Imi’s Reviews > Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995, The: Myth, Memories, and Monuments > Status Update
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
Like flag
Imi’s Previous Updates
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
