Lifting the Siege: Women’s Voices on Leningrad (1941–1944)

Abstract

Lifting the Siege: Women's Voices on Leningrad (1941-1944)* I. THE SIEGE AS A GENDERED EXPERIENCE AND THE EARLY HISTORY In this last decade of the twentieth century, intellectual inquiry has survived the rage of subversion for subversion's sake and has settled, for the most part, with the type of revision of our knowledge that is not anarchistic; rather it is contextual and polyphonic. History is everywhere being rewritten. The discovery and integration of the voices, those not writing History, is undeniably warranted when their narratives are in some cases the most authentic. So it is with a number of recently published or newly available diaries, memoirs, oral recollections, and works of fiction dealing with the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). The Siege has received considerable academic and artistic attention both as a cataclysmic event and as an example of how starvation became a military weapon against a civilian population.2 With the recent fifty-year commemorations of various events of World War II, and, alas, the siege of Sarajevo, the Siege of Leningrad and the siege phenomenon in general have become subjects of popular and academic discussion. Yet even in the contemporary academic climate, when we grant ever more authority to the individual's voice in history, few have recognized the Siege of Leningrad as an ordeal endured primarily by women. The primary goal of this analysis is to examine the Siege as a gendered experience. Such an approach implies that gender matters, that the feminine (whether biological or environmental) leaves its stamp on the testimony of the women who suffered and survived the Siege. Although the testimonies of women survivors (blokadnitsy) were solicited early on and formed the foundation of the canonical history of the Siege-a process we will survey below-political exigencies of the post-war period led to government (and self-) censorship. If we hope to study the Siege from the perspective of gender, we must consider those testimonies that were written or given in the greatest atmosphere of freedom-i.e., documents authored in private (not intended for publication), in emigration, as well as oral testimonies given in the current context of relative freedom. We might at least expect certain consequences to follow from the traditional responsibilities of women in Russian culture, even during the great socialist experiment of Soviet rule. Women were responsible for the private domain, home and children, even if they held public positions; hence their relegation to the literary genres of private life-memoirs and poetry. Moreover, the traditional role of woman as arbiter of morality was codified for centuries in the admonitions to the lady of the house in the Domostroi. Yet there must be a caveat. As we know, and as the documents that follow will attest, women's personalities and experiences vary. The stereotypes that arise from what women share biologically and mass-culturally cannot serve to characterize the remaining multitude of differences. For some women, their differences, real or perceived, from the archetypal Soviet woman bore greater significance than what they may have shared with their gender's common lot. Although this study has led to generalizations concerning the Soviet woman's experience during the Siege of Leningrad, the women tell the stories themselves. They are members of various ethnicities (some are Jewish and ethnic Germans-minorities the Soviets found politically advantageous to term nationalities), professions, and socio-economic classes. For some, membership other than that in Soviet womanhood proved more consequential, and their testimony proves the exception to our generalization. What has been recognized, but what must now be emphasized, is that relatively early during the 900 days, the Siege of Leningrad became a woman's experience. Indeed the battlefront, the male domain, was close by-so perilously close that some soldiers attempted to return to the city sporadically at night to bring a portion of their rations to their starving families. …