‘When most people in a great city were dying of hunger, some died faster than others. Some lived by privilege, by crime, or by the goodness of others. Some were empowered to decide which others would live or die.  What does this tell us about their morality and about our own rules of ethical behaviour? Sergei Yarov’s study of wartime Leningrad is an unblinking inquiry into the depths of the human spirit.’
Mark Harrison, Warwick University

‘St Petersburger Sergei Yarov was, until his cruelly premature death, one of Russia's leading historians, and in this spare, searing analysis of his home city's greatest disaster, he is at the height of his powers. Unlike conventional eulogies to siege heroism, Yarov's retrospective anthropology, drawing on hundreds of diaries and documents, shows us what he calls 'real people, irate, resentful, but still imbued with a sense of compassion'. Amid the horrors of disintegration and degradation, he testifies to how “Leningrad saved itself through redeeming actions great and small”. An intensely moving and unforgettable book.’
Catriona Kelly, University of Oxford