Siege of Leningrad Revisited: Narrative, Image, Self
SIEGE OF LENINGRAD REVISITED: NARRATIVE, IMAGE, SELF Introduction Polina Barskova The siege of Leningrad, the longest-lasting military blockade in modern history, has never suffered from a dearth of written documentation. As early as September 1941, this tragedy drew the attention of journalists, historians, and poets, both in the USSR and the west. During the war, the most immediate purpose of this coverage was that of propaganda, to en courage Leningraders to persevere despite the loss of at least one million lives. After the siege ended in 1944, its narration acquired a somewhat peculiar character: often sensational and only partially informed in the west and euphemistically "neutralized" in the Soviet Union.1 Study of this topic was severely hampered as a consequence of "The Leningrad Affair" (1949-53); after a wave of severe purges, museums and archives dedi cated to collecting siege materials were shut down, thus disrupting any attempt at responsible scholarship. For the next four decades, until the time of perestroika, the siege engendered a mighty flow of descriptions. (A full bibliography of Soviet siege texts could easily number in the thousands.) Unfortunately, these accounts typically rehearsed variations on the themes of heroism and sto icism, with Blokadnaia kniga, in which the writers Daniil Granin and Ales' Adamovich used victims' and survivors' diary accounts to present a more objective interpretation of conditions during the siege, constituting the major and valuable exception.2 In this book, attention is focused not on the allegorical virtues of the "front-city" but rather on the price Lenin graders were forced to pay for their city's endurance.
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