Academic literature on the topic 'Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1944'

The research is based on briefing papers and other reporting documents prepared during 1943– 1944 by the Cadres department of the Leningrad City Committee of the ACP(b) for the Cadres Department of the Central Committee of the Party. It contains information on the senior leaders of besieged Leningrad, who were on the nomenclature lists of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. These lists included heads of organizations and enterprises that were considered the most important for the country. Briefing papers and reports contain information about the personal composition of managers, their education, age, previous jobs. Based on the analysis of these documents, the article concludes that during the Great Patriotic War, the cadres of Leningrad leaders consisted entirely of local officials. During the period of 1941–1944 less than half of the posts included in the nomenclature of the Central Committee for Leningrad were occupied by workers who were sent from other regions. Most of the leaders of the party and Soviet apparatus held their positions from the pre-war period throughout the entire period of the Siege. Cadre appointments were approved by heads of the Leningrad city committee, while the second secretary of the city committee A. A. Kuznetsov played the main part in this process. This policy led to the formation of a stable group of “Siege officials”, which remained in leadership positions in Leningrad until the start of purges in 1949–1950. Most of the Siege leaders belonged to the same age group (30–40 years old), about half of them had a higher, most often engineering, education. The article also discusses some typical cases of dismissal of executives from their positions. The author shows that during the Siege, such punishments were used by the local party leaders, and not by the initiative of the central authorities.

Focusing on less studied areas of the twentieth-century war experience, this article investigates the notions of “urban beauty” and “urban spec-Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (Summer 2010) tacle” as experienced by the residents of besieged Leningrad. Polina Barskova suggests that, via an estrangement effect, the siege gaze replaces the unrepresentable traumatic experience of presentnesswith an aestheticized cultural past containing such useable notions of cultural memory as ruin, stage set, monument, and frame. This replacement can be described as a siege urbanscape sublime, a sublime lying not in the distinction between the horrific and the beautiful but rather in the observer's tendency to substitute the horrific with the beautiful. This particular species of sublime aims at psychological anesthesia and is thoroughly oxymoronic: the intense clashing of opposites—to the point that oxymoronic sensibility leads to rhetorical confluence—alerts us to the connection between the aesthetic discourse of besieged Leningrad and the perennial Petersburg text, thus opening new opportunities for the study of the functioning of cultural memory in Soviet society.

The subject of this research is the aviation industry during the siege of Leningrad. This topic is gaining relevance due to the recently published documents dedicated to the work of the higher party authorities in the period from 1941 to 1944. In the summer-autumn of 1941, Leningrad was detached from the “main land”. In these conditions, the full operational control over resource base of the city fell on the shoulders of the Soviet and party authorities, who received additional powers, and thus, responsibilities. The author provides an alternative outlook on the activity of the Leningrad plants under the People's Commissariat of Aviation Industry of the USSR, not from the perspective of classical reconstruction of the history of aviation industry in the USSR during the war, but a specific managerial task that was resolved by the party leadership using the general resource base. The conclusion is made that despite the evacuation of the vast majority of production facilities of aviation industry during the war, the resource base was adapted to the specific tasks of the Leningrad Front. The city manufactured the industrial products in accordance with the orders and requirements of the Soviet Air Force. Mobilization of the Leningrad industrial base for the tasks of aviation units during the war years in many ways became a crucial factor in maintaining the combat effectiveness of the Air Force, namely during the rough winter of 1941/1942, when the replenishment of aviation units with new equipment ceased  for the most part.

Objective: The impact of famine during early stages of development can be transmitted across generations and change susceptibility of chronic cardiometabolic diseases. The study aims to assess possible association of famine during early stages of ancestors’ lives with remote cardiometabolic and behavioral patterns across generations of their descendants. Design and method: The besieged Leningrad residents at different ages were exposed to famine during prolonged period of time (8 September 1941–27 January 1944) during World War II. 309 Leningrad survivors were examined in 2007-2008 and divided into three groups depending on the period of exposure to famine: the children group – participants born before 01.01.1941, the infant group – respondents born between 01.01.1941 and 31.10.1941, and the intrauterine group – those born between 01.11.1941 and 27.01.1943. In 2020-2021 87 descendants of Leningrad Siege survivors aged 18 to 63 years without cardiovascular complications were examined. Examination included questionnaires, anthropometry, blood pressure measurement and biochemical blood tests. Mathematical and statistical data analysis was implemented using the R-4.0 programming language. ANOVA test was used to analyze differences between groups. Results: The descendants of Leningrad Siege survivors who experienced famine during intrauterine development demonstrated significantly lower triglyceride levels and prevalence of abdominal obesity, hypertension, in comparison to respondents whose ancestors experienced famine in childhood. Descendants of Leningrad Siege survivors, whose ancestors faced famine during the intrauterine period, were more likely to be non-smokers compared to other participants (Table 1). Table 1. Cardiometabolic and behavioral risk factors in descendants of Leningrad Siege survivors according to the period of ancestral famine exposure. Conclusions: The impact of famine during the intrauterine period may exacerbate selection bias resulting in higher survival rate for individuals with favorable risk factor profiles, including non-smoking attitude (Agreement No. 075-15-2022-301).

The article is devoted to the history of creation and characterization of transcripts of narratives of the Leningrad citizens who lived in the besieged city during the war. The article is to determine the significance of this historical source for the study of the siege of Leningrad. The idea to collect materials on the wartime city emerged in autumn 1941 and was implemented by the staff of the Leningrad Institute for the History of the CPSU, who began to prepare chronicles of Leningrad and its region during the Great Patriotic War. A notable part of this work was stenography of stories of the soldiers and partisans who fought in the Leningrad region and of the residents of the besieged city. The work of the Leningrad historians began in spring 1942, intensified in April 1943, and was completed in early 1948. The prepared shorthand notes were preserved in series 10 of the fond R-4000 of the Central State Archive of Political and Historical Documents of St. Petersburg. Over 350 of the 650 archival documents are records of conversations with the Leningrad residents. In the 1960s, 130 items (duplicates) were transferred to the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, forming the body of fond 332 of the Scientific-Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. As a rule, the respondents were middle-ranking executives: directors and chiefs, chairmen and secretaries of district executive committees (raikoms); but there also were ordinary workers and engineers, teachers and policemen, scientists and artists. Questionnaires were prepared for representatives of some professions and positions in 1944–45, which permitted to identify common features in the life of citizens and specifics of the respondents' activities. Varied scope of the interviewees and wide range of questions were supplemented by the possibility for the narrator to use various documents in their answers. The "freshness of memories" and narration to a Leningrad resident, who had undergone the same ordeal, contributed to creation of voluminous and relatively objective picture of life and activities of citizens in besieged Leningrad. Nevertheless, self-censorship was apparent, and while few made direct distortions, exclusion of some “inconvenient” (in narrator’s opinion) details from the final text was quite common. The study of transcripts permits to reveal new facts about the history of wartime Leningrad, to broaden our understanding of the blockade everyday life, and to give impetus to the analysis of the era in terms of history of emotions and micro-history. Most valuable and interesting transcripts can be published in anthologies.

The official Soviet narrative of the Second World War used the concept of heroism to imbue war commemoration with an obligation towards the state. Such a concept was designed to make subsequent generations feel inferior to their predecessors and obliged to give of their best. Today, the victory serves as the strongest connection between Soviet and modern Russian patriotism. The paper argues that the memory of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) as treated in museums in St Petersburg today is an appropriation by present-day Russian propaganda of the Soviet narrative. Soviet memorial sites are developed to foster support for Russia rather than the former Soviet Union. While the use of the heroic paradigm continues, the definition of heroism has changed to include each and everybody who suffered during the Siege. With collective heroism as the leading image, a critical view of the historic events becomes all but impossible. The paper makes references to the alternative narratives of literature, memoirs and diaries to contrast the version of the Siege presented in the museum exhibitions.