Download or read book The War Within written by Alexis Peri and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize Honorable Mention, Reginald Zelnik Book Prize “Fascinating and perceptive.” —Antony Beevor, New York Review of Books “Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured.” —Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator “Powerful and illuminating...A fascinating, insightful, and nuanced work.” —Anna Reid, Times Literary Supplement “Much has been written about Leningrad’s heroic resistance. But the remarkable aspect of [Peri’s] book is that she tells a very different story: recounting the internal struggles of ordinary people desperately trying to survive and make sense of their fate.” —John Thornhill, Financial Times “A sensitive, at times almost poetic examination of their emotions and disordered mental states. It both contrasts with and complements the equally accurate official Soviet portrait of a stalwart population standing firm in the face of evil and in defense of Soviet ideals.” —Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs In September 1941, two and a half months after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the German Wehrmacht encircled Leningrad. Cut off from the rest of Russia, the city remained blockaded for 872 days, at a cost of almost a million lives. It was one of the longest and deadliest sieges in modern history. The War Within chronicles the Leningrad blockade from the perspective of those who endured it. Drawing on unpublished diaries, Alexis Peri tells the tragic story of how young and old struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them. When the blockade was lifted in 1944, Kremlin officials censored publications describing the ordeal and arrested many of Leningrad’s wartime leaders. Some were executed. Diaries—now dangerous to their authors—were concealed, shelved in archives, and forgotten. The War Within recovers these lost accounts, shedding light on one of World War II’s darkest episodes while paying tribute the resilience of the human spirit.
Download or read book Writing the Siege of Leningrad written by Cynthia Simmons and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silver Winner, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year, History From September 1941 until January 1944, Leningrad suffered under one of the worst sieges in the history of warfare. At least one million civilians died, many during the terribly cold first winter. Bearing the brunt of this hardship—and keeping the city alive through their daily toil and sacrifice—were the women of Leningrad. Yet their perspective on life during the siege has been little examined. Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina have searched archival holdings for letters and diaries written during the siege, conducted interviews with survivors, and collected poetry, fiction, and retrospective memoirs written by the blokadnitsy (women survivors) to present a truer picture of the city under siege. In simple, direct, even heartbreaking language, these documents tell of lost husbands, mothers, children; meager rations often supplemented with sawdust and other inedible additives; crime, cruelty, and even cannibalism. They also relate unexpected acts of kindness and generosity; attempts to maintain cultural life through musical and dramatic performances; and provide insight into a group of ordinary women reaching beyond differences in socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and profession in order to survive in extraordinary times.
Download or read book Leningrad 1941 42 written by Sergey Yarov and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book recounts one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century: the siege of Leningrad. It is based on the searing testimony of eyewitnesses, some of whom managed to survive, while others were to die in streets devastated by bombing, in icy houses, or the endless bread queues. All of them, nevertheless, wanted to pass on to us the story of the torments they endured, their stoicism, compassion and humanity, and of how people reached out to each other in the nightmare of the siege. Though the siege continues to loom large in collective memory, an overemphasis on the heroic endurance of the victims has tended to distort our understanding of events. In this book, which focuses on the "Time of Death", the harsh winter of 1941-42, Sergey Yarov adopts a new approach, demonstrating that if we are to truly appreciate the nature of this suffering, we must face the full realities of people's actions and behaviour. Many of the documents published here – letters, diaries, memoirs and interviews not previously available to researchers or retrieved from family archives – show unexpected aspects of what it was like to live in the besieged city. Leningrad changed, and so did the morals, customs and habits of Leningraders. People wanted at all costs to survive. Their notes about the siege reflect a drama which cost a million people their lives. There is no spurious cheeriness and optimism in them, and much that we might like to pass over. But we must not. We have a duty to know the whole, bitter truth about the siege, the price that had to be paid in order to stay human in a time of brutal inhumanity.
Download or read book Symphony for the City of the Dead written by M.T. Anderson and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2015.
Download or read book Leningrad Siege and Symphony written by Brian Moynahan and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “gripping story” of a Nazi blockade, a Russian composer, and a ragtag band of musicians who fought to keep up a besieged city’s morale (The New York Times Book Review). For 872 days during World War II, the German Army encircled the city of Leningrad—modern-day St. Petersburg—in a military operation that would cripple the former capital and major Soviet industrial center. Palaces were looted and destroyed. Schools and hospitals were bombarded. Famine raged and millions died, soldiers and innocent civilians alike. Against the backdrop of this catastrophe, historian Brian Moynahan tells the story of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Seventh Symphony was first performed during the siege and became a symbol of defiance in the face of fascist brutality. Titled “Leningrad” in honor of the city and its people, the work premiered on August 9, 1942—with musicians scrounged from frontline units and military bands, because only twenty of the orchestra’s hundred members had survived. With this compelling human story of art and culture surviving amid chaos and violence, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony “brings new depth and drama to a key historical moment” (Booklist, starred review), in “a narrative that is by turns painful, poignant and inspiring” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). “He reaches into the guts of the city to extract some humanity from the blood and darkness, and at its best Leningrad captures the heartbreak, agony and small salvations in both death and survival . . . Moynahan’s descriptions of the battlefield, which also draw from the diaries of the cold, lice-ridden, hungry combatants, are haunting.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book Leningrad written by Michael Jones and published by John Murray. This book was released on 2009-05-28 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the German High Command encircled Leningrad it was a deliberate policy to eradicate the city’s civilian population by starving them to death. As winter set in and food supplies dwindled, starvation and panic set in. A specialist in battle psychology and the vital role of morale in desperate circumstances, Michael Jones tells the human story of Leningrad. Drawing on newly available eyewitness accounts and diaries, he shows Leningrad in its every dimension including taboo truths, long-suppressed by the Soviets, such as looting, criminal gangs and cannibalism. But, for many ordinary citizens, Leningrad marked the triumph of the human spirit. They drew deeply on their inner resources to inspire, comfort and help one another. At the height of the siege an extraordinary live performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony profoundly strengthened the city's will to resist. When German troops heard it in their trenches one remarked: ‘We began to understand we would never take Leningrad. Yet, Leningrad’s self-defence came at a huge price. When the 900-day siege ended in 1944 almost a million people had died and those who survived would be permanently marked by what they had endured, as this superbly insightful and moving history shows.
Download or read book The Siege written by Helen Dunmore and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by "The New York Times Book Review, The Siege" is Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental--the Nazi's 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed 600,000--but her focus is heartrendingly intimate.
Download or read book Shurik written by Kyra Petrovskaya Wayne and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Russian actress and nurse tells of her experience caring for an orphan boy during part of the three-year siege of Leningrad.
Download or read book Besieged Leningrad written by Polina Barskova and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 872 days of the Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 to January 1944), the city's inhabitants were surrounded by the military forces of Nazi Germany. They suffered famine, cold, and darkness, and a million people lost their lives, making the siege one of the most destructive in history. Confinement in the besieged city was a traumatic experience. Unlike the victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp, for example, who were brought from afar and robbed of their cultural roots, the victims of the Siege of Leningrad were trapped in the city as it underwent a slow, horrific transformation. They lost everything except their physical location, which was layered with historical, cultural, and personal memory. In Besieged Leningrad, Polina Barskova examines how the city's inhabitants adjusted to their new urban reality, focusing on the emergence of new spatial perceptions that fostered the production of diverse textual and visual representations. The myriad texts that emerged during the siege were varied and exciting, engendered by sometimes sharply conflicting ideological urges and aesthetic sensibilities. In this first study of the cultural and literary representations of spatiality in besieged Leningrad, Barskova examines a wide range of authors with competing views of their difficult relationship with the city, filling a gap in Western knowledge of the culture of the siege. It will appeal to Russian studies specialists as well as those interested in war testimonies and the representation of trauma.
Download or read book Leningrad 1943 written by Alexander Werth and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-27 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Siege of Leningrad is the most powerful testimony to the immeasurable cruelty and horror of World War II. From 1941-1945, the Eastern Front was the site of some of the bloodiest atrocities of the war and the city of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, proved to be a decisive point in the conflict. German policy was resolutely determined to redraw the map of Europe, annihilate the Soviet Union and give large areas of territory to Finland. Through Hitler's ambition to completely eradicate the city and its entire population, it was decided that the most efficient method of invasion was to encircle and bombard the city into submission. After 872 days of aggression, one and a half million people lost their lives, mostly from starvation. As the sole British correspondent to have been in Leningrad during the blockade, Alexander Werth's eyewitness account presents a harrowing perspective on the savagery and destruction wrought by the Nazis against the civilian population of the city. His writing evokes compelling images of terror - the oil bombing of children's hospitals, mass starvation and cannibalism - with rich and sophisticated commentary on the internal politics of Soviet party chiefs, soldiers and civilian resistance fighters. Both an authoritative historical document and a journalistic re-telling of the overwhelming sadness, grief and futility of 20th century warfare, this is an invaluable look at one of the greatest losses of human life in recorded history.
Download or read book Leningrad written by Anna Reid and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On September 8, 1941, eleven weeks after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his brutal surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Leningrad was surrounded. The siege was not lifted for two and a half years, by which time some three quarters of a million Leningraders had died of starvation. Anna Reid's Leningrad is a gripping, authoritative narrative history of this dramatic moment in the twentieth century, interwoven with indelible personal accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists on both sides. They reveal the Nazis' deliberate decision to starve Leningrad into surrender and Hitler's messianic miscalculation, the incompetence and cruelty of the Soviet war leadership, the horrors experienced by soldiers on the front lines, and, above all, the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the relentless search for food and water; the withering of emotions and family ties; looting, murder, and cannibalism- and at the same time, extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice. Stripping away decades of Soviet propaganda, and drawing on newly available diaries and government records, Leningrad also tackles a raft of unanswered questions: Was the size of the death toll as much the fault of Stalin as of Hitler? Why didn't the Germans capture the city? Why didn't it collapse into anarchy? What decided who lived and who died? Impressive in its originality and literary style, Leningrad gives voice to the dead and will rival Anthony Beevor's classic Stalingrad in its impact.
Download or read book The Leningrad Blockade 1941 1944 written by Richard Bidlack and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based largely on formerly top-secret Soviet archival documents (including 66 reproduced documents and 70 illustrations), this book portrays the inner workings of the communist party and secret police during Germany's horrific 1941–44 siege of Leningrad, during which close to one million citizens perished. It shows how the city's inhabitants responded to the extraordinary demands placed upon them, encompassing both the activities of the political, security, and military elite as well as the actions and attitudes of ordinary Leningraders.
Download or read book The Madonnas of Leningrad written by Debra Dean and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An unforgettable story of love, survival and the power of imagination in the most tragic circumstances. Elegant and poetic.” —Isabel Allende, New York Times bestselling author of Zorro The ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye. Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind—a refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . . “Extraordinary. . . . Dean’s exquisite prose shimmers . . . illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment.” —Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Aloft and Native Speaker “A poignant tale.” —Booklist, starred review “Dean writes with passion and compelling drama.” —People “Rare is the novel that creates that blissful forgot-you-were-reading experience . . . but that is precisely what Debra Dean has achieved with her image-rich book.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer “Poetic.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “[A] heartfelt debut.” —New York Times Book Review “Remarkable”— NPR, Nancy Pearl Book Review
Download or read book The Siege of Leningrad 1941 1944 written by David M. Glantz and published by Cassell. This book was released on 2004 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leningrad (now reverted to its pre-1914 name of St Petersburg) was surrounded by German forces in 1941 and cut off from the rest of Russia. It was besieged for nearly three years, the great city's population suffering terribly in the bitter cold of the Russian winter. Over a million men, women and children died of starvation and hypothermia, but the city fought on and never surrendered. In 1943 the Russian army broke through to link up with the garrison and end the longest, bloodiest siege of the Second World War.
Download or read book The Diary of Lena Mukhina written by Lena Mukhina and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1941 Lena Mukhina was an ordinary teenage girl, living in Leningrad, worrying about her homework and whether Vova - the boy she liked - liked her. Like a good Soviet schoolgirl, she was also diligently learning German, the language of Russia's Nazi ally. And she was keeping a diary, in which she recorded her hopes and dreams. Then, on 22 June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and declared war on the Soviet Union. All too soon, Leningrad was besieged and life became a living hell. Lena and her family fought to stay alive; their city was starving and its citizens were dying in their hundreds of thousands. From day to dreadful day, Lena records her experiences: the desperate hunt for food, the bitter cold of the Russian winter and the cruel deaths of those she loved. A truly remarkable account of this most terrible era in modern history, The Diary of Lena Mukhina is the vivid first-hand testimony of a courageous young woman struggling simply to survive.
Download or read book The Battle for Leningrad written by David M. Glantz and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on an unparalleled access to Russian archival sources and going far beyond the military aspects of other historical works, Glantz's book is a testament to the nearly two million Russians who lost their lives during the battle for Leningrad. 90 illustrations. 16 maps.
Download or read book Leningrad 1941 44 written by Robert Forczyk and published by Osprey Publishing. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Osprey's Campaign title for Hitler's protracted siege of Leningrad, which resulted in one of the most brutal campaigns on the Eastern Front during World War II (1939-1945). The German Army Group North was able to isolate the city and its garrison for a period of 900 days, during which an estimated 1.5 million Soviets died from combat, disease and starvation. For over two years, German forces pounded the city with artillery and air assaults while the Soviets made repeated efforts on the frozen swamplands of the Volkhov Front to break through. Finally, in January 1944, the Soviets were able to break Army Group North's front and relieve Leningrad. While most histories of the siege of Leningrad focus on the plight of the starving civil population, this refreshing title instead examines the strength of the garrison's defenses - which ultimately prevented the Germans from capturing the city - and the growing sophistication of Soviet offensive tactics. Dr. Forczyk also provides an assessment of how weather and terrain factors shaped the campaign in this superb addition to the history of the Eastern Front.
