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The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments by
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Imi
is on page 271 of 309
The defense of the memory of the heroes and victims of the blockade became the keynote of arguments in favor of Leningrad. [...] [Opponents] of Petersburg equated the disappearance of the name with the destruction of the memory. Letters expressing support for Leningrad labeled the renaming of the city both blasphemous and insulting—as symbolic and psychic injury.
— Mar 04, 2018 07:30AM
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Imi
is on page 253 of 309
The prefabricated stories provided by the state can be understood as providing narrative templates for structuring difficult, painful, and unprecedented experiences. Consciously or not, individuals used stories provided by the state to demarcate and reinforce the boundaries of the "unspeakable" and to integrate painful experiences into meaningful memory.
— Mar 04, 2018 06:11AM
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Imi
is on page 247 of 309
By the early 1990s, the worst aspects of the siege, cannibalism in particular, had come out of the shadows, but such revelations did not necessarily reshape the blockade narratives. [...] Survivors continued to explain their own survival in terms of steadfastness, patriotism, and intelligentnost'. The Leningrad myth remained largely intact.
— Mar 04, 2018 05:33AM
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Imi
is on page 226 of 309
[The] inclusion of images of the suffering rodina in the [Monument to the Heroic Defenders] [...] clearly added emotional legitimacy to the narrative of Soviet state power [...] [but] the co-option worked in two directions. While the state's effort to legitmize itself may have led it to adopt popular, national images, projections of national power offered a redemptive conclusion to the story of the blockade.
— Mar 04, 2018 04:47AM
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Imi
is on page 211 of 309
Leningraders recognized that the monument's location would shape the story it told. [...] Those who hoped to emphasize military aspects of the "Leningrad epic" called for monuments along the former front. [...] Away from the city center, "real" heroes—pilots, sailors, soldiers, tank crews—tended to overshadow the "simple inhabitants" of the city.
— Mar 04, 2018 02:26AM
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Imi
is on page 200 of 309
Piskarevskoe [cemetery] was for [the poets, sculptors, and architects who worked on it] a necessary, if belated, part of the process of coping with sorrow and loss. Even as they created an official monument that marginalized individual sacrifices, the monuments' designers managed to express painful and persistent personal memories.
— Mar 04, 2018 02:13AM
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Imi
is on page 185 of 309
Internalizing officially sanctioned myths [meant for the postwar generation], [surviors and veterans] found a powerful framework for narrating their own personal stories. [...] With their emphasis on individual struggles and triumphs, the stories from the city front at once perpetuated the myth of redemptive victory and called attention to the unfulfilled promises of the "people's war."
— Mar 04, 2018 01:36AM
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Imi
is on page 180 of 309
By the mid-1970s, a decade after Khrushchev's ouster, the optimism of the early post-Stalin years had given way to pessimism and cynicism. [...] [War stories] acquired new importance as a means of, if not inspiring Soviet citizens, at least reminding them of both the sanctity and the great costs of victory. The cult of war [...] "tried to shame young people into feeling respect for their elders [...]"
— Mar 03, 2018 10:53PM
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Imi
is on page 159 of 309
Khrushchev took the risk of incriminating both himself and the system because he viewed selective revelations of Stalin's crimes as a means of purifying the political landscape, of quieting the ghosts of the terror. [...] The leadership permitted the limited publication of stories of the terror and the camps not as means of commemorating the victims but as a means of giving the past a proper burial.
— Mar 03, 2018 07:40AM
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Imi
is on page 153 of 309
Krushchev's decision—upheld by his successors—to lift Stalin's ban on war stories [...] constituted an essential and durable, if less-sensational, part of the de-Stalinization process. [...] The stories of the war cult sought to [encourage] veterans and blokadniki to tell moving, personal, and tragic tales, and [position] such war stories in an overarching narrative of the unity of the party and the people.
— Mar 03, 2018 07:21AM
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Imi
is on page 146 of 309
In postwar Leningrad, the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad had been the most prominent and, from the point of view of the party elite in Moscow, the most dangerous repository of the memory of the siege. [...] Its closure underscores the degree to which the Leningrad Affair aimed not only to discipline local leaders but also to erase the memory and the myth of the blockade.
— Mar 03, 2018 06:24AM
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Imi
is on page 141 of 309
By [1945], [...] [there were] official efforts to rein in the practice of emphasizing the city's unique spirit and wartime experiences. [...] Wartime propaganda had emphasized the local and private loyalties that made sacrifice meaningful and urgent. By 1945, efforts to universalize the Leningrad epic by reconnecting it to Soviet patriotism marked the limits of official tolerance of local pride and identity.
— Mar 03, 2018 06:02AM
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Imi
is on page 133 of 309
During the war, architects had assumed that victory would bring monuments. As early as 1942, Leningrad architects began to sketch victory monuments and memorials to the civilian victims of the blockade. [...] [The] state's preference—shared by many survivors—for moving forward and healing the city's wounds thwarted plans to build the memory of the war into the cityscape.
— Mar 03, 2018 05:39AM
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Imi
is on page 121 of 309
[As much as] "totalitarian systems" might have wished to maintain "absolute control over the production of meaning" in the built environment, the urban landscape layered in memories often worked against them. [...] For those who survived the war, the reconstructed city remained a city built not only on ruins but on remains of the prewar past, even as it became a living site of new memories and meanings.
— Mar 03, 2018 05:10AM
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Imi
is on page 116 of 309
By 1945, [...] Stalin had reason to be concerned about the memory of war. [...] [The] early catastrophes [caused largely by his military failure] had afforded Soviet citizens unprecedented autonomy and freedom of expressions, and raised expectations of a postwar liberalization of the system. [...] In the case of Leningrad, the state ultimately aimed not to merely manage the memory of war, but to obliterate it.
— Mar 03, 2018 03:39AM
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Imi
is on page 105 of 309
The central media pictured the return of peace [...] as a reassertion of the power of Stalin and the party to shape public policy and private lives. The approach of peace substantially reduced the state's tolerance for the emphasis on the personal and emotional dimensions of the war that is had done so much to promote in the first years of fighting.
— Mar 03, 2018 03:15AM
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Imi
is on page 100 of 309
Karatygina noted that "our work supported many of us, and helped many of us to bear all the severity of the blockade and the sorrow of loss." [...] For the librarians, collecting and cataloguing became a means of coping with catastrophe. As Karatygina noted: "It was easier to live, having before you a clear aim, devoting all your strength to work, and living with a harmonious, united collective."
— Mar 03, 2018 03:01AM
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Imi
is on page 97 of 309
The memory project undertaken by a small group of librarians at the State Public Library provides an usually well-documented example of how Leningraders integrated the state's rhetoric, images, and narratives into individual stories that emphasized collective work, shared experience, and meaningful sacrifice.
— Mar 03, 2018 02:58AM
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Imi
is on page 80 of 309
In its official commemorations of the siege [...] the state employed small, personal blockade stories as a means of establishing emotional authenticity of the national struggle, bolstering patriotism, and sustaining the "war mood." At the same time, individuals wove state-sponsored images and narratives into their "personal" memory projects [to invest] their wartime experiences with historic significance.
— Mar 03, 2018 02:26AM
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Imi
is on page 76 of 309
The wartime narratives offered by the local media reflected and shaped individual experiences—and therefore individual memories. [They] did so by validating and inspiring the sense that Leningraders were living through and making history. [...] Wartime narratives of the hero city [...] structured memories and monuments. Even as the blockade continued, Leningraders [...] began the work of commemoration.
— Mar 03, 2018 02:12AM
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Imi
is on page 75 of 309
What is particularly striking about these local representations of victory is the degree to which they eschewed the emphasis on the party and Stalin that, beginning in early 1943, had become increasingly prominent features of war reportage in the national newspapers. [...] In the Leningrad press, local stories, while certainly joined by those reinstating Stalin's cult, often had pride of place.
— Mar 03, 2018 02:07AM
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Imi
is on page 64 of 309
Zhilinskii's sorrow in the aftermath of his wife's death was deepened by the fact that she had died just days before the thaw and the return of the radio—two important improvements that he believed might have sustained her. The faith in the radio [and the meaning attached to its mere existence] is particularly striking in this case, given that Zhilinskii himself was later arrested for anti-Soviet agitation.
— Mar 02, 2018 11:03PM
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Imi
is on page 56 of 309
That the myth of heroic Leningrad deflected attention from the state's failure to evacuate civilians or to protect them from air raids did not necessarily diminish its psychological utility. More than an official fiction, the story of heroic Leningrad—an embattled, united, and courageous community—provided a shared narrative that helped Leningraders to make sense of their own experiences and to sustain hope.
— Mar 02, 2018 10:34PM
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Imi
is on page 55 of 309
Seeing the limits of the myth did not prelude accepting at least some of its consolations.
Indeed, those who produced wartime accounts of the blockade, and who perhaps knew the limits better than anyone, also seem to have taken comfort in the notion that there was something special, even epic, about not only the situation in Leningrad but Leningraders' responses to it.
— Mar 02, 2018 10:31PM
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Indeed, those who produced wartime accounts of the blockade, and who perhaps knew the limits better than anyone, also seem to have taken comfort in the notion that there was something special, even epic, about not only the situation in Leningrad but Leningraders' responses to it.
Imi
is on page 53 of 309
[Ol'ga] Freidenberg (Boris Pasternak's cousin) rejected the myth of the heroic defenders [...] She was among the minority who blamed Stalin for the war and called for Leningrad to be declared an open city. [...] Starving civilians [...] stood not only as a potential reproach to the state that lacked the means to feed them, but also as a potential challenge to the notion of heroic, meaningful, willing sacrifice
— Mar 02, 2018 10:22PM
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Imi
is on page 52 of 309
In keeping with the emphasis on heroic defense, the wartime press emphasized the threat of German shells and bombs—not deaths due to starvation. Even in Leningrad itself, where by the end of 1941 the reality of starvation was plain to see, and where the blockade afforded the local media unprecedented freedom [...] the newspapers and radio rarely mentioned the world golod (famine) while it was occurring.
— Mar 02, 2018 12:24PM
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Imi
is on page 49 of 309
As a means of mobilizing support for the state, Soviet propaganda rehabilitated both Russian imperial heroes—the medieval prince Aleksandr Nevskii and the generals of the Napoleonic wars Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov—and motherhood and family. Wartime propaganda likewise enlisted the heroes of the imperial state alongside invocations of "my mountains, my brothers and sisters."
— Mar 02, 2018 12:19PM
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