Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize Honorable Mention, Reginald Zelnik Book Prize “Fascinating and perceptive.” —Antony Beevor, New York Review of Books “Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured.” —Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator “Powerful and illuminating...A fascinating, insightful, and nuanced work.” —Anna Reid, Times Literary Supplement “Much has been written about Leningrad’s heroic resistance. But the remarkable aspect of [Peri’s] book is that she tells a very different story: recounting the internal struggles of ordinary people desperately trying to survive and make sense of their fate.” —John Thornhill, Financial Times “A sensitive, at times almost poetic examination of their emotions and disordered mental states. It both contrasts with and complements the equally accurate official Soviet portrait of a stalwart population standing firm in the face of evil and in defense of Soviet ideals.” —Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs In September 1941, two and a half months after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the German Wehrmacht encircled Leningrad. Cut off from the rest of Russia, the city remained blockaded for 872 days, at a cost of almost a million lives. It was one of the longest and deadliest sieges in modern history. The War Within chronicles the Leningrad blockade from the perspective of those who endured it. Drawing on unpublished diaries, Alexis Peri tells the tragic story of how young and old struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them. When the blockade was lifted in 1944, Kremlin officials censored publications describing the ordeal and arrested many of Leningrad’s wartime leaders. Some were executed. Diaries—now dangerous to their authors—were concealed, shelved in archives, and forgotten. The War Within recovers these lost accounts, shedding light on one of World War II’s darkest episodes while paying tribute the resilience of the human spirit.

In May 1941 Lena Mukhina was an ordinary teenage girl, living in Leningrad, worrying about her homework and whether Vova - the boy she liked - liked her. Like a good Soviet schoolgirl, she was also diligently learning German, the language of Russia's Nazi ally. And she was keeping a diary, in which she recorded her hopes and dreams. Then, on 22 June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and declared war on the Soviet Union. All too soon, Leningrad was besieged and life became a living hell. Lena and her family fought to stay alive; their city was starving and its citizens were dying in their hundreds of thousands. From day to dreadful day, Lena records her experiences: the desperate hunt for food, the bitter cold of the Russian winter and the cruel deaths of those she loved. A truly remarkable account of this most terrible era in modern history, The Diary of Lena Mukhina is the vivid first-hand testimony of a courageous young woman struggling simply to survive.

This is the story of Misha, a young Russian boy who survived the siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany during World War II. For 900 days (1941-1944) three million Leningraders endured starvation, lack of water, electricity, and fuel, living on one small piece of bread per day and subjected to endless air raids and bombardments. Cold and starvation destroyed over one million lives. The focal point of the book is based on the events detailed in Misha's diary. The remainder describes the historical context and impact of the blockade, and the survivor's life story. The book is intended as a tribute to the human spirit. Evelina was born in Russia in 1934. She worked as an engineer in Lvov, Ukraine for many years. It was there that she married Misha. After her husband died prematurely, Evelina decided to emigrate to America. She settled in Minnesota and found a job as an engineer. It was in America that Evelina became a Christian and married a minister. For many years she had an unshakeable determination to write this book, a biography of her beloved husband. Even as she struggled with cancer, which eventually took her life, finishing the book remained one of her top concerns. Although she never saw it published, her hope was that one day many people would be inspired by her husband's great zeal for life. In Misha's own words, "I have just now realized what life means to me. Life is a great gift given to us; it is not always lived properly."

Can a woman ever really know herself if she doesn't know her mother? From the author of the smash-hit bestseller Firefly Lane and True Colors comes Kristin Hannah's powerful, heartbreaking novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between the present and the past. Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family apple orchard; the other followed a dream and traveled the world to become a famous photojournalist. But when their beloved father falls ill, Meredith and Nina find themselves together again, standing alongside their cold, disapproving mother, Anya, who even now, offers no comfort to her daughters. As children, the only connection between them was the Russian fairy tale Anya sometimes told the girls at night. On his deathbed, their father extracts a promise from the women in his life: the fairy tale will be told one last time—and all the way to the end. Thus begins an unexpected journey into the truth of Anya's life in war-torn Leningrad, more than five decades ago. Alternating between the past and present, Meredith and Nina will finally hear the singular, harrowing story of their mother's life, and what they learn is a secret so terrible and terrifying that it will shake the very foundation of their family and change who they believe they are.

This book recounts one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century: the siege of Leningrad. It is based on the searing testimony of eyewitnesses, some of whom managed to survive, while others were to die in streets devastated by bombing, in icy houses, or the endless bread queues. All of them, nevertheless, wanted to pass on to us the story of the torments they endured, their stoicism, compassion and humanity, and of how people reached out to each other in the nightmare of the siege. Though the siege continues to loom large in collective memory, an overemphasis on the heroic endurance of the victims has tended to distort our understanding of events. In this book, which focuses on the "Time of Death", the harsh winter of 1941-42, Sergey Yarov adopts a new approach, demonstrating that if we are to truly appreciate the nature of this suffering, we must face the full realities of people's actions and behaviour. Many of the documents published here – letters, diaries, memoirs and interviews not previously available to researchers or retrieved from family archives – show unexpected aspects of what it was like to live in the besieged city. Leningrad changed, and so did the morals, customs and habits of Leningraders. People wanted at all costs to survive. Their notes about the siege reflect a drama which cost a million people their lives. There is no spurious cheeriness and optimism in them, and much that we might like to pass over. But we must not. We have a duty to know the whole, bitter truth about the siege, the price that had to be paid in order to stay human in a time of brutal inhumanity.