5/30/2023 0 Comments Siege diarie![]() ![]() The War Within recovers these lost narratives, shedding light on one of World War II's darkest episodes. Diaries-now dangerous to their authors-were concealed in homes, shelved in archives, and forgotten. When the blockade was lifted in 1944, Kremlin officials censored publications describing the ordeal and arrested hundreds of Leningrad's wartime leaders. The city's isolation from Moscow made it politically suspect. Anything that describes a life not like the present one. But in a bitter twist, the diarists became victims not only of Hitler but also of Stalin. Track your R6 stats and compare your performance against friends & other players. The writer Vitalii Bianki, the author of popular children’s books about nature, visited Leningrad in FebruaryMarch 1942 and noted an active book trade in his diary: Most of what is being bought up is exciting pulp stuff, adventure novels. Leningrad's party organization encouraged diary writing, hoping the texts would guide future histories of this epic battle. ![]() The journals also reveal that Leningraders began to reexamine Soviet life and ideology from new, often critical perspectives. For many, diary writing became instrumental to survival-a tangible reminder of their humanity. Residents recorded in intimate detail the toll taken on minds and bodies by starvation, bombardment, and disease. Drawing on 125 unpublished diaries written by individuals from all walks of Soviet life, Alexis Peri tells the tragic story of how citizens struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them. The War Within chronicles the Leningrad blockade from the perspective of those who endured the unendurable. Cut off from the rest of Russia, the city remained blockaded for 872 days, at a cost of almost a million civilian lives, making it one of the longest and deadliest sieges in modern history. Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina have searched archival holdings for letters and diaries written during the siege, conducted interviews with survivors. I listened to that symphony over and over and over for about two weeks on my commute while I dove first into the history of the siege itself, but at a certain point I decided to go deeper. Summary: In September 1941, two-and-a-half months after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the German Wehrmacht encircled Leningrad. It has been four years since I completed Leningrad: Siege and Symphony and took my first dive into the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. ![]()
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