The presentation of The Siege Book
by Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin

On January 18th, 2013, the 70th anniversary of the breaking through the Siege of Leningrad, The Siege Book by Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin was presented in a new edition from the Lenizdat publishing house. The book has been published for the first time without the chapters cut by the censors in the Soviet period. A new chapter has been added to the book about the Leningrad Affair, which specifically described the tragic face of the repressed and closed Museum of the Defense and Siege. Daniil Granin described why he decided to add a chapter to the book about the Leningrad Affair, which describes the postwar reprisal against the surviving city, and made a proposal to the Director of the State Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky, to establish an exhibit about the Hermitage’s experience of the Siege in the museum’s former bomb shelters, emphasizing that this kind of visual experience is especially important for schoolchildren. M. B. Piotrovsky said that it would definitely be done next year; the Hermitage plans to complete this project for the 70-year anniversary of the lifting of the Siege, January 27th, 2014. D. A. Granin also shared his recollections of the war years (the writer began his service in the Leningrad militia) and noted that when describing the Siege, one must devote attention not only to everyday life, but also to the spiritual experience of Leningraders of the period, in order to understand how they managed to hold out.

Participants in the discussion included Evgeny Artemov, the Director of the State Museum of Political History of Russia, Nina Popova, the Director of the Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House, Julia Demidenko, Deputy Director of the State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg, Julia Kantor, Advisor to the Director of the State Hermitage Museum, and Natalia Sokolovskaya, editor-in-chief of The Siege Book.