Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Wartime Suffering and Survival : The Human Condition under Siege in the Blockade of Leningrad, 1941-1944, Hardback Book

Wartime Suffering and Survival : The Human Condition under Siege in the Blockade of Leningrad, 1941-1944 Hardback

Hardback

Description

During the 872-day siege of Leningrad from September 1941 to January 1944, civilians endured air raids, bread rations as low as 125 grams, food theft and speculation by opportunistic officials and shadow market traders, and death by starvation.

As shocks of total war weaken institutions, desperate survival can compel violation of norms, and personal suffering can shatter long-held beliefs and practices. In Wartime Suffering and Survival, Jeffrey K. Hass uses the Blockade of Leningrad in World War II to explore the social practices and dynamics by which we cope or collapse.

Using hundreds of personal accounts from diaries, recollections, police records, interviews, and state documents, Hass tells the story of how average Leningraders coped with the nightmares of war, starvation, and extreme uncertainty.

By exploring the state and shadow markets, food, families, gender, class, death, and suffering, he describes the routines of daily life, the functioning of official institutions, and the development of illegal practices that were made and remade in the interactions of citizens and state agencies coping with new and extreme situations.

The key to what Leningraders did and how they survived, Hass argues, is relations to anchors--entities of symbolic and personal significance that tethered Leningraders to each other and shaped practices of empathy and compassion, and of opportunism and egoism. Moving and powerful, Wartime Suffering and Survival goes to the heart of human resilience and fragility and to the core of the human condition--both individual and social.

Information

Save 7%

£37.99

£35.05

 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information