During the 900-day siege of Leningrad, 800,000 civilians died. The vast majority of them starved to death. We are indebted to Alexis Peri for finally putting a human face to numbers and events which have always astonished. The War Within courageously deciphers siege-era diaries to explain how hunger reignited Leningraders’ critical awareness of their selves and of Soviet life in general—an awareness that remains muted within a Russia distracted by the collectivist myth of the Great Patriotic War.

Based on 125 unpublished and twenty-five published diaries written from across the social spectrum, the book is divided into two sections. These respectively cover Leningraders’ conceptualizations of self and society after both were cut off from the Soviet “mainland” by Nazi blitzkrieg. Though the city's communists asked their population in fall 1941 to document this unprecedented situation, Peri finds no ideological line guiding these diarists as the Soviet Union's wartime propaganda remained in flux.

Most of the material here focuses on the siege's worst six months: the winter of 1941–42. During this time, the diarists were forced to see the world in new ways. First studying her subjects’ physical bodies, the author finds them developing a “new sixth sense” (66); Leningraders lived by instinct, with most receiving only 4.4 ounces of filler-imbued bread per day. In such a situation “mazes of the self” (88) appeared, for it was impossible to reassemble an “I” shattered by constant near-starvation. Experiencing this with close family members in tow, for example, only made matters worse. Peri's text recounts one diarist's chilling tale from a time when parents failed to balance their families’ rations with children: “Uncle Arkadii, my mom died,” a seven-year old girl exclaimed “in a fit of joyful excitement” upon realizing her mother's rations had now become her own (106).

As hunger “distorted or exposed true human character,” (125) the author asks whether Leningraders recovered impulses toward altruism or sacrifice—the dominant themes of Soviet and post-Soviet siege history. Her answer is a definitive “no,” as different varieties of prewar Soviet rhetoric again reared their ugly faces while Leningraders tried to make sense of the unimaginable. While the siege's rationing fit nicely with Vladimir Lenin's “doctrine of necessary inequality,” (133) the diarists analyzed here also adapted the rhetoric of class struggle against new enemies of the people such as inevitably venal food-service workers and “blockade wives” (145) who traded sex for food. More interesting, though, is Peri's explication of how Leningraders adopted official wartime rhetoric where those starving to death supposedly suffered from a disease known as “nutritional dystrophy” (alimentarnaia distrofiia) (180). The diarists’ widespread mobilization of such absurdity illustrated a sense that their own leaders were also responsible for the city's suffering. With the Bolsheviks’ more optimistic, future-looking rhetoric now forgotten, ordinary people seeking to advance their interests probably leveraged the authorities’ wartime language for some time to come.

Intriguingly, the population's own imagined condition of “hunger psychosis” (golodnyi psikhoz) (194) also became widely recognized as a pathological outcome of the times. Peri illustrates this with a diarist's description of her father's death from starvation: “All day he lies around … indifferent to everything. Or he begins to cry or scream from hunger and says that he will eat kindling, that he is prepared to eat himself. His voice rings in my ears, ‘Give me something to chew on! Give me something to chew one!’… Sometimes he starts saying all sorts of absurd things: ‘Where is my body? I don't know what happened to me.’” (196) Although the father's statements were completely logical as he experienced starvation's final cannibalization of the body, Peri argues that witnessing such situations resulted in Leningraders developing new ways of seeing the world, however erroneous.

Such outcomes inevitably meant that contemporaneous efforts by officialdom to compare the siege with Russia's past—whether the Napoleonic invasions or the Civil War—were doomed. In some diaries, Leningraders were just another version of the Grande Armée in retreat. While this reader hungered for these sources’ ideas to be placed within a blow-by-blow account of the Nazis’ tightening of the “ring” and the Soviet authorities’ subsequent responses, the material used simply does not allow it. These diarists were temporally- and spatially-challenged writers who somehow survived the early 1940s while sharpening their critical eye on the world. That outcome makes this book an essential text for readers who seek to understand Russia today.