| FB-57514-14 | Research Programs: Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars | Jeffrey Kenneth Hass | A Siege Mentality: Practices and Politics of Surviving War in the Blockade of Leningrad | 9/1/2014 - 8/31/2015 | $50,400.00 | Jeffrey | Kenneth | Hass | | | | University of Richmond | Richmond | VA | 23173-0001 | USA | 2013 | Sociology | Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 |
Using the Blockade of Leningrad (1941-44) as a topic of its own and as a case study, this project analyzes behavior under extreme wartime duress. Leningraders confronted multiple sources of suffering and survival challenges: starvation, mass death, a draconian state, and uncertainty of war. Civilian responses varied with gender, class/occupation, education, and the like, yet most frameworks cannot adequately explain why. Using a wide range of untapped archival data--wartime diaries, postwar recollections, and Party and state documents (investigations, propaganda, policy discussions), etc.--I show how Leningraders grappled with and responded to challenges to survival and to assumptions of normal Soviet life. Gender, social norms, etc. continued to matter because: 1) civilians mediated Blockade suffering by imbuing identities and practices with status, dignity, and meaning; 2) concrete objects, relations, and sites of significance were anchors for shared meanings, even if contested. |