"Joe Haldeman - Tool of the Trade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

is not too long a drive away, and today, people who are allowed to can
cross over into Helsinki and buy computers and jazz records and play
roulette for Finnish chanties. Finns seem to like Russians now, or at
least tolerate them.
But they were not fond of the Russians after Stalin's 1939
invasion, and so it was Finnish soldiers who reinforced Hitler's
battalions, converging on Leningrad on the eve of Nikola Ulinov's sixth
birthday. Leningrad was ready for them. There weren't many Soviet
soldiers there-Stalin, having no love for the European city, had drawn
most of the troops toward Moscow for the coming winter-but the
civilians had been trained in street-fighting techniques. Molotov
cocktails were mass-produced and distributed. Weapons oiled and
ammunition portioned out. The people were ready to defend their city
street by street against the implacable enemy. If the Nazis wanted
Leningrad badly enough, they would no doubt have it. But they would
first pay a terrible price.
Hitler, or his advisers, outmaneuvered the Soviets. They saw there
was no need to go into the city and fight. All you had to do was cut off
all avenues of supply, and let the natives try to live through a Russian
winter without food or fuel. Throw in some artillery. At least a third of
the city's three million would die. And then when spring came, simply
lift the siege, and push the survivors out to disrupt the rest of the Soviet
Union.
The strategy did take Leningrad by surprise, but it didn't work out
quite as neatly as Hitler had hoped. More than a million did die, but the
others didn't cave in. They lived on moldy grain and shoe leather and
hope and hate-until three Russian winters finally did to Hitler what one
had done to Napoleon. Leningrad and Russia won, even if the price
they paid would warp the city and the country with grief and fear for
the rest of the century.
 (Leningrad's reward for heroism was to become a noncity
populated by nonpersons. Malenkov and Beria implemented Stalin's
distaste for the Western city by destroying, or hiding in inaccessible
archives, all written records of the Siege.)
Five-year-old Nikola knew mere was a war going on, and like
most boy children, he vaguely approved of the idea. Even when the
artillery and bombs began dropping into the city, when sleep was
pinched off by air-raid sirens-even then, it provoked excitement more
man fear. An interesting game with obscure rules.
Then one day at noon an artillery round or a bomb fell across the
street, and Nikola ran outside breathless with excitement, and saw his
best friend's father stumbling bloodsoaked out of the wreckage of their
flat, carrying cradled in his arms what was left of his son, blown to
bloody rags and dying there in front of Nikola with a last bubbling
moan. From then on he would remember the war as quite real, and
terrible. And some parts would be too terrible to remember.
The Leningraders tried to get their children out of the city before
the fighting started in earnest. Nikola loaded a suitcase almost as big as
he was aboard a boxcar headed for the relative safety of Novgorod.
They never made it. Nazi Messerschmitts, perhaps thinking it was a