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Minds Under Siege: Rethinking the Soviet Experience Inside the Leningrad Blockade, 1941-45

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Minds Under Siege: Rethinking the Soviet Experience Inside the Leningrad Blockade, 1941-45 Minds Under Siege: Rethinking the Soviet Experience inside the Leningrad Blockade, 1941-45 By Alexis Jean Peri A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair Professor John Connelly Professor Irina Paperno Fall 2011 Abstract Minds Under Siege: Rethinking the Soviet Experience inside the Leningrad Blockade, 1941-45 by Alexis Peri Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair The Blockade of Leningrad during the Second World War was one of the longest and most devastating sieges in modern history, which claimed the lives of about one million of the city’s residents. Rather than invade Leningrad, Hitler vowed to simply “let the city devour itself.” For those trapped inside the city, the war became first and foremost an internal struggle against the demands of their own bodies, which, under conditions of severe starvation, literally fed upon themselves. Over the course of almost 900 days spent under siege, Leningraders turned their attention inward and closely monitored the deterioration of their city, their community, and their lives. During the Blockade, Leningraders were confronted with the transformation of virtually every aspect of daily life, the defamiliarization of all that was known to them. Leningraders grew estranged from their physical bodies as well as from the identities, communities, attitudes, and beliefs that characterized their prewar lives. The Blockade thrust many established narratives—personal, historical, scientific, and ideological—into crisis. This dissertation examines how Leningraders struggled to make sense of the Blockade, and it draws on diaries that were kept during the siege as its main source base. I have uncovered a large corpus of blockade diaries from state, private, and family archives across Russia. These intimate accounts, which have largely been unknown to and untapped by scholarly research, are replete with insights about the how individuals endure extreme deprivation and the effects of prolonged trauma and starvation on the mind. Although the diaries do not provide direct access to Leningraders’ innermost thoughts, they do give us insight into the various interpretive and narrative strategies that the diarists used as they struggled to find meaning in such horrific, almost unthinkable suffering. This study traces how the diarists studied their new surroundings and attempted to formulate new, meaningful narratives of the body, self, society, and history in their journals. I demonstrate how the diarists placed their society under a critical microscope and, from their unique vantage point “inside the ring,” reconsidered certain fundamental aspects of Soviet life and of 1 human existence more generally. Although they were aware of the particularity of their situation “inside the ring,” the diarists viewed their discoveries in universal terms, suggesting that the Blockade led them to new insights about human nature, laid bare by the siege. The Soviet regime may have attempted to radically restructure human nature through socialism, but, according to the siege diarists, the Blockade actually was succeeding in doing so. 2 To My Family i Acknowledgements In the process of conceptualizing, writing, and researching this dissertation, I have been extremely blessed by the support and guidance of my teachers, colleagues, friends, and family. This work is really a testament to their continual encouragement and inspiration. First, I would like to thank the members of my committee who tirelessly and patiently spoke with me about my project. I am extremely fortunate to have worked with Susanna Barrows on the early stages of this project. The sharpness of Susanna’s insight and wit were always a most welcoming combination. Our conversations comparing the Paris Commune and the Leningrad Blockade were among the fondest of my graduate career. I am very grateful to John Connelly for his careful feedback and thoughtful questions, and for bringing a larger, eastern European perspective to my project. It has been a great privilege to have studied with Irina Paperno, who helped to inspire this project and me to undertake it. She has been a close academic adviser for eleven years, and she first opened my eyes to the potential of using diaries as historical sources. Her astute comments and her great attention to detail have been invaluable to me. It has been a pure pleasure to have Yuri Slezkine as my chair and adviser. He continually brought rigorous questioning, fresh perspectives, and a sense of humor and warmth to an otherwise stressful undertaking. He allowed me great freedom and flexibility as I struggled to organize my thoughts and ideas into a narrative. I owe a large debt of gratitude to many other teachers who discussed portions of this project with me, generously shared their insights, and greatly contributed to my education through their inspiring work. My sincere thanks to Ned Walker, Victoria Frede, Hank Reichman, Carla Hesse, David Henkin, Jochen Hellbeck, Ilia Utekhin, Aleksei Yurchak, Ethan Pollock, Jeff Hass, Nikita Lomagin, Sergei Yarov, Aleksandr Chistikov, Lisa Kirschenbaum, Polina Barskova, and Emily van Buskirk. My colleagues at Berkeley have provided tremendous emotional and intellectual support over the course of this journey. I thank all the members of the Berkeley kruzhok for their invigorating discussions of my chapters as well as the members of my writing group, especially Christine Evans, Elisa Gollub, Jody La Porte, Alina Polyakova, and Nicole Eaton, who generously provided me with feedback and diversion whenever I needed it. Erik Scott and Victoria Smolkin were the best odnoklassniki I could have hoped for, and I am so glad that I made this journey with them. I also am extremely grateful to Mark Sawchuk and Penny Ismay who greatly enriched this project by bringing a much-needed European perspective to it. In addition, I have been very fortunate to have such a wonderful support network of friends in Russia, who gave me many gifts including shelter, hot meals, contacts, intellectual engagement, and lifelong friendship. Thank you to Ania Dolganova, Ania Tsiunchik, Nadia Prokof’eva, Tat’iana Voronina, Colleen Lucey, and Jessica Golloher, Erin Doherty, and Andrea Mazzarino. While researching this project, I was blessed with the generous assistance from professional researchers, scholars, and archivists. My warmest thanks to Mariia Svichenskaia and Natal’ia Rogova at the Otdel’ rukopisei RNB, to Ol’ga Prutt, Zoia Korganova, and the incredible staff at “A Muzy ne Molchali,” to Natal’ia Bykova at TsGAIPD, and Natal’ia Semicheva at GMMOBL. I also owe a tremendous debt to Tamara Staleva, who welcomed ii me to the world of blockade studies and who so richly contributed to my project with her insights, documents, and contacts. In addition, I am very grateful to two tremendous research assistants, Lydia Petrovic and Aglaya Glebova, and a dear friend Milia Zakirova, who helped me to decipher the less intelligible portions of the diaries after I returned. I also wish to express my appreciation to several institutions that generously supported this project including: the US Department of State’s Fulbright-IIE program, the Phi Beta Kappa Association, Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, and the Abigail Reynolds Hodgen Publication Fund as well as the Department of History, the Graduate Division, the Institute of East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Berkeley Program in East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Most of all, I am forever grateful to my family, who made all of this possible. I cannot adequately express my appreciation to them except to say that this dissertation is dedicated to them. Over the course of this seven-year adventure, my family has patiently endured my absences, moods, and anxieties, and they have helped me to keep a sense of perspective. I could not have done it without my parents, who gave me so many opportunities, including freedom to study whatever I wanted, and who instilled a love of reading in me. Bobby and Amiee Peri constantly checked in with me, listened patiently, and gave me precious opportunities to relax. They will always remain my closest friends. Hanns Hartman is perhaps the most responsible for the timely completion of the dissertation. He deserves a degree of his own for his steadfast support, reassurance, and affection, which kept me striving and smiling until the end. Any mistakes that may appear in this dissertation are entirely my own. iii Contents: “Inside the Ring”: an Introduction 1 Living Narratives: Comments on the Diary as a Source 9 One: From Leningraders to Blokadniki: Inhabiting the Siege Body 16 Two: Not “I”: Literary Expressions of the Self, Besieged 54 Three: Families under Siege: the New Forms, Functions, and Conflicts of Home Life 73 Four: A Living Experiment: Examining the Blockade through the Lens of Medical Science 122 Five: The Transformation of the Social Body: the Role of Food in reshaping Blockade Society 162 Six: “A Great Time Machine:” Living, Writing, and Reading History 196 303 Minds Under Siege: Concluding Remarks 232 Appendix 237 iv “The inhabitants of Leningrad have become absorbed in their unusual daily work. The life of each one of them would make a very different story. Some day thousands of diaries will lie on the historian’s table, and then we shall see how much there was that was remarkable in the unremarkable biographies of simple Russian people.”1 -Nikolai Tikhonov 1 Nikolai Tikhonov, Leningradskii god, mai 1942-1943 (Leningrad: Voennoe Izdatel’stvo NKO, 1943), 64. v “Inside the Ring”: an Introduction “Mankind’s normal existence came to an end on 22 June 1941. That day signifies the beginning of our new era. We (the Soviet people) have a sacred date, 25 October 1917, which we all took as the start of a new era, of humanity’s rebirth.
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