Author:
Hass, Jeffrey Kenneth, 1967- author.
ImprintNew York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]
Descriptionxx, 411 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cm
Note:With Our Backs Against the Wall: Politics of Survival and Suffering -- Part I. Order and Authority: Breaking and Making the Rules -- Order Under Assault: Institutions and Authority, Opportunism and Desperation -- Ties that Bind: Distance, Empathy, and Relations of Local Order -- Part II. Differing Experiences and Unequal Survival: Gender and Class -- Gendered Survival and Status: Women and Men in the Blockade -- Durability of Class: Compelled Habits of Survival -- Part III. Dark Sides of Survival: Loss, Suffering, and Tragic Agency -- Valence of the Dead: Expedience, Aesthetics, Opportunity, and Dignity -- Questioning Suffering, Rethinking the World: Tragic Agency of Blockade Theodicies -- Conclusions without Closure: Legacies and Lessons of the Blockade?
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 387-399) and index.
Note:"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.
