Leningrad, 1941–42: Morality in a City under Siege by Yarov Sergey (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 581 occupiers and occupied, Germans were also forced to deal with locals to obtain various means of sustenance: ‘Robbing the locals was often combined with black-market activities’ (p. 136). Some Germans even extended such activity to the officially out of bounds Jewish ghetto (p. 139), euphemistically noted as the ‘Jewish Residential District’ (p. 41). Morale among the occupiers was a perennial problem for Reich officials since ‘the greatest problem that the various office directors had to confront was the homesickness of the occupiers’ (p. 128). Given that spouses were discouraged from travelling east, practical sexual issues for the occupiers often led to ‘the so-called Eastern marriage — that is the relationship of a German with a woman from a racially lower-class ethnicity (normally prohibited) — [which] was by no means rare and could be observed in both cities from the start of the occupation’ (p. 188). An SS judges’ conference in May 1943 was forced to admit that ‘sexual relations with members of the population of other races was customary for around half of all members of the SS and police’ (p. 188). Thus, whilst ‘normal’ emotional and sexual relationships with female members of the occupied was out of the question as constituting ‘racial defilement’, paid sex with ‘good looking Polish girls’ was approved of in officially established brothels (p. 189). Lehnstaedt’s study provides valuable new insights into the nuanced nature of the German-Nazi occupations in Warsaw and Minsk. However, one gets the distinct impression that his findings exist in a vacuum since there is hardly any chronological historical context his evidence relates to. This is especially important since from 1939 to 1944 there are several distinct phases to the German wartime experience in the East which the experiences and feelings of the occupiers necessarily changed and adapted to as they occurred. London John P. Fox Yarov, Sergey. Leningrad, 1941–42: Morality in a City under Siege. Translated by Arch Tait. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017. xiii + 409 pp. Notes. Index.£35.00. Over 400 books were published in the Soviet Union on the nearly 900-day siege of Leningrad; however, the quality of most was severely constrained by the necessity to conform to the official narrative that Leningraders displayed unqualified heroism in defending their city. Since 1991, an outpouring of scholarship on the siege based on substantial declassification of Soviet archival collections (including a book co-authored by this reviewer) has revised that narrative by addressing formerly taboo topics, such as the existence of strong SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 582 policy disagreements between Leningrad’s leaders and the Kremlin and of antiSoviet sentiment and widespread criminal activity, including cannibalism, within the city. In 2012, three years before his cruel, premature death, Sergey Yarov took blockade historiography to a profoundly new level when he published his magisterial Blokadnaia etika, which explores in voluminous detail the essence of what it means to be human and what happened to moral standards within a besieged city where close to one million perished from starvation, cold and enemy bombardment, mainly during the winter of 1941–42. Yarov, who was born and educated in Leningrad and was a much beloved professor at the city’s European University and Herzen Pedagogical University as well as a Senior Research Fellow in the Russian Academy of Sciences, based his decadelong labour of love on hundreds of diaries, letters, memoirs and municipal and party reports, as well many interviews with siege survivors. No one has examined the primary sources on the horrific blockade more thoroughly than he. Yarov’s starting point is that there exists a universal ‘rootedness of moral values’ (p. 87), of ‘civilized behavior’ (p. 183). A moral person is ‘decent, honest, fair, responsive, generous’ (p. 5). (Interestingly, he ignores any notion that the Stalinist project to create ‘a new Soviet person’ had produced a distinctly Bolshevik ethical code.) He adopts an intimate, conversational tone with his reader and describes with great empathy the depth of suffering and anguish that blokadniki endured as they tried to supplement their inadequate bread rations during the winter of 1941–42 with wallpaper glue, boiled leather belts, animal fodder, acorns, and anything else they thought was edible...