The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments

Description

The siege of Leningrad constituted one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II, one that individuals and the state began to commemorate almost immediately. Official representations of 'heroic Leningrad' omitted and distorted a great deal. Nonetheless, survivors struggling to cope with painful memories often internalized, even if they did not completely accept, the state's myths, and they often found their own uses for the state's monuments. Tracing the overlap and interplay of individual memories and fifty years of Soviet mythmaking, this book contributes to understandings of both the power of Soviet identities and the delegitimizing potential of the Soviet Union's chief legitimizing myths. Because besieged Leningrad blurred the boundaries between the largely male battlefront and the predominantly female home front, it offers a unique vantage point for a study of the gendered dimensions of the war experience, urban space, individual memory, and public commemoration.

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is a Professor of History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (2001). She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and grants from the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson Center. She has published articles in the Slavic Review and Nationalities Papers, and contributed to the Women's Review of Books.

'Lisa A. Kirschenbaum has produced a lucid account of the processes of commemoration and forgetting that began almost as soon as the blockade started ion September 1941 ... This wealth of material is arranged and analysed so as to provide some fascinating answers to the question with which the book begins ...' Modern Language Review