Wartime Suffering and Survival: The Human Condition under Siege in the Blockade of Leningrad, 1941–1944 by Jeffrey K. Hass

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wartime Suffering and Survival: The Human Condition under Siege in the Blockade of Leningrad, 1941–1944 by Jeffrey K. Hass Alexis Peri Hass, Jeffrey K. Wartime Suffering and Survival: The Human Condition under Siege in the Blockade of Leningrad, 1941–1944. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2021. xx + 411 pp. Map. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £32.99: $49.95. 'Who are we when our backs are against the wall?', Jeffrey K. Hass asks to open his study of the Leningrad Blockade. Taking an historical-sociological approach, Hass concentrates on the mutually constitutive relationship between Leningraders' acts of survival on the one hand and their habits, knowledge, [End Page 775] relationships and social contexts on the other. In this intricate, rich, and at times theoretically dense work, Hass deftly integrates complex concepts with stories of human experience. He also brings wonderful lucidity, synthesizing his overall argument into just one sentence: 'survival is a tragic tension between material needs of physical persistence and emotional and symbolic needs of being human' (p. 2). Hass then presents a number of tensions — actor versus context, individual versus collective, contingency versus agency, etc. — as key vectors of Leningraders' actions and perceptions. There are no easy explanations in this book, no singular causes, or simplistic dichotomies. Instead, Hass unpacks the dynamics of Leningraders' actions with an eye to habitus, social fields, structures of knowledge and anchors of valence. Hass shows how anchors — such as food, social relationships and even corpses — shaped Leningraders' perceptions and actions in a given context. Despite the clarity of his explications, this book is not for beginners who lack background knowledge of the siege, Soviet history, or sociology. It is best suited to readers with a foothold in at least one of these areas. This is no knock on Hass, just a reflection of the fact that he is doing so much in this work, layering new archival material with sophisticated theoretical analysis and a cross-disciplinary approach. The chapters deal with concrete situations and powerful human narratives that clarify the book's conceptual apparatus. Part one examines themes of authority and order, part two class and gender, and part three loss and 'tragic agency' (p. 223). In each section, Hass does what few studies of the Blockade have: he gives equal attention to individual accounts (especially diaries and recollections) and to state and party institutions, masterfully showing how institutions are at work in the lives of individuals and how individual actions fold back on institutions (p. 14). One major insight this approach yields is that, contrary to many scholarly claims, social norms and institutional order remained intact during the siege, and this was the work of individuals as much as organizations. 'Empathy and opportunism, as much as coercion and dependency, held things together' (p. 41). An admirable and ambitious aspect of Hass's study is that it weds disciplinary perspectives together in an effort to reap the benefits and overcome the limitations of each. Those disciplines include history, sociology and economics. A meta-argument of this book is that historical studies capture what happened during the Blockade and how Leningraders described it, but they do not offer explanations of why people acted, reasoned and suffered as they did. Social science provides such explanations, but here too Hass is critical. He mediates between a sociological approach that explains social action via structures and institutions, and an economic approach that considers the individual actor a relatively autonomous calculator of gains and losses (p. 330). No one [End Page 776] approach sufficiently explains the Blockade experience, and Hass — who has expertise in historical, political and economic sociology as well as deep knowledge of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods — is perfectly suited to weave these methodologies together responsibly. Unfortunately, literary scholars are lumped in with social historians, despite their enormous contributions to our understanding of the siege experience as narrative (p. 13 n. 29). Hass reads blockade diaries carefully but more to see how Leningraders' perceptions were 'coded' than to unpack the constructedness of their narratives. Still, Hass's cross-disciplinarity is extremely compelling. 'A social science without the range of human experiences — emotions, suffering, calculation, habit — rips out...