By the fall of 1941, as the German army closed its blockade of Leningrad and the German air force began its campaign to bomb the city into submission, only a small fraction of the city’s 400,000 children had been evacuated.1 Few children escaped the city during the first months of the siege, when the daily bread ration for dependents fell to 125 grams. No official figures count the number of children who died during the terrible winter of 1941–1942, when thousands of Leningraders died of starvation every day. The city lacked the capacity to bury, let alone identify, all of them. When the so-called “Road of Life” opened across frozen Lake Ladoga in late 1941, children were among the first evacuated. However, some remained in the blockaded city, which was often subject to heavy air and artillery attack until the siege was finally broken in January 1944.
In official Soviet parlance, Leningrad was a “city front,” a place where the distinction between front and rear, soldier and civilian, disappeared. With most of its adult male population in the army or evacuated with the war industry, the city of Leningrad was a front “manned” largely by women and children. Wartime accounts tended to emphasize that children not only withstood the siege but also that they played a vital role in defending the city. In these accounts the most visible representative of the young generation was the Young Communist teenager (Komsomol), often a girl, digging anti-tank trenches, extinguishing incendiary bombs in buckets of sand before they set fire to rooftops, or delivering food, water, and even the mail to Leningraders struggling against starvation and isolation.
While wartime accounts emphasized child heroes, the emerging “cult” of World War II in the 1960s made an innocent child victim a prominent state-sanctioned symbol of the city’s wartime experience.2 The rituals, heroes, and memorials of the “cult” worked to turn the war into the Soviet state’s chief legitimizing myth. In the case of Leningrad, the cult of the war made an eleven-year-old girl the most visible victim of the siege. Tania Savicheva’s laconic nine-sentence “diary” chronicling the deaths of six members of her family during the famine winter and spring of 1941–1942 became an emblem of the “Leningrad epic.” Soviet, post-Soviet, and Western accounts used the diary as a means of evoking the horrors of the blockade.
Tania’s brief diary and stories about hard-working, spirited Young Communist girls and boys define the city’s children in wartime as at once innocent victims and heroic defenders. The publicity these images received, both during and after the war, illuminates the political uses of children’s wartime experiences. That these images continue to shape the memory of the war in post-Soviet Russia suggests the difficulty of separating the “raw” memory of people who lived through the siege as children from the Soviet “myth” of innocence and heroism.
Wartime Images of Children in Leningrad
In wartime accounts, two sorts of children inhabited besieged Leningrad: those receiving excellent care in state institutions and those doing adult work to “defend” the city. Newspapers praised Leningrad’s women for their protection and rehabilitation of the youngest survivors of the siege. The press pictured teenage boys and girls as fighting for their mothers and the motherland by caring for children, the sick, and the old. The wartime story of Leningrad’s children can thus be understood as of a piece with propaganda that made devotion to family and hometown key markers of Soviet patriotism.3
What remained largely invisible in these Soviet wartime accounts was the failure to evacuate children and the fatal effects of starvation. During the war, telling the story of the youngest victims of Nazi aggression proved difficult for the Soviet state. Images of threatened and wounded children often functioned in Soviet wartime propaganda as a means of generating hatred of the invader and of inspiring sacrifice. A wartime photograph of Leningrad’s main street shows a bombed-out building decorated with a two-story version of a frequently reproduced poster that featured a woman with a child in her arms and the caption “Death to the child-killers!”4
At the same time, the failure to evacuate or feed hundreds of thousands of children hardly constituted the sort of fact that the Soviet state liked to publicize. The Soviet press did not cover experiences like those of historian Andrei Dzeniskevich, who as a nine-year-old in 1941 was part of a group of children evacuated from Leningrad directly into the path of the advancing Germans. Trainloads of children that came under German bombardment had to be returned to Leningrad, and not all could be re-evacuated in a safer direction before the blockade closed.5
Instead, wartime accounts detailed the extraordinary acts performed predominately by women to save children. Typical of the genre is a 1944 account, published in English for Allied consumption, that described a nurse at a children’s home who led her charges to the shelter during an air raid, all the while restraining her motherly impulse to leave and check on her own children. When the immediate danger had passed and the nurse returned home, she found that her own children had been taken to safety by the neighbors.6
Unable to raise uncomfortable questions about the state’s failure to respond effectively to the emergency, the wartime press emphasized measures taken to protect children, and in general downplayed starvation as a cause of death in the besieged city—favoring instead stories about heroic efforts to combat the deadly effects of German bombs and artillery.7
Recognizing the profoundly damaging effects of war on children, wartime accounts maintained that for Soviet youngsters the trauma was short-lived. The credit went both to dedicated women and to the Soviet state. Writing in the newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda in May 1943, novelist Aleksandr Fadeev emphasized the speed with which Leningrad’s children recovered from the famine winter of 1941–1942. “In April [1942], when I first saw Leningrad children, they had already passed through the most difficult period of their lives, but the imprint of that terrible winter remained on their faces and was expressed in their games. Many children played by themselves. Even in collective games, they played silently, with serious faces.” Yet by July, according to Fadeev, “the majority of children appeared completely normal and healthy,” the only exceptions being recently orphaned children.8 In an extended version of his Leningrad observations published in 1944, Fadeev provided a detailed catalog of physical and emotional injury fully healed by the “sacred work of Leningrad’s women.”9
Wartime accounts traced children’s resilience to the upbringing provided by the Soviet state. A 1944 account of the siege acknowledged that Leningrad “[p]arents worried over the psychological effect of such abnormal times, remembering stories of embittered, gnome-like children and maladjusted, unhealthy adults, the spawn of warfare. What actually happened,” according to the authors, “was that most of the children who remained in Leningrad developed a sardonic and simple humor that was indestructible.” They traced these happy results to the fact that “[m]ost of these children had received splendid training as members of the Young Pioneers,” and, at a still younger age, as Little Octobrists.10
The “steadfastness” (muzhestvo), patriotism, and determination attributed to children made it possible to picture them as “heroic defenders” on par with the adults. Moving from his description of the speed with which Leningrad’s orphans “had become completely normal children” to his account of Leningrad schoolchildren, Fadeev emphasized that while “the people of Leningrad can be proud of having saved the children” it was also true that “the children of school age can be proud of having defended Leningrad together with their fathers, mothers, elder brothers and sisters.”11 The official newspaper of the Young Communist League, Komsomol’skaia pravda, routinely carried stories of schoolchildren and Komsomols, usually teenagers finishing or just out of school, who, in addition to their studies, waited in line for bread for the family, worked in defense factories, brought food and firewood to the homebound, stood watch on rooftops, put out incendiary bombs, and caught spies and speculators.12 In a glowing account of an industrial trade school, the school’s director attributed the remarkable survival rates among his pupils to the teachers’ commitment to preserving discipline and to the teenagers’ work in war industries.13 The school provided an inspirational story not only of survival but of survival made possible by participation in the heroic defense of the city.
The story of the haven of the trade school, as well as accounts of infants saved from bombed buildings, diverted attention from the thousands of children who died in the blockaded city. Women’s heroic protection of children during air raids could not change the fact that in Leningrad the primary killer of children was starvation, not German bombs and artillery. With regard to teenagers, later Soviet accounts admitted that some of the highest death rates in the city could be found in the industrial trade schools, where children, who worked like adults but received only the dependent’s ration, were among the first to die. The memoir literature and archival documents suggest that many starving teenagers resorted to stealing ration cards and bread. Other teenagers, both pupils in the factory schools and those who, as early as age fourteen, had entered the work force, tried to defect to the German lines. One memoir documents a demonstration of several hundred people, mainly children between the ages of ten and fourteen, demanding that Leningrad be declared an open city.14
None of which is to deny that both adults and children displayed remarkable courage and fortitude in withstanding the siege and trying to save others. As Richard Bidlack notes in his study of political attitudes in blockaded Leningrad, many people “demonstrated considerable heroism and self-sacrifice and pride in their native city.”15 The point is that despite the best efforts of parents and officials alike, death by starvation was everywhere in Leningrad—a simple and painful reality downplayed or ignored in wartime accounts of the city’s children.
Children and the “Cult” of the War
With the emergence in the 1960s of the state-sponsored “cult” of World War II, increasingly graphic accounts of innocent victims of starvation became a part of the official story of the siege of Leningrad.16 This reworking of the story of the children of the siege parallels “the forty-year evolution of Soviet war literature” that critic Boris Gasparov has characterized as involving “the revelation of the war’s human aspect: personal suffering, individualized characters, social and ethical problems.”17 In the 1960s, the “human aspect” of the blockade came to be embodied in Tania Savicheva, whose diary became an indelible icon of the siege. Such individual accounts humanized the war and were, therefore, well suited to one of the chief aims of the state-sponsored war cult: impressing upon the postwar generation the sacrifices and heroism of their elders as well as the legitimacy of the Soviet state that engineered victory.
The fame of Tania’s diary, at least in the Soviet Union, suggests comparisons with the legendary status of the diary of Anne Frank. While Tania’s brief account offers none of the intimate details that have made it possible to read Anne’s diary as “an uplifting and not a harrowing experience,” her matter-of-fact log has been similarly represented as a testament to “sustaining strength rather than debilitating weakness.”18 By the early 1980s, Tania’s diary had opened the way to the publication of other, much fuller, children’s diaries and oral histories.
Tania Savicheva’s diary went on display in Leningrad before the war ended. In its totality, the diary, written in a child’s notebook, reads:
Zhenia died 28 December, 12:30 in the morning, 1941.
Babushka [Grandmother] died 25 January, 3:00 in the afternoon, 1942.
Leka died 17 March, 5:00 in the morning, 1942.
Dedia [Uncle] Vasia died 13 April, 2:00 at night, 1942.
Dedia Lesha, 10 May, 4:00 in the afternoon, 1942.
Mama, 13 May, 7:30 in the morning, 1942.
Savichevs died. All died. Only Tania remains.19
In 1944, Tania Savicheva’s terse log of the deaths of her mother, grandmother, sister, brother, and two uncles constituted one small piece of a massive museum in Leningrad that filled over 20,000 square meters of space and featured impressive displays of Soviet and captured German military hardware. Tania’s sister Nina, who had been evacuated from Leningrad, found the diary in 1944 and turned it over to the museum. At the time of the museum’s opening, the diary attracted little official attention. It is not mentioned in the 1945 guidebook to the exhibition, although it does appear briefly in the 1948 guidebook, where Tania is identified as a nine-year-old. The many press reports announcing the opening of the exhibition and later the museum did not mention the diary. The press and the exhibition’s guidebook focused on the military displays and on the mock-up of a Leningrad bakery where the visitor could look through an icy window to see scales with the 125-gram bread ration of late 1941 and a sign describing its adulterated contents.20
In more recent accounts of the museum, the diary is mentioned as a key exhibit. When, in the early 1980s, one of the museum’s founders looked back on the establishment of the museum, Tania’s diary assumed a prominent place in his narrative. Vasilii Kovalev remembered the diary as a central exhibit in the room that displayed the 125-gram bread ration. “This little book,” he recalled, “made an incredible impression … I remember Lady Churchill standing before the case containing Tania Savicheva’s diary. When the contents were translated to her, her eyes filled with tears.”21
The retrospective importance of the diary stemmed in part from its prominent display, along with a prewar photograph of Tania, in the small museum at Piskarevskoe Memorial Cemetery fifteen years after the end of the war. Opened on Victory Day (May 9) 1960, Piskarevskoe Cemetery honors the hundreds of thousands of nameless dead buried in mass graves—and one girl with a name and a face, who recorded the deaths of her family. Tania, who was evacuated but died as a result of prolonged malnutrition suffered in Leningrad, became a “symbol of the blockade.”22 In 1968, the diary itself became part of a memorial to “the young heroes of Leningrad” that consisted of a gigantic “flower of life” and Tania’s diary, each page rendered in larger-than-life stone.23
The children’s memorial suggests the conflation of heroism and victimization that became central to the war cult’s use of the stories of children. Historian Nina Tumarkin explains the emergence of the war cult in the 1960s, and particularly in the years after Leonid Brezhnev took power in 1964, as “a kind of counter-campaign against the international youth culture” that “tried to shame young people into feeling respect for their elders or, as a minimum goal, into behaving obediently in their presence.”24 Stories about children who gave their lives to “defend” Leningrad—even if that “defense” consisted only of going to school during the blockade—offered a means of reaching the postwar generation.25 Sergei Smirnov’s 1971 poem “Heart and Diary” takes Tania’s diary as its point of departure and imagines Tania’s siblings and uncles as dedicated young people expending their last reserves of strength working in the war industry and Tania herself as a dutiful Young Pioneer struggling to survive. The poem’s homey details—such as the family’s preparations for summer vacations—is bracketed by notes emphasizing that Tania’s diary served as evidence of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg.26 The framework allows identification with a fellow child while underscoring the historic significance of her story and the war.
Persuading survivors to share personal and painful stories of the siege, Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, editors of an important collection of siege diaries and oral histories, made the need to reach youngsters explicit. They told one reluctant informant “that it was very important for the younger readers to know more about the life of a teenager during the blockade.”27
One of the central accounts included in Adamovich and Granin’s Blokadnaia kniga (A Book of the Blockade) is the diary of Iura Riabkin, who turned sixteen shortly after the blockade closed. Blokadnaia kniga begins with the iconic image of Tania, but its real child hero is Iura, whose lengthy diary records the inner life of a teenager in blockaded Leningrad. Typical of the diary’s perspective is the first entry on the outbreak of war. Having gone to the Pioneer Palace—a kind of youth club—to play chess, Iura heard the announcement of the German invasion. Iura’s account recognizes the immensity of the news—“My head was spinning. I just couldn’t think straight”—but also notes that despite the shock he managed to win three straight games of chess.28 Iura recorded his involvement in all sorts of war work from helping to build bomb shelters to putting out incendiary bombs at school. He thus fits the stereotype of the young heroic defender. At the same time, he emerges as a very real boy, whose motives and reactions were not self-consciously “heroic,” but included the desire to be with friends, to keep busy, and to participate in the great adventure of war.
Iura’s diary, unlike Tania’s, provides insight into the child’s experiences and understandings of the blockade. As food rations diminished in the winter of 1941, Iura chronicled a painful struggle between, in the editors’ phrase, “conscience and hunger.” In December 1941, the starving Iura recorded his “degradation … dishonor and shame”: “like a bastard I sneak their last morsels” from his mother and thirteen-year-old sister Ira.29 In early January, Iura described the advanced stages of starvation—“I’m bloated ...I can’t force myself to move about, can’t make myself get up from a chair and walk a step or two”—and expressed his soon-realized fears that his sister and mother would leave him behind when they were evacuated.30
The power of Iura Riabkin’s diary, like other diaries and oral histories published in the years of the war “cult,” stems in part from the moving, personal descriptions of previously taboo subjects: the inadequacy of efforts to evacuate children, the effects of starvation, the strain and breakdown of family relations.31 In his diary, fifteen-year-old Misha Tikhomirov told the story of December 1941 and early January 1942 by detailing his daily food intake, the often “hellish cold” inside and out, the increasing difficulty of reading and preparing lessons, and the numbers of corpses encountered on the way to school.32 A child survivor interviewed by Adamovich and Granin recounted that she remembered the children’s New Year’s party in January 1942 because it was the day her father died. A woman who was twelve during the siege remembered that her four-year-old sister, who never asked for food “because she understood that it couldn’t be got,” coped by incessantly cutting and tearing paper. Many mothers, like Iura’s, had to choose which child to save. Others abandoned their children altogether. A woman who had been in charge of evacuating children told of a once “tender mother,” who threw her child out of the house when he lost a ration card. The child died, and sometime after the war, the mother committed suicide.33
Collections of documents published in the years of the war cult represented the words of children and child survivors as providing direct access to the reality of the siege. Explicitly in Adamovich and Granin’s collection, and implicitly in others, children’s diaries became privileged repositories of the “true” story of the siege. The editors of Blokadnaia kniga, who collected large numbers of oral reminiscences, argued that the diaries provided the truest picture of life in blockaded Leningrad. While oral histories might be distorted by contact with published accounts, diaries constituted the pure “bedrock” of truth. At the same time, of all the oral histories, they most trusted the words of child survivors, deeming the child’s memory “clear and exact.”34
What such claims about the authenticity of the child’s words ignored was the degree to which the diaries themselves reflected not just the child’s truth but also the child’s internalization of the official version of the war and the siege. Many in Leningrad kept diaries during the war, often for the first time. Convinced that they were living through epic events, diarists created personal accounts for the historical record. Iura Riabkin, for instance, wrote that on the first day of the war, “A really serious battle is beginning, a clash between two antagonistic forces—socialism and fascism! The wellbeing of mankind depends on the outcome of this historic struggle.” Iura may well have shared this view of the war, but it was clearly one that he had encountered in school or in the press, which he read avidly.35 Nonetheless, the diary’s emotional authenticity softens and sometimes conceals its ideological content. The war cult capitalized on the “truth” of children’s diaries and recollections, presenting them as unmediated proofs of the sacrifice and heroism at the center of the mythic telling of the war.
That the mythic story of Leningrad’s stoic and heroic children persisted after the fall of communism suggests that it was more than a means of maintaining the authority of the Soviet state. Even at its most hackneyed, the war cult recognized and represented the suffering of individuals, while offering a larger meaning for their sacrifices. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the war cult has in part been unmasked as a manipulative effort to invent heroes of mythic status.36 Still, many of the heroes and monuments created by the cult remain compelling, particularly for the generation that fought the war. One child survivor, telling her story eight years after the demise of the Soviet Union, prefaced her account with the story of Tania Savicheva.37 Similarly, a recent book of reminiscences of the siege compiled by survivors who relocated to Stalingrad (now Volgograd) opens with the images of the Soviet-era memorials commemorating the siege of Leningrad and the battle of Stalingrad.38 The Tania Savicheva memorial graces the cover of a post-Soviet collection of poetry by child survivors of the siege.39 Moreover, the collection itself contains nothing that would directly challenge the official story of innocent and heroic children. Adamovich and Granin cautioned readers looking for the “truth” that survivors often “substituted well-known facts for their personal stories.”40 That “truthful” children and child survivors often did the same suggests that the “substitution” or interleaving of the personal and the public functioned as a key means of endowing the experience and the memory of a wartime childhood with meaning.
NOTES
1. Dmitri Pavlov, in charge of food distribution for the city, provides the figure of 400,000 children in the city at the start of the siege, September 8, 1941. Pavlov, Leningrad 1941: The Blockade, Translated by John Clinton Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 48. He does not specify the age range included in the category “children.”
2. On the “cult” of World War II, see Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 3, 188, and Weiner, Making Sense of War, 17, n. 18.
3. Kirschenbaum, “‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families,’” 825–847.
4. The photograph is reproduced in Boris Skomorovsky and E. G. Morris, The Siege of Leningrad: The Saga of the Greatest Siege of All Time as Told by the Letters, Documents, and Stories of the Brave People Who Withstood It (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1944), 45.
5. Andrei R. Dzeniskevich, “The Social and Political Situation in Leningrad in the First Months of the German Invasion: The Social Psychology of the Workers,” in Thurston and Bonwetsch, eds., The People’s War, 73–74.
6. Skomorovsky and Morris, The Siege of Leningrad, 83–84.
7. Lydia Ginzburg, Blockade diary, Translated by Alan Myers (London: Harvill Press, 1995), 31; Ol’ga Berggol’ts, “Iz dnevnikov,” Zvezda no. 5 (1990), 190. The press mentioned “hunger” in Leningrad only in 1943, well after the period of starvation had passed.
8. A. Fadeev, “Deti geroicheskogo goroda: Iz leningradskikh zarisovok,” Komsomol’skaia pravda (hereafter KP), May 12, 1943.
9. A. Fadeev, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, Translated by R. D. Charques (London: Hutchinson and Co., [1946]), 40–45. The Russian original is A. Fadeev, Leningrad v dni blokady (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1944).
10. Skomorovsky and Morris, The Siege of Leningrad, 42. KP’s coverage of the war routinely explained young peoples’ heroism as stemming, at least in part, from their training as Young Communists.
11. Fadeev, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, 45, 46.
12. Fadeev, “Deti geroicheskogo goroda”; K. Filatova, “Chasovye goroda-geroia: Komsomol’tsy okhraniaiut revoliutsionni poriadok,” KP, July 10, 1942; K. Filatova, “V povestke dnia—voprosy vospitaniia,” KP, February 20, 1943.
13. Fadeev, Leningrad in the Days of the Blockade, 47–48.
14. Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin Adamovich, A Book of the Blockade (Moscow: Raduga, 1983), 46, 82; Richard Bidlack, “Survival Strategies in Leningrad,” in Thurston and Bonwetsch, eds., The People’s War, 100–101.
15. Richard Bidlack, “The Political Mood in Leningrad during the First Year of the Soviet-German War,” Russian Review 59 (January 2000), 112.
16. A discussion of why the “cult” of the war emerged in the 1960s lies beyond the scope of this chapter. See Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead.
17. Boris Gasparov, “On ‘Notes from the Leningrad Blockade,’” Canadian American Slavic Studies 28 (Summer–Fall 1994): 217.
18. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank,” in Hayes, Lessons and Legacies, 250, 260.
19. I have used the photographs of the diary included in Sergei Simonov, Serdtse i dnevnik (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Sovremennik,” 1971). Harrison Salisbury provides a translation in 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 484.
20. Vystavka “Geroicheskaia Oborona Leningrada”: Ocherk-putevoditel’ (Leningrad and Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1945); Muzei oborony Leningrada (Leningrad and Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1948), 54. Press accounts include: L. Rakov, “Vystavka “Geroicheskaia oborona Leningrada,” Leningrad no. 8 (June 1944): 14–15; S. Avvakumov, “Pamiatnik muzhestvy i stoikosti,” Leningradskaia pravda, August 22, 1944; L. Rakov, “Pamiatnik geroiam nashego goroda: K godovshchine so dnia otkrityiia vystavki “geroicheskaia oborona Leningrada,” Leningradskaia pravda, April 30, 1945; D. Khrenkov, “Po znakomomu adresu,” Literaturnaia gazeta, January 25, 1964.
21. V. P. Kivisepp and N. P. Dobrotvorskii, “Muzei muzhestvo, skorbi i slavy,” Leningradskaia panorama no. 8 (August 1991): 24. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 12–13. In her telegrams from Leningrad, Churchill mentioned her visit to a children’s hospital, but not the museum. Mary Soames, ed., Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 525.
22. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 13. Gennadi Petrov, Piskarevskoe kladbishche (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1971), 35–36; Iu. Alianskii, “Tanets v ogne,” in Deti voennoi pory (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1984), 181.
23. Viktor Golikov, ed., Podvig naroda: Pamiatniki Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1980), 120; Iu. A. Lukíianov, Rubezhi stoikosti muzhestva (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1985), 127–135.
24. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 133.
25. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 454.
26. Smirnov, Serdtse i dnevnik, 4, 91.
27. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 486. A. Aleksii, “Detiamplanetu bez voin,” in Deti voennoi pory, 6.
28. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 236.
29. Ibid., 411, 410.
30. Ibid., 414–415. Iura himself was later evacuated, but did not survive.
31. A Book of the Blockade, 247, 255; E. Maksimova, “Vtoraia pobeda,” in Deti voennoi pory, 92–102.
32. Ia. Kamernetskii, “Dnevnik Mishi tikhomirova,” in Deti voennoi pory, 79–91. The introductory material states that Misha died in an artillery attack. Similar accounts may be found in Deti goroda-geroia (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1974).
33. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 192, 163, 21.
34. Ibid., 234, 25, 134, 177.
35. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 236–237.
36. Elena S. Seniavskaia, “Heroic Symbols: The Reality and Mythology of War,” Russian Studies in History 37 (Summer 1998): 61–87; Rosalinde Sartori, “On the Making of Heroes, Heroines, and Saints,” in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 176–193.
37. Interview at the Russian National Library, June 1999.
38. Blokadniki: Volgogradskoe oblastnoe dobrovol’noe obshchestvo “zashchitniki i zhiteli blokadnogo Leningrada “(Volgograd: Komitet po B70, 1996).
39. Blokadnoi pamiati stranitsy (St. Petersburg: ROO “Iunie uchastniki oborony Leningrada,” 1999). See also Sankt-Peterburgskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet. Universitet v blokadnom i osazhdennom Leningrade 1941–1944: Sbornik ofitsial’nykh dokumentov, pisem, fotografii i drugogo fakticheskogo materiala (St. Petersburg: TOO “Gippokat,” 1996).
40. Adamovich and Granin, A Book of the Blockade, 25.