After 200 days and night of fierce battling, the Soviet soldiers emerged victorious and took captive the enemy’s nearly complete line of commandment including the Field Marshal Paulus himself. The military victory would soon be succeeded by many years of hard work – and yet another victory in it.
 
In the “Stalingrad Battle” book published in 1953 by M.P.Menshikov, the author cites the following numbers:
“Out of the city’s housing fund, 80 percent were destroyed or perished in explosions: in the central part specifically, only 18 houses remained intact our of 1,800. […] The urban facilities and transportation system were rendered unusable – the street car, the water supply system, the electric works, the sewerage, the telephone, the whole system of railroad and water transportation… More than 100 factories were ruined, including the giants like the tractor factory and the steelmaking one… Neither trees nor shrubs survived in the city itself and in the suburbs”.
 
The city had to be restored virtually from scratch.
Already in 1943-44, the USSR Architectural Academy developed an overall plan of Stalingrad’s new urban design, amending the flaws of the previous one and improving the city’s general structure.
 
For example, the most beautiful part of the city – the bank of the Volga River – was earlier taken up by the railroad lines and warehouses, crowded by the cargo docks, petrol stations, and ash-disposal areas…
 
The new idea was to clear the bank from them, put the petrol stations down the river well below the living quarters and make the embankment more beautiful by filling it with parks, stadiums, beaches and swimming stations.
 
Next, the city’s overall design before the war still preserved the street net established before 1820. As a result, the oldest part of the town was an awkward combination of two planning patterns at once (spoke-ring plus regular rectangular), making the overall street pattern unnecessarily complicated. There were no magistral roads in the city, so to cross it from south to north, one had to make a long detour.
 
The new design of the city’s road structure was composed around two major longitudinal ways connected by perpendicular smaller streets through each single district of the city.
 
In his 1955’s lecture for the future construction engineers, Stalingrad’s Architect in Chief V.N.Simbirtsev proudly pointed out back in 1949, the city’s restored and reconstructed industry has surpassed the prewar level, and that by 1955, the city’s housing fund expanded to make 125% of that before the Battle of Stalingrad. 
 
“We have no doubt that all our future plans will come to fruition, too,” he underscored in conclusion. “The only thing we need for that is peace in the world. That is why we, the Soviet people, have made it our passion and principle to struggle for peace and friendship between nations!”
 
To these principles, Stalingrad-Volgograd stays true.