About the Siege

Daniil Granin tells about the Blockade. His memories—of what the people who lived through the Blockade told when Granin and Adamovich wrote “The Blockade Book”—a historical account of the causes of the Blockade and how people lived in the besieged city.

“Blockade Book” (documentary, chronicles of the siege of Leningrad; co-authored with Alexei Adamovich. For the publication of this book in Leningrad there was a ban. For the first time, part of it was printed with cuts in 1977 in the magazine “Novy Mir,” and in Leningrad the book was published only in 1984 after the change of party leadership of the city and G. Romanov’s move to Moscow)

“I have a bad attitude toward D. Granin—more precisely, toward what he says and writes about the Blockade. It’s all wrong, unobjective. No matter what he says, his thoughts lean toward the idea that ‘the city had to be surrendered,’ and that is a completely wrong way of posing the question. If we had surrendered it, there would have been nothing left of him; the victims would have been even worse than those of the Blockade… The leaders of the country, including Zhdanov, did everything to save Leningrad.”