Greatest war movies I've ever seen! Hey Chris, if Lenin is still so popular why do people want to trade in "Leningrad" for "St Petersburg"?
Joanna
--- I love some of the commedies, like that one they always show arounf New Year, when the guy hets drunk in the sauna with some of his buddies in Moscow and wakes up the next morning in the apartment of a strange woman in Leningrad, with whom he falls in love. They were showing "Devushka s Gitaroi" (Girl with a Guitar) the other day, which is from the 50s I think. It was quite good. There's also the amusing one about the cop who's new on the beat and keeps hassling people for irrelevant crimes like throwing cigarette butts on the street.
As to Leningrad/Petersburg, only about 51% of the population of Leningrad voted for the name change, a suspiciously close number. Moreover, since most Russians don't vote and are pretty politically apathetic, I am sure that only the small percentage of the population that really cared one way or the other really cared.
Lenin is almost a fictional character in the popular mind at this point, like Grandfather Frost or Baba Yaga. The Lenin cult was omnipresent: There was Grandfather Lenin when you were a child, then Young Pioneer Lenin, then Lenin the authority on anything and everything. Practically every book published in the USSR had to have a quote by Lenin in the preface (I have seen this in children's math textbooks and collections of science-fiction stories). The Moscow metro is wall-to-wall Lenin. By 1991 it was like living in Jonny Appleseedgrad.
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