During the 872-day siege of Leningrad from September 1941 to January 1944, civilians endured air raids, bread rations as low as 125 grams, food theft and speculation by opportunistic officials and shadow market traders, and death by starvation. As shocks of total war weaken institutions, desperate survival can compel violation of norms, and personal suffering can shatter long-held beliefs and practices. In Wartime Suffering and Survival, Jeffrey K. Hass uses the Blockade of Leningrad in World War II to explore the social practices and dynamics by which we cope or collapse. Using hundreds of personal accounts from diaries, recollections, police records, interviews, and state documents, Hass tells the story of how average Leningraders coped with the nightmares of war, starvation, and extreme uncertainty. By exploring the state and shadow markets, food, families, gender, class, death, and suffering, he describes the routines of daily life, the functioning of official institutions, and the development of illegal practices that were made and remade in the interactions of citizens and state agencies coping with new and extreme situations. The key to what Leningraders did and how they survived, Hass argues, is relations to anchors--entities of symbolic and personal significance that tethered Leningraders to each other and shaped practices of empathy and compassion, and of opportunism and egoism. Moving and powerful, Wartime Suffering and Survival goes to the heart of human resilience and fragility and to the core of the human condition--both individual and social.

Jeffrey K. Hass is currently an associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at the University of Richmond and a part-time Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Economics, Department of Economic Theory, at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.

Acknowledgements Chapter 1: With Our Backs Against the Wall: Politics of Survival and Suffering Part I: Order and Authority: Breaking and Making the Rules Chapter 2: Order Under Assault: Institutions and Authority, Opportunism and Desperation Chapter 3: Ties that Bind: Distance, Empathy, and Relations of Local Order Part II: Differing Experiences and Unequal Survival: Gender and Class Chapter 4: Gendered Survival and Status: Women and Men in the Blockade Chapter 5: Durability of Class: Compelled Habits of Survival Part III: Dark Sides of Survival: Loss, Suffering, and Tragic Agency Chapter 6: Valence of the Dead: Expedience, Aesthetics, Opportunity, and Dignity Chapter 7: Questioning Suffering, Rethinking the World: Tragic Agency of Blockade Theodicies Conclusions without Closure: Legacies and Lessons of the Blockade? Bibliography Notes Index