Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995
- Introduction
- PART I MAKING MEMORY IN WARTIME
- 1 Mapping Memory in St. Petersburg–Petrograd–Leningrad
- 2 The City Scarred: War at Home
- 3 Life Becomes History: Memories and Monuments in Wartime
- PART II RECONSTRUCTING AND REMEMBERING THE CITY
- PART III THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
- Epilogue: No One Is Forgotten?
- Index
2 - The City Scarred: War at Home
from PART I - MAKING MEMORY IN WARTIME
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995
- Introduction
- PART I MAKING MEMORY IN WARTIME
- 1 Mapping Memory in St. Petersburg–Petrograd–Leningrad
- 2 The City Scarred: War at Home
- 3 Life Becomes History: Memories and Monuments in Wartime
- PART II RECONSTRUCTING AND REMEMBERING THE CITY
- PART III THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
- Epilogue: No One Is Forgotten?
- Index
Summary
The verses and songs of the war years possessed some kind of magical power; they inspired hope, and strengthened belief in victory and the coming radiant life.
M. G. Zeger, recollections of a wartime radio engineer in 1991Just before dawn on 22 June 1941, more than three million troops – the Germans and their allies – rolled across the Soviet border from the Baltic to the Black Sea. At noon on that lovely summer Sunday, Leningraders gathered around public loudspeakers to hear Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov inform the country that Kiev, Zhitomir, and Sevastopol' had come under surprise attack. While Soviet propaganda had long predicted a war with the capitalist West, many Leningraders, like other Soviet citizens, remembered scarcely believing what they heard – although what they heard was hardly the full story. Molotov explained neither the extent of the debacle nor the reasons that Soviet forces were unprepared. The broadcast itself remained a vivid memory, clearly marking a rupture in the life of the country and of individuals. It was, as the literary critic Lidiia Ginzburg remembered, a “combination of the intensely personal (the loudspeaker prophesying each one's fate) and the epochally important.”
As the war became an everyday reality for Leningraders, the radio and newspapers remained vital components of their experiences. Within twenty-four hours, the news of the invasion prompted some hundred thousand Leningraders not subject to immediate mobilization to volunteer for service in the home guard (opolchenie).
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- The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995Myth, Memories, and Monuments, pp. 42 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006