TY - BOOK

T1 - Wartime suffering and survival

T2 - The human condition under siege in the Blockade of Leningrad, 1941-1944

AU - Hass, Jeffrey K.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © Oxford University Press 2021.

PY - 2021/5/6

Y1 - 2021/5/6

N2 - This book explores how people survive in the face of incredible odds. When our backs are against the wall, what are our interests, identities, and practices? When are we self-centered, empathetic, altruistic, or ambivalent? How much agency do the desperate have-or want? Such was the situation in the Blockade of Leningrad, nearly 900 days from 1941 to 1944, in which over one million civilians died-but more survived due to gumption and creativity. How did they survive, and how did survival reinforce or reshape identities, practices, and relations under Stalin? Using diaries, recollections, police records, interviews, and state documents from Leningrad, this book shows average Leningraders coping with war, starvation, and extreme uncertainty. Local relations and social distance matter significantly when states and institutions falter under duress. Opportunism and desperation were balanced by empathy and relations. One key to Leningraders’ practices was relations to anchors-entities of symbolic and personal significance that anchored Leningraders to each other and a sense of community. Such anchors as food and Others shaped practices of empathy and compassion, and of opportunism and egoism. By exploring the state and shadow markets, food, families, gender, class, death, and suffering, Wartime Suffering and Survival relays Leningraders’ stories to show a little-told side of Russian and Soviet history and to explore the human condition and who we really are. This speaks not only to rethinking the nature of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, but also to the nature of social relations, practices, and people more generally.

AB - This book explores how people survive in the face of incredible odds. When our backs are against the wall, what are our interests, identities, and practices? When are we self-centered, empathetic, altruistic, or ambivalent? How much agency do the desperate have-or want? Such was the situation in the Blockade of Leningrad, nearly 900 days from 1941 to 1944, in which over one million civilians died-but more survived due to gumption and creativity. How did they survive, and how did survival reinforce or reshape identities, practices, and relations under Stalin? Using diaries, recollections, police records, interviews, and state documents from Leningrad, this book shows average Leningraders coping with war, starvation, and extreme uncertainty. Local relations and social distance matter significantly when states and institutions falter under duress. Opportunism and desperation were balanced by empathy and relations. One key to Leningraders’ practices was relations to anchors-entities of symbolic and personal significance that anchored Leningraders to each other and a sense of community. Such anchors as food and Others shaped practices of empathy and compassion, and of opportunism and egoism. By exploring the state and shadow markets, food, families, gender, class, death, and suffering, Wartime Suffering and Survival relays Leningraders’ stories to show a little-told side of Russian and Soviet history and to explore the human condition and who we really are. This speaks not only to rethinking the nature of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, but also to the nature of social relations, practices, and people more generally.

KW - Blockade of leningrad

KW - Class

KW - Death

KW - Gender

KW - Russia

KW - Social fields

KW - Soviet union

KW - Survival

KW - World war II

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85112267866&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/a31cde30-d8a1-3b89-b603-4be1c6be99fa/

U2 - 10.1093/oso/9780197514276.001.0001

DO - 10.1093/oso/9780197514276.001.0001

M3 - Book

AN - SCOPUS:85112267866

SN - 9780197514276

SN - 978-0197514276

BT - Wartime suffering and survival

PB - Oxford University Press

CY - New York, USA

ER -