The Soviet Union promoted a heroic ideal of wartime Leningrad, besieged by the Nazis for two-and-a-half years, as a city of survivors against impossible odds. Many inhabitants did survive until victory was achieved, yet their diaries and letters were censored and even eyewitnesses came to believe the officially sanctioned legend rather than the evidence of their own experience. Russian historian Sergey Yarov went to the original unexpunged sources and finds a terrible story of human reaction to the unspeakable horror of air raids, shelling and—worse still—starvation. Yarov’s description of the emotional and physical degeneration caused by hunger—the apathetic, trudging masses obsessed only with eating—will remind some readers of scenes from George Romero. “Apathy weakened the ties between people,” Yarov writes, and with it, ethical standards and emotions atrophied. Leningrad 1941-42 is a disturbing examination of humanity under duress.
