In the preface to her book on how the Siege of Leningrad has been represented in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, Russian historian Tatiana Voronina declares that “understanding the past begins with understanding how historical memory works” (9). Voronina's study examines Siege memory, the various stages of its formation—from official historiography to works of fiction; from documentary evidence to purely personal recollections silenced for years. The work Voronina has performed in analyzing a large, multi-leveled corpus of Siege texts shows the complexity of any attempt to disentangle the Siege narrative, insofar as such an ostensibly unitary phenomenon blends the quite various, heroic and traumatic, experiences of survivors.

Since the glasnost era, the Siege of Leningrad has been a key topic in revisionist-historical approaches to the “Great Patriotic War.” Such researchers as Lisa Kirschenbaum, Irina Sandomirskaia, Alexis Peri, Andrea Zemskova-Züge, Polina Barskova, and Riccardo Nicolosi, to name only a few, have written on it. Recommending Voronina's book is especially productive for its focus on the narrative structure of Siege texts; its highlighting of the main stages in attempts to break through the “petrified heroism” of the socialist-realist canon.

The book consists of an introduction and three parts, divided into separate chapters. Each chapter is chronological: Voronina describes the period of 1941–53, then the Thaw and “stagnant” 1970s, and finally the period from 1985–2006. In the introduction, Voronina outlines her methodological approach to analyzing Siege texts, employing key concepts like “place memory,” collective memory, and trauma and traumatic writing. To Voronina, traumatic writing represented a new phenomenon in the Russian historical narrative, which had “no suitable language for a story about history as tragedy” (16). Crucial to understanding the texts Voronina analyzes is socialist-realist historicism—whose conception she derives from Katerina Clark's famous description of the socialist-realist canon as based in ritual. Socialist-realist historicism encourages an optimistic perception of history; its “hero” always emerges victorious, even if s/he perishes. Misfortune is perceived as a necessary condition for the triumph of good over evil. This is the paradigm on which the Siege narrative is built, as Voronina clearly confirms with numerous examples from literature (part 2) and historiography (part 3). She makes the important observation that in the post-perestroika period, personal recollections remain subordinated to the structure imposed by socialist-realist historicism, specifically when personal involvement in the Siege takes the form of material subsidies to the few remaining survivors.

The factual material Voronina presents in her chapters is fascinating and occasionally unique: the history of the postwar fate of the Siege; the “lack of demand” for personal Siege memory as opposed to the memory of collective heroism; and the manipulation of Siege memory during the Thaw, which produced certain party- and Komsomol-encouraged templates that Siege survivors were supposed to pass on to the younger generation. Voronina describes the emergence of special Siege rituals—laying flowers at monuments, a winter marathon, and so on—meant to activate the memory of collective heroism. The author also provides details on the societies of Siege survivors that arose in the perestroika period, their complex relationships with the authorities and each other. In the 1990s, these societies’ campaigning to gain certain privileges from the authorities led to the use of “mixed” discursive practices, with personal experience simultaneously described in heroic and victimological terms (but with the latter still also implying meaningful sacrifice).

Discussing the emergence of this new discourse in Siege memory, Voronina analyzes childhood recollections from the collective volume Children and the Siege, 2000. In theory, those who had been children at the time would make the likeliest Siege “victims,” but here, too, the socialist-realist model predominates, as survivors emphasize the care taken of them by their elders and by the state (albeit not sparing horrific details of malnutrition), and the great fortitude of the city's defenders, big and small. According to Voronina, the ultimate “victory” of socialist-realist narrative practices in Siege memory represents a hardly spontaneous submission to a stereotypically heroic memory developed over the course of years. That is, in the struggle for social privileges in post-Soviet Russia, collective heroic memory proved more “in demand” than private memory of pain and loss. It is with this sad but honest assessment that the researcher concludes her book.

The book's many methodological approaches may “pile up” to the detriment of a clear understanding of the vast factual material assembled in it. Siege memory is examined at various levels: as a historical and literary phenomenon, a personal experience, and a social institution. Given such broad coverage, the book is understandably not free of certain repetitions. This is a necessary book, however, not only for historians and cultural scholars, but also for a broad range of readers. Tatiana Voronina offers a new and comprehensive way to understand this tragic event that still inspires works of art and historical research.