on all sectors and the front line had become stabilized. But this is not the place to tell the story of the Leningrad fighting nor of the attempted seizure of the city named for the great Lenin. I mention it only to emphasize that all of us, from the Military Council of the front down to the city's ordinary defenders, in those days lived with but a single thought: to stop the enemy no matter what. Everyone did all he could in his assigned post."

"Officials at the Reich Security Main Office planned the annihilation with cynical precision. They planned a war that declared the entire Soviet population – the entire Soviet population – to be the enemies, from newborn babies to the very old. The enemies were to be defeated not just militarily, but were also to be made to pay for the war imposed upon them themselves, with their lives, their property, with everything that was part of their existence. The entire European part of the Soviet Union, whole stretches of today's Ukraine and Belarus – and I quote from the orders – were to be "cleansed" and prepared for German colonisation. Metropolises such as Leningrad, present-day Saint Petersburg, Moscow or Kyiv, were to be razed to the ground."

"By retaining control of St Petersburg and Moscow, the Communists, in a traditional Russian response to attackers, could afford to trade space for time. They did so in what was very much a war of movement, a characteristic of a conflict with a lower force density than that on the Western Front in World War One. Indeed, by October 1919, White forces were within 250 miles of Moscow, as well as close to St Petersburg. Nevertheless, the Communist ability to trade space for time, while benefiting from a central position, provided an opportunity to benefit from the failings of the anti- Communist forces. These failings owed much to their internal divisions and to their political and strategic mismanagement. Although, in combination, there was a formidable array of opponents, each of the anti-Communist forces had its own goals, and they sometimes took non-cooperation as far as conflict."

"...everything was going in regular caravans to the summer villas. It seemed as though Petersburg threatened to become a wilderness, so that at last I felt ashamed, mortified and sad that I had nowhere to go for the holidays and no reason to go away. I was ready to go away with every waggon, to drive off with every gentleman of respectable appearance who took a cab; but no one—absolutely no one—invited me."

"I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentleman, that to be too conscious is an illness--a real thorough-going illness. For an's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg."