Writing the siege of Leningrad
Cynthia Simmons · 2002 · 244 pages
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About this book
From September 1941 until January 1944, the city of Leningrad suffered under one of the worst sieges in the history of warfare. At least one million civilians died, many during the first terribly cold winter. Bearing the brunt of this hardship - and keeping the city alive through their daily toil and sacrifice - were the women of Leningrad. Because the Stalinist purges in the late 1930s and the manpower needs of the Soviet army following the Nazi invasion, women easily constituted more than half of the city's population - and workforce - when the German and Finnish armies cut them off from the outside world. This volume uses recently opened archives of letters and diaries from the period of the siege and the immediate post-war years, conducted interviews with some of the remaining survivors and recovered poetry, fiction and retrospective memoirs written by blokadnitsy (women survivors) in order to present a truer picture of the city under siege.
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