History of Science and Engineering Annotation << Back RZHANOVY: THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY OF DEFENDERS OF LENINGRAD I.A. Krayneva This article discusses the family history of the Rzhanovs: parents and two sons during the Great Patriotic War, namely in 1941–1944. during the Leningrad blockade. Three of the Rzhanovs were at that time on the Oranienbaum Piglet. Among the defenders of Leningrad was Anatoly Rzhanov (1920–2000), future academician and director of the Institute of Semiconductor Physics, SB RAS (1964–1990), who now bears his name. The relevance of the article is due to the fact that the family history of the Rzhanovs partially goes beyond the framework of a unified description of the blockade of the Soviet period of historiography, shows that they regarded their stay at the front not only as a patriotic duty, but also as a means of salvation from starvation in the city. The combat path of A.V. Rzhanova. The publication was carried out in a combination of a biographical approach (a collective biography, which is not the sum of personal biographies, but is a symbiosis of personal stories and context) and case studies (case studies that are temporally and personally limited). We consider this example a priori “significant” according to the methodology of John Gering, professor at Boston University. It can allow problematization of the situation as typical in the case of analogies, its further classification as maximally similar or minimally similar. The very concept of the blockade of Leningrad is currently being actively debated. Disputants note that it is a complex symbol of Soviet-Russian historiography of the war, requiring clarification: it is proposed to consider it both as a simulacrum (isolation, the enemy’s encirclement of the city, which are questioned), and as a symbol of a reliable essence (hunger). Keywords: Anatoly Vasilievich Rzhanov, Oranienbaum bridgehead, blockade of Leningrad, personal approach, “new biography”, case study. DOI: 10.25791/intstg.05.2020.1178 Pp. 27-37.