Description

Hunger was a defining feature of the Second World War in the Soviet Union. While hunger was nothing new to many Soviet citizens, the war politicized hunger in new ways and generated distinct ways of conceiving of hunger’s effects. This talk will examine contemporaries’ reflections on the hungry body and the hungry mind in Leningrad and beyond, and will address the way hunger both underpinned and threatened to destabilize wartime myths of sacrifice and solidarity.

Rebecca Manley is an Associate Professor of History at Queen’s University. She is the author of To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Cornell University Press, 2009). She is currently working on a SSHRC funded book length provisionally entitled Tsar Hunger: Conceiving Hunger in Modern Russia. The project offers a fresh perspective on the place of hunger in modern Russian history by examining the way writers and revolutionaries, political economists and physiologists, government officials and philanthropists conceptualized and attempted to come to grips with hunger.