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Leningrad, 1941–42: Morality in a City under Siege. By Sergey Yarov. Translated by Arch Tait. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 392. $35.78.)

The Leningrad blockade, which lasted 872 days between September 1941 and January 1944, was one of the most horrific events in world history. The number of Soviet civilians trapped within the blockaded territory who died from hunger, cold, and enemy bombardment was probably close to 900,000. Most of them perished during the first winter. Hundreds of books were published in the Soviet Union on the blockade, but they suffered from limited access to sources and had to conform to the official narrative that Leningraders displayed unqualified heroism in defending their city. Following the collapse of the USSR and partial opening of Soviet archives, there has been an outpouring of scholarship on the blockade. Sergey Yarov was born and educated in Leningrad and became a much beloved teacher and scholar at the city’s European University and Herzen Pedagogical University as well as a Senior Research Fellow in the Russian Academy of Sciences. His book on the period, which he simply calls the “Time of Death,” was originally published in 2012, three years before his own cruel death at the age of fifty-six. Yarov meticulously researched and wrote his richly detailed and carefully documented study over a decade. His sources include hundreds of diaries, letters, memoirs, declassified government reports, and interviews with siege survivors. The book was a labor of love, intended for a wide audience, and it ranks among the most important on any aspect of the Second World War. Yarov displays tremendous empathy for the blokadniki, and his descriptions of them trying to supplement their starvation-level bread rations with wallpaper glue, animal fodder, boiled leather belts, rotten cabbage leaves, and acorns reveal their persistent sense of anguish. At the same time, his book is a clear-eyed, unvarnished, and penetrating examination of changes in moral behavior. His thesis is that