The Heroic Dead
The Blockade, the Number of Victims, and Memory
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The number of victims of the Leningrad Blockade is not an objective source. It has political and ideological implications. At the Nuremburg trials, the Soviet Union spoke of 629,000 dead. In the narratives on the war, these people were transformed into heroes. Attempts on the part of academia to correct this number upward were dismissed by the regime as an attack on Soviet heroism. To this day, the heroic myth determines memory of the blockade. Victim associations use it to justify their privileges. The state monopoly on the historical interpretation of the blockade and the number of victims belongs to the past.
(Osteuropa 8-9/2011, pp. 155–168)