| Description |
1 online resource (xx, 411 pages) : illustrations, maps |
| Contents |
With our backs against the wall -- Order and authority : breaking and making the rules. Order under assault -- Ties that bind -- Differing experiences and unequal survival : gender and class. Gendered survival and status -- Durability of class -- Dark sides of survival : loss, suffering, and tragic agency. Valence of the dead -- Questioning suffering, rethinking the world -- Conclusions without closure |
| Summary |
"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 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 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"-- Provided by publisher |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed November 4, 2021) |
| Subject |
Resilience (Personality trait) -- Russia (Federation) -- Saint Petersburg -- History -- 20th century
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Survival -- Russia (Federation) -- Saint Petersburg -- History -- 20th century
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Resilience (Personality trait)
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Survival
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| SUBJECT |
Saint Petersburg (Russia) -- History -- Siege, 1941-1944.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh93001009
|
| Subject |
Russia (Federation) -- Saint Petersburg
|
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books
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History
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| Form |
Electronic book
|
| LC no. |
2020037925 |
| ISBN |
0197514286 |
|
9780197514306 |
|
0197514308 |
|
9780197514290 |
|
0197514294 |
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9780197514283 |
|
