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 and altruistic, or ambivalent? How much agency do the desperate really have—or want? Such was the situation in the Blockade of Leningrad, which lasted nearly 900 days from 1941 to 1944. Perhaps over one million civilians died, most from starvation, but many more survived, mostly from their own gumption and creativity. How did they survive, and how did survival reinforce or reshape their identities, practices, and relations—especially in the era of Stalin?
Using diaries, recollections, police records, interviews, and state documents from the Blockade of Leningrad in World War II, Jeffrey Hass shows how average Leningraders coped with the nightmares of war, starvation, and extreme uncertainty. Local and intimate relations and social distance matter significantly when states and institutions falter under duress. Opportunism and desperation were balanced by empathy and relations. The key to what Leningraders did and how they survived is relations to anchors—entities of symbolic and personal significance that anchored Leningraders to each other and a sense of shared 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, and 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 the nature of social relations, practices, and people more generally, in other moments of suffering—not least the suffering inflicted on the people of Ukraine over the last year, among other tragic and all-too-frequent examples of surviving under duress.
