>It's Volgograd that sticks in my craw. Stalin is an ugly name.
>Stalingrad is a noble one.
Maybe its for the best though. It isn't as though Stalingrad the battle can ever be forgotten and perhaps it is too enormous an event in human history to share its name with a living city. Stalingrad the epic battle, the human tragedy, will live on. A symbol of the 20th century, a byword for the insanity of total war. But let the living city of go its own way, neither diminishing nor being diminished by that mammoth historical event named Stalingrad.
And of course Stalin's name becoming attached to the horror story of a million lost lives seems somehow more appropriate than being attached to a living city.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas