"Out of place" in the postwar city: experiences and representations of displacement during the resettlement of Leningrad at the end of the blockade

This thesis explores the repopulation of Leningrad following the blockade of the city during the Second World War. In the years after the lifting of the siege blockade survivors remaining in Leningrad were joined annually by hundreds of thousands of incomers. However, while the siege has recently been the subject of a number of scholarly and literary treatments, much less attention has been paid to what happened next in terms of the mass resettlement of the city. Accounts of the consequences of the blockade that touch upon the postwar population have deployed the term ‘Leningraders’ as shorthand for a cohesive community of blockade survivors, embedded in the culture and landscape of the city. Even pieces of work that have portrayed post-siege Leningrad as a ‘city of migrants’ have concentrated on the impact of the loss of the prewar population rather than on the multifarious experiences of its itinerant populations. The thesis addresses the role of widespread experiences of displacement and resettlement in structuring relationships among individuals and between citizens and the authorities in the post-siege civic environment. It examines the repopulation in the context of evolving Soviet practices of population management after the war and in terms of the intersection of population movements with the re-affirmation of a civic community in a city which had lost a vast proportion of its population, just as it gained the basis for a powerful new narrative of belonging. It demonstrates how competing visions of the desired postwar order on a national and local scale were constructed and contested in relation to displaced people who were often targeted as a potentially transgressive presence in the postwar landscape