With Our Backs Against the Wall

Chapter 1 sets up general themes: individual versus collective identities and survival; power and tragic, compelled agency; and change versus reproduction of practices and relations. After a brief discussion of historiography, the chapter developed its theoretical framework, building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and fields. First, perception and sensation are the foundation of social fields, which are structured signals of practice and authority. Second, fields have topographies of social and symbolic distance that shape perceptions and practices. Empathy is particularly important. Third, a crucial facet of fields is anchors, entities of symbolic and emotional valence that link individuals to fields through personal and symbolic meanings. Finally, groups of fields and actors crystalize into “economies” of contexts and rules of worth. The chapter closes with a discussion of power and compelled, tragic agency, and with a discussion of data: Blockade diaries, state and Party records (NKVD and police reports, Party documents, etc.), and interviews (during the Blockade, in the late 1970s, after 1991).

Order Under Assault

To provide a backdrop for our stories and to study effects of duress on order, this chapter explores political authority and the field of power (the state and Communist Party). The dearth of food deprived the state of a tool for control, and skills and routines of average officials were not initially aligned with wartime needs. Further, intense material deprivation and hunger shifted civilians’ incentives: survival compelled breaking rules, even for civilians not otherwise so inclined. Finally, some officials and cadres were tempted to steal and resell food in shadow markets for speculative profit, creating a competitor to the state: the collective farmers’ market (rynok). Elites and the police/NKVD knew of food theft and rynok speculation but could not stop it. Paradoxically, shadow opportunists and civilians simultaneously challenged institutional coherence and reproduced it: shadow practices bled the state of control, but also required the state to provide food.

Questioning Suffering, Rethinking the World

Suffering provokes theodicy, the search for meaning and dignity. Blockade theodicies had two key logics: causation and community of suffering. Social and symbolic distance shaped both. The Germans were the prime cause, but the Allies were viewed with suspicion. Party and state officials were closer and more visible; civilians could read into them incompetence and coldness, but also some humanity, leaving a fuzzy picture. Leningraders also asked how Soviet culture and human nature, closest to home, could cause suffering. For the suffering community, the city was a key anchor that bred contradictions. Civilians knew soldiers suffered, suggesting a broad national community. Yet this created status competition: Leningraders as the superior soviets. Competition emerged inside the city in politics of authenticity. Dystrophics were possibly shirking duties, and for some, Jews were inauthentic sufferers deserving exclusion. Blockade theodicies grounded identities in the city experience, in which USSR and Red Army had status, but Stalin and Moscow less.

Durability of Class

Class figured prominently in the Blockade, as unequal distribution of resources, and as differing perceptions and practices. Intelligentsia, a professional culture-producing class (artists, writers, professors), saw themselves as gatekeepers of ethics and culture. They used networks to plead for meager extra food, but they were loath to admit doing so. In contrast, intelligenty criticized the rynok in moral terms and tried to avoid using it. Blue-collar workers grounded status and identity in physical labor, socialism, and pragmatism. They chafed at superiors’ privileges, which reinforced class identity. In contrast, they were less reluctant to use the rynok pragmatically (although they could be critical). Managers were instrumentally rational. They enjoyed privileges and were almost silent about using networks for food. They used managerial paternalism to ground authority, including shadow practices to help employees survive. Managers sometimes used the rynok for gain. In sum, class mattered as habits and differential relations to food.

Gendered Survival and Status

With men in the army or succumbing more quickly to starvation, women’s efforts were vital to the war effort and city survival. In large part this was due to pre-war skills and dispositions instilled in women: caregiving and breadseeking (finding scarce food). That women bore burdens of family survival also challenged dependency vis-à-vis men. Women also observed men succumbing to starvation, leading them to believe they were the stronger sex. Women also framed caregiving as patriotic duty, enhancing their sense of self-worth. Yet caregiving also reinforced their sense that they fulfilled themselves vis-à-vis an Other. Men sensed this shift in status; while many felt indebted to women, others belittled their efforts and characters. One manner in which Leningraders confronted shifts in gender statuses was commenting on resexualization after the peak of starvation had passed. In sum, gender shaped experiences of survival, which in turn reinforced the traditional gender order.

Conclusions Without Closure

The conclusion provides brief lessons about the Blockade and survival. First, unresolved legacies of the Blockade remained: rebuilding authority and infrastructure; aligning wartime adaptations (practices and habits) with postwar politics; facing the expanded shadow economy; dealing with the flood of civilians hoping to enter the city; and framing and integrating the Blockade experience into a postwar narratives and propaganda. Some commentary on Stalinism and Russian historiography is offered: in particular, the need to square the circle of the Stalinist cult and dictatorship with everyday practices, without dismissing or understating either. The conclusion ends with possible lessons about social theory. Institutions require more exploration, especially regarding fields and the role of anchors. Power and authority need refinement, especially regarding “compulsion.” Social distance, anchors, and empathy and emotion require far more serious research and inclusion into theoretical frameworks. And suffering demands more attention empirically and theoretically.

Ties That Bind

Starvation impacted not only political authority. It also severely shocked intimate relations and fields of meaning. In such duress, stealing food and other innovations and violations of norms became growing temptations—yet whether one carried out such strategies depended in part on social distance and empathy vis-à-vis those who might benefit and might suffer. Theft from organizations was easier than stealing from strangers, which was easier than stealing from an acquaintance. Symbolic distance also shaped survival practices, especially as Leningraders were forced to reclassify “food.” Proximity of nontraditional to traditional forms of food shaped culinary innovations. Inanimate objects (e.g., glue) were easier to reclassify as food than animals, and Leningraders ate horses more easily than cats. The most problematic innovation was cannibalism, a recurring narrative touchstone. Paradoxically, cannibalism could corrode and support norms: its appearance created dread of a new unhuman normality, but it also invoked condemnation and reinforced the importance of “civilization.”

Valence of the Dead

Death was a Blockade constant, the dead a new anchor of valence. Perceptions and practices of the meaning of the dead, and of proper disposal, depended on social distance between the dead and an actor’s habitus (dispositions) and field. In the field of power (state and Party), officials perceived the dead as threats to the political order to be counted and disposed of expediently. In the field of labor and implementation, cemetery workers coded the dead opportunistically and entrepreneurially as commodities and objects of gain: e.g. negotiating prices (in money or kind) for disposal and commemoration. In the field of intimacy (kith and kin), actors close to the dead were guided by a moral economy of a dignified subject. Yet this logic faced a brutal contradiction: providing a dignified farewell required resources that could be invested in survival. This contributed to a sense of powerlessness and passive resistance to dehumanization.