Suffering and Survival in Besieged Leningrad: A Sociologist’s View on the History of a Humanitarian Catastrophe

Abstract

The subject of the review is a book by American sociologist Jeffrey Hass devoted to the history of the survival and suffering of civilians in besieged Leningrad in 1941–1944. Exploring the strategies of survival, the political and bureaucratic control of the Leningrad authorities, the gender and class dimension of blockade survival, as well as the discursive framework by which the Leningraders explained and comprehended the humanitarian catastrophe that happened to them (theodicy of war), Hass, unlike most historians of the blockade, uses the sociological approach of P. Bourdieu, describing the wartime everyday life of Leningrad through the prism of the concepts “capital”, “habitus” and “field”. Based on an impressive body of blockade ego-documents and official reports, the sociologist wonders why the Leningraders acted in the catastrophic conditions of the blockade in one way or another, what social mechanisms were behind their suffering, resistance, opportunism and ethical choice. Appreciating the book of Hass, the authors of the review consider it a methodological breakthrough in the modern historiography of the siege of Leningrad and hope for the speedy translation of this book into Russian. If for Russian historians of war the book Wartime Survival and Suffering will become a model of a rigorous theory and methodology for studying the wartime everyday life of civilians, then sociologists will be able to see how productive for the social theory may be the study of ego-documents, personal testimonies describing the survival of the inhabitants of a huge city in the conditions of a humanitarian catastrophe and an unprecedented military siege.