Children of the Siege of Leningrad

In her presentation Olga Kucherenko will explore the life of children in besieged Leningrad. She will investigate how they coped with cruelty, starvation, separation and loss, and show that, contrary to the Soviet propagandistic image, children were more than hapless victims. Besides being symbols of suffering they were also scapegoats, breadwinners and swindlers, workers and beggars, fearless defenders and miserable wretches, selfless carers and vicious predators.

Olga Kucherenko is the author of Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War, 1941-45 (OUP, 2011) and Soviet Street Children and the Second World War: Welfare and Social Control under Stalin (Bloomsbury, 2016). She is currently working on Anglo-Soviet relations in the 1940s.