A. V. Zotova, Ekonomika blokady (Saint-Petersburg: Ostrov, 2016).

Anastasia Zotova is an assistant professor at the Bonch-Bruevich Saint Petersburg State University for the Telecommunications and an executive editor at the Klio journal.

The book is probably based on the author’s Ph. D. thesis and deals with the economy of Leningrad during the Great Fatherland War 1941–45. It covers not only the period of the blockade, but also the first months of the war and the period after the lifting of the blockade—until May 1945. The author investigates the situation both in the city of Leningrad in its prewar borders, the surrounding territory that was not occupied by the Germans, but was also encircled by them, and finally, other localities of the Leningrad agglomeration that were liberated by the Soviet troops in 1944. The main goal of the research was to analyze all the main aspects of Leningrad economy in the years of the war in a broader context of the Soviet economy in that period that is especially important because the Soviet government did not slash output targets for Leningrad enterprises even during the blockade and the enterprises evacuated from the city to the other regions of the country played an important role for the local economy. Evacuation of a large part of industrial equipment laid the groundwork for a large-scale re-equipment of Leningrad factories after raising the blockade (with captured German equipment among other things) that provided a basis for the postwar economic growth in the city.

Special attention is payed also to the agriculture of Leningrad and its suburbs in the years of the war. Twenty five state farms and more than 6 hundred subsidiary plots were functioning in the territory of the city in 1942, 276 thousand citizens became vegetable growers, local authorities provided them with seeds and necessary equipment free of charge. These measures helped the citizens to survive.

From the methodological viewpoint the research belongs to the economic history, the author used both purely historical methods and economical ones.

The source base of the research make the documents of several central and local archives (the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the Russian State Archive of the Economy, the Central State Archive of Saint Petersburg etc.), materials from German archives (the German Federal Archives, the German Federal Military Archive) as well as a large complex of Leningrad newspapers of the war years (50 titles). Many of the documents used in the book were declassified only a short time ago.

The book consists of an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion. The first two chapters deal with historiography and sources. In the next five chapters the author analyses the economic life of Leningrad on the eve of the siege (June–August 1941), in the most dangerous period since the German troops reached Lake Ladoga in September 1941 and until the blockade running in January 1943, then—till the final lifting of the blockade in January 1944 and on the final stage of the war (1944–45). The economical contribution of Leningrad into the victory over Nazi Germany is analyzed in the last chapter.