Michael Ashcroft
It is the city that will never be allowed to forget its savage past. Although it is 75 years since the end of World War II, the bitter, close-quarter fighting that took place in Volgograd from the summer of 1942 through to the winter of 1943 is still easily recalled by the city’s residents, young and old. Soldiers on both sides fought not just street to street, but cellar to cellar, and even sewer to sewer. It was 200 days that the Germans called the “Battle of the Rats,” but you might know it by a different name: Stalingrad.
I have always been fascinated by Russian history. In 2017, we became one of the first foreign-flagged yachts to complete the journey through the infamous White Sea-Baltic Canal, built with slave labor and opened in 1933, traveling from St Petersburg on the Baltic Sea to Belomorsk on the White Sea (see the May 2018 issue of BOAT International US Edition). At the end of that epic adventure, I vowed to return to Russian waters sooner rather than later, and in the summer of 2019 I seized the opportunity.
WE KNEW THAT IF WE ACCIDENTALLY STRAYED INTO CONTESTED MILITARY AREAS, IT COULD LEAD TO OUR ARREST OR SEIZURE
Our route back into the country would take
