1959–2015
○ Natural causes
A historian who widened the blockade story from heroism to everyday ethics
Iarov’s research invited readers to see blockade survivors not through a hero-or-perpetrator binary, but through records of choice and survival.
Sergei Iarov was a historian of Russian twentieth-century social history and workers’ political consciousness who made the everyday life and moral choices of besieged Leningrad a central subject. Rather than explain blockade society through heroic resistance or administrative mobilization alone, he reconstructed from sources the interwoven experiences of solidarity, conformity, and strategies of survival under hunger. His books Blockade Ethics and Everyday Life in Besieged Leningrad placed the contradictions of human action in catastrophe at the centre of public memory.
Also known as: Sergey Yarov
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1984Graduated from the History Faculty of Leningrad State University
- 1985–1988Postgraduate researcher at the Leningrad Institute of History, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1988–2015Researcher at the St Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences
- 1998–2015Professor at the European University at St Petersburg
- 1999Received a doctorate in history
- 2013–2015Member of the History Expert Council of Russia’s Higher Attestation Commission
- 2014Received the Enlightener Prize for Everyday Life in Besieged Leningrad
Related historical events
Blockade diaries and changing moral norms
In the 2000s, Sergei Iarov concentrated on the everyday life and ethics of besieged Leningrad. He led a large oral-history project begun at the European University at St Petersburg and studied the blockade through personal records, chiefly diaries, as well as the collected recollections of survivors. Rather than reduce the siege to heroic resistance or administrative response, he examined strategies of survival and changes in norms of conduct under extreme conditions. His book Blockade Ethics: Ideas of Morality in Leningrad in 1941–1942 was a major outcome of this research.
This approach traced what people considered permissible or forbidden amid hunger and the threat of death, and how attitudes and norms shifted. Yet, as Iarov and fellow historian Nikita Lomagin emphasized, the small number of surviving diaries cannot support straightforward generalizations about the whole city. Diary writers represent social groups unevenly, and entries raise questions of reliability, including in their accounts of themselves and those close to them. Rather than remove these limitations, Iarov’s work made the critical reading of diaries central to understanding everyday life and moral choices during the siege.